I ran into a former student and his family Friday evening while rounding a sharp curve along the Greenway. The oldest of four under ten was riding a blue mountain bike. I challenged him to a race, so we peddled furiously down a straightaway for a hundred yards or so, then slowed in the forest under a shower of maple helicopters.
I remember throwing handfuls of twirling maple wings into the air as a child, imagining a dizzying ride aboard a miniature single-seater.
Flanked by maples, the Dillingham Street bridge spans the Chattahoochee River, connecting Columbus, Georgia and Phenix City, Alabama. Each November, thousands converge in solidarity at the gates of Fort Benning in Columbus in an effort to shut down The School of the Americas, now called the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.”
Below is a recording taken while leaving the solemn procession which ended in approximately 20 indiscriminate arrests, including journalists, a 90-year old Jesuit priest, and a local barber who stepped out of his shop to watch the march.
Initially established in Panama in 1946, it was kicked out of that country in 1984 under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty. Former Panamanian President, Jorge Illueca, stated that the School of the Americas was the “biggest base for destabilization in Latin America.” The SOA, frequently dubbed the “School of Assassins,” has left a trail of blood and suffering in every country where its graduates have returned.
Over its 59 years, the SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. These graduates have consistently used their skills to wage a war against their own people. Among those targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, “disappeared,” massacred, and forced into refugee by those trained at the School of Assassins.
Each year the Puppetistas testify for memory and creative resistance.
On March 7th, 2011, WikiLeaks released two cables from the U.S. embassy in Costa Rica “that offer insight into the U.S. pressure tactics to keep the SOA/ WHINSEC in business” (SOA Watch).
Read the cables here:
Cable 1: http://213.251.145.96/cable/2007/11/07SANJOSE1999.html
Cable 2:http://213.251.145.96/cable/2007/12/07SANJOSE2073.html
All The People Who Are Now Red Trees
By Martín Espada
When I see the red maple,
I think of a shoemaker
and a fish peddler
red as the leaves,
electrocuted by the state
of Massachusetts.
When I see the red maple,
I think of flamboyan’s red flower,
two poets like flamboyan
chained at the wrist
for visions of San Juan Bay
without Navy gunboats.
When I see the flamboyan,
I think of my grandmother
and her name, Catalan for red,
a war in Spain
and nameless laborers
marching with broken rifles.
When I see my grandmother
and her name, Catalan for red,
I think of union organizers
in graves without headstones,
feeding the roots
of red trees.
When I stand on a mountain,
I can see the red trees of a century,
I think red leaves are the hands
of condemned anarchists, red flowers
the eyes and mouths of poets in chains,
red wreaths in the treetops to remember,
I see them raising branches
like broken rifles, all the people
who are now red trees.
