by Simon Owen
Published in All Things New magazine (Spring 2008)

If knowledge is to recover its place as a key ingredient of love instead of power, perhaps we must return to its most basic elements. For me, the question “what do we know?” was addressed, and answered, with startling power this November at the gates of the Fort Benning U.S. military base in south-western Georgia. It was there, along a stretch of urban pavement bounded at one end by razor fencing and at the other by a police checkpoint, that 25,000 activists, puppeteers, pilgrims, priests, professors, punk anarchists, elders and infants – peace lovers every one of them – gathered to transform the road into a sacred space of memory and anger, resistance and celebration. Before the know-it-all authority of the state agents assigned to mind us, we reclaimed the origin of meaning, the source reason and moral of why we were there.

A thin wooden cross, still smelling of fresh white paint, lay cradled in my soft white hands. So much lighter than the guns that killed her, this 25 year-old woman, this Hilda Marauez, this El Salvadoran peasant. I had of course never met Hilda, since she died before I learned to walk, in a country my feet have not yet been. The cross, marked only with her spartan biography in black felt pen, had been passed to me by one of the veterans who return every year to protest against the continued operation of the military academy that trained Hilda’s assassins. Every year her cross is re-made, fastened by a single nail and carried towards the base by one of the living who choose to make the journey. Every year Hilda’s name, and those of over 900 other victims of the U.S. sponsored war on socialism in Latin America – representing only those whose deaths can be traced back to the graduates of the School of the Americas – is sung out over the fences and the crowd of thousands, who raise their own crosses and respond in one voice ¡Presente! She is here. The mothers are here. The farmers are here. The students and the babies are here. The ones murdered in El Salvador, in the 1980s. In Guatemala, in the 1990s. In Colombia, today. We are here. The message is profoundly simple, the effect on unfenced hearts mournfully potent: here are your casualties, here are the fruits of your training. Here are their names, their ages: 6 months, 14, 25, 79. Led by a colleague of the nuns and priests murdered for their peaceful activism, chanting against the whirr of a police helicopter and loudspeaker announcements warning us with jail if we trespassed, 25,000 processed up to the line. I pierced Hilda’s cross through a link in the fence separating us from the khaki-clad soldiers, pouches on their legs bulging with zap-straps for our wrists should we try to penetrate the base, that other sacred territory. By the end of the procession the barrier itself had been transformed, each inch of steel wire veiled by small wooden crosses, the whole of it cloaked in a thicket of remembered names. An elderly woman pointed me to the photo of a man she had tucked into the fence. “He is my brother. They killed him.”

The officials on the other side did not try to refute us, and moved only when one of our number threw herself over the fence like a live offering, six honed officers swooping down to drag her off to a waiting van. Perhaps they felt no need, no duty to respond. Certainly they were under orders not to. Across town, another demonstration was underway, at which similar numbers of fervent supporters were gathered to help “God Bless Fort Benning”. I heard they had kissing booths and touch-a-tank exhibits, and cell phone companies offering free calls home for new recruits before they were hustled off to foreign wars. Sadly, we could not attend each other’s parties – as with much of the divided social landscape that characterises today’s America, opportunities for interaction with those across the gap are few and fraught with challenges. I could only speculate how a newly minted private would respond to the suggestion, made excruciatingly explicit with each name that rang out in the sunny afternoon, that the institution that commanded him also commanded the slaughter of unarmed civilians, people killed for their inconvenience to empire. Perhaps he would say, with narrow accuracy, that he was not among the guilty, or that no army can be responsible for all its rogues, or that freedom depends on a few unpleasantries. I wonder if I would have found the strength to kiss him then.

The machines of power are fuelled by abstract values. Atrocities get buried under the sun of high ideals, and shadowy methods prevent hypocrisies from coming to light. But that weekend in Georgia, armed only with the particular, inherently human answers to the too-often confounding question of what we know, a few thousand peacemakers overpowered the logic of a military system that does not want to remember what it does. For me, for those few hours of holding her memory in my hands, the answer is Hilda Marauez.

by Erica van Velsen
November 20, 2007

Our days and nights of pilgrimage were wonderful in every little way…. From the bottom of my heart I feel that I will remember it and carry the story of SOA and the passion of those who feel the wrong it is doing and want to do something about it.

A reflection on the School of the Americas pilgrimage
by Emily Wiebe
November 22, 2007

… The SOA was the purpose of our journey. We set out … to protest this unjust school which is notorious for having some of the worst forms of human rights abuses in the world. The SOA graduates killers who go out and not only put their victims to death but brutally torture them beforehand…. The world doesn’t need anymore murdering of the innocent. So, with … heart-wrenching stories lingering in our minds, my fellow travelers and I set out to Fort Benning, Georgia in order to make our young yet determined student voices heard in a world full of violence, hopelessness and corruption…

Read Emily’s reflection in full >

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Some resources you might be interested in related to Pilgrimage can be found at our SOA resources page