Revolution #157, February 22, 2009
Father Luis Barrios and 4 Others Sentenced to 2 Months Jail for Protest to Close Down the School of the Americas
On January 26, a federal judge in Georgia declared the “SOA 6” “guilty” of trespassing for carrying the protest against the School of the Americas (SOA) onto the Fort Benning military base. The six were among the thousands who gathered on November 22 and 23, 2008 outside the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia to demand the closure of the School of the Americas. The six carried out a non-violent civil disobedience action, stepping onto the grounds of Fort Benning, at the front of the march. The judge sentenced Fr. Luis Barrios; Kristin Holm; Sr. Diane Pinchot, OSU; Al Simmons and Theresa Cusimano to two months each in jail for carrying the protest against the School of the Americas onto the Fort Benning military base. A sixth defendant, Louis Wolf, was sentenced to six months of house arrest.
Like Guantánamo, the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia is associated with torture and crimes against humanity. While the Guantánamo crimes take place “on site” at Guantánamo, for over 25 years the School of the Americas has been a “training” facility, where military personnel from all over Latin America have been given instruction that they then put to use once they return to their respective countries.
Due to widespread exposure and opposition to what the School of the Americas had come to represent in the minds of millions, in 2001 the military renamed the School of the Americas as the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” with no significant changes in its criminal program that had also given the school the nickname of “the School of Assassins.” Its graduates have been linked to such crimes as the infamous killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero and four nuns in El Salvador in the 1980s. Now its graduates are involved in brutal counter-insurgency campaigns in Colombia and brutally attacking anti-government protesters in numerous Latin American countries.
Like Guantánamo, the School of the Americas needs to be closed and those who run it put on trial as trainers for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide—and those involved in this protest consciously drew the links between the two. This protest at Fort Benning occurred several weeks after Obama’s election and challenged the “standard wisdom” of many who should know better, that people should “wait and see what Obama will do.”
Revolution newspaper had the opportunity to speak with one of those about to go to prison, Fr. Luis Barrios. As regular readers of Revolution may recall, Luis is an Episcopal priest and the Chair of the Department of Latin American and Latina/o Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. He served on the national steering committee of World Can’t Wait, and was singled out for special punitive charges arising from a civil disobedience action when George Bush came to speak at the United Nations in September 2006. (Go online for coverage of the 2006 protest [revcom.us/a/090/barrios-acquit-en.html] and interview with Fr. Barrios [revcom.us/a/063/barrios-en.html])
In his comments to Revolution, Luis spoke to why it was important to act now: “We are in campaign against militarism, we are against these war machines. We are against their campaign of arresting people, of torturing people. We are in campaign against U.S. imperialism.
“Why now? Because School of Americas is part of big project. They bring soldiers here, about 2,000 each year from around Latin America since 1946, first in Panama and now here. And then they send them back. See how these soldiers protect USA interests in Latin America.
“In relation to Guantánamo, torture techniques used at Guantánamo are taught at the School of the Americas. If you go into the SOA Watch web page [the organizers of the protests: www.soaw.org], you can see the actual SOA training manual about torture, instruction on how to inflict maximum pain against prisoners without actually killing them and more. Guantánamo, SOA, Iraq and Afghanistan, they are all connected.
“Obama promises to close Guantánamo, but many say he is moving people to other locations. We activists, we need to understand how imperialists uses cosmetology. People demand: Get the School of the Americas out of Panama. OK, it’s out of Panama. But what did they do?—they moved it to Georgia. Close the School of the Americas? Ok, they close the school, but it remains at Fort Benning but under a new name [Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation]. He tells people he is pulling soldiers out of Iraq, but he is sending 25,000 or 30,000 more to Afghanistan. So what is going on here? I thought you said you were going to stop all of this nonsense, invading countries, controlling countries? It is the same thing with Guantánamo, we want all this stuff to stop. Period.
“This is the same thing going on with Guantánamo. Yes, we want Guantánamo closed, but we want all of the places where torture goes on closed, we don’t want this to be stopped at Guantánamo and then everything gets shifted to the Dominican Republic. The [government of] the Dominican Republic is ready to have them go there. Haiti, they control everything in Haiti, they could send them there. They still control my country, Puerto Rico—so they could use Roosevelt Roads [giant U.S. military base on Puerto Rico, currently closed], no one is using that now—they could use that. So we have to be very careful.
“Second, putting all our dreams, our hopes in Obama. Obama is going to continue doing the same things in a different way. Bush was very confrontational, ‘This is my way, you do it that way, that is it,’ while Obama is using more diplomacy, two different strategies, but doing the same nonsense. Two different strategies with the same objectives. Obama says he will negotiate first, but his objectives are the same. We are going against the whole military/industrial complex. SOA is one piece, Guantánamo is one piece, we need to get the whole picture.”
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Revolution: You mentioned that lots of people counseled you that this was not the time to act, that people should wait and see what Obama will do.
Fr. Luis Barrios: Well, from the beginning I fell in love with that expression “The World Can’t Wait” because that is exactly what we must say and what we must do. We can’t wait. When it comes to peace with justice there is no time for vacation. When it comes to revolution, when it comes to social transformation, you don’t go on vacation. Some were calling and emailing me and telling me that this is not the time to do this, but it was very interesting, there were about 25 phone calls or emails like this. None of them, no one answered the question, if this is not the right time when is the right time?
Some argued specifically that we shouldn’t act because Obama has just been elected. I was glad that Obama won and that Bush was out, but you can’t put your hopes in this. WE have the power, we need to create the critical mass in the streets, we must take the leadership. This idea that we must wait for Obama, to follow Obama, that is that “caudillismo” mentality that so many have right now. [Revolution—Luis explained later that by “caudillismo,” he was referring to a trend in Latin America of blindly following a leader, a “caudillo,” without regard to leader’s actual program.] The people must take responsibility. We saw this around Bush after Hurricane Katrina, people said that they didn’t like Bush, but too many did nothing about it.
We know that this whole thing is not going to change because of an election. It is more cosmetology. We can’t wait for Obama. WE must act. We must get out of the office. We have to do it.
Revolution: Here we are at a school of criminal justice. Let me ask you a question about criminal justice. Who do you think ought to be incarcerated, who do you think ought to be brought to justice for what has been taught at the School of the Americas and what has been done at Guantánamo?
Fr. Luis Barrios: Glad you brought this up. I get very angry at this [new] President and at this Congress. Bush is going out, he is going out with all his dignity and some day he will be buried like what we did with Ronald Reagan, with all the honors, which is not fair, it is not right. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condolleeza Rice, Alberto Gonzáles, the rest of them…they need to be brought to justice. Obama kept Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Gates. It is a continuation. They have all committed crimes against humanity and need to be in prison. I should not be going to prison, the others who protested should not be going to prison, it is THEY who ought to be going to prison. They are sitting there laughing. They were killing people, they were disappearing people, they were committing human rights violations, they went into another country, they destroyed that country, they killed thousands of people, civilians and they are sitting there laughing and then go to church on Sunday morning? NO! This is wrong. We can’t wait for Obama and Congress to do it, they are not going to do it. We can’t go into that nasty habit of people destroying historical memory. We can’t forget what they did for those eight years.
My mother told me when I spoke to her on the phone about my going to jail, “When are you going to retire? When are you going to slow down? You are 57. I remember when you were 14 and were first arrested.” I said, “It’s good that you bring that up. We have a responsibility to change this world. There is no quota on it, like we do so much and then we can stop. We all have to find the way to continue acting.”
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In concluding the interview, Luis said: “When it comes to the solidarity of love, those of us who believe in god and those who don’t need to find the ways to work together, to fight together. Another world is possible.”
Fr. Luis Barrios and the other defendants are awaiting notification of which federal prison they each will be sent to, which they expect to receive in the next few days. The Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund will have his mailing address in prison as soon as it is known, and will gladly share it with Revolution newspaper readers. The prison addresses for all of the SOA 6 will also be posted on the School of the Americas Watch web site.
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