The School of the Americas Protest has become my activist family reunion. For the last five years, I’ve marched with many of the same people from organizations I trust and love. This year we converged on the Mexico/US border in Nogales.
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A considerable piece of the argument from the School of the Americas is that “no school should be held accountable for the actions of its graduates,” and, I guess, if we're being completely honest, I can't hold them directly accountable for these murders in the same way I might the person who put ammunition into a gun and then shot a child in the head. But I can certainly hold them accountable for being the school that taught them how to target people who the government claimed to be dissident. How to hold total control. How to decimate the very communities they were once a part of without a shred of wariness.
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Happy New Year! What a year 2015 was. It would be easy to reflect on the past year and think it was a year of new and big changes for PPF--and it was, with a transition in staff and volunteer leadership and our change in structure, among many other changes. But even amid these changes, 2015 was also a year of deepening our foundational commitments to peacemaking and nonviolence--work that we will continue in this new year and for many years to come.
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For 25 years, the SOA Watch has been a consistent and powerful movement calling for a close of the School of the Americas and an end to the training of Latin American soldiers by the US Army. They organize around a common vision of an end to militarism and empire by focusing specifically on closing the School of the Americas through nonviolence.
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“I think there’s going to be another revolution.” Hermano Pedro spoke these words to me, nodding slowly, as we sat at the kitchen table drinking sweet coffee and eating bread. That was in early July of this year. We were talking about Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina and the protests that were happening in the capital calling for his resignation. I had asked him what he thought would happen--would Guatemala just wait it out until the September elections or would Molina be forced to resign, just as his vice-president had done a few months earlier?
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The Rev. Kelly Allen, chair of the Mission Presbytery (South Texas) Immigration Task Force, talked of how churches in Texas are cooperating with other local agencies to respond to the surge of children and families fleeing violence in Central America, and the Rev. Linda Eastwood, a PPF National Committee member who worships with a New Sanctuary Movement congregation in Chicago, told stories and shared ways for congregations around the country to advocate for immigration reform and to protect immigrants facing deportation.
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Saturday, April 26, 2014 – Saturday, May 3, 2014 The 120-mile "Right to Peace” walk will culminate with a rally at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta.
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Sunday, March 30, 2014 – Thursday, April 3, 2014
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