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Singular Success of High Roads Campaign Has Lacked Attentionh
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Bob Heberle, W A M M
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In Honor of Mary Swenson: August, 1949 - March, 2005
Very seldom does it seem that peacemaking activists get the chance to sing of success, but success did happen a few years ago. It has not been notably heralded in Mary Swenson’s legacy because of her distaste for self-aggrandizement. For those not familiar with Mary, she was a spiritual giant in a small corporal package. Leading a simple life, she labored long and hard for peace and justice at what is now called the Resource Center of the Americas.
She was gratefully eulogized at her funeral celebration and at a later memorial, but I want to point out that missing from the accolades was an important campaign she waged and won. In 1995, Mary helped lead a coalition called “High Roads” (to counter the military’s jingoistic labeling, “Fuertes Caminos/Strong Roads”) to end the dispatch of American military personnel to Central America on so-called “humanitarian” missions. That year our own Minnesota National Guard and Reserves were dispatched. She also debated an army officer on Public Television’s News Night Minnesota.
Challenged by our leafleting and our objections and at the air base in February’s minus 20 degree weather, Minnesota’s National Guard spokesperson asked me for a list of abuses charged to Guatemala’s military. It was Mary’s listing of the overwhelming number of the military’s human rights abuses along with her coalition leadership that finally brought to a halt the operations called “Fuertes Caminos” or “Strong Roads.”
After High Roads’ considerable lobbying of the military and politicians about the disservice to the people of Guatemala that ”Strong Roads” created, I was told by an official of Minnesota’s National Guard that Mary’s list, called Human Rights in Guatemala, had been flown out and hand-delivered to the Pentagon that winter
The operations were later transferred from Guatemala to the Red Lake Indian Reservation. They built homes and other things there instead of going to Latin America.
With support from WAMM and VFP, Marian and Bob Wright, Rita Steinhagen, Steve McKeown, Sisters McDonald and O’Brien, Tamara Milbourn, Sisters Jan Dalsin and Marguerite Corcoran, Jane Reagen, Jim and Sandra Brophy, Patty Guerrero, Sam Ross, and Rep. Bruce Vento were just a few of the many others that took an active role in the (successful) education of our military.
In 1994, Rigoberta Menchu addressed the Strong Roads program: “While they say that the (U.S) troops are in Guatemala for social projects, such as road construction, their presence is perceived as support for the repressive policies of the Guatemalan Army.” Mary Swenson’s leadership helped to expose systems of oppression that Menchu knew all too well. Thwarting the Strong Road mission was part of a legacy that transcends Mary’s passing, and the justice she promoted surely lives on in many forms. |
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Word UP!
Women On War:
Today the real test of power is not the capacity to make war but the capacity to prevent it.
—Anne O’Hare McCormick, foreign correspondent for the New York Times
Peace we want because there is another war to fight against poverty, disease and ignorance.
—Indira Gandhi
You can no more win a war than win an earthquake.
—Jeanette RankinM!
Conscientious Objector Resources
A national registry for Conscientious Objection is administered by the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, Massachusetts. The abbey is an interfaith retreat center for the practice of nonviolence and pacifism.
More information online.
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© 2005/2006 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete December 2005/January 2006 Index - click here
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