No más, no more

The young woman could not stop sobbing. Her grief was too new. Only a few weeks ago, she had visited El Salvador and spent time in the home of a Lutheran pastor and his wife, both of whom worked on behalf of the poor of their country. Last week they were assassinated. On November 19, their young friend stood at the gates of Fort Benning in Georgia, along with more than 20,000 other protesters.

 

The assassins of the Lutheran leaders in El Salvador have not been identified yet, but their deaths are consistent with a history of persecution and abuse and assassination connected to the School of the Americas in Fort Benning. The School of the Americas (SOA) is a military school that has trained more than 61,000 Latin American Latin American officers in combat techniques, command tactics, military intelligence, and techniques of torture. SOA is an official program of the U.S. government, funded by the government and run by the U.S. Armed Forces since 1946. SOA graduates have been implicated in terrorism, human rights violations, coercion, and atrocities committed against civilian populations across Latin America.

 

The deaths of the Lutheran pastors are among the tens of thousands of stories that brought more than 20,000 people to Fort Benning over the weekend. Some stories are well-known, like the assassination of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 at the hands of SOA graduates. Others are anonymous, like the children killed in massacres in Guatemala in the 1980s and in Colombia during the past decade. 

 

Some people came with their own, painful, personal stories. Patricia Isasa was kidnapped and tortured by police and soldiers thirty years ago in Argentina, when she was 16 years old. Carlos Mauricio was tortured for nine nights by SOA graduates during the 1980s in El Salvador.

 

Other people come because they have made a commitment to stop the torture and killing. Leah is here from Ithaca, New York. She has come for the ninth time. “As long as the school is open, I have to keep on coming,” she says. She made her first trip to the School of the Americas when she was eight years old.

 

Greg came from St. Paul, Minnesota. His teenage daughter brought him to the SOA in 1999, because she needed a chaperone for her group’s trip. Greg was arrested for “crossing the line” onto the base in 2003 and served three months. Today he is here with his wife and a friend.

 

War protesters, nuns and priests and ministers and students, parents and children, war veterans and teenagers of every variety marched together at Fort Benning. Nuns wearing black veils walked with the new century’s children in black leather and multiple body piercings.  Buddhist prayer drums shared space with Mayan incense offered to Grandfather Sun and Mother Earth and messages from a rabbi and a priest and a minister. Towering puppets and stilt-walking skeletons created new liturgies in a gathering that embraced and included people of many religions and of no religion at all.

 

The protesters at Fort Benning see closing the SOA as a necessary first step, but only a first step. Carlos Mauricio tells the assemblage that the United States is funding a police academy in El Salvador, the Institute for Law Enforcement Assistance (ILEA), which will “train” police from across Latin America. He is clear that such “little SOAs” must also be stopped.

 

This year, the Fort Benning SOA protesters were connected with thousands of anti-SOA protesters across Latin America in actions and vigils in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Peru and Paraguay, and also with protesters in Ireland and Canada and in other U.S. cities. In addition to the sixteen people arrested for peaceful protest at Fort Benning, two priests were arrested at Fort Huachuca in Arizona.

 

Connections reach beyond Latin America. Vets for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War marched to the gates of Fort Benning, remembering their own wars. They listened to the father of a young soldier denounce the current war in Iraq. This war, he said in a voice thick with emotion, “has killed more than 600,000 Iraqis and nearly 3,000 U.S. soldiers – and my son among them.”

 

Civil rights activists spent a week in Selma, celebrating and building Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “beloved community,” before walking to Fort Benning. Other marchers work with battered women, with students in an increasingly militarized inner city school system, with immigrant workers victimized by unjust labor contracts, with victims of Hurricane Katrina. Individual names and stories melded with collective histories and rallying calls – the Trail of Tears of Native Americans two centuries back, today’s indigenous resistance and community-building in Chiapas and Oaxaca, thirty-six million hungry people in the United States, two million-plus prisoners in U.S. jails.

 

At Fort Benning on Sunday, they all came together. Together they sang the promise written by John McCutcheon:

 

No más, no more! shout the hills of Salvador.

Compañeros, compañeras, we cry out, “No más, no more!”

 

Together they sang a litany of martyrs, two hours of walking to the Fort Benning fence, raising their white crosses and responding “Presente” as each name was sung.

 

Presente. You are present, living in memory though you can no longer walk here with us.

 

Presente. We are present in our world today, honoring our commitment to you through our resistance to today’s wars and torture around the world, through the service we offer to our brothers and sisters, through our commitment to nonviolence and to building the “beloved community”

 

Presente. We are present with you, remembering you, holding your stories and names in our hearts.

 

Compañeros, compañeras, we cry out, “No más, no more!”