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!”

Waking up on the morning after the election, I saw a political landscape that was superficially transformed – a Democratic majority in the U.S. House and Senate, a DFL majority in the Minnesota House and Senate, pundits trumpeting the rejection of Bush war policies and of the right wing in general, progressives of all stripes claiming victory.

What does this prove? Not much. We don’t really know why people voted the way they did. Even the near-unanimous media conclusion that opposition to the war in Iraq motivated voters fades under closer scrutiny. Polls show that more voters named corruption as their top issue (67% said the war was “extremely” or “very” important, compared to 74% for corruption.) Even more – 82% — cited the economy as “extremely” or “very” important.

The new Democratic majorities just elected are just as confused. They include anti-immigrant Democrats and homophobic Democrats and pro-life Democrats. Even on the issue that supposedly sparked their victory, many take inconsistent and timid positions. What kind of message is “we have to reconsider our options in Iraq?” What common ground is there between us and this new Democratic majority?

My concern is what we do now, as peaceniks and progressives, as immigrants and allies, as people concerned about Venezuela and Oaxaca and Iraq and Darfur, as well as New Orleans and Minneapolis and Owatonna.

For years, I have heard the choice described as one between activism (protest, especially in the streets) and electoral politics (elections, lobbying, legislation.) Activists identify more with grassroots organizing (though there are disagreements about what that means), with demonstrations and marches, with boycotts of corporations, with strikes (whether student, labor or general), and with protest of all kinds. Young people are more often activists, though there are plenty of gray hairs in the crowd.

Progressive participants in electoral politics tend to believe that this is the best, if not the only, way to effect real change. They may hate the idea of compromise, but they acknowledge practical necessity. Usually, but not always (witness the Green Party), they look for candidates who can win, even if those candidates share only some of their principles. They believe that the first step to effectiveness is getting a voice in the halls of power, whether that means the city council or the U.S. Senate.

The activist critique of electoral politics talks about selling out and compromised convictions and ineffective wheeling and dealing with corrupt, unprincipled opponents. The political critique of activism talks about preaching to the choir and alienating the majority. Historically, advocates of progressive electoral politics and left-wing activists view each other with suspicion, even when they agree on the same principles or goals.

Today, in 2006, we can come together. We must come together. 

During 1964’s Freedom Summer, proud black college students put their suits and ties away and donned SNCC’s inelegant uniform of farmer’s overalls to work for voter registration and civil rights. Despite cultural and political differences, white northern students and black southern students, atheists and ministers, Jews and Christians, unreconstructed macho men and angry feminists, socialists and New England aristocrats (not that these two groups are mutually exclusive), all worked together. Not without arguments. Not without battles. But, in the end, they transformed the face of the country.

They did not finish the job of building Dr. King’s “beloved community,” but they began. Four years later, bearded, long-haired college students up north went “clean for Gene” and donned suits and ties to stump for presidential peace candidate Eugene McCarthy. They did not finish the job either. We inherit both their shining (and less-than-shining) examples and their work.

That work starts with learning and teaching. Immigration activists concerned with deaths on the border and life in the shadows and anti-genocide activists concerned with Darfur and environmental activists concerned with water as a part of the global commons and anti-free-trade activists and anti-racism activists and human rights activists and labor union activists – we all need to teach and to learn from one another and to make the connections between “our” issues. And we need to learn and practice the respect that allows us to have different issues and differing means of working on these issues – from education to lobbying to marching in the streets.

We also need to teach and to learn from the non-activist majority. We need to go to them, in churches and synagogues and mosques, in union halls, in libraries, in living rooms and at kitchen tables. We need to educate people who are instinctive allies but who don’t have the facts. We need to educate people whose racism or conservatism or militarism is based on misinformation. Most of them do not know the facts and do not understand what is at stake. We need to connect with their minds as we communicate our key messages – over and over again, to one person after another. We need to win their hearts, by telling personal stories, by making personal contacts.

We can come together. We must come together. The stakes are too high for us to form the traditional, circular leftist firing squad, attacking one another’s lack of purity or lack of pragmatism. The nation and the world need, and we can offer, strong voices and strong messages, and an example of overcoming differences and reaching across divides to work together for the common good. 

Torturing prisoners. Spying on political dissidents and religious minorities. Suspending constitutional protections. Infiltrating peace groups. Instituting a national identity card system. Restricting the rights of immigrants. Imprisoning more than two million people, making us number one in the world: the nation with the highest percentage of our population in prison.

Today, 230 years after colonial leaders rebelled against “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” the American Civil Liberties Union warns that Americans are suffering “serious setbacks in the protection of civil and political rights.” The descendants of the rebels who escaped the tyrannies of King George III have now virtually crowned King George II, and handed over our freedoms to his corrupt administration.

The Declaration of Independence was a powerful indictment listing specific violations of rights by King George III. The signers complained of a government “depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury.” The 2006 Military Commissions Act gives King George II the same abusive powers, taking away the right of trial by jury for anyone accused of being an “unlawful enemy combatant.” That includes citizens as well as non-citizens, and anyone who has “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” The president determines who is covered by this law.

Habeas corpus protection was enshrined in common law even before the founding of the United States. The writ of habeas corpus is used to demand that a prisoner be brought before a judge and that the judge determine whether or not the person is legally detained. Under the Military Commissions Act, the prisoner has no right to habeas corpus, no right to a speedy trial, and no access to a court until after conviction.

In 1776, the colonists complained of King George III “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.” King George II maintains a prison camp at Guantanamo, beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. Other prisoners are shipped to secret prison camps abroad or simply turned over to foreign governments for interrogation in a process called “extraordinary rendition.”

Torture

The U.S. Constitution, in the Eighth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, prohibits torture. International prohibitions on torture and cruel treatment abound, from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the Geneva Conventions.

King George II and his minions in Congress disagree. They insist on the government’s right to use “alternative interrogation methods.” These methods include waterboarding. Waterboarding involves tying the victim to a board with the head lower than the feet and then either submerging the head in water or pouring water over the head so the victim cannot breathe and believes that he or she is in imminent danger of drowning. When waterboarding was used in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, it was called the “ submarino.” In a 2005 Senate hearing, then-CIA director Porter Goss characterized waterboarding as a “professional interrogation technique.”

Other “alternative interrogation methods” approved under the reign of King George II include sleep deprivation, withholding of food, and prolonged detention at very cold temperatures. Murder and mutilation, however, are still forbidden. Although today “alternative interrogation methods” might be acceptable only for “unlawful enemy combatants” … or maybe for prisoners of war … or maybe for non-citizens, Once torture is approved for one kind of prisoner, no one is safe.

Patriot Act

Prisoners may be the most vulnerable to violations of human rights, but every person is at risk. The Patriot Act requires businesses (such as libraries and banks) to turn over information about individuals to the government, and prohibits them from telling anyone that the information has been turned over. “Sneak and peek” provisions allow secret searches of homes and businesses. Wiretaps and data mining routed through three “secret rooms” touch uncountable millions of people and transactions. And, even though the Patriot Act and its progeny made it much easier for the government to get warrants for searches or wiretaps, King George II insists that federal snoops have the right to conduct warrantless searches, without regard to the Fourth Amendment.

Illegal infiltration and spying tactics were used by the FBI, COINTELPRO and other intelligence agencies against civil rights organizations and the Black Panthers in the 1960s, against anti-war movements in the 1970s, against anti-intervention movements in the 1980s. Now they are back. (Or maybe they never really went away.) Today’s targets include everyone from Arab-American groups to student, anti-war, anti-globalization, animal rights and environmental activists.

Immigrants

During World War I, the U.S. government cracked down on anarchists, unionists, leftists – and immigrants. President Woodrow Wilson denounced “hyphenated Americans.” Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917, with prison terms for anyone encouraging “disloyalty.” Some anarchists responded with bombs. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer organized a series of raids. The Palmer Raids collected data on all kinds of leftist organizations and also arrested at least 10,000 people. Immigrants were special targets for both arrest and mass deportations.

Today, prison construction is moving ahead in tandem with the other “anti-terrorist” and anti-immigrant measures. Early this year, a Halliburton subsidiary was awarded a $385 million contract to build detention centers to imprison “an unexpected influx of immigrants or to house people after a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space.” Not surprisingly, both immigrants and dissidents fear that they will become the inmates of the new prisons.

Today’s accelerated immigration enforcement includes raids and mass deportations across the country (see p. 15). Political rhetoric stigmatizes immigrants as criminal and disloyal, and characterizes border fences and increased enforcement as anti-terrorist measures.

Another law characterized as both an anti-terrorist and an immigration enforcement measure, the REAL ID Act, imposes stringent national standards for state drivers’ licenses. After May 2008, issuance of drivers’ licenses will require strictly-defined proofs of citizenship or immigration status and the licenses must include “a common machine-readable technology, with defined data elements.” Drivers’ licenses (or equivalent identification) will be required for entry into federal buildings and for airport security.

Solidarity and Resistance

Today the whole world is watching us, denouncing our government’s torture of prisoners, observing the erosion of our civil liberties and the due process of law. The revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib were only the beginning. Since then, Amnesty International has reported allegations of torture, ill-treatment and deaths of those held in U.S. custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and elsewhere.

For years we have leaned on heroes in other places. We have been inspired by the courage of human rights defenders in Colombia and Central America. We have drawn strength from the persistence of campesinos in Brazil and from the determination of union organizers in Mexico.

Now it is our turn to stand up – our turn to resist human rights violations by our own government. The whole world is watching – let’s give them some heroes to watch.

Mary Turck is the editor of the Connection to the Americas and AMERICAS.ORG.

The four international observers came to watch and film as displaced Colombian families occupied an abandoned, government-owned slaughterhouse. Instead, they were seized and taken away by police, accused of organizing the peaceful protest and paraded before television news cameras. Eleven hours later, the Spanish, Italian and U.S. citizens were released, with police officials warning that their “life histories were being analyzed to proceed with their deportation.”

The four, who work for the International Peace Observatory, consider their arrest “a diversion by the authorities to take attention away from internally displaced persons and the violence the state was planning to commit against this civilian population.” Far from organizing the protest, the four arrived after police had surrounded the 300 internally displaced persons, and watched as police gassed and beat the men, women and children.

An IPO observer reported: “ I myself saw police ripping children from their parents and striking indiscriminately against a defenseless population. … In the end, when over 100 persons were locked up in the city jail, three ambulances were needed to transport the gravely wounded. One man was disappeared for two days – he eventually “re-appeared” in a small town in the outskirts of Bogotá. … There were hundreds of riot police, an obvious disproportionate measure in and of itself. The authorities simply refused to address the legitimate needs of the internally displaced population to such basic rights as housing, food, health, and education.”

The three hundred protesters are victims of Colombia’s hidden war, a war usually unseen or perhaps simply ignored by the rest of the world. Like the “low-intensity” wars in Central America during the 1980s, Colombia’s war drives people from their homes as it destroys communities. The U.N. High Commission for Refugees reports three three million internally displaced persons in Colombia, a population of internal war refugees second only to Sudan.

According to the United Nations, Colombia has enlightened laws guaranteeing help to these refugees, but does not follow those laws. Peaceful occupations of property have been an effective means of pressuring the government. Before their attempt to occupy the slaughterhouse, the September 4 protesters had issued a statement detailing the government’s failure to fulfill an agreement signed in 2005, in which the government promised to provide for the displaced people’s health, education, housing, humanitarian aid, accompaniment and safe return to their places of origin. The 2005 agreement was the fruit of a takeover of vacant houses in another part of Bogotá.

The Colombian Constitutional Court in 2004 denounced the government’s failure to aid displaced persons, reporting that 92 percent of displaced persons were unable to meet their basic needs, 80 percent were indigent, 63.5 percent lacked decent housing, 49 percent lacked access to public services, and 23 percent of children under the age of six were malnourished. According to the U.N. World Food Program, mortality rates for displaced persons are six times higher than the national average. Leaders and members of displaced communities are frequent targets of death threats and violence.

International observers are usually safer than Colombia’s internally displaced persons, indigenous communities, teachers, union leaders, journalists or human rights workers. Military and paramilitary soldiers violate human rights, kidnap and even kill with impunity. In just the past few weeks, a university professor was taken from his home in Bogotá by several armed men and shot to death, a human rights leader in the Valle de Cauca department was kidnapped and remains missing, riot police attacked an anti-war march with tear gas and water cannons, the army attacked a mining town, soldiers killed a local resident in the Arenal municipality … the list goes on and on.

On September 7, an Amnesty International report criticized the Colombian government for giving a “green light” to attacks on human rights activists. According to the report, “The official strategy against human rights campaigners seems to be three folded: government authorities publicly question their legitimacy, mount unfounded legal processes and fail to bring to justice those who commit the attacks, even when evidence is widely available.”

The harassment and public denunciation of the International Peace Observatory team on September 4 certainly fit that description. “ As far as what happened to the members of the International Peace Observatory (IPO),” writes one member, “the situation is delicate. We were publicly threatened with deportation, and accused of committing illegal acts and organizing the action. With the active complicity of the mass media, Colonel Yamil Moreno Arias, an instructor for the School of the Americas in 1994 and involved in the judicial persecution of the San José de Apartado Peace Community as the commander for the National Police in Uraba, went before the cameras and slandered us excessively. All of our faces were plastered on the afternoon news bulletins. This of course on a certain level raises the level of risk for all.”

According to Sofia Nordenmark, Amnesty International human rights defenders coordinator, “Attacks against human rights activists in Colombia have a double purpose: they aim to silence individuals and prevent others from continuing with their work.”

The International Peace Observatory team has not yet been silenced, and intends to continue. “ While national and international attention has focused on us and on the absurd tale invented by the police, hundreds of homeless families continue to go hungry,” they say. “We remain firm in our decision to continue to accompany communities as they strive for a truly democratic and just nation.”

Mary Turck is the editor of Connection to the Americas and WWW.AMERICAS.ORG, for the Resource Center of the Americas, where this article first appeared. 

Published in Connection to the Americas, September/October 2006

The stories are hard to tell. No one wants to give a name. No one wants to be identified. Everyone is afraid.

    It is a June morning in a Twin Cities suburb. The young couple has dropped the children off at the babysitter’s house. They are on their way to work. Then vans with flashing police lights block in their car, front and back, and ICE (Immigration Control and Enforcement) agents jump out, guns drawn. They had been watching the house, following the car. They wanted this couple, this mother and father, wife and husband. Handcuffs. Jail.

    “Police,” the man at the door told an 11-year-old who answered the door at another home in January. They told his mother they were searching for a gang member, a criminal. They were not. They were ICE agents looking for undocumented immigrants to deport. In this home, they struck out – the mother and son, like most Latinos living in Minnesota, were U.S. citizens. (Most immigrants in Minnesota are citizens or legal permanent residents.)

    Shakopee. Blaine. Minneapolis. Farmington. May. June. July. August. Immigration arrests continue, and fear builds, as ICE targets people who have lived in the United States for years. La redada – the raid. Whenever and wherever it comes, la redada spreads fear far beyond its actual targets.

    ICE came for the Bloomington family in May. They had worked hard, owned a home, belonged to a church. They had to leave, taking their U.S. citizen children to a “home” in Mexico they had never seen. In their church and community, fear spreads. Who will be next? What plans should families make for their homes, their cars, their children?

    In August, ICE descended on the Star Packaging factory in Whitewater, Wisconsin, arresting 25 workers. “”We have been living in the United States for 20 years,” protests a relative. “Our home is here, our job; we have children.”

    Also in August, the Barreto family sat in jail in St. Paul. After seventeen years in the United States, they were being sent back to Mexico. Half the family, anyway – mother and father prepared to say goodbye to 16-year-old Jorge and 11-year-old Eric, their U.S. citizen sons. And to their church, their friends, the south Minneapolis community where they lived, the lives they had built since arriving in the United States as young adults with dreams.

    Across the country, ICE now targets people with old deportation orders or expired voluntary departure agreements. Who among our friends lives with an expired TPS (Temporary Protected Status) document? Who among our children’s classmates has parents who, many years ago, crossed the border without documents? What family on our block or in our church has one documented, one undocumented parent? As ICE focuses on people who have lived here for years, fear builds in our communities.

Mary Turck is the editor of the Connection to the Americas and AMERICAS.ORG.

Published in AMERICAS.ORG, July 2006

As the intensity of internal conflict mounts, Mexico awaits the verdict of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (variously known as the TEPJF or the Trife), and the streets of Mexico City are occupied by encampments of protesters demanding a full recount of the ballots in the July 2 presidential election, “vote by vote, precinct by precinct.” The constitution says the seven-judge Trife must complete its work by August 31 and must announce its decision by September 6.

At stake is the outcome of the July 2 presidential election, and perhaps much more. The Federal Election Institute (IFE) declared Felipe Calderón, candidate of the ruling National Action Party (PAN), the winner of the election by 243,000 votes, a razor-thin margin of the 41.5 million votes cast. Supporters of the Democratic Revolutionary Party’s Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) insist that he won the election, pointing to numerous instances of fraud. Among them: ballot boxes found in garbage dumps, boxes stuffed with additional ballots, tally sheets reporting totals that do not match the number of votes inside the box – the list goes on and on.

After two rallies of more than a million people each, AMLO supporters have settled in a well-organized, well-supplied encampment in downtown Mexico City, spilling out from the Zócalo (central square), blocking roads and disrupting daily life in the capital.

Despite evidence of widespread election irregularities, the Trife refused the call for a complete national recount, agreeing only to examine the results in 11,839 of the nation’s 130,000 precincts. That recount was completed in mid-August, though the results have not yet been publicly released. The Mexican daily La Jornada reported conflicting PRD and PAN claims about the results of the recount, with PRD insisting that the Trife had uncovered major problems and PAN dismissing the irregularities as “errorcitos.” But La Jornada’s website features videos showing violated ballot boxes and other evidence of fraud from sites across the country. Narco News Bulletin, which has closely followed the election and post-election results, claims it has received information that the Trife’s partial recount showed irregularities sufficient to reverse the results of the election. (Mexico’s Partial Vote Recount Confirms Massive and Systematic Election Fraud, Narco News Bulletin, 8/15/06, http://www.narconews.com/Issue42/article2010.html)

The Trife has several options. First, it could annul the results in specific precincts, based on its examinations. Many results are tainted by “taqueo” (stuffing ballot boxes as if they were tacos) or by “saqueo” (theft of ballots.) In either case, determining the true count for the precinct is impossible, so annulment is the remedy. Annulments of even a portion of the 11,000 recounted precincts could reverse the margin of victory, giving the presidency to AMLO.

Second, the Trife could annul the entire election. It has annulled local and even gubernatorial elections in the past. If it annulled the entire election, Congress would select an interim president to govern and new elections would be scheduled within two years. Since Congress is effectively controlled by the governing PAN party, with the support of the deposed and discredited Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), a two-year delay in elections would mean two more years of PAN rule.

Whatever decision the Trife takes, they are not the only actors on the scene. López Obrador has pledged “civil resistance” if the Trife declares in favor of Calderón, beginning on September 1 when President Vicente Fox gives his annual State of the Union address to Congress.

As in the U.S. presidential election in 2000, it seems clear that various kinds of election irregularities (or outright fraud) resulted in the initial award of victory. Unlike the Democratic candidate and party in the United States in 2004, AMLO and his supporters have refused to yield, instead pledging to escalate their campaign of nonviolent civil resistance and to prevent a Calderón presidency.

While the magnitude of Mexico’s electoral fraud may be even greater than the “irregularities” of Florida in 2000, that alone does not explain the militance of the resistance. “Mexico has a revolution every hundred years,” say many voices from the street. In 1810, the War of Independence began. The Mexican Revolution came in 1910. Today, millions of voices are raised in protest, peaceful resistance fills the streets of the capital with encampments, the Zapatistas’ La Otra Campaña marches through the countryside and, in Oaxaca, teachers lead a popular revolt against a corrupt and abusive governor.

This may be what a revolution looks like. It may be what democracy looks like. And it may be – in a lesson to the citizens of the neighbor to the north – what principled resistance to corrupt abuse of power and theft of elections looks like.

“Minutemen, go home!” Chants and drums reverberated across the Capitol mall on the Fourth of July, as a few hundred Minnesotans gathered to celebrate the Fourth of July by protesting the visit of an anti-immigrant motorcycle caravan. The multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-generational crowd of Minnesotans listened as a speaker denounced the Minutemen as “part of a long tradition of racism.” Green Party candidates and supporters worked the crowd, looking for signatures on nomination petitions. Long-time activists stood shoulder to shoulder with young anarchists.

Below them, in the parking lot, about a dozen motorcycles stood at the curb.  The riders call themselves “brave men and women on modern day iron steeds.” and they are riding cross-country warning, “The Mexicans are coming!” One of the young Minnesotans observes, grinning, that the motorcycles are imports.

While Minnesota may have mounted the biggest counter-demonstration to date, the cross-country anti-immigrant caravan has failed to generate much enthusiasm anywhere. Typical turnouts for their rallies have been about two dozen people, including the half-dozen riders – in Yakima, Washington on June 7, in  Oklahoma City on June 27 and in Des Moines, Iowa on July 2. (Minutemen supporters claim “large” turnouts of 175-200 people in Oregon and California.)  Few in middle America seem alarmed or inspired by their anti-immigrant message.

Finally, the white-haired leader of the anti-immigrant crew pulled up, revving his bike for maximum noise. He is the showman who has hyped this as a “Paul Revere Ride,” and he has been upstaged by the multi-ethnic Minnesota enemy. Drastic times, drastic measures – he reclaimed the media spotlight with a little dance that ended with him turning his back to the Capitol steps to waggle his butt at the Minnesotans.

 “What do we want? Legalization! When do we want it? Now!” “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” In two languages, the Minnesota counter-demonstrators chanted their solidarity and confidence. Political rallies are as much a part of the Fourth of July, as immigrants are  a part of America. These Minnesotans embraced both politics and immigrants.

The small anti-immigrant caravan left by 3:15, to a derisive chorus of “Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more!” And the Minnesotans dispersed to celebrate with hot dogs or spring rolls or tortillas. A very Minnesota Fourth of July. 

Sásabe is a dusty border town, with 50 people living on the U.S. side and a few thousand living on the Mexico side. Thousands of immigrants travel the road to Sásabe each week, mostly headed for unofficial, uninspected desert crossings. The stories they carry on that dusty road show the inescapable connection between globalization and immigration.

The road to Sásabe begins in Washington, D.C. and in Mexico City, where powerful corporate interests command legislation that bankrupts small business owners in Veracruz and subsistence farmers in Chiapas, driving them north to serve as cheap labor in fields and factories.

NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, took effect in 1994, and has built corporate profits, while depressing Mexican wages and driving more than a million small farmers off their land. Corn farmers were devastated as cheaper U.S. corn flooded Mexican markets, beginning in the 1990s. Their U.S. competition comes mostly from large farming operations, which receive the lion’s share of U.S. farm subsidies, to the detriment of small farmers in the United States as well as those in Mexico.

After NAFTA, the Mexican government also ended the CONASUPO program, which had provided marketing assistance and support to small corn growers. (Cuts to CONASUPO had begun in 1988, even before NAFTA, as part of neo-liberal economic restructuring.) Now small Mexican farmers have no way to compete with large U.S. grain companies, such as Cargill or ADM. At the same time, government subsidies that had kept down the price of corn tortillas ended. Between 1997 and 2002, the price of corn tortillas, a staple food in Mexico, more than doubled.

Farmers in the southern Mexican states of Chiapas and Oaxaca were hit hardest by NAFTA, with millions of people forced off their land to seek work somewhere else in – or outside – the country. René and Mauricio are two of those migrants. They left Chiapas in May, in a search for jobs that is now taking them to the United States. On June 1, at a migrant shelter in Altar, about sixty miles from the border, they stayed up late to talk with a group of Minnesota visitors.

“I worked in a cattle ranch and earned about 400 pesos ($36.00) per week,” Mauricio told us. “Then last October it rained a lot. My boss lived next to a river. The ranch was flooded, killing cattle and chickens and everything. I lost my job. The flood wiped out the mangoes, too. My boss was ruined.

“I started working at another job. Then I came up here with my friend. I worked to harvest calabazas (squash) up here for a couple of weeks – they weren’t paying much. I went to Guaymas, Sonora, and they weren’t paying much either.”

“I’m not married – I just support my mother and a nephew. I’m her only son and she wants me to go back to Chiapas. I say “I’ve come this far. I’m not going back to Chiapas with nothing.’ I’m afraid of robbers and snakes. But I’m with my friend and we are going to make it across.”

The town of Altar has become a major jumping-off point for migrants, who must now cross through forbidding desert terrain. Walls and major enforcement efforts have made safer crossings impossible for most. In the high season for immigration, January through March, about three thousand migrants take the road from Altar to the border at Sásabe each day. In May, the Mexican Grupo Beta police, a force charged with protection of immigrants, say the number is down to about 1,000 daily.

Grupo Beta stops northbound vehicles at a checkpoint on the heavily rutted dirt road that runs from Altar to Sásabe. They count the people packed into the vans that traverse the trail daily. They tell people to stay with a group, warn women that they especially need the protection of a group, warn them never to let their children leave the group. They warn of the dangers of the desert – dehydration, scorching sun during the day, snakes and scorpions, robbers.

Mountains beckon in the distance. Along the road, majestic saguaro cactus stretch their arms thirty or forty feet toward the blazing blue sky. Squat barrel cactus and spiky ocotillo bear shriveling flowers. Paddle-shaped nopales  and shrub-like chollas grow everywhere, mixed in among the creosote bushes and mesquite trees. . 

Neither the forbidding terrain nor the discouraging messages from Grupo Beta nor the U.S. government’s posturing with National Guard troops and increased Border Patrols can turn back many of the determined migrants on the Sásabe road. Most will make it across the border. Some will die in the desert – 460 bodies counted last year. Many will be captured and sent back across the border. Most will make it to the north.

One of the two Grupo Beta agents at the checkpoint is from Chiapas. He has found work in the northern part of Mexico. Many of his fellow Chiapanecos find work in the maquilas (factories producing goods for export only) clustered along the northern border.

Cecilia Guzmán, who has lived in the northern border city of Nogales for more than sixty years, watched her city grow from 30,000 people to its present size of somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000. The maquilas began coming, she says, after the United States ended the bracero program in 1965, sending thousands of Mexican “guest” workers home. At first, the maquilas paid rent to the Mexican owners of the land and factory buildings. After the passage of NAFTA, foreigners could buy the land outright, so less money comes to Mexicans. In 2000, about 100 maquilas operated in Nogales, but the economic downturn after the 9/11 attack in the United States resulted in 20 or 30 closings. Now the number is back up to about 90.

The official work week in Mexico is 48 hours. The minimum wage in Nogales is now 48 pesos per day, about $4.50. Most maquila workers make more, earning bonuses for perfect attendance or error-free production or taking fewer bathroom breaks. The average worker may earn closer to 70 pesos per day, closer to six dollars. They work in electronics manufacturing at Motorola or Anfenol, making staples and office supplies at Acco or combination locks at MasterLock or leather belts to be sold at Wal-Mart and K-Mart.

Guzmán believes that there is some benefit from maquilas, because they do provide work for people. Some maquilas even provide a type of subsidized housing for some workers. Most workers live in colonias, spreading over mountainsides with housing ranging from cardboard and wood shacks to prized cement-block homes. Colonias generally lack sewage, running water and other amenities.

She points out that maquilas cause other problems. Nogales means walnuts, and oak and walnut trees filled the town when she was young. Now the pleasant groves where her family picknicked on Sundays are gone, cut down to make room for maquilas. Today industrial wastes poison the people and environment.

The economic refugees crowding Nogales and other border towns or crossing the desert at Sásabe will not stop because of National Guard troops or better walls or enforcement, but most would happily return to their homes if only they could earn enough money to feed their families. The road to Sásabe begins in Washington, DC and Mexico City with trade agreements and neo-liberal economic policies imposed by political and corporate power. The same powers that pushed through NAFTA and CAFTA, that ended CONASUPO and food assistance to the poor – these are the powers that must act to build or rebuild just and sustainable economies, so that migrants have no need to take the dangerous road to Sásabe. 

As our group of Minnesotans left the Mexican town of Altar for the border crossing in  Sásabe, our white mini-van  stopped first at a private toll booth near the turn-off from the paved highway to a two-lane dirt road. The toll booth was planted firmly in place by a private landowner who claims the toll for the grading and “improvements” to the road. The toll collector, a former mayor of Altar, also owns a hotel housing immigrants there. Government attempts to dislodge him from his toll booth have failed. Within a mile of jolting along the rutted dirt road, someone jokes that we should go back to demand a refund.

Joking aside, this rutted excuse for a road sees heavy traffic. Francisco García Aten, human rights director at a Catholic immigrant shelter in Altar (and himself a current aspirant to the office of mayor of Altar), told us about the thousands of migrants who pour through Altar daily. Almost all of them end up on the road to Sásabe, though few will pass through the border checkpoint itself. Most scatter through the desert territory around Sásabe, crossing the border, which amounts to no more than a barbed wire cattle fence along this part of la frontera, and then walking through the desert for three nights (if they are lucky) or being picked up by the U.S. Border Patrol if they are not so lucky) or wandering, lost, through cold nights and scorching days, if they are really unlucky. 

Sásabe is a twin town, with only a handful of people living in Sásabe, Arizona, and only about 2,000 people living in the Mexican Sásabe. It lies in the Tucson sector of the U.S. Border Patrol, as do the far larger twin cities of Nogales, Mexico (population somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000) and Nogales, Arizona (population about 21,000). The Tucson sector stretches for 261 miles, from New Mexico to the Yuma County, Arizona border. More than half of the 473 documented immigrant deaths last year occurred in the Tucson sector.

We stopped at a checkpoint for Grupo Beta, where two friendly agents said that about 31,000 people passed through their checkpoint in May 2006.  During the high season for immigration, January through March, they counted an average of 3,000 people daily on the Sásabe road. That’s a dramatic increase over March 2004, when Grupo Beta counted 56,000 people and March 2003, when the number was only 41,000.

Grupo Beta was established in 1991 as an immigrant protection/police agency. It is not charged with immigration enforcement. Back at the CCAMYN migrant shelter in Altar, Francisco Garcia had told us that CCAMYN communicates with Grupo Beta and considers their numbers the most reliable figures available on immigration in this part of Mexico.

 “Our mission is protecting immigrants,” the Grupo Beta officers insisted. Breaking off their conversation with us, they spoke briefly with the immigrants packed in a white van, and handed out leaflets with warnings. Returning, they said they call a hospital if anyone is in need of medical care. Mostly, though, they warn people of the dangers that lie ahead. Especially women, they say. Women are particularly fragile, particularly vulnerable to the dangers of the desert. It is clear that they mean dangerous people as well as dehydration.

At the border crossing in Sásabe, the agents treat us politely. They do check the passport for the one Venezuelan member of our group, but don’t even ask to look at the U.S. passports.

Now we are headed for a Baptist church to join other people on the Border Trail Walk. The desert around us is beautiful but forbidding. I think of the migrants in Altar who told me that they planned to walk for three nights through the desert before reaching Tucson. Walking at night, in cooler temperatures, seemed a sensible plan. Now that I see the amount of vegetation in the desert, I wonder how they will manage in the dark. The giant saguaro cactus may be easy to avoid, but the gnarled cholla reach twisted, thorny branches to catch at arms, legs, eyes, hair. This  is not storybook sandy desert, but a landscape filled with hostile vegetation – as well as poisonous snakes, scorpions and other night-moving creatures.

As we drive toward the church, a mobile Border Patrol unit stops us again. This time, they have a few more questions for Maria, but still none for the rest of us. Many Border Patrol vehicles and a fair amount of surveillance equipment is in evidence. I wonder how many people they pick up in a night – how many of the thousand people on the Sásabe road will be heading back to Mexico in the morning, not of their own volition.

We hear of, but do not see, the Minutemen building some kind of fence on a nearby ranch, in one of their small but highly-publicized operations. Operating on the legal fringes, they claim to patrol the border to deter or detain immigrants. While anti-immigrant sentiment or plain old racism is a large part of the Minutemen’s appeal, some Arizona border residents are afraid of the violence of drug traffickers, and of traffickers in human beings. While the vast majority of border crossers are people looking for any honest work, a small number of violent traffickers make the already-dangerous desert even more deadly.

Pro-immigrant groups operating in the Arizona desert near Sásabe far outnumber the anti-immigrant Minutemen. Like the Catholic-run CCAMYN shelter in Altar, they are motivated by the desperate plight of hundreds of immigrants who die each year attempting to crdoss the desert and thousands more who barely survive the dangers of dehydration, snake or scorpion bites, and the dangers posed by criminals who prey on migrants. At the church, and on the Border Trail Walk, we will meet people from many of these groups.

The Humane Borders/Fronteras Compasivas organization maintains a network of more than seventy blue water barrels. Volunteers maintain the barrels, which are located in areas of the desert where immigrants frequently cross and are at greatest risk. The U.S. Border Patrol advised the project on where to place the barrels and agreed not to stake out the locations or target them for arrests.

No More Deaths/No Más Muertes began operating in 2004, with roots in religious groups in Tucson.  and send volunteers into the desert, looking for desert crossers who have become disoriented or run out of water or have medical emergencies and need assistance. Though they negotiated an understanding on operating rules with the U.S. Border Patrol, two No More Deaths volunteers were arrested in 2005 for transporting dying immigrants to a Tucson hospital. Daniel Strauss and Shanti Sellz found the three dehydrated men in the desert, called a doctor and a nurse after conducting a field examination, and transported the men to a hospital. All five were arrested, and Strauss and Sellz were charged with felonies carrying up to fifteen years in prison.

The Samaritan project, organized in 2002, patrols the desert to offer survival assistance to border crossers. Each patrol carries water, food, emergency medical supplies, communications equipment, maps and individual survival packs for immigrants.

By the time we get to the church, it is nearly dark. Many people have settled in for the night, getting some sleep before the 5 a.m. wake-up call. Others have gathered for a concert and sing-along. We spread out, one on a bedroll under the open sky, others in a tent. I opt to unroll a sleeping bag inside the church, listening to the end of the concert  and falling asleep as soon as the lights go out.

June 2, Altar, Mexico: Four Mexican men and seven visitors sit in a tight circle in the spacious gravel courtyard in the middle of the night. As other residents of the migrant shelter sleep, they plunge deep into conversation, explanation, translation. Omar, the youngest, is from Veracruz. Rene and Mauricio are from Chiapas. Gerardo, the oldest, is from Sinaloa. They listen as Maria introduces the visitors. Todos somos hermanos, she says. The fact that you have such difficulties passing borders is wrong. We would like to know why you had to leave your families and your culture, and also about your work here in Mexico.

Rene welcomes the visitors. “I am happy you have come. We are brothers, we have the same blood, the same God.” Mauricio agrees. He was very happy to be invited to sit down and eat the evening meal with another group of visitors, the American high school students. “It makes you feel good inside to sit and eat with people. I never was invited to sit down and eat with Americans before.” He is glad to talk. “We couldn’t sleep anyway,” he explains, “too many things going through our heads. It helps to talk.”

CCAMYN is the Centro Comunitario de Atención al Migrante y Necesitado in Altar, a formerly small town in the State of Sonora in Mexico. CCAMYN opened its doors in 2001, as a program of the Catholic Church, with the goal of “being an oasis in the desert for our migrant brothers and sisters.” They serve meals, provide showers and a place to sleep for a few nights, provide some medical care, and support and stand with migrants who are heading north and with those who have been captured and deported back to Mexico. Migrants can stay one to three nights at CCAMYN before leaving – for home or for the border.

Earlier in the evening, CCAMYN’s human rights director, Francisco Garcia, spoke to an attentive circle of visitors. He explained how Altar’s main economic activity shifted from agriculture to migration over the past ten years. “The year 1994 is a year marked in the history of our country because that is when the infamous NAFTA agreement took effect. This agreement has been beating down our country. Until now we have seen far more disadvantages than advantages.

“This was also a historic year because the first time a guerrilla insurgency appeared, as a reaction to the free trade agreement. In that same year, the United States initiated three big operations on the border. The objective of these operations was to completely end immigration, an objective clearly not achieved…. On the contrary, the migration moved to the most dangerous and remote locations.”

Daytime temperatures in Altar climb well above 100 degrees. Located in the unforgiving Sonora Desert, it is a 65-mile van ride from the U.S. border at Sásabe. Francisco continues: “And since 1994, when migration was channeled to these areas, our undocumented brothers and sisters, illegals, migrants, whatever you call them, did not only appear in the United States, but also in statistics. We began seeing a lot of migrant deaths. Deaths grew every year. Every year, more migrants die looking for the famous American Dream….

“In 1997, 200 people came through Altar each day. Then there were 400 in 1998, 600 in 1999. In 2000, 2200 migrants arrived here every day. … In 2002, 2,300 came each day, and the number kept growing. In February the last numbers we saw from the 13 of February to 13 of April, there were 3,200 people passing daily, according to the count on a route between Altar and Sásabe.” The high season for migration comes in January through March, with comparatively lower temperatures.

Francisco’s message is clear and emphatic: “Who really is the migrant? Is it a human being like ourselves who has a family and no better options for a better life? Whose only hope is to get to the United States to work, to offer the only tools he has, his hands and feet? With the hope that that job will offer them a better salary. …

“Go and tell everyone from your family to your workplace to Congress, that migrants are human beings, that they migrate for necessity. Would you leave your home if you had a way to support your family? They leave because they have no way.”

Omar, Rene, Mauricio and Gerardo speak more quietly than Francisco, offering personal stories rather than analysis.

Omar worked in a business fixing LP gas canisters, earning about $30 weekly. “The wages here are so low that I can’t make it. I want to study and work and then come back to build a home.”

Gerardo worked in the fields – onions, tomatoes, fruit, vegetables. “I was just about a prisoner of the company,” he says. He earned 70 pesos, a little more than six dollars a day. But, he explains, a canasta basica, the food for a family of four, costs 300 pesos. So his wage would not even feed a family, much less pay for clothing or housing them.

Rene comes from Chiapas. He must migrate because his wages are not enough to support his two children. He has to leave in order to support them. Coffee prices dropped drastically this year, he explains. “I talked to my brother and decided to go and see how luck treats me. I have three brothers in the United States, in New York, New Jersey and Los Angeles. When I told my brothers I was coming up north, they said it is really hard. One of them said he was turned back six times before crossing.”

Mauricio, also from Chiapas, worked on a cattle ranch until floods wiped out the ranch. He has looked for other work, picking squash for a while, cutting grapes for a while, never finding a job that lasted or that paid enough to live. “I’m not married,” he tells the group. “I just support my mother and a nephew. I’m her only son and she wants me to go back to Chiapas. I say “I’ve come this far. I’m not going back to Chiapas with nothing. I’m afraid of robbers and snakes. But I’m with my friend and we are going to make it across.”

As the conversation winds down, the men have a message for their visitors. “Tell people in the United States that we are not robbers. We are not criminals. We just want to work. All we want to do is work.”