Latin America

Hello and Happy late spring,

I wanted to inform you about this special program - info below - being initiated at RCC this fall, for your own interest or if you have friends or colleagues who might be interested in hosting. I met with Laurie Pina, the coordinator at Rockland Community College, recently. The program sounds well structured and intense, with an intention to prepare the women participants to make a significant contribution to their home country. A requirement is that they must return home after the two year program.

I have agreed to host a student in my home. This fits quite well with Whole Women Healing's mission to facilitate women's healing and empowerment, and our commitment to join FOR's delegation to Colombia in August, from which I will return to greet my student.

Sunday morning is appropriately more sober and reverential. An estimated 20,00 – 25,000 individuals carry small white crosses in a procession that spreads from the gate into Ft. Benning back to the public access road and forward again, five persons wide to accommodate hundreds of banners representing various groups here in large numbers.

As I enter from the public road, the police are confiscating crosses which don't strictly meet the 18" maximum for the vertical strut. These are later collected and displayed at the head of the road, just as thousands and thousands are inserted in the chain link fence at the gate to the Fort.

Each cross bears the name of a victim of violence in Latin America, derivative or directly related to training presented at the School of Americas (or 35 other U.S. bases where Latin American military leaders are trained). As the procession circulates in front of the main program platform, the names of the dead are intoned and the entire procession responds "Presente". Particularly powerful is the recitation, "unknown child, Choco" repeated perhaps a hundred times to represent a massacre of more than 130 persons.

This weekend is the annual protest and vigil in Fort Benning, Georgia against the School of Americas (recently renamed to "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation"). Many of our colleagues from FOR will be there, and I hope to get them to post some updates here on the blog during the event.

Meanwhile, ¡Presente! magazine has a fascinating collection of videos like the one above, and lots of informative articles, including this one about the impact of the SOA in Colombia: