Emissaries of Hope

She witnessed the atrocities, the killings, the abject poverty, the helplessness and hopelessness of millions of Latin Americans—victims of U.S. policies unraveled. If all that was ever to change, she knew she'd need to recruit many more witnesses from the United States to tell the story back home.

That was two decades and 12,000 witnesses ago.

Gail Phares, 63, a former Maryknoll missioner to Central America, is still recruiting volunteers and challenging them "to do hard things." She is still forming "beloved communities" out of like-minded strangers. She is still leading Witness for Peace delegations into war zones and returning to the United States to demonstrate and lobby for change.

They know Phares around Washington's political circles. They know her in the campos and in the capitals of Nicaragua, Guatemala, Cuba, and Colombia. They have seen what witnesses can do.

It all started back in spring 1983. Phares, who had seen too much violence during her missionary days in Nicaragua and Guatemala, formed an interfaith task force in her community of Raleigh, North Carolina. She convinced others to travel to Nicaragua on a fact-finding mission to learn firsthand of the fallout from the U.S.-funded contra war. The group visited El Porvenir on the Honduran border in the wake of a contra mortar attack that had destroyed numerous peasant huts.

"We went to one shack. The mother was standing in shock," Phares recalled. "The tiny house had been hit by mortars and her daughter had just been taken to Jalapa by ambulance." But while the group was there, no shells fell. They could see the contra encampment. But the guns were silent. One of the members of the group said, "If all it takes to stop the killing is to have Americans here, let's call for a vigil."

Nicaraguan government officials reluctantly endorsed the idea, and the group returned to the United States, determined to hold a large peace vigil in the embattled frontier town of Jalapa. The delegation numbered 153 people from 37 states. On July 4, 1983, the Americans stood hand-in-hand with Nicaraguan peasants, and eye-to-eye with the contras grouped across the border. "We formed a big circle, holding hands with mothers who had lost kids to contra attacks," Phares said.

There were no violent incidents that day.

The Carolina Interfaith Task Force on Central America had given birth to Witness for Peace (WFP). That October a founding retreat in Philadelphia set the agenda.

"We defined ourselves as a nonviolent, faith-based movement that opposed the United States' covert and overt intervention in Nicaragua," Phares said. "Our purpose was to change U.S. foreign policy." Each month, Witness for Peace sent several smaller delegations into the war zones. By June 1984, 200 people from all 50 states had traveled to Nicaragua. WFP had become a nationwide movement in less than one year.

It began to raise $1 million annually. "We trained people in nonviolence and we created beloved communities," Phares said. As many as 40 long-term WFP volunteers, two-by-two, were in contra combat areas of Nicaragua over the next five-year period.

"We had the longest nonviolent presence in an active war zone of anyone in history," she said. "I remember going into villages and there were mortar shells right over our heads. Our young volunteers saw people and houses blown up." Phares added, "Several suffered from post-traumatic stress, and some still do." One delegation from New York was held by the contras at Rio San Juan, and two other long-term volunteers were also later kidnapped.

While President Ronald Reagan was equating the contras with America's Founding Fathers, Phares said, some members of Congress and the media were beginning to turn away and pay attention to the testimony of Witness for Peace. "We had a lot to do with the Boland Amendment," she said. "They couldn't give money to the contras, and the Marines couldn't invade because of our presence."

The war in Nicaragua was winding down when WFP was asked in 1989 to help ease the return of Guatemalan war refugees from camps in southern Mexico. Volunteers accompanied thousands of returning refugees over the course of several years and maintained a presence in Guatemala for more than a decade.

In Haiti, at the height of the regime that ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide and murdered thousands, the religious community there in 1992 called for international observers to stand by a people in crisis. WFP sent several delegations to Haiti. Seven years later, WFP began a permanent presence in Cuba to expose the true human cost of the punishing U.S. embargo. In the past four years, thousands have joined delegations to the Caribbean island.

In 2000, WFP opened an office in Colombia to document the effects of the multibillion-dollar military and counter-narcotics funding package to the Colombian armed forces. The following year, a 25-person delegation, led by Phares, went on a fact-finding mission. Last March, she led a 100-person delegation, including religious and union leaders and congressional staffers, to Colombia. "It's a highly dangerous place. But people are willing to risk their lives," she said.

Witness for Peace has undergone major transformations in recent years. The heart of the movement is still sending volunteers on fact-finding missions so they can return to the United States and affect government policy. Last June, delegations were sent simultaneously to Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia in observance of WFP's 20th anniversary. They returned to Washington, D.C., where they reported their findings, lobbied their congressional representatives, and demonstrated in front of the White House. More than 100 members processed on the sidewalks of Pennsylvania Avenue, urging government policy reforms. Five were arrested for deliberately sitting down at the White House gate.

But the issues, and the WFP recommendations, vary from country to country. Now it's not war in Nicaragua, but debt. It's not refugees in Mexico, but NAFTA and its likely successors. In Cuba, the U.S. embargo is the issue; in Colombia, the drug-driven counter-insurgency.

For all four countries the thrust is economic. The theme of the June gathering was "Our Hemisphere is Not for Sale." WFP says the Bush administration is selling off national sovereignty to the highest bidder. Its position papers say: no to free trade agreements; no to sending $2.5 billion to fund counter-insurgency in Colombia, and no to the 43-year-old embargo on the Cuban people.

According to Phares, WFP had to refocus its efforts after the Nicaraguan war. "We worked to stop the war in Nicaragua, but we always knew that the underpinning was injustice. We began to work on economic justice issues." Phares boned up on national debt effects, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. "I thought, Lord in heaven, how am I going to mobilize people around those issues?" Witness for Peace started bringing delegations to the Washington, D.C. offices of the IMF for briefings. They would travel to Nicaragua to see how those positions played out in country. Then they would report their findings back to the IMF.

The mid-1990s saw WFP organizing vigils to close the U.S. Army School of the Americas and protests at the World Bank in Washington. The staff worked with sweatshop workers in Nicaragua's Free Trade Zone, resulting in their first union contract. Last year, WFP led the effort to organize the National Mobilization on Colombia, which brought 10,000 people to Washington, D.C., in an effort to end U.S. support for paramilitary death squads and destructive counter-narcotics fumigation in Colombia.

Witness for Peace staffers also have played a leading role in investigations and publications that have impacted Latin America. In 1996, "A People Dammed" prompted the World Bank to rectify its failure to adequately resettle people displaced by the Chixoy Dam in Guatemala. In 2000, "A Bankrupt Future" told of the devastating human effects of the debt crisis in Nicaragua. The latest publication, "A Hemisphere for Sale: The Epidemic of Unfair Trade in the Americas," addresses the impact of NAFTA and free trade proposals on the poor.

After leading more than 40 delegations in 20 years, Phares still sees WFP as a vehicle for change. "The purpose of our delegations is to transform people, to help them see things differently and empower them to come home and change policies.

"I believe that this country desperately needs signs of hope," she said. "We just have to keep celebrating life, and forming those beloved communities."

Peter A. Geniesse is a former newspaper editor from Neenah, Wis. He interviewed Phares in June during Witness for Peace's 20th anniversary celebration in Washington, D.C. Sojourners assisted in the formation of Witness for Peace in 1983 and helped recruit volunteers for (and participated in) the vigil that year in Jalapa, Nicaragua.