Testimonies of Terror (by Anna Almendrala)
While volunteering in a legal clinic in my sophomore year of college, interviewing people applying for political asylum in the U.S., I heard a lot of people describe how they had had to leave everything behind and flee into the jungle, carrying children on their backs.
I interviewed lots of people and read the personal statements of cases already filed, and all the stories were sickeningly similar. The basic skeleton of their stories was this: one day, a group of "communist/insurgent/fill in the blank" guerillas passed by my village begging for food. A few weeks later, a military group from the national army stormed the community, accusing us of being part of a rebellion. After enduring the military's accusations/threats/rapes/beatings/murder attempts, we survivors melted into the surrounding mountains and jungles. We walked for weeks, living like fugitives in foreign countries until we finally collapsed within the border of California.
It was always the same story, the same timeline of events. The only deviations from the testimony were in those grisly details: "all the men in my village were shot in the head," or "all teens were forced to join the army," or "all the ladies and girls were violated." Once I interviewed a client who remembers soldiers kicking his pregnant mother in the abdomen. She gave birth in the jungle, three days later, to a stillborn baby. Another time a child returned from farming to find his entire community shot dead in the center of the village. Once, a man came into our clinic seeking help on his asylum case, and when he told about how he had helped the army gather up all the leaders of the village into a church and set it on fire, we turned him away.
It wasn't even until a few weeks into the volunteer work that someone told me about the United States' involvement in the massacres. The military dictators and officers that created the structures and protocols for combating "communism" in the 1980s and 1990s attended military training programs in the United States. Their armies are funded generously by our government. Some were politically supported in the world arena when they staged their coup d'etats against democratically elected administrations. I know that if the people of the United States heard even a few of the stories from people that had miraculously survived village massacres, they would be in Fort Benning every year en masse, protesting the School of Americas with us.
Anna Almendrala is the marketing and circulation assistant for Sojourners.
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Comments
What was so disappointing to me about the Christian reaction to 9/11 was that I thought it would make American Christians more thoughtful, more tender, and more aware of how the horror that had been inflicted on innocent people in NYC and DC had been inflicted in the recent past by the US government on other innocent people. Boy, was I ever wrong. It's been much more rewarding, apparently, to talk about how moderate Muslims need to face up to the crimes committed in their name.
Posted by: Donald | November 20, 2007 3:40 PM
I'm wondering why the School of Americas even exists. I can understand an agrument for it back in the days of fighting Communism in S. America, but today? Close it down.
Posted by: Eric | November 20, 2007 4:31 PM
I agree. Close it down. Why does it exist anymore? It produces criminals through the American Tax Payers (at least in part), does it not?
How ironic. We fund military strategies that often create havoc and ultimately create refugees who then come to our country... then we spout off about how hard that is on our economy,etc...
Again, I will say to people who want "strong borders"... let's help with STRONG nation building... if people in other countries weren't treat abominably often by their own governments... they wouldn't flee to America, would they?
Posted by: e-dubya | November 20, 2007 4:44 PM
Christian reaction to 9/11 was that I thought it would make American Christians more thoughtful, more tender, and more aware of how the horror that had been inflicted on innocent people in NYC and DC had been inflicted in the recent past by the US government on other innocent people
???????????????????????????????????????????????
Posted by: Anonymous | November 20, 2007 7:26 PM
You'd have to explain what all those question marks mean, anonymous.
It's possible, of course, that you're saying "What kind of naive idiot actually expected Americans to become self-aware of the sorts of terror we've inflicted on other people just because an atrocity was committed against us? If they didn't bother to find out before, 9/11 wouldn't change their attitude. If anything, quite the reverse."
If you meant that, I agree. I was projecting my own reaction. I'd been reading about atrocities caused by US foreign policy for 20 years before 9/11 happened, but it never really hit home what it must feel like to be at the mercy of violent men who want you dead. Not that I was in danger on 9/11, but I had friends and loved ones in Manhattan that day and it crossed my mind that what I was feeling was similar to what people in places like El Salvador might have felt. But it was silly to think that the average evangelical Republican voter was suddenly going to become curious about US-caused atrocities just because an atrocity was committed against the US.
Of course you might also mean "What US-caused atrocities are you talking about?" There are these organizations that deal with human rights that you can find online, and places called libraries...
Posted by: Donald | November 20, 2007 11:41 PM
O Lord, we need to treat one another with love, and we need it bad. It's one tall order in today's deteriorating climate.
Posted by: Anonymous | November 21, 2007 4:40 AM
Ms. Almendrala,
Thank you for this compelling post. I too have had the experience of interviewing many people who experienced what you are describing. I will never be the same for it.
Jim
Posted by: JamesMartin | November 21, 2007 9:15 AM
As one of its first acts, Sojourners formed a commune in the Washington, D.C. neighborhood of Southern Columbia Heights. Members shared their finances, participated in various activist campaigns, and organized events at both the neighborhood and national levels. The themes of these campaigns, echoed monthly in the pages of the group's in-house publication Sojourners, centered on attacking U.S. foreign policy, denouncing American "imperialism," and extolling Marxist revolutionary movements in the Third World.
Giving voice to Sojourners' intense anti-Americanism, Jim Wallis called the U.S. "… the great power, the great seducer, the great captor and destroyer of human life, the great master of humanity and history in its totalitarian claims and designs."
In the 1980s the Sojourners community actively embraced "liberation theology," rallying to the cause of communist regimes that had seized power especially in Latin America, with the promise of bringing about the revolutionary restructuring of society. Particularly attractive for the ministry's religious activists was the Communist Sandinista regime that took power in Nicaragua in 1979. Clark Pinnock, a disaffected former member of Sojourners, revealed in 1985 that the community's members had been "100 percent in favor of the Nicaraguan revolution."
Sojourners initiated a program called "Witness For Peace," under whose auspices Americans traveled to Nicaragua and returned with reports of humanitarian disasters wrought by the Reagan-backed anti-Communist guerrilla forces. The Sojourners delegates insisted that any efforts to undermine Sandinista power violated the Nicaraguan people's "right to self-determination."
Writing in the November 1983 issue of Sojourners, ministry leaders Jim Wallis and Jim Rice drafted what would become the charter of leftist activists committed to the proliferation of Communist revolutions in Central America. Titled "Promise of Resistance," this document called on activists to carry out various acts of civil disobedience in order to obstruct any attempt by the United States to invade Nicaragua. CISPES, the propaganda arm of El Salvador's Marxist guerrilla movement, was invited by Sojourners to participate in acts of resistance in the event of American military intervention. Nearly 70,000 activists signed the document, which was sent to Congress, President Reagan, the Defense Department, and the CIA.
Steadfast advocates of the nuclear freeze movement, Sojourners members maintained that a U.S. nuclear buildup was "an intolerable evil" irreconcilably at odds with Christian teaching, and that "[t]he Reagan Administration remains the chief obstacle to the first step in stopping the arms race." While assailing the Reagan administration's defense buildup, Sojourners activists downplayed the threat posed by the Soviet Union, chastising U.S. policy-makers for their tendency "to assume the very worst about their Soviet counterparts."
With the end of the Cold War, Sojourners turned its attention to causes such as environmentalism. In one 1990 Sojourners article, for example, writer Bob Hulteen mounted the argument that environmental activism was a logical outlet for the notions of justice long championed by the ministry. "Justice-seeking work without concern for the earth is naïve and narrow minded," Hulteen explained.
The ministry also reviled welfare reform as a "mean-spirited Republican agenda" characterized by "hatred toward the poor" and mounted a defense of affirmative action.
In the fall 1994 issue of Sojourners, writer Martha Orianna Baskin assailed the American trade embargo against Cuba. Similarly, the ministry declared against every American military intervention in the 1990s and, more recently, the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In addition to publishing Sojourners, the ministry now sends out a weekly email newsletter, called Sojomail. Another recent addition is a blog authored by Jim Wallis, who penned the 2005 book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It.
"
Posted by: Frederick | November 21, 2007 8:09 PM
...and that is a verbatim screed from the website that follows "the vast left-wing conspiracy" for "conservatives" - more like paranoid John Birchers than real conservatives - that imagine conspiracies by cherry-picking only what can be distorted to "prove" their imaginary preconceptions and slanting what they write to make sure it discredits (in their minds) the group they are trying to smear.
Try doing a little research on your own from primary sources and thinking for yourself, instead of getting catapulted by the propaganda.
Posted by: Truth in Advertising | November 22, 2007 1:55 AM
"...and that is a verbatim screed from the website that follows "the vast left-wing conspiracy" for "conservatives" - more like paranoid John Birchers than real conservatives - that imagine conspiracies by cherry-picking only what can be distorted to "prove" their imaginary preconceptions and slanting what they write to make sure it discredits (in their minds) the group they are trying to smear."
Much of what was written above is well established fact. I will also add that Wallis criticized those fleeing Vietnam as wanting to support their consumer habits in other lands.
In other words, if someone is fleeing terror from a thug who is an enemy of the U.S., Wallis turns a blind eye or condemns it. He isn't committed to Biblical justice. Anyone who was would be strongly anti-communist (if for no other reason is that it was militantly atheistic). He's committed to a liberal political agenda, whether it fits the Bible or not. He's just not honest enough to admit it.
And talk about cherry-picking. The writers of the things above that post mention Ft. Benning and the School of the Americas. 600 Latin American human rights abusers attended that school - out of 60,000 total who did, or 1%. 1% (or more) of any group will turn out bad. It's silly to argue that they wouldn't have been thugs if they just hadn't gone there.
Posted by: Brent | November 22, 2007 8:33 AM
Dear Brent and Frederick,
Thank you for giving me even more reasons to like Sojourners and Jim Wallis.
Posted by: JamesMartin | November 23, 2007 2:47 PM
James Martin--
Your response to the information provided by Brent and Frederick gives me even more reason to despair that there will ever be any true rapprochement between left and right. I've personally known refugees from Latin American countries who have experienced the same kinds of torments from their alleged Marxist liberators as have been attributed above to the military forces of the represssive anti-Communist governments. We all need to check out primary sources and open our minds as well as our hearts to the realities that our ideological commitments obscure. By reading "Sojomail" and other "Red Letter Christian" sources, I'm trying to be open to that aspect of the truth. Would you be willing to open your mind to the truth as told by Brent and Frederick? Yes? No? If not, I fear our nation is becoming much like Spain had become on the eve of their civil war back in the 30's.
--Ray
Posted by: Ray | November 27, 2007 11:04 AM
Post a Comment
Are you aware of our Rules of Conduct?