New River Activists Prepare for Prison, Spread the Word

In Post-9/11 Days, It's Hard for Some to Understand Why They Oppose U.S. Foreign Policy

BY MIKE GANGLOFF

Niklan Jones-Lezama looked at the young faces before him last week in the meeting room in Virginia Tech's Squires Student Center and tried to explain again about the burden of knowing.

It's a phrase Jones-Lezama picked up last summer in a federal courtroom. It seemed good shorthand for something that's been both easier and harder to describe in the year since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Good shorthand for why Jones-Lezama has opposed U.S. foreign policy for two decades, and why he and fellow New River Valley activist Sue Daniels set out in November to protest against what they call the United States' own terrorist training camp - a U.S. military school at Fort Benning, Ga., that trains Latin American soldiers and police.

Good shorthand for why Jones-Lezama and Daniels will be spending the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in federal prison.

On Tuesday, they are to begin six- and three-month sentences, respectively, for misdemeanor trespass charges stemming from their participation in demonstrations against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a facility still known by its former name, the School of the Americas.

At a meeting of Tech's chapter of Amnesty International, about a dozen students listened as Jones-Lezama, a 38-year-old switchboard operator at Tech's veterinary school, and Daniels, a 42-year-old doctoral student in Tech's biology department, tried to relate their experiences.

"I had the burden of knowing," Jones-Lezama began.

Kenneth Kennon, a retired minister who was jailed for a School of the Americas protest and last year published a memoir of his experience, wrote that a common thread among the protesters who entered the base was a "personal deep experience with pain and suffering."

That's true for Daniels and Jones-Lezama, though both have to be prompted to detail the paths that brought them to imminent imprisonment. They insist their personal stories are nothing compared to the suffering endured by the Latin American victims of the school they protested against.

Jones-Lezama is a soft-spoken Blacksburg resident whose interest in the politics of Central America is haunted by the sense that he's not doing enough to counteract the destructive role the United States has often played there.

It's a feeling disturbingly similar to what Jones-Lezama thinks his father felt during the final decade of his life, when the retired Air Force colonel became a staunch opponent of U.S. policy in Latin America.

Jones-Lezama's father killed himself in 1997, overwhelmed, Jones-Lezama thinks, by the enormity of the task he'd set himself. On some level, his father seemed to be trying to make up for the trauma Jones-Lezama's older brother underwent when he was arrested by Haitian dictator Jean Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's police during a 1983 mission trip, Jones-Lezama said. Jones-Lezama's brother was held only a few hours but never seemed to get over the experience. He has had problems with mental illness since then, Jones-Lezama said.

The episode in Haiti, where U.S. aid supported Baby Doc's regime, spurred Jones-Lezama into activism. He began traveling to Central America while he was a Tech student and saw firsthand some of the devastation inflicted by U.S.-backed economic and military forces. He later became co-coordinator of the Coalition for Justice, a Blacksburg-based activist group.

It was Jones-Lezama's 1987 trip to San Jose de Bocay, a Nicaraguan town then in the war zone between the Sandinista government and the U.S.-supported Contras, that sparked Blacksburg's sister-city relationship with the town, other organizers of the sister-city effort said.

Daniels, who lives in Newport, also traces her activism to family grief. Growing up in upstate New York as one of six children raised by a single mother prompted an early concern for the less powerful, she said. But it was her brother's suicide when Daniels was 14 that made members of the family decide to make a difference in the world. Her mother became a theologian. A sister studied for the ministry.

Daniels began what would be a years-long practice of writing letters to government officials. But her life's patterns changed with the death of her mother in 1996 and a split with a longtime partner in 2000. Daniels worked for Ralph Nader's presidential campaign and attended protests against the International Monetary Fund and World Economic Forum, taking steps against the hopelessness that she thinks has only spread since the time of her brother's death.

"I think the antidote to that hopelessness is direct action," Daniels said.

Jones-Lezama and Daniels were among an estimated 10,000 people who went to Fort Benning last year. Neither had previously attended the annual demonstration.

The U.S. Defense Department says its institute promotes peace and democracy. Protesters, who 13 years ago began demanding that the school be closed, say it helps dictators oppress their own people.

Long notorious in Central and South America, the school was at the center of the 1996 torture manuals scandal after the Pentagon released documents that indicated the school taught assassination, abuse of prisoners, and military infiltration of labor unions, political parties and student groups.

Daniels and Jones-Lezama were among about 100 people who left the main protest in what has become an annual rite, a mock funeral procession that crossed onto Fort Benning's property. Participants carry coffins and crosses emblazoned with the names of the victims of the school's graduates.

They were among 36 people convicted in July of misdemeanor trespass. Daniels was fined $500 along with her prison time. Jones-Lezama wonders if he got the longer sentence because he led the courtroom in singing Bob Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" during his pre-sentencing statement and voiced support for an anarchist co-defendant.

Last month Jones-Lezama and Daniels got letters telling them to report on Sept. 10 to separate prison camps in West Virginia.

They and their supporters - many people have offered encouragement - see it as no accident that the Fort Benning protesters all were scheduled to begin their sentences before the Sept. 11 anniversary.

After all, the protesters were criticizing the Bush administration's war on terrorism, an act Attorney General John Ashcroft has described as akin to aiding the enemy.

"Why is it that our country can't accept criticism?" asked Nancy Alexander, a friend of Jones-Lezama and secretary at Cooper House, the Tech Presbyterian campus ministry that long has been a presence in Central American-related organizing in Blacksburg. "It is the truest sense of patriotism that you can stand back and look at these issues and say, 'What are we doing?' "

"A lot of people think it's now in bad taste or somehow inappropriate to protest," said Jonson Miller, who helped start a fund that so far has raised $1,600 to help pay prison expenses and help Jones-Lezama's family while he's gone. "The implication is protesters are aligning themselves with terrorism."

Like other activists, Daniels and Jones-Lezama describe the Fort Benning protests as part of a bigger picture that includes opposing war in Afghanistan and Iraq and reining in international corporations. It's a struggle that plays out on many levels, with community-building on one side and violence on the other, Daniels said.

"Our action is saying, 'Not in our name,' " Jones-Lezama said.

Preparing for prison has meant a host of adjustments. Daniels rescheduled her research and arranged care for her horses. Jones-Lezama applied for leave from his job.

His wife, Claudia, a Nicaraguan who backed the Sandinista revolution and came to Southwest Virginia for a master's degree in nursing, switched from a part-time job at Tech back to her former full-time position as a hospice nurse.

"You have to take a stand for something," Claudia Jones-Lezama said of her husband's action. "I hope this will be his first and last time in prison."

Their son, Omar Martinez, a senior at Blacksburg High School, said he didn't expect to hear much criticism of his father at school. "I find that youth are more understanding of the conflicts of the world than adults are," he said with teenage assurance.

Jones-Lezama had surgery Friday on a dislocated shoulder he suffered in a bicycle accident last summer, an injury that was aggravated during an altercation with a U.S. marshal and probation officer outside the courtroom in July.

His shoulder will probably complicate whatever work he's assigned at the prison camp, but Jones-Lezama and Daniels said they might refuse to work and go on hunger strikes as a further protest.

"There's a feeling there's so much more to be done than to drive myself to this camp," Jones-Lezama said.

At the Tech Amnesty International meeting, Daniels and Jones-Lezama's talk was greeted with knowing nods by several students who have themselves protested at Fort Benning, and by confusion among others.

That divide has come into stark relief since Sept. 11, Daniels and Jones-Lezama said.

While they were appalled by the Sept. 11 attacks, they said they also hoped the shock of the day would prompt people to reflect upon the United States' role in the world and upon the aftermath that violence leaves wherever it occurs - to reflect, in other words, upon the burden of knowing.

It's too early to tell, Jones-Lezama and Daniels said, if that reflection took place or what all of the results may be.