Tuesday, December 8, 1998
The University Daily Kansan
Section A · Page 5
Protestors take stand against oppression
Above: Second-time protesters carry cardboard coffins past supporters. Included are some child-sized coffins.
Below: These cardboard coffins bear the names and ages of Latin
Americans killed by militaries. School of the Americas opponents allege that the School's graduates are responsible for the people's deaths.
Continued from page 1A
people and myself to sign up, and pay $40 to make the trip to Georgia.
We left the Burge Union at 4 p.m. on a Friday, with a van packed to the bursting point with luggage, food and people.
When we arrived in Georgia on Saturday morning, the crowd numbered about 4,500. Their protest, run by School of the Americas Watch, was meticulously organized.
Grandmas for Peace, Veterans for Peace, nuns, priests, families, church youth groups and college students from around the country shared stories, hugs and peanut butter sandwiches.
Protest organizers, musicians, former protesters recently released from six-month jail terms, and people who had witnessed violence throughout Latin America rallied the crowd from a stage.
Ann Tiffany, a 62-year-old protester from Syracuse, N.Y., who had served six months in prison for crossing onto the fort's property last year, told the crowd she was amazed at how quickly the movement had grown.
"It is important that as we try to reach our goal, we remain conscious of each other," she said. "The ripple effects of our solidarity are tremendous."
Megan Hope, Garden City graduate student and first-time protege, said she hadn't expected the well-organized program.
"There seemed to be a real sense of unity, since we we were all doing the same things a the same time," she said.
For Hope, the highlight of the protest's first day came when Army personnel read a statement to protesters over a loudspeaker, warning them that political protests on the fort's property were illegal.
"We completely drowned them out by singing." she said.
In the morning, Grilliot and Monica Enriquez, a graduate student from Colombia, seemed excited for those of us who were crossing the Army's line.
I was nervous. I knew I couldn't take any notes. We'd been told not to bring a pen or pencil and that anything we had relating to the protest could be taken from us. I wondered if I could remember enough detail to do justice to the day's events.
In the van on the way to the protest, Joanna Griffin, Wichita sophomore, almost had come to a definite conclusion that she would cross the line that day.
She was impressed with the movement's commitment to a peaceful, well-organized protest.
"That's something I can be proud to be a part of." she said.
She talked about the state of Chiapas, Mexico, where she had spent three weeks last summer meeting members of the Zapatista movement. The movement is comprised of indigenous people and others in southern Mexico seeking autonomy. Hearing about the School of the America's recent focus on Mexican military and the suppression of the Zap-
atistas brought the cause of closing the school a lot closer to home, she said.
"You can talk and talk about peasants, but when you see it, you see that their lives are filled with fear every day because of the military," she said.
Griffin had harbored reservations about crossing the line because she only could do so once without facing prison. She didn't want to have to stand by next year, when her feelings against the school might be even stronger.
We combed the crowd looking for a cross Griffin could carry. She borrowed one from a group of other protesters
Protesters who planned to cross the line covered the hill outside the fort's gates, holding crosses that bore the names of those who had died violently at the hands of Latin American military forces.
who had several. She was ready.
"I stopped doubting it," she said later. She was thinking about the faces she saw in Chiapas and the lives that touched hers, she said. "It was really emotional and really intense," she explained.
We stood together, singing songs, listening to speeches, and announcing the presence of those victims of violence we had come to mourn.
Friar Bourgeois spoke to the crowd.
"Let our anger be transcended into joy," he told them.
We linked arms four abreast. We were led by people crossing the line for the second time, carrying cardboard coffins with the names of the Latin American dead.
fort was. The trees all had turned red and orange, and I expected a deer to prance from the woods at any moment.
We marched through the crowd and onto the fort's property.
I was surprised by how beautiful the
We marched for about 15 minutes, mostly in silence.
"I felt very much at peace during the process," Hope said. "It felt like the right thing to be doing, and it felt like we were doing it in the right way."
The front of the line reached the buses onto which military police planned to load us all. There were 26 buses, each of which held 44 protesters. More than half of the protesters wouldn't fit on the buses. They waited with the soldiers at the side of the road for a second round of loadings.
People hummed "Amazing Grace".
As we finally drove off of the fort's property, I wondered what was going
on. We didn't know where we were headed, but no one seemed concerned. The police officers had been cordial, and the protest always had been peaceful in past years.
We rode for less than 10 minutes to a city park in Columbus.
We were on the 26th bus.
I stared out the window at the front buses, which were starting to unload. No one was leaving, and I assumed people were being processed. They lounged against the fence of a baseball diamond. We sat and waited.
Eventually, people from the first buses came back to tell us what was going on.
We weren't to be arrested. The army had decided against processing 2,319 people. We would wait on the bus for the fort's head of personnel to come and talk to us. He was going to give us a letter, barring us from the fort for the rest of the day. Then we were free to leave.
We all walked 1 1/2 miles back to the protest site. We sang We Shall Overcome, and the Columbus Police stopped traffic at intersections for us. When we got close to the protest site, supporters who had stayed behind at the vigil surrounded us. They grasped our hands, applauded, said thanks. Some were in tears.
For the line-crossers, the whole situation was confusing.
"I felt like I was supposed to feel tricked, but I didn't really feel like that," she said.
Griffin told me later that, in a way, it was disappointing not to be arrested. She'd made a decision to face that consequence, to stand up for what she believed in. But with a little reflection, she said later that she believed she had done what she came to do. The day was a victory no matter how the Army reacted, she said
"I think it is a victory. They didn't have enough buses for us. They didn't have the ability to process us. We had numbers, and we showed them that a lot of people in the U.S. care about human rights and about what their graduates do to people."
Hope agreed that the protest, and the trip, were a major victory for the School of the America's opponents and an inspiration to her as a year-round activist.
"The best thing is to think back to there being 7,000 people all gathered in that small space and all so committed to this issue," she said.
Hope and Griffin both told me that they hoped their efforts would close the school soon. Regardless of the results, they will continue to struggle against things they see as wrong.
"If my children are someday reading about the SOA and it strikes them as unjust, I want to say I was part of opposing that." Hone said.
“It’s always so easy to think, when things are happening, that somebody else will deal with them or they’ll just go away,” Hope said. “It’s powerful to realize that you can be a part of it.”
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