"You Can Jail the Resisters,
         but You Can't Jail the Resistance!"

Prison Witness in the Movement
         to Close the SOA

By Margaret Knapke
(Updated October 3, 2003)

Opposition to the SOA began in earnest in 1990, when the perpetrators of a November 16, 1989 massacre of six Salvadoran Jesuit priests at the University of Central America (UCA), their housekeeper and her teenage daughter, were identified. Of the 27 soldiers cited, 19 were discovered to be SOA graduates. This was the first documented linkage between the School and what would become a long, gruesome litany of atrocities. 

Taking seriously the demand of slain Archbishop Oscar Romero that "We who have a voice must speak for the voiceless," Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois and a small group of supporters formed SOA Watch. They began to research the SOA, educate the public, lobby Congress, and practice creative, nonviolent resistance at Ft. Benning.

The November anniversary of the UCA massacre has continued to be an important focus for the growing grassroots movement to close the SOA / WHISC. (Note: since the 2001 name change, critics call the School the SOA / WHISC. Please see the Introduction essay.) Indeed, the band of ten resisters who gathered at the gate of Ft. Benning to commemorate the first anniversary has grown in recent Novembers to a teeming resistance community of 10,000. People come from all over the country and even the world to honor victims of the SOA -- as well as their survivors -- with music, words, puppets and theatre. 

Traditionally the legal vigil and memorial service concludes with a mock funeral procession onto Ft. Benning, with all who choose to march onto the post technically at risk for arrest. Subsequent to 9/11 and the subsequent erecting of a security fence at the main gate of Ft. Benning in 2001, protesters who wish to take their mourning onto the post need to go over, under, or around that fence -- as opposed to the simple marching of the past. Over the years, hundreds and even thousands have chosen to risk arrest for so-called "criminal trespassing" in order to challenge the war against the Latin American poor with a louder voice. 

To date, more than 150 SOA Watch protesters have been sentenced in federal court to prison sentences. Collectively they have served more than 70 years "speaking truth to power" from behind prison walls on behalf of the people of Latin America. (Some have served several sentences, including Fr. Roy with 4 1/2 years total.) Many others have served probationary sentences.

A chronology of actions against the School of Americas resulting in prison witness may be viewed at the following URL: 

www.soaw.org/new/article.php?id=339. 

If Judges Robert Elliot, Hugh Lawson and G. Mallon Faircloth thought that imprisoning the resisters would intimidate or suppress the movement to close the SOA, they were quite mistaken. All Prisoners of Conscience found their voices within their respective prisons, and all found ways to advocate more strongly for closure of the School.

US poet Carolyn Forche has said in her poem "Ourselves or Nothing": 

There is a cyclone fence between
ourselves and the slaughter and behind it
we hover in a calm protected world like 
netted fish, exactly like netted fish ....

With each November commemoration, each letter or visit to a Congressperson, each prison witness, we critics and protesters weaken the "cyclone fence" that holds us "calm," "protected" and complicit. Together we break through to a clarity, vigor and freedom that even prison cannot diminish.