08
Oct
2002
For Gwen and Dorty Hennessey, the two Catholic nuns from Dubuque who received the Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth) award from St. Ambrose University last Thursday for their service in promoting world peace, the wind knows no government.
Daily, thousands of farmers and peasants deal with fear of a toxic-chemical deluge in the hills of the Columbian countryside. As a strategy in the War on Drugs, the U.S. government - in cooperation with the elected government of Columbia - dumps fumigation toxins in cool early-morning hours by Huey helicopter and airplane to eradicate the coca crop that is eventually manufactured into cocaine that lands on our shores.
But as Gwen states, the chemicals meant to devour coca leaves also end up destroying bananas, corn, coffee beans, and other crops meant for food and trade. She also says these chemicals have adverse health effects on the local population.
This battle is one of many in which the Hennessey sisters have been active in their quest for peace. In November 2000, Sister Gwen (now age 69) and Sister Dorothy (89) were arrested during a protest at the U.S. military base in Ft. Benning, Georgia, and later sentenced on trespassing charges to six months in the minimum-security federal penitentiary in Pekin, Illinois.
The younger and healthier Sister Gwen served her six-month sentence in Pekin, while the frail yet rosy and chipmunk-cheeked Sister Dorothy served only two months there due to ill health, spending the rest of her term in a correctional center in Dubuque near her family and Franciscan sisters.
What they were protesting, along with 24 others who were sentenced, was the School of the Americas housed in the base, an institution (now re-named the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation) that trains military from Central and South America in various tactics, including torture, critics claim.
The protesters include military personnel who worked at the base, the highest ranking of whom is retired Major Joseph Blair, who was an instructor at the School of the Americas and alleges that torture is part and parcel of what is taught to these men in "counter-insurgency" training. The U.S. government denies the charges that the school teaches torture and intimidation techniques, and claims that its main focus is to provide modern training for allies fighting guerilla movements in Central and South America.
On November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests were murdered by the Salvadoran military on the campus of the University of Central America in San Salvador, El Salvador. To mark that day this year, Gwen and Dorothy plan to return to Ft. Benning and the School of the Americas to protest again. They will possibly be jailed again. But that doesn't seem to faze these two, who believe that what they are doing is morally right. Possible U.S. government involvement in training people who have eventually used that training to commit atrocities in Latin American wars weighs heavily on their consciences.
"I'd like to show you videos," Gwen says of the tapes made about the training in intimidation and torture at Ft. Benning, brought out by former military personnel who disagree with the practices there. She recently returned from Columbia, where she visited farmers in the war zones of the long and brutal civil war waged between former leftist thugs and narco-terrorists listed on numerous terrorist lists - the FARC - and the government- and landowner-backed paramilitary terrorists who roam the countryside. "The guerillas are taking advantage of the farmers as much as the paramilitaries are," says Gwen. "It is endless and ugly."
Both sides are involved in the drug trade. Both have been fingered for committing mass slaughter. Both have been involved in kidnapping for ransom. Weapons sent by the Clinton and Bush administrations have ended up in the hands of the paramilitary and the official government, an aid package that amounts to roughly $1 million per day under Plan Columbia. The main aims of the plan, according to U.S. policy, are to halt the production and flow of drugs with the use of fumigation chemicals and to help stabilize the country by providing military support for the legitimate government.
Gwen went on to explain how the farmers are caught in the middle, many growing legal crops as well as many growing illegal coca to support their families. Nearly 80 percent of the cocaine that comes into the U.S. originates in Columbia. Bordering Columbia is Venezuela, a member of OPEC and supplier of nearly 7 percent of the U.S. oil imports. Panama and the Panama Canal are a crow's fly away. Columbia is therefore of great strategic importance to the U.S.
"The whole situation is very comparable to what happened in El Salvador," says Gwen. During the 1980s she spent much of her time in that war-ravaged country, and her brother Ron was a priest and missionary in El Salvador and Guatemala for 34 years. Between 1981 and 1992 the U.S had troops, advisors, and a command center in El Salvador to aid in military transport to pro-U.S. government forces against communist rebels; 70,000 died in that war, mainly civilians caught in the crossfire and many killed or "disappeared" by the Salvadoran military, an army in which many of the higher-ranking officers were trained at the School of the Americas.
"If we can put out one fire anywhere," says Gwen, "we can eventually put out many."
The Pacem in Terris award has been given to 32 other individuals since 1964 and is named after an encyclical letter by Pope John XXIII in 1964 calling on "all people of good will to secure peace among all nations." Past recipients have included Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Cesar Chavez (whom Gwen worked with, helping organize migrant workers in California), Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, and John F. Kennedy (posthumously). Six of those have also received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Daily, thousands of farmers and peasants deal with fear of a toxic-chemical deluge in the hills of the Columbian countryside. As a strategy in the War on Drugs, the U.S. government - in cooperation with the elected government of Columbia - dumps fumigation toxins in cool early-morning hours by Huey helicopter and airplane to eradicate the coca crop that is eventually manufactured into cocaine that lands on our shores.
But as Gwen states, the chemicals meant to devour coca leaves also end up destroying bananas, corn, coffee beans, and other crops meant for food and trade. She also says these chemicals have adverse health effects on the local population.
This battle is one of many in which the Hennessey sisters have been active in their quest for peace. In November 2000, Sister Gwen (now age 69) and Sister Dorothy (89) were arrested during a protest at the U.S. military base in Ft. Benning, Georgia, and later sentenced on trespassing charges to six months in the minimum-security federal penitentiary in Pekin, Illinois.
The younger and healthier Sister Gwen served her six-month sentence in Pekin, while the frail yet rosy and chipmunk-cheeked Sister Dorothy served only two months there due to ill health, spending the rest of her term in a correctional center in Dubuque near her family and Franciscan sisters.
What they were protesting, along with 24 others who were sentenced, was the School of the Americas housed in the base, an institution (now re-named the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation) that trains military from Central and South America in various tactics, including torture, critics claim.
The protesters include military personnel who worked at the base, the highest ranking of whom is retired Major Joseph Blair, who was an instructor at the School of the Americas and alleges that torture is part and parcel of what is taught to these men in "counter-insurgency" training. The U.S. government denies the charges that the school teaches torture and intimidation techniques, and claims that its main focus is to provide modern training for allies fighting guerilla movements in Central and South America.
On November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests were murdered by the Salvadoran military on the campus of the University of Central America in San Salvador, El Salvador. To mark that day this year, Gwen and Dorothy plan to return to Ft. Benning and the School of the Americas to protest again. They will possibly be jailed again. But that doesn't seem to faze these two, who believe that what they are doing is morally right. Possible U.S. government involvement in training people who have eventually used that training to commit atrocities in Latin American wars weighs heavily on their consciences.
"I'd like to show you videos," Gwen says of the tapes made about the training in intimidation and torture at Ft. Benning, brought out by former military personnel who disagree with the practices there. She recently returned from Columbia, where she visited farmers in the war zones of the long and brutal civil war waged between former leftist thugs and narco-terrorists listed on numerous terrorist lists - the FARC - and the government- and landowner-backed paramilitary terrorists who roam the countryside. "The guerillas are taking advantage of the farmers as much as the paramilitaries are," says Gwen. "It is endless and ugly."
Both sides are involved in the drug trade. Both have been fingered for committing mass slaughter. Both have been involved in kidnapping for ransom. Weapons sent by the Clinton and Bush administrations have ended up in the hands of the paramilitary and the official government, an aid package that amounts to roughly $1 million per day under Plan Columbia. The main aims of the plan, according to U.S. policy, are to halt the production and flow of drugs with the use of fumigation chemicals and to help stabilize the country by providing military support for the legitimate government.
Gwen went on to explain how the farmers are caught in the middle, many growing legal crops as well as many growing illegal coca to support their families. Nearly 80 percent of the cocaine that comes into the U.S. originates in Columbia. Bordering Columbia is Venezuela, a member of OPEC and supplier of nearly 7 percent of the U.S. oil imports. Panama and the Panama Canal are a crow's fly away. Columbia is therefore of great strategic importance to the U.S.
"The whole situation is very comparable to what happened in El Salvador," says Gwen. During the 1980s she spent much of her time in that war-ravaged country, and her brother Ron was a priest and missionary in El Salvador and Guatemala for 34 years. Between 1981 and 1992 the U.S had troops, advisors, and a command center in El Salvador to aid in military transport to pro-U.S. government forces against communist rebels; 70,000 died in that war, mainly civilians caught in the crossfire and many killed or "disappeared" by the Salvadoran military, an army in which many of the higher-ranking officers were trained at the School of the Americas.
"If we can put out one fire anywhere," says Gwen, "we can eventually put out many."
The Pacem in Terris award has been given to 32 other individuals since 1964 and is named after an encyclical letter by Pope John XXIII in 1964 calling on "all people of good will to secure peace among all nations." Past recipients have included Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Cesar Chavez (whom Gwen worked with, helping organize migrant workers in California), Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, and John F. Kennedy (posthumously). Six of those have also received the Nobel Peace Prize.
