Local activists will serve time in prison for SOA protest

No. 123, May 24-30, 2001

By Beth Trigg

Columbus, Georgia, May 23— The 26 women and men being prosecuted for civil disobedience at the US Army’s School of the Americas (SOA) were found guilty Tuesday in federal court. They were charged with trespassing on Fort Benning, the military base where the SOA is located, in violation of previous “ban-and-bar” letters banning them from the base. The sentences handed out today ranged from 2 years probation, with no prison time, to 1 year in federal prison; fines ranging up to $3,000 were also imposed.

Three western North Carolina residents were among those sentenced today. Kathryn Temple of Asheville pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 2 years probation and a $500 fine. Clare Hanrahan of Asheville and Jon Hunt of Boone were sentenced to 6 months in federal prison, in addition to a $500 fine.

The school, renamed the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC), has been implicated in training some of the most infamous perpetrators of human rights abusers in Latin America.

Artist and feminist Kathryn Temple began her trial Monday with a question addressed to Judge G. Mallon Faircloth: “Why would I do something at such great personal risk when the thought of leaving my life and my home even for a short while grieves and frightens me so deeply? The truth is that I what I have learned researching the atrocities committed by graduates of the SOA frightens and grieves me even more deeply.”

Temple recounted the details of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, and showed Faircloth a painting of a small girl killed in the massacre. The judge listened attentively, and commented, “you have touched a soft spot in my heart with your art.”

Tuesday morning, the defendants filed into the courtroom along with about 200 supporters. The first to testify that morning was John Ewers, who is retired from his career working for two different multinational corporations.

Ewers described his path from corporate manager to social change activist: “I lived my life in what a lot of people would call the mainstream. I didn’t really believe that the US would be involved in something like this. When I look back now, I guess I was in denial.”

Pointing to a pivotal trip to Colombia with his Presbyterian church group, Ewers tearfully recounted: “We went to an abandoned garbage dump in Cartajena. It was 1998. There were 25,000 people living there in plastic and cardboard shacks. They were people who had lives, just like us, but they were internally displaced. They had nowhere to go."

One man there told me that a paramilitary had come to his house and said, ‘We’re going to buy your land.’ And they offered him some pittance. He said no, and very matter-of-factly, the paramilitary representative said, ‘Then we’ll buy it from your widow.’ They fled."

In 1999, we went back to the same garbage dump, and there were 40,000 people living there. After that, we couldn’t back away. I found out that there were human rights commissions in Colombia, and out of 240 soldiers implicated in abuses, 147 were SOA grads. To me it was a clear, direct link between the pain and suffering that the military and the paramilitaries were causing there, and the SOA.”

Like Ewers, Lois Putzier, a union organizer from Arizona, underwent a process of awakening about these issues.

“The majority of my career was spent at a bomb factory -- something for which I am profoundly ashamed. I worked at Hughes Aircraft. My basic job was to take positions from management, watered down from the Pentagon -- they were our customers -- and make lies palatable," said Putzier.

Putzier traveled to Guatemala in 1997, where, she says, “I heard first about the School of the Americas from survivors of a massacre there. I met a young man who was ten when it happened. He saw his mother raped and killed. He was carrying his 3-year-old brother, when the baby was ripped out of his arms and his head smashed in front of him.”

Many of the defendants likewise described personal experiences with traveling to Central or South America and witnessing the devastating effects of US military and economic policies there, or of meeting refugees here in the US. Several spoke of friends and colleagues who had been murdered in Latin America by military or paramilitary forces.

Hazel Tulecke, who worked with families of disappeared people in Guatemala, recounted her experience of losing co-workers to assassination, and concluded, “I began to understand that our government is truly implicated.”

Martha Hayward, a mother of four who is on trial along with her sister Mary Lou and her daughter Rachel summarized the message that so many of the activists heard from people they met in Latin America: “The people I met in Honduras said to us: ‘Tell your government we are not the enemy.’”

The defendants pointed to their efforts to close the School through other nonviolent means -- letter writing, lobbying, and community education before risking prison. Jack Gilroy of New York told the judge that he had personally made more than 80 congressional visits to Washington. At some point, all those charged had decided that their lobbying and public education efforts had been insufficient.

In the words of Rachel Hayward, the youngest defendant at 19, “ I felt that what was being done in Latin America because of the training at the SOA was horribly wrong. . . .To remain silent in the face of injustice is to comply with that injustice. And I want no part of what is going on at the SOA. It has no place in a country that claims to believe in democracy and justice and human rights.”

The decision to “cross the line” in civil disobedience and risk imprisonment was a difficult one for most of the defendants.

Lois Putzier explained that she crossed the line because the need to close the school “became more important than my own risk.”

Judge Faircloth asked many of the defendants if they had researched the “new” school (WHISC). All replied that they believed that the name change was superficial.

As Clare Hanrahan summarized, “to the best of my knowledge, there is insignificant difference, and this is another deceit and an attempt to confuse the American people.”

Jon Hunt added: “Changing the name is not the answer. The only answer is closing the SOA permanently and ending US imperialism in Latin America and around the world.”

And, explained Lois Putzier, “The lie is now that WHISC is a democratizing institute. In addition to the atrocities that have been committed and will continue to be committed I am sure, there is the atrocity of the lie.”

Defendants repeatedly pointed to larger systems of which the Army’s training school is only one small part.

William Houston, a math teacher from Ohio, explained, “SOA or WHISC is part of a broader picture of policies of repression against indigenous peoples resisting corporations that would move them off their land, also aimed at getting rid of unions, also aimed at religious leaders.”

Betty McKenzie, a nun and teacher from Minnesota, said, “We invest money in training to protect our so-called interests, such as oil. We seem to be unable to do without oil, and it seems that virtually all of the oil in the world we consider to be ours. We’ve seen our factories move to Latin America where labor is cheap and there are no environmental protections. These are our ‘interests.’ The SOA is only the tip of the iceberg. And that iceberg is about 225 years old, as old as our country.”

Another common theme was an abiding commitment to anti-militarism, pacifism, and nonviolence.

Russell DeYoung, a Southern Baptist and NASA scientist who has been arrested repeatedly for civil disobedience at both the Pentagon and the SOA, explained that he had come to believe that “violence is so caustic that it is poison at any dose.”

Many of the defendants pointed to Plan Colombia as the latest in the series of unjust, violent US interventions in Latin America. In the words of John Hunt, “When I look at Colombia and Mexico today, I see the Guatemala and El Salvador of yesterday.”

In the testimony of the 26 defendants, and in the symbolic direct actions which occurred at the base the day of sentencing there was a clear statement that the movement to close the SOA, whatever its name, will continue.

On the steps of the courthouse, Kathryn Temple told reporters, “Others will cross the line, and the resistance will continue.”

In the courtroom, other defendants committed themselves to continuing in civil disobedience until the school is closed.

Josh Raisler Cohn entreated the judge and federal employees in the courtroom to “join us in calling for the closing of the school.”

Eric Robison, after quietly explaining his commitment to speaking up against injustice finished his statement to the court with the simple words, “I refuse to be intimidated.”

Acting on Robison’s statement, 9 activists were arrested on the grounds of Fort Benning today in an action intended to demonstrate that the harsh sentences imposed for nonviolent action would not dissuade the movement from continuing its work to close the SOA.

Several activists used black spray paint to erase the line marking the entrance to the base. Others attempted to string crime scene tape across the doors of the SOA itself.

One Asheville resident, Willy Rosencrans, attempted to deliver a “ban-and-bar” letter to the commander of the base, banning and barring the School of the Americas from the base because of crimes against humanity. The letter stated that the school had “crossed the line” of human decency, and it was barred from teaching torture, assassination, and counterinsurgency techniques. It was signed, “Peace be with you, The People.”