A Statement by Don Beisswenger
before his trial
for School of the Americas demonstration

January 16, 2004

For background, see our earlier report.

Tomorrow I will be leaving for Columbus, Georgia, for a time of preparation for my trial in Federal Court on January 26th. I will be joined by 35 other people also arrested for criminal trespass on November 23rd, 2003. We all share a conviction that the School of the Americas (now WHISC) must be closed. We are, alongside Amnesty International, asking that training be suspended, a thorough investigation be conducted, and that a commission of inquiry be able to recommend appropriate reparations for human rights violations that SOA-trained military personnel contributed to.

I am ashamed of what the school has done in my name, in our names. I gave my witness as a small sign of my sadness and anger, but also in the great tradition of justice, fairness, democracy, charity, truth, and nonviolence.

I have spent the last 23 years paying attention to Latin America and the nature of American Foreign policy. I have traveled every single country in Latin America, and have made several visits to Colombia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize. In the 1980s, as I started my research to understand what was going on in El Salvador with the death squads and the assassinations, I became aware that the death squads were working in complicity with the military - and that the military was being given training and support by the United States and its School of the Americas. My tax dollars helped destroy the 900 poor villagers in El Mozote - 60% children, and my tax dollars continue to support massacres in Colombia, where over 10,000 graduates are now at work.

I seek to live my life as a Christian, seeking to respond to the will of God for me and for life on this planet. Central to my faith is the call to love God, my neighbor, my self, and creation. As a post-Holocaust Christian, one who knows how far a Christian nation can lose touch with what is going on by those with political power, I believe that Christian faith has social responsibility.

We have a calling to care for the poor. We have a calling to share resources. We have a calling to speak and live in truth. One of the great concerns of the Bible is idolatry, placing something less than God into the position of God, and trusting that to bring life, security, happiness. It is easy to make our nation into an idol, and, in a time of war, with soldiers dying, it gets more difficult to point out our idolatry. Self-justification becomes essential; people do not want to believe that their deaths are for less-than-noble causes. Yet, when we see distortions of truth, false arguments, and misuse of people, we have to try to speak up.

I am trying to speak up. I have sought to live my life from the bottom up. I believe that the health of a society is evident by what happens to the poor and the marginal. In the United States and throughout the world, I've seen the plight of the poor get worse and worse. I have tried to do what I could in the war against the poor. The Christian Church in the US has a calling to care for the poor, but they are increasingly being patronized, kept out of site, and told there are no resources. In Latin America, the Church has paid a far heavier price, in the blood of its teachers, ministers, and leaders - many assassinated by people trained at the School of the Americas.

The School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation, is only one point in our destructive US-Latin American foreign policy, but it is an important one. I witness not because I have any illusions of its impact, but I must do what I can. Living my life with proximity to those at the margins, those who are poor, those who are oppressed, has helped me to see the true consequences of policy decisions made in far-off board rooms. They have names and faces - like Karla Reyes, a 16 year old girl killed by death squads in El Salvador.

I am acting out of care of a nation which still has a potential to be a life-giving force in the world. This nation has been good to me, but not good for so many. Our poor population increases as the wealthy become more wealthy. As the middle class is winnowed out in the US, just as it has been in Latin America, our education, health care, and environment suffer heavy consequences.

I believe that the ground of life is love, and that love is all that will last. Thus, I am not only a prisoner of conscience; I am a prisoner of hope.