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-----------------~-----~------- ---- TkE u. s. CENT'R.A.L A.MERIC.A. PE.A.CE MOVEMENT' CHRISTIAN SMITH The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London List of Tables and Figures ix Acknowledgments xi Acronyms xiii Introduction xv portone Setting the Context 1. THE SOURCES OF CENTRAL AMERICAN UNREST 3 :Z. UNITED STATES INTERVENTION 18 J. Low-INTENSITY WARFARE 33 porttwo The Movement Emerges -'. LAUNCHING THE PEACE MOVEMENT 5 9 5. GRASPING THE BIG PICTURE 87 '. THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF MORAL OUTRAGE 13 3 '1'. THE INDIVIDUAL ACTIVISTS 169 porlthreeMaintaining the Struggle 8, NEGOTIATING STRATEGIES AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY 211 1'. FIGHTING BATTLES OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE 231 1 O. FACING HARASSMENT AND REPRESSION 280 11. PROBLEMS FOR PROTESTERS CLOSER TO HOME 325 1%. THE MOVEMENT'S DEMISE 348 portfour Assessing the Movement 1J. WHAT DID THE MOVEMENT ACHIEVE? 365 1-'. LESSONS FOR SOCIAL-MOVEMENT THEORY 378 ii CONTENTS Appendix: The Distribution and Activities of Central America Peace Movement Organizations 387 Notes 393 Bibliography 419 ,igures Index 453 Illustrations follow page 208. lobles 1.1 Per Capita Basic Food Cropland (Hectares) 10 1.2 Malnutrition in Central America 10 7.1 Comparison of Central America Peace Activists and All Adult Ameri­ cans, 1985 171 7.2 Occupational Ratio of Central America Peace Movement Activist to All Americans, 1985 173 7.3 Prior Social Movement Involvement by Central American Peace Activists (%) 175 7.4 Central America Peace Activists' Prior Protest Experience (%) 175 7.5 Personal and Organizational vs. Impersonal Sources of Activists' Introduction to Sanctuary and WFP (%) 181 7.6 Relational Links to Central American Activism(%) 182 7.7 Types of Sanctuary Groups, 1987 185 7 .8 Relationship Offering Witness for Peace Delegates First or Second Strongest Supporter and Opposer (%) 187 7 .9 Frequency of Communication of Witness for Peace Delegates with Strongest Supporter and Opposer(%) 188 7.10 Support and Opposition for Witness for Peace Activism from the Two Most Important People in Respondents' Political Reference Group (%) 188 7.11 Respondents Calculating the Costs and Benefits of Activism(%) 191 7.12 Expected Costs of Central America Activism(%) 191 7.13 Correlation Coefficients for Factors Affecting Differential Levels of Central America Activism 194 9.1 Soviet-Aggression Frame 241 9.2 Fragile-Democracies Frame 242 9.3 Another-Vietnam Frame 244 9.4 Botching-Democracy Frame 245 9.5 Wayward-America Frame 247 9.6 Imperial-America Frame 248 A.1 States with Great Number of Central America Organizations 389 LAUNCHING THE PEACE MOVEMENT Their conclusion was always the same ... that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down. The essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying .... And to do this there was only one resource: to fight the plague. There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical. Albert Camus, The Plague The U.S. Central America peace movement was not a unified, mono­ lithic entity. Few social movements are. It was, instead, a broad assem­ bly of individual and collective actions and organizations, all of which challenged U.S. Central American policy in some way. Many of the movement's actions were isolated, relatively uncoor­ dinated deeds of protest and solidarity. Handfuls of demonstrators in small towns held candlelight vigils publicly to mourn El Salvador's war dead. U.S. cities "adopted" and supported individual Nicaraguan cities. Community groups shipped truckloads of clothing and tools to Guatemala's poor. Angry dissidents threw blood on the walls of gov­ ernment buildings. Community leaders wrote searing op-ed articles for local newspapers opposing aid to El Salvador. Ideologically direct­ ed consumers bought Nicaraguan-grown coffee in support of the San­ dinistas. Activist groups aggressively campaigned and voted against politicians who supported aid to the Guatemalan military. Middle­ class citizens undertook hunger strikes and war-tax resistance. Out­ raged dissenters floated beach balls, painted to resemble explosive mines, in U.S. harbors to protest the mining of Nicaraguan harbors. Suburban homeowners planted in their front yards memorial crosses bearing names of individual peasants killed in Contra attacks. These kinds of grassroots expressions of activism reflected the movement's broad-based diversity and energy.1 But what gave the U.S. Central America peace movement its great- 6D CHAPTER FOUR LAUNCHING THE PEACE MOVEMENT &I est potency and endurance in contesting U.S. policy were its national the final moments before the abduction to lie about his Salvadoran movement organizations. These organizations mobilized hundreds of identity. "Tell them I work for you and we are traveling together," he thousands of activists across the country, coordinating their energies had pleaded. Dudley now wondered aloud whether he had made a into targeted strategies of collective action. The most important ones mistake telling the truth. Couldn't he have tricked or eluded the Bor­ were Sanctuary, Witness for Peace, and the Pledge of Resistance. 2 der Patrol somehow? Jim and Pat thought not. "Once you're stopped, After only three years of existence, Sanctuary had mobilized more there's not too much you can do." than seventy thousand U.S. citizens to participate in breaking federal But as they discussed the incident, their concern for the arrested immigration laws in order to confront the Reagan administration with hitchhiker grew. They remembered news stories reporting El Sal­ the consequences of its low-intensity war in Central America (Golden vador's civil war and the assassination of El Salvador's Archbishop and McConnell 1986: 3). Witness for Peace activated more than four Oscar Romero and four North American churchwomen. They thousand U.S. citizens to risk their lives by traveling to Nicaraguan recalled that only ten months earlier twenty-seven middle-class Sal­ war zones to see first-hand the effects of U.S. policy and to return vadorans had been discovered trying to cross the scorching desert sev­ home to struggle to stop it (Taylor n.d.). And in two years, the Pledge enty miles west of Tucson. The Salvadorans' paid smugglers-"coy­ of Resistance mobilized eighty thousand U.S. citizens collectively to otes"-had gotten lost and abandoned them, and they were forced to threaten mass civil disobedience if the U.S. invaded or escalated its drink urine and cologne before the Border Patrol recovered them. Half war in Central America (Butigan 1991). of the twenty-seven had died of thirst and exposure. The remaining This chapter briefly tells the stories of how these organizations survivors were taken in by several Tucson churches. Frank Shutts, formed and what collective actions they produced. It is primarily another Quaker also visiting Corbett that night, said that he had heard descriptive. Future chapters will explore why they emerged and what rumors of entire planeloads of deported Salvadorans being murdered can be learned about social-movement dynamics from their experi­ at the San Salvador airport by death squads, as examples to others ences. Those chapters will be more analytical in nature. But first, the who might consider fleeing the country. descriptive histories. "There must be some way to intervene for these people," Corbett said. But none of them knew how. Helplessly, they shrugged their shoulders, noting that the night was getting late and Dudley had to SANCTUARY3 catch a bus to Albuquerque. Frank Shutts drove him to the station. Jim Corbett woke up on the morning of May 5, 1981, knowing that And the Corbetts went to bed. But Jim Corbett did not sleep well. He he had to do something about the arrested hitchhiker. He did not could not escape the thought of Dudley's arrested hitchhiker being know, however; that what he was about to do would launch a social sent home to a death-squad assassination. movement. In the morning Corbett resolved to follow. up on the matter. He Corbett was a forty-six-year-old semi-disabled Quaker who, with called the offices of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service his wife, Pat, raised goats on a ranch outside Tucson, Arizona. The (INS) and the Border Patrol, who told him that they could not give out night before, a fellow-Quaker friend of Corbett's, Jim Dudley, had information on detainees. Corbett then remembered that his name been stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol on his way back from a trip to was the same as that of a well-known former Tucson mayor. He called Mexico, shortly after picking up a Salvadoran hitchhiker. Dudley was back the Border Patrol office and said in a commanding voice, "This on his way to Corbett's house to return a van he had borrowed and to is Jim Corbett here in Tucson, and I need the name of the Salvadoran discuss the planned construction of a chapel in a Mexican village. The you picked up late yesterday at the Peck Canyon roadblock. His name, hitchhiker was arrested. Dudley was interrogated for half an hour and and where he's being held." It worked. The officer looked up and gave accused of smuggling an illegal alien before being released. him the information. When Dudley finally arrived at Corbett's, he was visibly disturbed. After a few more phone calls to a local immigration-rights organi­ The frightened hitchhiker, he told Jim and Pat,.,had begged Dudley in zation, the Manzo Area Council, Corbett learned that the arrested 62 CHAPTER FOUR LAUNCHING THE PEACE MOVEMENT 63 hitchhiker could not be deported without a hearing if an INS G-28 the harder he pressed, the more disillusiorted and frustrated he became form designating legal council was signed and filed. So, Corbett drove with the INS and the Border Patrol.

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