Reflections on the SOA Experience
In November 2007, about 10 PWRDF-affiliated young adults along with at least 100 other Canadians attended the annual Pilgrimage to close the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning Georgia. The group included theology students, members of the PWRDF Youth Initiative Network and Youth Council, and the Rev. Lucy Reid, Anglican/Ecumenical Chaplain at the University of Guelph. Along the way we visited Jubilee Partners, an intentional Christian community which houses refugees.
The Body of Christ by Meagan Crosby
"Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. If one suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it".
(I Corinthians 12: 27,26)
These words came back to me as I stood, surrounded by thousands of people, raising our white wooden crosses to invoke the presence of the lives taken and in faithful solidarity.
But this road to prayerful remembrance and action filled hope began even earlier than our solemn funeral procession and joyful dance of celebration and life.
In early November, I was commissioned with many others across the country, to set out on the incredible pilgrimage to the School of Americas.
It was very powerful to know that I was carrying the support and commitment of this community who would be standing with us, in prayer, from Victoria and around the globe.
Becoming a part of the journey to Fort Benning, Georgia, allowed me to live out my feeling of call, to walk with others in responding to the continuing atrocities that are perpetrated by graduates of this school. It also allowed me to symbolically take a stand against violence in its many forms as it continues to oppress people in all parts of our beautiful, broken world.
The pilgrimage was a life-altering path that both challenged and enriched my faith. I was inspired by the work and stories of groups such as the Jubilee Partners and by the people like Alvaro Carias. I was incredibly moved by his gift of presence and honoured by his willingness to share both his experiences in El Salvador and his impassioned acknowledgment of the value of solidarity.
Traveling together through the changing landscape of the US, and through our own reflections, we had the amazing opportunity to richly connect with our co-pilgrims. I found within the deepening relationships and passionate discussions, the incredible promise and transformative power of community in Christ.
I would like to thank the SCM Canada and The Primate's World Relief & Development Fund for making it possible for me to participate in such an important event and for having the vision and faith to support those who will bring an awareness of justice issues to our faith communities.
Protesting at the School of the Americas: Embodying Memory
In March 2006 I stood in the ruined village of El Mozote, in the mountains of El Salvador, and listened as Rufina Amaya described how a battalion of soldiers had come to her village in 1981, during El Salvador’s civil war, and massacred every man, woman and child – more than one thousand in all. Her husband and four children, one an infant torn from her arms, were among the victims. Rufina survived by hiding in bushes at the edge of the village.
Eight months later I was walking with some twenty thousand others in a protest outside the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia – the military training school for Latin American forces, whose graduates ordered the massacre in El Mozote to terrorize the surrounding population. SOA graduates have also been implicated in numerous other human rights violations and atrocities both in El Salvador and elsewhere in Latin America. We were there to protest the SOA’s record, to call for its closure, and to remember its victims.
The gap between El Mozote and my world closed when I saw my own son, sixteen years old, lying face down in a stretch of road given over to an embodied memorial of the massacre. Beside him lay a woman cradling a baby doll. Beyond them lay many others, sprawled and motionless on the cold road that November morning, enacting the fate of the Salvadorans twenty-five years earlier. The sight was more than I could bear. It broke down the last vestiges of abstract thinking in my mind about war and human savagery, and made it real at a visceral level – at a womb level. My instinct was to run to my son and lie with him, hold him, protect him, as Rufina had been unable to do for her own children. His embodiment of the massacre moved it from history to the present, and from a distant place to the ground on which I stood.
The SOA protest embodies the victims of violence by chanting their names one by one, with the crowd responding: “Presente!” (“Present! Here!”) The chant and response go on for two hours – two hours of making a vast multitude of the tortured, assassinated and disappeared present again, with their spirits urging us to take action, speak out, stop the killing.
“Do this in remembrance of me.”
It is more than a political protest, more than a memorial service. It is a great communal act of making real and facing that reality. As the names are called out, we hold up white wooden crosses, each with a name written on it. We walk in a funeral procession to the chain link fence erected across the road to prevent us from approaching the fort. At the fence we insert our crosses into the wire mesh, until it becomes a vast wall of names of the remembered dead. What had been an object of disconnection, soldiers on one side, protestors on the other, becomes a shrine of remembrance and deep connection. It embodies the transformative power of memory, naming, protest and community.
“Do this in remembrance of me.”
When we are willing to remember like that, we are actually re-membering – putting back together, embodying and making real those who died or disappeared. They come into our presence and into our psyches and hearts. They change us. They inspire and challenge us.
This re-membering is at the heart of every eucharist we celebrate as Christians. Christ is with us, embodied in bread and wine, and commissioning us to go out into the world and take up his work of justice and reconciliation.
School of the Americas Watch