Thanks to the friends of Eve that helped write this Press Release and Washington Peace Center for helping send out: Activist Prepared for Jail Sentence for Peaceful Protest WASHINGTON, DC -- Retired DC public school teacher and peace activist Eve Tetaz will be tried on January 29 in a Columbus, Georgia federal courthouse for entering Ft. Benning on November 23, 2014, site of the School of Americas, now called Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation (SOA/WHINSEC). She has been charged with criminal trespass, which carries a maximum sentence of six months in federal prison. As a citizen, I am obliged to accept responsibility and to be held accountable for the actions of those whom I have chosen to be my representatives. I cannot, and will not, remain silent in the face of the SOA’s egregious violations of human rights, Tetaz said. Unless I speak out against the use of tactics which involve the killing and torturing of thousands of innocent men, women and children, I become complicit in such acts which are committed in my name. Also arrested for entering Ft. Benning last year was Nashua Chantal. The two join the more than 300 protesters who have engaged in civil disobedience at the School of Americas. Since 2005, Tetaz, who is closely associated with the Catholic Worker Movement, has been involved with various peace and social justice organizations, such as Code Pink, TASSC, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, and Witness Against Torture. Since 1946, the US taxpayer-funded SOA/WHINSEC has trained more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers and police. The institution became infamous in 1996 when grassroots pressure forced the release of manuals used to teach torture, extortion and the targeting of civilian populations. Graduates have been responsible for military coups, torture campaigns, and the disappearance and murder of thousands of their own citizens. SOA Watch was founded shortly after the 1989 massacre of six Jesuit priests, their co-worker and her teenage daughter at the University of Central America in El Salvador. A US Congressional task force determined that 19 of the 26 soldiers responsible were trained at the SOA. Each year, SOA Watch organizes the largest annual anti-militarization protest in the country outside Ft. Benning, commemorating the November 1989 massacre and all those tortured and killed by SOA/WHINSEC graduates. SOA Watch is a nonviolent grassroots movement that works to stand in solidarity with the people of Latin America and the Caribbean, to close the SOA/WHINSEC and to change oppressive U.S. foreign policy that the SOA represents.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:57:57 +0000
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