thinkful thoughts: School of Americas

This deserves a second post.

This past weekend (Thursday-Monday) I went on a trip to Ft. Benning, Georgia to go to protest the School of Americas. It was probably one of the coolest experiences of my life. For those of you who don't know, the School of Americas is a military combat training facility to train the latin american military. (www.soaw.org is a helpful website) The school trains Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics, and thousands of civilians, union leaders, religious workers and students in Latin America have been murdered, tortured, raped and assassinated by soldiers trained at the school. I went to the protest with a bus from CSB/SJU.

Music and dancing was a huge part of the protest. On Sunday there was a funeral procession for the people who have been killed. Every one of the 22,000 people at the protest held a white cross with the name of a person killed by the soldiers, and people on stage sang the names of just some of the people killed more recently. After each name (and sometimes age), the thousands of people in the crowd sang, "Presente" It was incredibly moving to hear the names. "Eugina Claros seventeen years old" and "Eduardo Alvarez, 76 years old" and "unnamed child of Domingo Parez, two days old." After the procession a parade of drummers and puppetismos came and everyone danced to celebrate life.
Another moving experience was on Sunday morning when people came and gave facts and testimonies about killings going on, and after each testimony the crowd sang, "No mas! no more! we must stop this dirty war, companeros companeros, we cry out, no mas no more!"
Most of Saturday was simply singing and dancing, but there were also speakers who gave first hand testimonies. Many people had witnessed their families being killed or raped or both. a lot of the songs were very folky, and quite a few were in spanish.

Here are a few pictures from the whole thing, if you'd like to see more go on my facebook (this is Christina Newman by the way) and I have an album called SOA watch.

some of the music going on at the SOA (a lot of old ex-hippies sang at their own booths or in front of trailers)

during the funeral procession everyone walked toward the fence of the SOA and hung their crosses on. This is at the very beginning, but after 22,000 crosses, you can imagine what the fence looked like- the entire thing was so covered in crosses you couldn't see the fence hardly.