Americas

We rode through the rural communities of the Bajo Lempa in a white pickup, picking up the survivors one by one. Maria. Elsa. Irma. Luisa. Lencho. Chici. All clamored into the back of the truck, chatting about this and that, their laughter filling the sweltering air around us. We were going to listen to stories that no one should ever have to tell: testimonies from survivors of the massacre of La Quesera, a brutal attack by the Salvadoran Army which took the lives 600-800 innocent people, mostly women, children and elders.

In the mid 1980s, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a young parish priest working in an impoverished and embattled district of Haiti's capital city Port-au-Prince. A courageous champion of the rights and dignity of the poor, he soon became the most widely respected spokesman of a growing popular movement against the series of military regimes that ruled Haiti after the collapse in 1986 of the US-backed Duvalier dictatorship.

This may be the year that the infamous SOA of the Americas (SOA), implicated in massacres and human rights violations throughout Latin America, is finally closed. The prospect of an impending vote in the U.S. Congress, combined with a steady movement of Latin American countries withdrawing their troops from the school, makes the shut down of the school very possible in 2007.

Evo Morales was arguably elected on the platform of nationalization. A country-wide protest deposed president Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada in 2003, and then kicked former vice-president Carlos Mesa out of the Presidential Palace in 2005.

Aviva Chomsky is professor of history and Latin American Studies at Salem State College in Massachusetts. She is also a founder of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, which has been working since 2002 with Colombian labor and popular movements, especially those affected by the foreign-owned mining sector.