It was more than a gate. It was a symbol, a barrier between points of view. Barbed wire decorated the top and a bicycle lock was all that kept the two sides apart.
On one side of the gate Sunday was Fort Benning. The Army was wearing its game face and its work clothes. Some had stars. Some had stripes. Federal officers stood guard with thick plastic shackles on their belts that they could use to secure prisoners.
On the civilian side was an eclectic army of protesters, chanting slogans and waving signs that complained about their tax money paying for war. There was a frowning clown with a red nose and "study war no more" on his forehead. There was a prancing group in yellow who turned saute pans and boilers into percussion instruments and urged the world to make bread, not bombs.
For the 13th year, SOA Watch -- an estimated 6,000 strong -- was camped in front of this historic gate, less than five miles from the school they so fervently want to close. The Department of Defense calls it the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Protesters still insist on calling it the School of the Americas.
By day's end, that gate had been turned into a bulletin board. Hundreds of white crosses were stuck in the fencing. Coffins small enough for a baby were left there, handmade by a nun serving time in Tennessee. A letter from Katie O'Hara, addressed to the people of Latin America, apologized for the acts of her country and her own inaction. A Marine Corps blouse, vintage 1950, with the stripes of a sergeant on the sleeve, battle ribbons on one heart and an abolish war button on the other was still on its hanger.
A year ago, there was tension, with local lawmen in riot gear standing over a group of protesters who had locked arms on the street and refused to move. Sunday, it was protest as usual.
"From our perspective, it was uneventful, nothing out of the ordinary," said Maj. Julius Graham of the Columbus Police Department.
"People didn't let the metal detectors deter them. There was a sweet spirit," said SOA Watch official Jeff Winder.
"This is America at its finest," said Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, Fort Benning's commanding general.
Not that laws weren't broken. Federal authorities reported 88protesters were arrested Sunday for going on to the military reservation. On Saturday, two were arrested for failing to stop at an Army checkpoint on Interstate 185.
Sunday, a 65-year-old protester was arrested by Muscogee County sheriff's deputies. Karl Meyer of Nashville, Tenn., refused to allow deputies to scan him with a hand-held metal detector. He walked away, then bodily pushed through the Fort Benning Road checkpoint.
In a move that shocked protesters who chose to enter the post, federal authorities held trespassers in the Muscogee County Jail overnight Sunday.
"That decision was made by U.S. Marshals, not the Army," Fort Benning Provost Marshal Col. Sean Finegan said.
Spending the night in the local lockup distressed detainees who expected to be back on their college campuses or on their jobs Monday. Instead, they await arraignment by U.S. Magistrate G. Mallon Faircloth.
As it has for 13 years, the ceremony began with a reverent funeral procession calling the names of those assassinated in Latin America -- deaths SOA Watch connects to graduates of the Fort Benning school. But as it began, the crowd cheered as six Catholic nuns squeezed through an opening in the fence in the trees next to the main gate.
The nuns from the convent of St. Mary of the Woods in Chicago carried white crosses. They came to show solidarity with Sister Kathleen Desautels, who in July was sentenced to six months in federal prison for entering that same installation.
As the sisters defiantly walked on to post, they stopped and stuck their crosses into the ground.
"Plant them," shouted the crowd on the other side of the fence. "Plant them."
As the procession continued, a solitary man with a red beard walked among them countering their chant with one of his own. "God bless America," he repeated over and over. "God bless the Constitution that allows you to be here -- even if you all are FOOLS!"
Finally, just after 4 p.m., the Rev. Roy Bourgeois -- who started the protest in that same spot 13 years ago -- brought it to a close. "Let us take this spirit back to our homes," he said, promising to return until the school is closed.
Only it didn't end.
By 7:30 p.m. Sunday, a small band of protesters stood vigil at the Muscogee County Jail, showing support for jailed comrades. Drums were beating, and a 10-foot puppet silently danced in the street.
Most of the protesters were still free -- fitting Eaton's definition of a successful protest. "I define it a success when all parties act in a civilized and humane manner," the general said, "when all can home tonight to peace and security."
About 15 graying women joined hands in a prayer circle a few feet away from a line separating freedom from prison.
Other than wearing lime-green "No War In Iraq" T-shirts, they didn't look like protesters.
They certainly didn't look like nuns.
"May the blessing of the Lord be upon you," they prayed. They broke the circle, and the Sisters of St. Agnes wept softly as they embraced 67-year-old Sister Caryl Hartjes.
It was the first time the Wisconsin-based Catholic order was sending one of its own off to prison for illegally crossing into Fort Benning. Hartjes would be one of at least seven nuns arrested Sunday.
"It's a big decision," said one of the St. Agnes nuns, Sister Marie Scott. "You can be gone six months, a year or even 18 months for crossing the line."
The Congregation of Sisters of St. Agnes has operated humanitarian missions in Nicaragua since 1945.
The nuns said their passions for protest were raised when four U.S. church women were raped and murdered by El Salvadoran soldiers in 1980.
Passion turned to action after two nuns from their order were killed in a 1990 missile attack launched by U.S.-trained Contra guerillas in Nicaragua.
"War doesn't answer anything. We've seen too many already," said 86-year-old Sister Mildred Ryan. "We keep working for peace and nonviolence. We have to prove it to ourselves. It starts with each and every one of us."
Preparing to enter a gap in the fence, Hartjes was asked why she had decided to voluntarily relinquish her freedom.
"It's a choice I'm making," Hartjes said. "I'm doing it for the millions in Latin America who didn't get to make that choice. They were just whisked away... . I think this is an act of patriotism."
Hartjes followed a group of other nuns who made the crossing earlier Sunday. One of them also described her act as patriotic.
"I think I'm being very patriotic today," said 48-year-old Dorothy Pagosa of Chicago, one of five Franciscan nuns who crossed the line Sunday. "I'm challenging my government to be the best it can be."
"It's a personal choice of conscience," said Sister Agnes Scott, campus minister for Marian College in Wisconsin. "We believe that the U.S. is wrong for trying to practice such hegemony in the world."
Hartjes said she had been arrested before for entering a Nevada test site during an anti-nuclear weapons protest.
But that was before Sept. 11, 2001. Amid the fear of terrorism, acts of civil disobedience against the government likewise have become more frightening, the nuns said.
Moments before entering the post, Hartjes was asked if she was scared.
She didn't blink.
"Yes," she said.
Eyes glistening, Hartjes paused a few seconds before continuing.
"I prayed last night that I would find that center deep within me where I'm at peace. Part of that fear is that I might stray from that center. I'm praying that I don't."
This year's protest was the first for Stan Spence of Milwaukee, but the scene at Fort Benning on Sunday wasn't entirely unfamiliar. His wife, Kate Fontanazza, is a social activist and has participated in past protests. She's currently in prison in Illinois, in the second month of a six-month sentence for trespassing onto the military reservation last year.
"She always raised hell," said Spence, a nurse. "I'm here in her stead."
He said he was impressed by the diversity of the crowd.
"What's really encouraging to me is to see so many young people," said Spence, whose typical weekends, when the weather is decent, are spent hiking and doing yard work or other outdoor activities.
"Agitated, Agitator, Agitating" read the $10 gray T-shirts being sold by Mark Konrad, president of a nonprofit human-rights organization in Schwenksville, Pa.
The slogan, he said, came to him in the middle of the night. "And it's me."
A social activist for 26 years, Konrad coordinates a group of about 270 people who write letters on behalf of political prisoners worldwide. In September, his organization, Global Importune Inc., held a fund-raiser to benefit Burmese women refugees.
It was the Watergate scandal that first caused him to question the government and set in motion a "long, slow process" to activism.
This was Konrad's third protest here. He has another connection to the city: His brother lives in Columbus. He's often frustrated, he said, trying to explain to his brother the people and purpose of the annual event.
Charles Butler spent three months in prison in 2000 for trespassing onto the military post where he spent a year as a young solider immediately after World War II.
Preparing to walk to the post's gate with hundreds of others in a symbolic funeral procession, Butler said his time behind bars gave him the chance to tell people about the movement.
"People were interested as to why I was there," said Butler, who traveled from Rochester, Minn., with a group of members of Christ United Methodist Church and of Veterans for Peace. The curiosity was especially keen because Butler is a retired minister, and people wanted to know how he landed in jail.
Butler has traveled to Latin America, as a missionary in Panama and member of a Witness for Peace delegation that went to Nicaragua in the late 1980s.
The protest, he said, is "one way to say no to the human cruelty our country's been involved in in Latin America."
"You guys know that we're not protesting Fort Benning, right?" a young man asked the small group gathered for God Bless Fort Benning Day, the first citizen-organized response to the 13th-annual protest.
Conversations broke out between the Fort Benning supporters and the protesters, some of whom snapped photos and video-recorded the supporters. One young woman with a camera said curiosity was high because Columbus residents had never done anything like this before.
Among the pro-Fort Benning group was outspoken Mary Knepper, who carried a sign that read, "Thanks to you we fly the Red, White and the Blue."
Knepper, a retired artist who teaches art classes at a senior center, has watched the protest in the past from her nearby home.
The protesters, she said, "should be this concerned about all the killings going on in the neighborhood." She said she's unconcerned about murders in Latin America. "I'm sorry."
Christina Greenough had always avoided the protest in the past. But this year she participated in the rally in support of Fort Benning, organized by her boss, Miriam Tidwell, owner of Miriam's Cafe and Gallery.
Greenough is production coordinator for "What's New Miriam?", a local television program featuring three guests and a cooking segment.
"They're not sure what to make of us, if we're hostile or not," she said of the protesters. "We're not, so it's confusing to them."
Greenough said the protesters' target seems broader than the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, which causes her to wonder if they know themselves what, precisely, they're objecting to.
"The question we're getting across the fence (set up to separate the groups) is, 'Why are you supporting Fort Benning?' "
She has always believed that they have a right to voice their concerns, though, and said she appreciates "the peaceful interest in what we're doing."
Wearing a cardigan embellished with about two dozen American flag pins, Dolores Melchor said the rally in support of Fort Benning was long overdue. It probably would have started sooner, she said, but no one organized one.
Melchor said she has always been "pro-military" and wants the soldiers to know they're respected. Like police officers, service men and women are "ordinary" people, she said, but it takes something beyond the ordinary to do what they do.
"They feel (the protest) is a personal attack against them, but it's not."
A Texas native who has lived in Columbus 14 years, Melchor, who works for a retail store, came to the event with her 19-year-old daughter and her son-in-law.
COLUMBUS, GA -- More than 90 people, including at least six nuns, were arrested for marching onto Fort Benning grounds Sunday during an annual protest of a U.S. military program that trains Latin American soldiers.
"I feel anger at the deliberate teaching of violence," Caryl Hartjes, a nun from Fondulac, Wis., said as she entered the compound, where she was arrested.
About 6,500 protesters gathered for the 13th annual demonstration by the School of the Americas Watch, which continues to protest the Nov. 19, 1989, killings of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador. Protesters said they demonstrate because people responsible for the killings were trained at the School of the Americas, a Fort Benning-based program that was replaced last year by a new institute. Protesters say the change was only cosmetic.
The demonstrators Sunday passed through the base's gates, including one where they cut the padlock and slipped through fence posts to get onto the property.
Inside, a line of military police guided protesters up a hill where they were arrested. Illegally entering base property is a federal offense that can carry up to six months in prison.
"I don't want to give up my freedom and I would enjoy peace and justice more, but as a person of faith, I can't stand back and watch the atrocities," Dorothy Pagosa, a 48-year-old nun, said as she was arrested.
"The atrocities that have happened have brought shame on this country," she said.
Post officials called the demonstration an example of American democracy at work and said they'd use it as a teaching tool for students from Latin America.
"It is America at its finest," said Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, post commander. However, he said he was "duty bound and legally bound to apprehend those who violate the law."
About 7,000 people took part in the protest last year. Twenty-eight later pleaded guilty or were found guilty of trespassing -- including three nuns over the age of 67 -- and most of them served their sentences in federal prison.
Demonstrators Sunday carried American flags and crosses honoring the alleged victims of the abuses in Latin America. Three protesters carried a mock-coffin draped in black. Others wore shirts that said "No War in Iraq."
"We're here to support the voices that are trying to make our country's international actions more just," said Bill Quigley, a lawyer representing the protesters.
The Army's School of the Americas was replaced last year by a new institution operated by the Department of Defense and supervised by an independent 13-member board that includes lawmakers, scholars, diplomats and religious leaders.
Officials say the new school, known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, still trains Latin American soldiers, but also focuses on civilian and diplomatic affairs. Human rights courses are mandatory.
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