by Lisa Sullivan, SOA Watch
A week ago, nine SOAW activists from California, Nicaragua, Colorado, Venezuela, Honduras, Virginia and Georgia converged in Quito, Ecuador. One of the first things we did was to visit the middle of the earth, a few miles from Quito, the line that divides the planet into North and South. It was a fitting place to begin a brief mission of citizen diplomacy that modestly hoped to budge a long-standing barricade to peace, plant a tiny seed of justice in the Americas.
None of us were diplomats by training, we were dairy farmers, teachers, students, journalists, musicians and a priest, coming from various points of the Americas. The only things in our life’s CV’s that prepared us for such a mission was the simple conviction that the School of the Americas was a place that shouldn’t exist , and the belief that each of us shared a measure of responsibility in trying to close its doors…
Yay, Ecuador !!