please take 30 seconds to help protect Martha and her family

Extrajudicial Killing In Colombia from Witness For Peace on Vimeo.

A few days ago I posted this great solidarity video work and incredibly brave and powerful testimony and video footage by Martha, the daughter of José, a campesino who was killed by the Colombian army, who then concocted a scenario to present him as a guerilla - ie, a "false positive" - a hideous euphemism if ever there was one.

The trial against a soldier indicted in this case began ten days ago. I am horrified and outraged to report that Martha's uncle--a key witness in the case--was shot in the head on Sunday in an apparent attempt to disrupt the trial and scare the other witnesses, including Martha. He is in intensive care awaiting neurosurgery.

MARTHA IS IN IMMEDIATE DANGER. She and her family need your support. They simply ask for protection and justice in the cases of Martha's father and uncle. Please take one minute to send a letter to U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield, asking him to stand up for justice in this case.

You can also send Martha and her family a message of support, in English or Spanish. They are incredibly brave and these letters mean a lot to them.

A new video of Martha asking for justice, and for your support, is below.

Target for Telling the Truth from Witness For Peace on Vimeo.

the power of having a video camera handy

Extrajudicial Killing In Colombia from Witness For Peace on Vimeo.

Absolutely amazing that this campesino family had quick access to a video camera to document how the Colombian army had left their father's body. Imagine a wold where everyone has quick access to a cheap and discreet flip camera? This is also very inspiring solidarity work by witness for peace as they amplify Martha's brave brave voice. You can stand with Martha, stand for justice and dignity, by taking this quick online action to ask the US to stop funding an army that kills it's own people. In a very cool online activism move I've never seen done by a solidarity group before, you can also send Martha and her family a quick online note of support here. I can't emphasize enough how scary it must be for them to put themselves at risk by telling this story, and how much letters like this must mean for them. please take a minute to write both.

what work do simulations do?

I had a great conversation with my friend Amy over lunch today about simulations that medical students do of being, say, (and each person gets a different person to play) a person with one leg, substance abuse problems, and trying to get housing, and having to go to stations around the room to talk to simulated social service offices, the bank, landlords. Does this help these students be more empathetic when they are doctors? Can such a brief distant semi glimpse into what it miiiight be like for someone make a difference? How so? Well a lot of people seem to think that the similar sort of glimpse offered by the game In her shoes originally designed by my friend Karen Rosenberg and distributed in the US by the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence makes a difference. It's been played by service providers, cops, judges, and all sorts of folks for years. Another friend, Lupita Patterson, worked on making a version reflecting the realities of Latino survivors in the US, and then PATH, the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, localized versions for several other countries (localizing means more than just translating, but making the scenarios, stories, etc relevant to the context). What I think might be even more important is that the Coalition has followed it up with an advocates guide called In our shoes, next steps. As they put it "This workbook helps communities take the next steps beyond understanding a survivor's experiences (In Her Shoes) to embracing our collective responsibility for ending domestic violence and poverty (In Our Shoes)." Because too often I worry that simulations leave people thinking they've really been in someone else's shoes, when of course you have only had the vaguest sense of it - and don't help us think about where then we want to walk in our own shoes, and how to walk alongside people in other shoes. I also worry that, as my friend Sarah puts it, if I walk in their shoes, is there still room in their shoes for them? Or to use academic jargon, when does empathy become appropriative? But really, in a workshop simulation, will anyone think they are *really* in anyone else's shoes? Or will it be clear it's just a paper doll cutout of someone else's shoes?

For another way more high tech simulation, check this video out: (I think it does good work, but it doesn't feel much to me like what I had going on emotionally when I walked down a path where folks had been hurt by mines a few days before, or when I chose to pee in a field that might have had mines rather than by the truck next to 30 people)

A Virtual Minefield from veggenmin.no on Vimeo.

connecting torture, North and South

I was incredibly moved by the article It's important that we make connections in the latest issue of Presente! the newspaper of the movement to close the School of the Americas. The article is an interview/conversation with black freedom movement leader Ruby Sales. Ruby has personal experience with accompaniment. In '65 Jonathan Daniels, a young white man working with SNCC in solidarity with black activists, was killed as he pushed Ruby out of the line of fire of a white vigilante.

Ruby's analysis in this article is so powerful and clear. I really encourage you to read all of it, but here are a few key snippets:

(warning, disturbing stories - but we need to be disturbed! see through our tears!)

...
Ruby: No, it was a whole body of white people. For example in 1930 a lynch mob of men, women and children in Meriam, Indiana mutilated and lynched Tom Ship and Abe Smith and lynched them. And they also burned their bodies, and then after their bodies were burned, white men, women and children tore off the victim's clothes and ripped apart their genitals to keep as souvenirs and reminders of their power over Black lives and bodies.

And as the crowd lynched Will Brown, they set up a cheer. And the white representatives of the criminal justice system that were sworn to uphold the law colluded with these crimes. And although when you look at those historical pictures you see the faces of the criminal, the criminal justice system never charged or punished them for these heinious crimes. Very much like police operatives today getting away with this kind of execution.

And then in 1918, a white mob lynched Mary Turner in Brooks County, Georgia. A mob of about several hundred people, and she was 8 months pregnant, and the mob tied her to a tree, took a knife and split her wide open and her unborn child fell from her womb to the ground, where the mob proceeded to crush the baby's head with the heels of other members of the mob. And then they riddled her body with bullets and set her afire with gasoline. And no one was punished for mutilating or murdering Mary Turner. And in the crowd, of course, there were policemen, and the policemen in these small counties knew exactly who had done it, and they never brought charges against them.

Most recently in 2007 in Logan County, West Virginia, Megan Williams was hospitalized after six white men and women held her captive and tortured her for days. They tortured her, they sexually abused her and forced her to eat rat droppings. They choked her with a cable cord and stabbed her in the leg while using white supremacist language designed to dehumanize her. According to Megan Williams, these white supremacists poured hot water over her and made her drink from a toilet. As of this writing, representatives of the criminal justice system both locally and nationally have decided not to charge Megan Williams' torturers with these crimes.

And then of course we have the murders of Adolf Grimes, who was murdered most recently in New Orleans, where the police for no apparent reason at all pumped 14 rounds of bullets in his body. And of course we have Oscar Grant in Oakland/San Francisco, most recently, who was shot by the police as he lay on the ground with his hands cuffed. And we of course have Sean Bell who was shot multiple times by the police in 2006 as he came from a bachelor's party that preceeded his wedding the next day. And of course you have 17-year-old Billy Joe Johnson who died mysteriously in the hands of the police. And on the day that he died, the police would not permit the parents to identify or see his body. As a matter of fact, the parents did not see his body for five days later. And when they returned the body to the parents, Mr. Johnson said that his son had been butchered like a pig. And later on we discover that his brains, tongue and the right side of his jaw were missing.

Vera: It's an overwhelming history and present of --

Ruby: Well, it's like the death squads of Latin America. That's exactly what they did. They cut out people's tongues in El Salvador. So this continues a trajectory of state violence against oppressed peoples, whether you're in Latin America [or not]. That was my thing, that people could make the connection in El Salvador, but they couldn't bring it back home to this country that has had a heinious history. The trainers of the death squads were able to teach them to do this because they had practiced it domestically at home. That's why they came to this country to be trained in how to commit these heinious crimes. Because this is what had happened in this country with African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos.

Vera: And because in this country, the state had this whole body of white people who were supporting them, either silent, and/or perpetrating it themselves.

Ruby: And when the Dyer Bill that came up in Congress against lynchings, that had been fought to bring to the national forefront by Ida Wells Burnett, most white Congressmen voted against the Dyer Bill. Voted against the bill to stop lynching in this country, and that was in the 20th century. That was not in the 18th century.

And I can tell you the story of Will Brown, whose body was broken and charred, after a white mob lynched him and hung his dead body from a telephone pole in 1919 in Omaha, Nebraska. They shot several hundred bullets into his lifeless hanging body. They then cut the rope and then tied his body to a car, and dragged it through the street. Next, they poured oil on his body and burned him. And once again, although the faces of members of the white mob are clear in the photographs, the white representatives of the criminal justice system that was sworn to uphold the law ignored the crime and no one was ever charged.

And what I'm trying to say is that this has always been a community event within white society. And white people have been told that this kind of blood letting and killing and lynching and torture of African Americans are essential to protect law and order and to protect the perogatives of the white community. That left untouched, Black people would destroy civilization and everything that's good in it. And so white people have been taught to fear African Americans. And they have most of the time bought into this.

So when we talk about torture abroad, you must understand that torture abroad that America is involved with begins at home. Even water boarding is not nothing new. The tactic was a little different, but it was water boarding when you unleashed water hoses on demostrators, water hoses that were going about a hundred miles a minute.


Vera: I'm wondering how to stand where we are and push against this. As a white person, I feel a lot of responsibility for pushing other white people, and myself, to see this and to study this and to understand this, but also to work in community with communities and leaders of color, to push against this. I'm wondering if we can speak about that a little bit?

Ruby: Well, one of the reasons why the movement here against death squads in El Salvador and the violence and terrorism in Nicaragua never gained hold among the African-American community here, because it rung with deep hypocrisy. We were living in the heart of police and state violence, and there seemed to have been on the parts of white people no recognition of this and no willingness to admit the truth about the country that they lived in and how their silence accelerates and sustains this police state that Black people have lived in for years. So it seemed weird to go running somewhere else without making a connection between that somewhere else in this community. And so Black people, when confronted with this situation, really saw white people as real hypocrites and that's why -- it's not that we didn't care about what was happening in Latin America, but we simply could not work with people who would deny what was happening in this country and who insisted on remaining ignorant about it. When there have been hundreds of books written on the subject.

So part of what I think needs to happen is that I need to bring young activists together in a kind of school, a movement history of militarism so that they can do their work within the context of a historical frame of reference. Because right now it's ahistoric.

...
there's much more great analysis in this article, keep reading here.

testimony with animation

Another creative way of presenting a personal story - of building understanding, connection, solidarity. I'm a huge fan of comics/graphic novels for popular education, and I love this blend of comic, video, music, and personal story. y es cierto, "todo viene en bolsas".

Memory in song

Fantastic song telling the story of Jiguamindo, one of the Colombian peace communities/ communities in resistance (they use different terms, but the basic idea is that they ask all of the different armed actors, including the army and police, to stay out of the community). This community is accompanied by the Quebec based organization PASC.

Empire's (and resistance's) workshop

(draft of a book review coming out in the journal Political Geography)

This book is a fast and compelling read and makes a strong case for its main argument: that Latin America served as a laboratory for what Grandin calls “new imperialism”. He argues that it was in Latin America that the US rehearsed both ideas used to justify US power and techniques (from napalm to finance) for a new imperial project in world where formal colonialism was no longer workable.

Lest this argument seem like the grandiose vision of a Latin Americanist, let me point out that David Harvey makes a similar argument in The New Imperialism (2005) (surprisingly Grandin never cites Harvey). Harvey argues that it was because in South America the US faced countries that, like itself, had recently “freed themselves from the colonial yoke through independence struggles” that it had to “work out means of imperial domination that nominally respected the independence of such countries yet dominated them through some mix of privileged trade relations, patronage, clientelism, and covert coercion” (2005: 48). It was in Latin America that the US “learned to mask the explicitness of territorial gains and occupations under the mask of a spaceless universalization of its own values, buried within a rhetoric that was ultimately to culminate, as Neil Smith points out, in what came to be known as ‘globalization’” (Harvey, 2005: 47).

Of course US empire in Latin America started out much more old school. Many of largest US companies got their start in Latin America, including those of the Guggenheims, Schwabs, and Rockefellers (Grandin, 2006: 17). They had astounding military backing. Grandin argues that Nicaragua in the 1920s was the “first practical laboratory for the development of post-war aviation in coordination with ground troops” The US marines practiced tactics that would become standard, such as reconnaissance flights, ground-to-air signalling, and propaganda leaflet drops. They also engaged in the first dive-bombing campaign in military history (2006: 22).

Grandin argues that the US’s overt imperial moment ended when FDR, in 1933, proclaimed the Good Neighbor policy and withdrew occupation forces, declared a non-interventionist policy, and even stood by while Bolivia and Mexico nationalized their oil (2006: 27). Why? He argues that though Sandino, in Nicaragua, had drawn them into their first quagmire, and the Mexican revolution threatened to be a second, it was really the great depression that inspired a new sort of imperialism (2006: 28). The US decided that it was more cost effective to be a good empire, er, neighbor. It set up alliances/treaties, and in the name of fighting communism and promoting development, structured economic and political relationships so that it had effective control over the supply of oil, ore, minerals and other primary resources – free of the burdens of formal colonialism (2006: 40).

When Arbenz came to power in Guatemala in 1954 the CIA, recently established 1947, took it as a chance to practice their new psych ops techniques for the first time (2006: 43). These were given a new spin with Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in the early 60s, which tried to steal the thunder of the ‘59 Cuban revolution and began the tradition of speaking of democracy while training death squads and supporting coups (in Uruguay, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile from ‘64 to ‘76) (Grandin, 2006: 47, 48).

Grandin argues that there was no whiff of insurrection in El Salvador in the early 60s when agents from the State Department, green berets, CIA and USAID organized two paramilitary groups that became the backbone of the death squad system. This was part of a purported attempt to professionalize Latin American security agencies and was part of Kennedy’s campaign to pre-empt communism (2006: 95), though if anything the ‘counterinsurgency’ repression in El Salvador seems to have finally conjured up the insurgency (2006: 99).

As part of same push “General William Yarborough also advised the Colombian government to set up an irregular unit trained to, “execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents”. As Grandin puts it, this is “as good a description of a death squad as any” (2006: 96) (and seemed to serve to similar effect, for the FARC guerrillas also attribute their taking up arms to US intervention in the 60s (Murillo 2004). This general had just come back from Vietnam, from which there was a good bit of traffic of personnel and tactics at the time. Strikingly, Grandin argues that it was actually in Colombia that the US did its first pre-Vietnam experiment with scorched-earth tactics (ie, razing villages and setting up “strategic hamlets”) and that it was in Colombia that the US first used napalm in combat (2006: 98).

Grandin argues that it was with the Latin American solidarity movement that the US government learned to bring its psych ops techniques home. Much of the Patriot Act and recent attacks on the peace movement are eerily like the COINTELPRO campaign he details. The FBI and CIA worked together in the 80s, using over two thousand individual agents to infiltrate over one thousand groups over five years in a campaign that involved all 59 FBI field offices. CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, was the primary target. They shadowed and intimidated activists, seized papers, tampered with mail, questioned employers, and did over 200 obvious break-ins. Yanira Correa was kidnapped from in front of the LA CISPES office, driven around in a van, tortured and raped, while explicit comments were made about her activism. There has been total impunity for all of these crimes (2006: 129), so why not do it all over again today?

My main frustration with Grandin is that he does not detail how Latin America has also been a key workshop for both grassroots and state resistance to empire, which continues to grow in brave creative new ways. For those of us in the global North who work against the new empire to ally and work with these movements in Latin America is not a matter of guilt or good will (though surely some of both comes into play), but good strategy. We need all the help of their courage and vision from their key location inside the workshop for our own resistance work inside the belly.

Grandin, Greg (2006) Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism. NY: Metropolitan Books

Harvey, David (2005) The New Imperialism. NY: Oxford Univ. Press

Murillo, Mario (2004) Colombia and the United States: War, Unrest and Destabilization. NY: Seven Stories Press

Amplifying voices that are less likely to be heard (no one is voiceless)

UN Voices from ourentries on Vimeo.

An absolutely amazing project put on by the UN in Australia (coming soon to major cities across the world). Seven images of different people with harrowing and inspiring stories were photographed and their images were placed around major Australian cities. Using unique photographic mobile technology the user would capture the person's mouth on the poster then MMS the image to a number that would call them back with the person's story.

The mobile call invited you to visit unvoices.org.au to leave your own voice and listen to the other stories you may not have encountered. You could also read the comments left by others.

and when the left gets in, then what?

Teo Ballvé has an article in nacla (in general a great resource) about how the solidarity movement in the US has and can respond when friendly faces get elected, North and South.

Amongst his arguments:

"The principal focus of U.S. solidarity activism should remain uncovering, denouncing, and fighting U.S. intervention in the domestic affairs of Latin American nations. With the Obama administration, U.S. meddling will likely become less brazen, if only somewhat less insidious. This is why the solidarity movement should also fortify what has rightly been another central aim of its organizing efforts: pressuring the U.S. government to adopt more just policies in the Americas based on respect for sovereignty and self-determination."

using maps for social change

much of this is reposted from the blog Social Design Notes:

some useful definitions:

Critical Cartography

Reading geography and maps as sites of power, deconstructing assumptions and political implications of maps. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_cartography, Siam Mapped, Spaces of Capital

and: Los Angeles: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2008

edited volume available for free online through praxis (e)press. Part IV are some critical articles on cartography (http://www.praxis-epress.org/CGR/contents.html).

edited ACME journal volume on critical cartography (http://www.acme-journal.org/Volume4-1.htm), guest edited by Leila Harris and Mark Harrower.

Radical Cartography

Using and creating maps to challenge power and facilitate social change, usually characterized by an oppositional, anti-authoritarian politics. See An Atlas of Radical Cartography, NYC Guide to War Profiteers, Radical Cartography.net, Million Dollar Blocks, and the image here is of the map of Plan Colombia by the fabulous Beehive Collective

Counter Cartography

Producing maps that challenge the dominant, mainstream narrative of a site or history, often from an explicitly political or activist perspective or from the point of view of historically marginalized communities. See DisOrientation Guide, CrashStat, A Threat to Peace, Notes for a People’s Atlas of Chicago.

Community Cartography

Maps produced collaboratively by a geographically local community, often used to promote a social agenda. See Green Map Systems, Asset Mapping, Aboriginal Mapping Network.

for ideas about how to do all of this check out Geog Visualisation Resources

Imagine Peace! A visual and critical encyclopedia

straight from the blog Groundswell (dedicated to critical cultural production at the intersection of art and activism) comes this post:

The Institute Design2context, at the Zurich University for the Arts, seeks to counter loss of the ability to imagine peace, and to substantiate their argument that this incapacity has resulted in an increase in disquieting space. In this effort, they have embarked on a search for visual representations of peace, a project they’ve titled Imagine Peace!:

We are gathering these representations in a variety of historical, cultural and political contexts, and bringing them together in research constellations. These constellations allow for a renewed ability in imagining peace and should contribute to forthcoming debates and controversies that encompass a vital presence of peace in political, civil and everyday life contexts.

The results of the research will be published as an encyclopedia in the autumn of 2009, and paired with written arguments that “today’s discordances and hostilities express the absence of proper imaginations of peace.” Conceiving of “Imagine Peace!” as

an exchange project, a source and networking knot for everyone active for the cause and creation of peace, be it in a political or personal context

the organizers have issued a series of calls for contributions, both written and graphical.

Worldwide workshops, entitled “Imagine Peace!”, are currently being held in places marked by situational crisis - recent locations include China, Brazil, and El Salvador - wherin key participants, artists, designers, graphic artists along with active grassroots peace organizations pursue effective and active concepts of peace.

Security without Empire

"The only truly common elements in the totality of America's foreign bases are imperialism and militarism - an impulse on the part of our elites to dominate other peoples largely because we have the power to do so."
- Chalmers Johnson, former CIA Consultant, Prof. Emeritus University of California

February 27-March 2
American University, Washington, DC

Many of us have a new sense of hope as we think about new possibilities in the Obama years. We also understand that if we and the world are to get the changes we need, we need to learn more and step up our organizing. This certainly applies to U.S. and international efforts to close the foreign military bases that make wars from Afghanistan and Iraq to Colombia and the Philippines possible, oppress "host" nations and communities, and divert our tax dollars from addressing essential human needs.

This inter-active conference will feature workshops, presentations by international and local activists, planning for action, lobby skills session, a Pentagon vigil and Congressional advocacy.

For more information and to register, click here.

Or contact GGold@afsc.org or call 617-661-6130

Organized by the National Project on U.S. Military Bases, made up of organizers from American Friends Service Committee, American University Department of Anthropology, Code Pink, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, Granny Peace Brigade/No Bases, Institute for Policy Studies, , International Women's Network Against Militarism, Southwest Workers Union, United for Peace & Justice, U.S. Peace Council, Pacific School of Religion/Institute for Leadership Development and Study of Pacific and Asian North American Religion, Veterans For Peace.

beautiful expression of solidarity

a great tool we could use in other struggles - this is a very personal video letter to Barack Obama, written and read by a member of Machsom-Watch/Checkpoint Watch, an Israeli peace organization that monitors and reports human rights violations in the West Bank and Jerusalem. I don't know that they call their work "accompaniment" but I would.

cool new open access journal by and for activists and academics

It's a journal of research for and from social movements, called Interface and the new issue includes articles like

* Movement knowledge.What do we know, how do we create knowledge and what do we do with it?

* Action research: mapping the nexus of research and political action.

* Extensão universitária: compromisso social, resistência e produção de conhecimentos (Continuing education: social commitment, resistance and the production of knowledge).

* Redes para a (re)territorialização de espaços de conflito: os casos do MST e MTST no Brasil (Networks for the reterritorialisation of spaces of conflict: the cases of the Brazilian MST and MTST).

Check it out. Lets support open source publishing by reading, citing and publishing open source!

The call for papers for issue two, on the theme of "civil society vs social movements" is online here. The deadline for submissions is May 15th, 2009; issue two is due out in September.

songs for solidarity

Sometimes it seems easier to hear things, to see things, in/with a song. This one is by Michael Heart (no, not Hardt).

war 2.0

War is now being waged on youtube. The Israeli Defense Force's channel of videos of the bombing is beyond creepy. Supposedly youtube has taken down the worst ones! ha. But there are also some incredible disturbing home videos being put up *from the ground* in Gaza like the one above (which I find very hard to watch). Youtube really is an incredible resource when no outside media is being allowed in. Of course, after so many years of being blockaded and trapped into a ghetto (which is now to top it all off being bombed), how many Palestinians will have the resources to own a digital camera that takes video? Right now who still has internet to upload it? Who has the generators to get electricity to run the computer? That any of these videos are getting out at all is amazing. Of course, these views from the ground are not nearly as widely seen as the IDF ones from the planes, and as disturbing as watching them is, I do think sharing them is important solidarity work.

yes, the international accompaniers are staying in Gaza

Foreign passport holders were allowed to leave, but there are 8 activists with the International Solidarity Movement that are staying. They are

Alberto Arce - Spain
Ewa Jasiewicz - Poland/Britain
Dr. Haider Eid - South Africa
Sharon Lock - Australia
Vittorio Arrigoni - Italy
Jenny Linnel - Britain
Natalie Abu Shakra - Lebanon
Eva Bartlett - Canada

Their powerful statements about why they are staying are here.

They include:

"As international observers, we have the responsibility to ensure that the international community has access to the reality of Israel’s attacks on Gaza.” Vittorio Arrigoni

"Our lives are no more important than theirs and we will stay during their suffering in solidarity and to document what Israel is preventing foreign journalists from revealing.” Eva Bartlett

Well no, their lives may be no more important (though of course, geopolitically they are treated as if they are), but then, they are choosing to put their lives on the line when they could leave. There is a real chance that in this chaos some of them will die. Especially now that they are accompanying ambulances (which, yes, have been targeted by Israelis), and since the Israeli's have been bombing places a second time once rescue crews are there trying to get people out of the rubble (this I learned from the reports from these accompaniers).

Let us honor their chosen risk by at least reading their reports - a much easier way of doing solidarity.

using youtube to speak truth to power

Here is a short video about 8 women who are fighting arrest warrants for their civil disobedience against Goldcorp mining in Guatemala. Obviously they can't go out and about and do public speaking, so this is a great tool. Great use of testimony and images - a powerful way to make stronger the voices of those usually less heard.

this might really be it!

For the last several years at the big annual vigil to close the School of the Americas (US army school that trains Latin American military officers) as the votes in Congress have gotten closer and closer we've said - this might be it! this might be the last vigil!

Well after this last election I certainly hope so! Of course, it's a symbol, and we will find some other symbol of US militarism to focus on next, but I'm going to miss this version of the struggle, and I'm sad that I'm in Colombia right now instead of in Georgia, where thousands are gathering this weekend in what is the largest ongoing protest against US Empire inside the belly of the beast, both in terms of numbers present and in terms of ongoing civil disobedience. I'm proud that as part of the interpretation and translation working group I've been part of building a diverse multilingual movement that draws on everyone's strengths and works to make sure we can all understand each other well. Much love and strength to the fabulous interpretation team there this year, especially Leo and Marcos that stepped up to the coordination! (the pic here is of Jenny and I, exhausted from coordinating but shining from the beauty of it all, in front of the tent where we handed out the radios, several years ago)

You can participate in the vigil virtually by signing the petition to Obama to close the school. There will be great photos of the vigil on the SOA Watch main page soon.

Building Supportive, Respectful, and Collaborative Relationships with Survivors of Human Rights

I am so grateful to Adriana Bartow-Portillo for writing a fantastic article about working in solidarity with survivors. The full article is here, y aca en español. It is well worth following the link to read the whole thing with prettier formatting, but if you're in a rush at least read this excerpt: (art by rini)

"There are some survivors that are eager to share their story with others in hopes that doing so will contribute to saving others from their same fate. The sharing experience, however, is often excruciatingly painful and stressful. Survivors who choose to tell their story relive these horrors and suffer the aftereffects of having chosen to speak out on behalf of those who no longer have a voice. For many survivors, intense lights, the presence of police or military officers and the sound of police or ambulance sirens often lead to flashbacks.

For me, sharing my story is a sacrifice I make to pay tribute to my disappeared father and daughters and to all of those who have perished at the hands of Latin American soldiers and officers trained at the SOA/WHINSEC. It is also an act of defiance, a refusal to remain silent in the face of injustice.

As a survivor, I have traveled all over the United States raising awareness of human rights issues – not only in Guatemala and Latin America but also in the United States and in several countries around the world. My audiences have been religious groups, elementary, high school and university students and professors, women, trade unionists, refugees, trauma survivors, and members of human rights and humanitarian organizations.

I have had many positive experiences, but several times the experience has not been so positive and in some cases, frankly, quite traumatizing. We survivors do not like the “exoticization” of our experience. I remember one occasion when I was asked to share my story only, leaving an “expert” to provide the context in which the disappearance of my family took place.

Survivors don’t like to be treated like celebrities. Several years ago I was asked for my autograph. I felt as if I had been pushed into a deep well of shame and embarrassment. Most of us consider our social justice and human rights advocacy work to be a responsibility rather than a choice.

How I wish that in those particular cases, event organizers had asked me about what would have made the experience more comfortable. Things like pacing the number of presentations to my level of comfort while doing a tour, providing a safe space where I could have had some privacy, involving me in the event’s planning process, providing all the necessary information and preparing the audience would have made a difference.

I believe it is of critical importance when planning public speaking events, national tours, media interviews and other SOA Watch events to always take into consideration the needs of survivors of violence and repression. Education about cultural issues and language needs must be incorporated into every planning process. Involving survivors in decision-making processes will only contribute to their empowerment. In addition, the creation of safe spaces for when survivors are stressed and an environment where the survivor feels supported and respected will contribute to restoring a survivor’s trust in others, and his/her sense of control over what impacts him/her directly.

It is essential to the development of collaborative long-lasting relationships between survivors and the movement to make these efforts."