March 2006

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Crying Out Against the Despair of Militarism: On "Crossing the Line" at the School of the Americas

Donte Smith, 19 years old, is a student, labor organizer, and social justice activist from Houston, Texas. He was one of 37 people arrested for engaging in civil resistance by crossing the fence into Fort Benning, Georgia during the School of the Americas Watch (SOA) protest on November 20, 2005. The following has been excerpted and edited from his pre-sentencing statement made in Federal Court in Columbus, Georgia, January 30, 2006.

My parent didn't want me to speak to this court today. Like any loving parent, they sought to protect and cradle me from the jaws of the criminal justice system; afraid I would show this court the hubris and arrogance I had shown as a stubborn juvenile activist. I myself have been afraid of a court that very well holds my future livelihood in its hands.

Still, as the daily struggle of life has shown me, what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised and misunderstood. You see, when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak. As Audre Lorde teaches us, "When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision" of a better world, "then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid." Our silence will not protect us from inhumanity and cruelty.

For me, crossing that fence was my personal method of addressing the inhumanity of a place like the School of Americas (SOA, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHINSEC). When describing the experience to a good friend of mine, I could only tell her that crossing that fence was tantamount to releasing a desperate cry from within my heart, forever bruised and weighted by the unthinkable violence created by military institutions like WHINSEC.

Recently, I have come to view the annual SOA/WHINSEC protests as very large therapeutic exercises: each of us found our own ways of confronting the monstrosity of an institution like SOA. Some of us channeled our anger and frustration into our own voices and made ourselves heard in the streets of Georgia. We marched and chanted and screamed until our vocal cords and heels were weary.

Some of us sought the vibrancy of joyful music by dancing and moving our feet to the rhythms of el pueblo de la lucha. Shuffling our feet became a method of breaking through the despair and misery buried deep into the soils of Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Chile and all across Latin America by the soldiers trained at the School of the Americas.

Some of us challenged ourselves to become more educated about the perversity and pervasiveness of oppression. Thus we spent our time at these protests being students of injustice, learning about how the darkness of oppression reaches far and wide, from the automobile factories of Argentina to the supermarket aisles of Wal-Mart.

Some of us employed theatrics (i.e. las Puppetistas) to express our own personal sorrow about the institutions like WHINSEC. Some of us sought the divine to make sense of the devastation that WHINSEC has left across the world. So we prayed that some higher power heal this bruised and battered planet of the violence and inhumanity of places such as WHINSEC.

So for me, whether my own personal arrest will lead to the closing of violent, racist, oppressive institutions like SOA is at most secondary. "Crossing the line" was my own personal affirmation of the lives of thousands of Latin Americans who have been tortured, raped, assassinated, "disappeared," massacred, and forced into refugee camps by those trained at the School of Assassins. One of my favorite Chicana feminist poets, [Cherrie Moraga], says that we are each "refugees of a world on fire," parched for lack of lively rain as we journey to make sense of all the despair that we pass by.

I choose civil disobedience as my own method of coping with the inhumanity of places such as the SOA that laud "security" and American national "interests" over the faces/names/stories/cultures/lives of el pueblo and, ultimately, justice itself. In that moment, "crossing the line" became a way for me to say not in my name will this institution continue to torture, rape, massacre, batter, harass, and threaten el pueblo del mundo. No mas.

So with hands quaking, I jumped over a barbed fence onto the WHINSEC military base, carrying only a white wooden cross engraved with the name of Jairo Caucail (a victim of the SOA who was murdered in Choco, Colombia) and sat down onto a green field as young people buzzed around me with enthusiasm and excitement. Of course crossing that line came with all kinds of consequences and I feel prepared to undergo them. If that solidarity means prison time, that's a burden I'm willing to bear for my actions. This doesn't mean that each of us should have climbed that fence to prove that we value social justice and solidarity; la lucha needs all of us. It demands that we each find our own way of crying out against the despair of militarism and violence.

I want to leave you all with something that touched my heart. In the darkness of the Muscogee County Jail, one Jesuit priest who had crossed the line less than an hour after I did, and who still sits in the Muscogee County jail at this moment, spotted me across the detox tank, afraid and cold and clearly in a very vulnerable state after undergoing hours of questioning and processing by both the US military and Muscogee County prison system. He leaned over to me and offered words of encouragement in a hoarse voice that now seems to quake throughout my body whenever I think about it: "Each time a man (sic) stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he (sic) sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." I felt then, as I feel now, emboldened by that comment. Thank you for your time.

Donte Smith was sentenced to three months in prison and a $500 fine.

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