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My Perspective: SOA protest

Demonstrators, including Sister Mary Kathryn Fogarty, center, assemble peacefully in protest of the SOA. Photo by Maria Friedman, FSPA

by Maria Friedman, FSPA

Why, at age 68, am I doing this?” I asked myself as Sister Mary Kathryn Fogarty and I boarded a bus along with over 50 college students for a 17-hour bus trip to Fort Benning, Ga.

We were bound for the School of the Americas (SOA), in 2001 renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC). Operated by the U.S. military, it trains students from Latin America in the art of war—counterinsurgency, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation techniques. If you listen to U.S. officials, the school orients soldiers to the skills and beauties of democracy. If you follow these soldiers back to Latin America, you’ll find a trail of torture, rape, assassination and massacre.

In the last two decades it was in Central America where such soldiers were responsible for the deaths of Archbishop Oscar Romero, six Jesuits and their women co-workers, four U.S. churchwomen (who were also raped), 767 people from the town of El Mozote, El Salvador, who were summarily massacred, and thousands of other civilians.

Today the horrific action is in Colombia, where the U.S. government is supposedly helping that government in a drug war, a war disrupting the lives of tens of thousands of people, and graduates of SOA/WHISC are again doing the horrible crimes they do so well.

I was going to Fort Benning because I was curious about this demonstration that had grown steadily from eight participants in 1990 to 16,000 this past November. I was going because I wanted to become a voice for the people who have no voice and to be inspired to take action in their behalf.

Sixteen thousand people sounds like a mob, but it was 16,000 peaceful people. I was impressed by the many who have come back year after year to participate. I was equally impressed by the huge number of college students, including those from Viterbo University and University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, whose group I was a part of.

I was impressed by Father Roy Bourgeois, the SOA Watch founder, a Vietnam veteran turned Maryknoll priest whose work among the poor in Bolivia led to his incarceration and torture. I was impressed by Martin Sheen who comes to the rally every year. “I make my living as an actor,” he says, “but coming here gives me life.” I was impressed by the large contingent from Veterans for Peace, men trained in war, who called for the close of SOA/WHISC.

I was impressed with the many speakers, among them Jennifer Harbury, a human rights attorney whose Guatemalan husband was kidnapped and killed by SOA graduates; a mother whose National Guard son was killed in Iraq, leading her to speak out against the war; Sister Helen Prejean who linked the killing we call “capital punishment” to the killing that goes on in war; Kathy Kelly, the Voices in the Wilderness activist who fought the U.S. boycott of Iraq because it deprived children of medicines.

The Puppetista Puppet Pageant comes alive with color, imagination and drumming. Photo by Maria Friedman, FSPA

The demonstration had color and imagination. The Puppetista Puppet Pageant was larger than life, one puppet so large that two people managed the arms separately. The puppets were warm and friendly and made their circuit to extensive drumming.

On the second day was a “funeral procession” with mock coffins and pallbearers in black, masked so as to represent us all. In the most moving experience of the two days, we joined that procession, each carrying a white cross with the name and country of a person who had been killed. In a lengthy ceremony the name and age of each person known to have been killed by SOA graduates was chanted. And after the name, we 16,000 demonstrators raised our crosses and chanted, “Presente (I am present).”

The 17-hour return trip gave me time to reflect on the experience. I was glad I had gone. So many things I believe but don’t act on rose to my consciousness. I am my brother’s (and sister’s) keeper. When others suffer, I must speak out. When my government ignores moral principles, I need to make my voice heard. Often the cause of suffering is what is so glibly called “protecting U.S. interests.” I believe that most often these interests are economic and that, good people though we are, we ignore the destructive alliances of our government as they “protect” these interests.

The focus of the trip was closing SOA/WHISC but the message for me is a broader one, summarized in a line from the prophet Micah: We are called to do what is right, “to love tenderly and to walk humbly with God.”

I pray that that message, the lesson of this trip for me, may stay in my mind, in my heart and on my lips.

Sister Maria Friedman is coordinator of the GATE (Global Awareness Through Experience) Office in La Crosse, Wis.

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