November 25, 2002
by Evan Silverstein

LOUISVILLE – At least two Presbyterians were among nearly 90 people arrested on Nov. 17 in Columbus, GA, after they marched onto the grounds of Fort Benning during an annual protest of a controversial military unit that trains Latin American soldiers.

Marilyn White, of suburban Houston, TX, and Ann Huntwork, of Portland, OR, could be imprisoned for six months and fined $5,000 for trespassing on federal property during the peaceful demonstration.

More than 60 Presbyterians are known to have taken part in the protest, which involved more than 6,000 peace activists from around the country. The protesters demanded that the combat training facility long known as the School of the Americas (SOA) be closed. The school has been renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC).

"I'm sorry that civil disobedience is necessary to focus . . . attention on the School of the Americas," White said Wednesday after her release on bail from the Muscogee County Jail, where she'd spent two nights. "Civil disobedience seems to be needed in order for our government to close the program. It has to come to an end."

Federal authorities said 88 protesters – including at least six nuns – were arrested during the 13th annual demonstration organized by a group that calls itself School of the Americas Watch (SOAW). The protests are held to mark the anniversary of the Nov. 19, 1989, deaths of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador.

SOAW claims that some of the people responsible for the priests' killings had been trained at the Fort Benning institute, which in the past has offered instruction in practices such as extortion, execution and torture. The Department of Defense says the curriculum no longer includes such training.

White was one of about 25 participants from the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship (PPF), which has long opposed the program. The crowd also included a number of students from Presbyterian-related Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC.

Presbyterians also were among a group of about 30 people bused in from Arizona by a Tucson-based non-profit organization called BorderLinks, a Presbyterian-founded group that conducts travel seminars focusing on issues related to Mexican border communities.

Rick Ufford-Chase, the group's founder and international director, said Presbyterians must oppose WHISC for reasons of conscience.

"The school is nothing more than a training ground for military counterinsurgency for Latin America," he said. "It seems fairly straightforward to me that people of faith would stand against that, because it's used primarily by Latin American dictators against their own people."

The demonstrators carried American flags, crosses representing the victims of abuse in Latin America, and a mock coffin draped in black representing people killed by graduates of the institute.

Twenty-eight people in last year's crowd of about 7,000 were arrested for trespassing. They later entered guilty pleas or were found guilty; most received six-month sentences in federal prison. Two of those imprisoned were Presbyterian ministers – the Rev. Chuck Booker-Hirsch, of Ann Arbor, MI, and the Rev. Erik Johnson, of Maryville, TN. They're still serving time.

The Rev. Leonard Bjorkman, a co-moderator of PPF who lives near Syracuse, NY, said the protest gave Presbyterians a chance "to express our commitment to the non-violence of Jesus" and support calls for "an end to the torture and other human-rights abuses that are inflicted upon people by graduates of the school."

The PPF, which gets no funding from the Presbyterian Church (USA), works through the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program.

The 1994 General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the closing of the school after the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest and longtime opponent of the SOA, spoke about it during a GA breakfast meeting.

White, a former PPF co-moderator, has been arrested during two previous protests at Fort Benning, but hasn't been jailed.

"I imagine that for repeat offenders, it's extremely likely that we're going to be looking at some prison time," she said.

Huntwork, a 71-year-old former missionary in Iran, has now been arrested during five different protests against the SOA. She also has never been jailed, but she has received a permanent "ban and bar letter" from the government.

She said the government is inconsistent, waging war on terrorism while refusing to acknowledge its own involvement in terrorism.

"Given what's happening right now, with the probable war with Iraq and homeland security, I wouldn't have seen it possible for me not to do this," she said. "It just feels like a really desperate time."

White and Hunt both pleaded not guilty during separate arraignment hearings before U.S. Magistrate G. Mallon Faircloth and scheduled for trial on Jan. 27. Each was released after posting $500 bail.

The Army acknowledges that some graduates – a few hundred, it says, out of the 60,000 who have passed through the school in more than half a century – have been guilty of abuses, but argues that the training facility shouldn't be judged on the basis of a few extreme cases. Army spokesman have pointed out that all WHISC students now receive instruction in human rights, and claim that the institute is largely responsible for the spread of democracy in Latin America.

The school is now supervised by an independent 13-member board that includes lawmakers, scholars, diplomats and religious leaders.

Opponents of the program say the changes are merely cosmetic.

"The important thing is still the same," said White. "We're still spending our tax dollars to train soldiers ... who aren't truly accountable to democratic governments. The nature of the training isn't even the main point. It's the relationship with these abusive regimes."

PCUSA News Service