The fountain at Washington D.C.’s Dupont Circle was overflowing with people dressed as peasant women from El Salvador, their scarves covering half their faces like abuelas – grandmotherly figures mourning sons and husbands who have disappeared or worse. Men dressed in Army garb were “strung’ like puppets, long pipes extending up their backs to hold frames from which their strings were hung. Women on stilts had wrapped around them cardboard horses, giving them the appearance of a small contingent of cavalry meant to accompany a giant grandmother trailed by ghostly babushkas strung behind her to represent thousands of women who had lost loved ones to men trained at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. Still others held up cloth signs, like gossamer that seemed to float on the cool spring breeze. And finally there were perhaps a hundred or so more people waiting in line to follow this parade that would weave its way to the White House in a few minutes.
Roy Bourgeois, the former Maryknoll priest who founded School of the Americas Watch 20 years ago, energized the 300 or so who had gathered to join the peaceful action at the White House, with words of encouragement, asking everyone follow in the footsteps of Dorothy Day and Cesar Chavez, helping to call “attention to something that’s very wrong, that causes suffering and repression to others. For that reason, on last Monday many of us here started a liquid only fast” to protest the continued operation of the School of the Americas, “and we are going to end the fast today.” Today, this group would set foot before the White House in an effort to force awareness to the SOA, and persuade President Barack Obama to shut the school down.
With the fast complete, the group lined up and began its march up and around Dupont Circle, finally snaked onto Connecticut Avenue, where we began our march towards the White House.
It was a beautiful day, and crowds happened to be gathered all along the protester’s route – tourists in town to enjoy the annual Cherry Blossom Festival. I heard one woman telling her young son that the group was part of the Cherry Blossom Festival Parade, which had been curtailed for fear of the government shutting down over the weekend as Congressional leaders and the President haggled about details of the government’s budget.
When we finally reached the center point in front of the White House along Lafayette Park, the actors in our entourage executed a bit of street theater meant to illustrate the struggle that tens of thousands of poor people in the Americas suffered at the hands of SOA-trained soldiers.
And then in a very somber moment, Roy Bourgeois and maybe 20 others walked in a procession to the fence surrounding the White House, and they all laid prostrate. The scene reminded me of some of the pen-and-ink drawings at the back of the Chapel at the University of Central America in San Salvador, where victims of violence lie akimbo in various positions of repose, their bodies riddled with bullets. It was no accident that the protesters who were about to be arrested were representing the same gruesome scenario.
As each person was processed and hauled into a paddy wagon, speakers from our group recalled the passing of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the Four Churchwomen and the Six Jesuits and two women at the UCA, and cried “shame” to the arresting officers as our friends were hauled away. As Bourgeois had said earlier, he and his companions suffered arrests to remember those who had suffered at the hands of SOA graduates.
After some time had passed, I walked away from the White House to the center of the park, where a statue of the Marquis de Lafayette was perched above a granite pedestal on a bronze horse, surrounded by a battery of canons. How ironic, I thought, that we had just gathered the past two days to discuss the perils of militarization in the United States, and here was an effigy of one of our revolutionary heroes in view of the presidential palace. How difficult this task will be, educating people about militarization, when it is a belief that is coded into our DNA.
As I looked across the park to our entourage, thinning now as all the arrests had been made, a young man and woman walked up to me, glanced at the group and to me and asked, “What’s going on there?” A protest against the School of the Americas. “What is that?” And I told them the story about the school, with its roots in Panama, then Ft. Benning; its name change to WHINSEC, and the martyrs of El Salvador and the rest of Central and South America.
“I didn’t know,” the young man said. “How horrible,” the girl added. They watched for a minute or two, and then spotting a Haagen-Dazs cart, they shuffled off to get an ice cream.
(CRISPAZ Executive Director Dennis O’Connor is attending he SOA Watch/Latin American Solidarity Days of Action in Washington, D.C., and he will be reporting on each day’s activities in The CRISPAZ Blog.)
Roy Bourgeois, the former Maryknoll priest who founded School of the Americas Watch 20 years ago, energized the 300 or so who had gathered to join the peaceful action at the White House, with words of encouragement, asking everyone follow in the footsteps of Dorothy Day and Cesar Chavez, helping to call “attention to something that’s very wrong, that causes suffering and repression to others. For that reason, on last Monday many of us here started a liquid only fast” to protest the continued operation of the School of the Americas, “and we are going to end the fast today.” Today, this group would set foot before the White House in an effort to force awareness to the SOA, and persuade President Barack Obama to shut the school down.
With the fast complete, the group lined up and began its march up and around Dupont Circle, finally snaked onto Connecticut Avenue, where we began our march towards the White House.
It was a beautiful day, and crowds happened to be gathered all along the protester’s route – tourists in town to enjoy the annual Cherry Blossom Festival. I heard one woman telling her young son that the group was part of the Cherry Blossom Festival Parade, which had been curtailed for fear of the government shutting down over the weekend as Congressional leaders and the President haggled about details of the government’s budget.
When we finally reached the center point in front of the White House along Lafayette Park, the actors in our entourage executed a bit of street theater meant to illustrate the struggle that tens of thousands of poor people in the Americas suffered at the hands of SOA-trained soldiers.
And then in a very somber moment, Roy Bourgeois and maybe 20 others walked in a procession to the fence surrounding the White House, and they all laid prostrate. The scene reminded me of some of the pen-and-ink drawings at the back of the Chapel at the University of Central America in San Salvador, where victims of violence lie akimbo in various positions of repose, their bodies riddled with bullets. It was no accident that the protesters who were about to be arrested were representing the same gruesome scenario.
As each person was processed and hauled into a paddy wagon, speakers from our group recalled the passing of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the Four Churchwomen and the Six Jesuits and two women at the UCA, and cried “shame” to the arresting officers as our friends were hauled away. As Bourgeois had said earlier, he and his companions suffered arrests to remember those who had suffered at the hands of SOA graduates.
After some time had passed, I walked away from the White House to the center of the park, where a statue of the Marquis de Lafayette was perched above a granite pedestal on a bronze horse, surrounded by a battery of canons. How ironic, I thought, that we had just gathered the past two days to discuss the perils of militarization in the United States, and here was an effigy of one of our revolutionary heroes in view of the presidential palace. How difficult this task will be, educating people about militarization, when it is a belief that is coded into our DNA.
As I looked across the park to our entourage, thinning now as all the arrests had been made, a young man and woman walked up to me, glanced at the group and to me and asked, “What’s going on there?” A protest against the School of the Americas. “What is that?” And I told them the story about the school, with its roots in Panama, then Ft. Benning; its name change to WHINSEC, and the martyrs of El Salvador and the rest of Central and South America.
“I didn’t know,” the young man said. “How horrible,” the girl added. They watched for a minute or two, and then spotting a Haagen-Dazs cart, they shuffled off to get an ice cream.
(CRISPAZ Executive Director Dennis O’Connor is attending he SOA Watch/Latin American Solidarity Days of Action in Washington, D.C., and he will be reporting on each day’s activities in The CRISPAZ Blog.)
No comments:
Post a Comment