Essay No. 4

14 August 2000 

Whenever I gaze at the razorwire that surrounds the men's prison at Federal Medical Center Lexington, I recall an experience months ago which helped lead me here.

I had been debating whether to "cross the line" onto Ft. Benning again, knowing it would put me at serious risk for arrest and imprisonment. I felt compelled to reassert my opposition to the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) which is housed there. But I worried that my likely imprisonment would create hardships for my loved ones, human and non-human alike. So I deliberated at length, weighing one life-affirming value against another, one concession or failing against another. There were no perfect solutions that honored all responsibilities in every moment.

Then one day I found a news item on the Internet which detailed the mobilization of Mexican troops into a village in Chiapas. As the reporter recounted the soldiers unrolling barbed wire around the community to better sequester and control the villagers, I received a vivid image. I saw a 30-something man standing in his simple home, watching the soldiers through his window. I felt his pain and consternation. But his thoughts -- facetiously -- were my own : "Oh, it's not CONVENIENT to have this happen to me at this time."

The mocking of my subconscious startled me awake, for even my discernment process had become a dreamy exercise in privilege. I was looking and waiting for an optimal moment, a time when I could choose to be a strong advocate for Latin Americans victimized by the SOA, but at minimal expense to myself and my loved ones.

The brief vision asserted the obvious: that the indigenous people of occupied  Chiapas -- and many other places coveted by U.S. corporations for their resources -- have no voice in the militarization of their sacred homelands. Certainly they are not repressed at their convenience!  The message was clear:  if I was serious about living in solidarity with the poor and effectively protesting the causes of their poverty, then surely I had to relinquish convenience as a condition for my advocacy. Solidarity required that I share the constraints of the poor.

And so I crossed. On November 21, 1999 I joined 4,407 other grieving citizens in a somber, nonviolent, mock funeral procession onto Ft. Benning in Georgia. Our destination was the SOA which is located about 2 miles beyond the perimeter. We wanted to deliver symbolically the SOA's dead to them. We wanted to honor the many, many thousands -- including children -- who have died throughout Latin America. Their cause of death: so-called Low Intensity Conflict training, the core of the SOA's curriculum.

Our criticisms of this repressive commando training are amply supported  by numerous human rights reports from governmental and non-governmental  sources alike. These include UN Truth Commission reports on El Salvador and Guatemala, and even documents from the U.S. State Department (itself nevertheless a stubborn supporter of the SOA !).

Yet Ft. Benning and SOA officials continue to ignore the documentation, the staggering loss of life, and their shared culpability for it.  Indeed portraits of some of the worst human rights abusers hang in the SOA library, and others are invited as guest instructors and commencement speakers. One example among many: Hector Gramajo -- former Defense Minister of Guatemala and a principal architect of the "scorched earth policy" which claimed more than 100,000 Mayan lives in the 1980's -- was invited to give a commencement address just 6 weeks after having been found guilty in a U.S. court of war crimes!  Those particular charges stemmed from the kidnapping, rape and torture of a U.S. nun working in Guatemala.

And so protesters and numerous Congressional allies persist in pointing to the grim reality that is too often obscured by the SOA's stirring rhetoric about promoting  democracy and human rights. It is a rhetorical deceit the deceivers also want to believe. But while denial can be a powerful intoxicant, both morality and international law require us to refuse that lie.

As of March, I and nine others from that solemn November procession stand convicted of repeated criminal trespass onto a U.S. military reservation, a post that is wide open to uncritical tourists!  Evidently the real criminal component of our action was not our being on the base, but expressing criticism of what transpires there. Arguably our real offense was criminal truth-telling!

My gaze now originates from the women's minimum-security facility, called Federal Prison Camp Lexington Atwood, which is adjacent to FMC Lexington.  We women are not corralled by the razorwire, as are the men. Yet there is, as my sister inmate Velma has declared, an invisible fence around us. It is no less daunting for being immaterial, and squeezes the heart no less.

But ironically, if the gleaming razorwire confines the men, in a certain way it delivers me from the smallness of this place. For by mirroring for me the occupation of Chiapas, it reminds me why I am here, and so returns me to the outside world. Surely it is a world with greed and repression to squeeze the human heart, but also beauty, compassion, and the determination of many to see real justice in Latin America.