Remembering and
Resisting for 30 Years by Steve Clemens. August 8, 2013
It was 30 years ago; the U.S. Army School of the Americas
was still in the Panama Canal Zone but military troops from the repressive
government of El Salvador were training at Ft. Benning, GA. A small cadre of
peacemakers, primarily from Koinonia Farm and Habitat For Humanity, came to the
main entrance to the sprawling military base for the weekly Quaker-style
candlelight vigil. The vigil had begun 4 months prior and usually consisted of
8-20 people who gathered in a circle to prayer, reflect, and protest U.S.
policy in Central America.
It was the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar
Romero while saying mass in the capital city in March of 1980 that had awoken
many of us to the suffering of the Salvadoran people and the U.S. complicity in
the harsh repression of the people; campesinos struggling for land and justice
from the couple of dozen families of elites that controlled the land and the
government. Romero had written to then-President Jimmy Carter just months
before his assassination asking him to stop the flow of military aid and
weapons to his nation. He never received a reply from the President before the
bullet ended his life as he held the chalice of wine over his head during the
mass.
Three years later activists discovered that Salvadoran troops
were being trained by U.S. Military instructors at the large infantry base on
the outskirts of Columbus, GA and a protest march and rally was scheduled
around the third anniversary of El Salvador’s increasingly famous martyr.
Unfortunately (from my perspective), the tone and tenor of that protest was
strident and caustic and I felt that while I agreed with the political aim of
ending the military training and changing the foreign policy of the Reagan
Administration towards Central America, we would be better served by a
reflective, contemplative and confessional presence outside that military base
than the bombastic chanting and finger-pointing of the larger demonstration.
A week later, our Thursday evening hour-long candlelight
vigil outside the base began. Some friends from across the Chattahoochee River
in neighboring Alabama joined us as did a couple of others from nearby Buena
Vista, GA. Someone would often read a short reflection, a poem, or a prayer,
we’d sing a song or two, but mostly held signs with our candles and reflected
and prayed. Occasionally someone driving out of the base would shout something
(frequently it wasn’t PG-rated even though children were often present); less
frequently someone would stop and talk to us.
In August 1983, Father Roy Bourgeois and Father Larry
Rosebaugh drove over to Koinonia Farm (where our family lived) to share with our
intentional community their plans for nonviolent resistance to the continued
training of the Salvadoran troops. It was my first encounter with “Father Roy”
but the Louisiana drawl in his voice and his gentle demeanor made me feel
energized and included. I had known “Father Larry” a lot better since our 1981
nonviolent witness together in Amarillo, TX led to our sharing the same jail
cell for a week after our arrest for praying at Pantex, the final assembly
plant for all U.S. nuclear weapons. After he was transferred to a different
jail, we saw each other at arraignment, trial, and sentencing before we headed
off to different federal prisons to serve the rest of our time.
Larry had told the 5 of us with him in the holding cell
outside the FBI office in Amarillo about his travels through Central and South
America, especially his time in Recife, Brazil where he was arrested, jailed,
and tortured for his work with the poor. I came to love and trust Larry during
our jail-time together so when he arrived with Roy, I suspected here was
another “radical priest” God had placed in my life to challenge me to further
action. (I should have seen a pattern after “Father Tom” from the Maryknoll
seminary in Glen Ellyn, IL “schooled” me during my Wheaton college years and
then former-priest Phil Berrigan continued that “education” during the year I
lived in Washington, DC.) Father Larry, and now, Father Roy: all wanted to
challenge me to live out my values in a way that nonviolently confronted those
in power.
Roy and Larry told us that they were fasting and planning to
nonviolently confront the Salvadoran troops. They didn’t share the details with
us (they seemed to just evolve from one action to the next for them), but we
did invite them to join our next weekly candlelight vigil and told them some of
us would possibly like to join them in their direct action. We talked about
“continuing” the candlelight vigil on to the base after our usual hour presence
by the entrance, knowing that we would likely be arrested by base security if
we did so.
As Thursday arrived, most of us had no idea that Roy and
Larry, joined by a local Catholic activist, Linda Ventimiglia, had already
stirred up a hornets nest with 3 or 4 other acts of witness including the
dramatic scaling of a tree outside the Salvador barracks and playing Oscar
Romero’s final radio address where he asked, plead, ordered Salvadoran troops
“in the name of God” to “put down their guns” and “end the repression.” The
three of them had been arrested and thrown off the base several times that week
before our Thursday evening vigil.
I don’t remember now if we walked or drove to the Base
Commander’s house but at least 4 of us went with Roy, Larry, and Linda. Someone
rang the doorbell while others planted a cross (not burning!, I must add, given
the context of Georgia) on the front lawn. A teenage girl came to the door and
we asked if the Base Commander was home. We were told he’d be home shortly so
we told her we would vigil quietly on the sidewalk with our candles. It was
only a few minutes before base security arrived, we were arrested, and hauled
off to what we assumed was base headquarters.
In the six hours we were held under arrest, I distinctly
remember overhearing various military officers saying very vicious and
demeaning comments about “Catholics”, especially since they had become familiar
with Roy and Larry’s vocation as priests. About 3 AM, each of us was handed a
letter stating that we were “banned and barred” from that military base. We had
the right to appeal this order if we wished but otherwise it was in effect with
no end date listed. (Years later I was to receive “Ban and Bar” letters lasting
1 year or 5 years; this one was presumably for life.) They then drove us off
base in groups of 2-3 dropping us off miles from the city center meaning we
would have to walk to get to our cars. Fortunately, they did drop Judy Cumbee
off back at the main entrance since her leg was in a cast from a previous
accident.
Less than one year after these nonviolent direct actions, it
was announced that the “School of the Americas” was moving to Ft. Benning as
part of the Treaty to return the Panama Canal Zone to Panama agreed to by
President Carter several years earlier. Our weekly vigils continued for several
years before becoming a monthly vigil. I moved to Minnesota in 1990 and just
months after our arrival, we heard word that Father Roy was going back to fast,
pray, and protest at the gates of Ft. Benning. And thus began what has become
The School of the Americas Watch, a nonviolent movement to embody the call of
the martyred Archbishop: “put down the guns and stop the repression” – now
throughout the Americas, not just El Salvador. One by one, nations have begun
to pull their troops out of this notorious school now renamed “The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation (WHINSEC)” in an attempt to “re-brand” it from a “school of
assassins” to an institution which promotes “human rights” (albeit at the
barrel of a gun!)
More than 300 nonviolent activists have gone
to prison to protest this school in those 30 years. Late last week 40 members
of Congress (including Rep. Keith Ellison from Minneapolis) introduced a bill to
suspend operations at SOA/WHINSEC and begin an investigation of the connection
between US military training and human rights abuses in Latin America. In
November, I will return to the gates of that notorious institution to once
again say “Close the SOA!”
