March-April 2005:
Dispatch from Fayetteville
More Tsunami Fallout
War Tax Resistance on the Rise
Letters
Activist Reviews

Homepages:
War Resisters League
The Nonviolent Activist

Activist Letters

Rooting for Winners

It wasn’t Branch Rickey who spirited the Brooklyn Dodgers away to Los Angeles (“Picturing [Nonviolent] Victory,” Winter 2005) but rather Walter O’Malley. Rickey was forced out years earlier. Many fans never forgave O’Malley for taking away their beloved team.

—Murray Polner
Great Neck, NY

Changing SOAW’s Focus

Karl Meyer can be counted on to bring fresh thinking to any issue he sets his mind to. For years he has been a valuable gadfly in the campaign to close the U.S. Army’s anti-insurgency training school, the School of the Americas, at Ft. Benning.

In his “Open Letter to SOA Watch” (Activist Letters, Winter 2005) Karl suggests that “a disproportionate amount of peace movement organizing energy and money is tied up in focusing on this one military program.” Instead Karl proposes that “the annual SOA Watch assemblies could be distributed by rotation among three or four major sites around the United States that are representative of the military/industrial/imperial agenda of U.S. policy.”

While such sites may be no less vile than the SOA, I believe such a proposal would fail.

The annual SOA vigil action at Ft. Benning has been a marked success—not in terms of the stated goal (closing it), but in terms of solidarity generated and consciousnesses raised. And in terms of providing visible accompaniment here in the United States for our besieged sisters and brothers in Latin America.

At one level it almost doesn’t matter whether we close the SOA. Whether there’s a single SOA campus or not isn’t the issue. Whether or not the SOA’s functions (training, indoctrinating, networking, vetting, and recruiting Latin American officers) are concentrated at one site or dispersed over many, the Pentagon won’t neglect to fund and foster those functions. Those functions will retain their high priority as long as the Pentagon seeks to entrench U.S. corporations and U.S. trade policy in Latin America.

Rather than “winning” and getting the SOA shut down, let the SOA stay open to serve as our best symbol of the imperium. With the exposure of the SOA, U.S. foreign policy also stands exposed. The SOA is a wonderful starter issue for those who hitherto knew little about Latin America, human rights, or militarism. And it’s the annual vigil action at Ft. Benning that provides the focus and forum.

That action—that pilgrimage, really—is a powerful witness. Is it replicable or rotatable? We need to grasp the elements of its power … and to ask whether those elements would have analogs at the other sites Karl suggests.

These elements include:

• the legacy of coups and massacres perpetrated by SOA-trained officers—recall the notorious SOA Hall of Fame.
• the legacy of martyrs (Romero, the Salvadoran Jesuits, the four U.S. churchwomen, the hundreds of thousands of campesinos and workers). These martyrs focus the head and heart and draw people and professionals of faith to the cause.
• the remarkably punitive judges who inhabit the federal court in Columbus, GA. the vibrant tradition of court- and prison-witness.
• a charismatic priest (Roy Bourgeois MM) stumping all over the country and (although not recently) coming in and out of prison.
• a movement drawing passion from as deep and diverse a reservoir as the various Latin American solidarity campaigns.

Unlike so-called “defense” bases, there’s no moral ambiguity about the SOA. It has nothing to do with defending the homeland. The facility doesn’t even provide many jobs. The issue isn’t abstract; it’s as concrete and visceral as torture and assassination.

—Ed Kinane
Syracuse, NY

I respectfully disagree with Karl Meyer’s conclusions [that School of the Americas Watch should divide its protests between SOA and other sites]. I agree that SOAW is at a stalemate; that it needs to broaden its focus; that Congress is extremely unlikely to actually close the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation this year; and that the school’s closure will simply see its tasks moved elsewhere. All of these circumstances, however, lead me to advocate the focus shifts that SOAW is already considering or working toward, not the extremely broad (frankly lack of) focus Karl Meyer calls for.

SOAW has been consulting with other NGOs for several years on combined efforts regarding U.S. military training and interaction with other nations’ militaries. People are working on legislation calling for change in several troubling U.S. policies regarding other militaries; this work needs further SOAW education and lobbying efforts. This project addresses the fact that SOA/WHInSeC is only one tiny part of U.S. inter-military interaction with other nations.

Greater outreach to Latina/o and Spanish-speaking people and media is another very important and overdue effort by SOAW, including both translation and media work with Spanish media and more community organizing in Spanish. Another outreach effort to our neighbors to the south is the exciting refusal by governments to send their soldiers to SOA/WHInSeC. Father Roy Bourgeois is proposing greatly extending the work of calling for and organizing Latin American governments’ resistance to U.S. pressure, and I heartily agree with his call. To properly address these tasks will be a stretch for SOAW, and I think they are a good and sufficient plan for the SOAW’s near future.

Aside from the overwhelming nature of shifting to the four-site plan Meyer advocates, I disagree that it would be good strategy. The other sites are more related to weapons and U.S. warmaking, as opposed to the SOA/WHInSeC’s connection to U.S. facilitation of internal oppression by other nations’ militaries. These are connected ideas, but somewhat distinct. Some focus is necessary.

The fact that so much time and energy has been directed at one very small part of the U.S. imperial machine, with so little solid impact, is evidence that it will take that much effort at every site of U.S. militarism or weapons creation. And probably the best we can do while we have this regressive Congress is to not let it forget that many people oppose U.S. dominance, militarism and imperialism.

I sympathize with the envy of organizers from other sites equally deserving of crowds of tens of thousands of resisters. I used to be an organizer at one of those other sites myself: the Pantex Nuclear Weapons Plant outside Amarillo, TX. The Peace Farm, right across the highway from Pantex, would love to have SOAW’s crowds at the Pantex gates.

Organizers at all these sites create powerful and moving rallies and vigils. They do excellent analysis of the issues. The one difference I see is the work of Father Roy Bourgeois. He spends huge amounts of time on the road doing speaking engagements inspiring people to come resist at Ft. Benning, and chooses to live on very little money. Instead of trying to divert inspired people from their faithful witness at Ft. Benning, I suggest that organizers at the other sites get full-time speakers on the road to educate another 10- or 20,000 people each to attend their events.

—Ellen Barfield
Baltimore, MD

The writer is on the SOAW national board and WRL’s National Committee.