ON THE LINE

Steif, William & Rosen, Elana Yonah

ON THE LINE Another Navy for Peace SAN FRANCISCO BA Y On a crisp, clear October Saturday, a man and boy are on the Bay, aboard a 101-foot ketch flying flags and bearing banners with the emblem...

...Three were being treated for injuries suffered in auto accidents, and the other eight had fallen to contra guns...
...A curious seal pops its head up from the waves, a group of pelicans are dwarfed by a quintet of Blue Angels, some kayaks are lost in the wake of a frigate...
...Almost as many females as males are victims, and 12 per cent of the cases have been transmitted from mothers to children...
...Race relations, Nouh-Chaia says, are "very good," but there's also a down side: "More insecurity because of more crime...
...A First Amendment lawsuit filed in 1987 succeeded in reducing the security zone to a safety zone of twenty-five yards between the two navies...
...After returning to the United States, Willson says, he was contacted by Jubilee Partners, a Georgia-based group that arranges sponsorship of injured and orphaned children in Central America...
...ON THE LINE Another Navy for Peace SAN FRANCISCO BA Y On a crisp, clear October Saturday, a man and boy are on the Bay, aboard a 101-foot ketch flying flags and bearing banners with the emblem Peace Navy...
...Magnet for Prosperity—and Trouble CAYENNE, FRENCH GUIANA Implanting the European Space Agency's launch site in this French department on the Atlantic coast of South America has been, in some ways, a blessing, says Roger Pradi-naud...
...the other is a seven-year-old Nicaraguan named Erick Cano Lopez...
...It had been one month since her husband, Erick's father, was killed...
...One is Bay Area antiwar activist Brian Willson...
...There is little unemployment and the newly completed census shows French Guiana with a population of 114,000...
...When Erick was taken to a hospital in Managua a day later, Willson and his wife, Holley Rauen, who were there to visit hurricane victims, came upon the boy...
...He adds, though, that living costs are also 25 per cent higher than in France, with food nearly 50 per cent higher...
...AIDS is an unwanted consequence of the boom in this French department, the French equivalent of a U.S...
...That," says Nouh-Chaia, "is a 30 per cent increase in eight years...
...Result: French Guiana has one of the world's highest rates of AIDS per 100,000...
...8,015 cases in France, a rate of 16.2...
...A breakdown for other French territories shows 153 cases in Guadeloupe, a rate of 45.1...
...104 cases in Martinique, a rate of 30.8...
...The Information Bulletin says 118 of the 191 patients identified as of last December 31 have died...
...Out on San Francisco Bay for Fleet Week, however, Willson does not lack for words in opposition to "celebrating the romanticizing and overwhelming madness" of the military...
...And then there's the AIDS epidemic, in this city that looks like a well-ordered French provincial town...
...Morin thinks those figures are minimal, because "there are 20,000 to 40,000 foreigners here, half of them illegal...
...The group had heard of Will-son's visit and asked if he would sponsor Erick for surgery that could not be performed in Nicaragua...
...We need more and more police...
...The Agency has put 1,200 people on the launch site's payroll, at salaries, Morin says, "25 per cent above those that would be normal in France...
...The French eschewed manned space flights and great size for their rocket boosters in favor of more modest experiments, sending their first four flights from a launch site in Algeria...
...Both contra ambushes occurred in Quilali, their small Nicaraguan town close by the border with Honduras...
...Elana Yonah Rosen (Elana Yonah Rosen is a freelance writer and documentary associate producer in San Francisco...
...William Steif (William Steif, a former foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, reports frequently for The Progressive from abroad...
...Reason: The Space Agency is a kind of magnet for Third World people...
...At about the same time, the European Space Agency was organized by thirteen nations, including two, Switzerland and Sweden, that were not members of the European Community...
...Navy and Coast Guard, a taxpayer-funded promotional extravaganza, with the Bay Area Peace Navy attending as uninvited guest...
...Pradinaud, a specialist in tropical diseases trained in Paris, Lyons, Strasbourg, and Dakar, says the number of AIDS cases identified in French Guiana is now 220...
...Willson has mastered the prostheses that replaced his legs, severed three years ago by a train during a demonstration at the Concord Naval Weapons Station...
...The zone was patrolled by river boats, and they kept the activists so far away that their antiwar banners could not be read by the crowd and their peace songs could not be heard...
...But the blessing is decidedly mixed, continues this physician, chief of dermatology and sexually transmitted diseases at the hospital on the Place des Palmistes in the center of this capital city of 60,000 people...
...We have prosperity and 90 per cent of it is from the Space Center...
...Heterosexual transmission is responsible for 86 per cent of French Guiana's AIDS cases, says Dr...
...Willson and Rauen accepted and raised the money to fly Erick to the Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children in San Francisco for three sets of operations—and took him on the trip with the Peace Navy...
...Pradinaud...
...But the small boy's disfiguration is more difficult to ignore...
...Following the Peace Navy's demonstration in 1986," he says, "the Coast Guard barred us from entering what they called a seventy-five-yard 'security zone' around Aquatic Park...
...They said Erick needed delicate eye-duct surgery and sophisticated plastic surgery," he explains...
...Today, the European Space Agency has 54 per cent of the Western world's commercial satellite market, according to Jean-Pierre Morin, deputy administrator of the Space Center at Kourou...
...A quarter-century ago, this was the most depressed of the three Guianas...
...The Bulletin also notes the majority of AIDS sufferers are "foreigners," with Haitians, "the preponderant group," accounting for 80 per cent...
...Pradinaud is campaigning for use of condoms and female protective devices—against the opposition of the Catholic Church—and worries about the spread of AIDS...
...France came late to the space game, in 1962, after the Soviet Union and the United States...
...This is Fleet Week, an annual celebration of the U.S...
...Morin says launching at Kourou allows the French-designed Ariane 4 to carry nearly 20 per cent more pay-load into an elliptical orbit than a similar launch from Cape Kennedy...
...The first Ariane flight was launched from Kourou on December 24, 1979...
...About 5 per cent of the people want independence," says Nouh-Chaia...
...So this year, the Peace Navy proceeded without restraint, circling one of the enormous U.S...
...Although Willson does not speak Spanish—Rauen does-he says his first meeting with Erick was "so moving I couldn't even speak English...
...Today," says Georges Nouh-Chaia, a merchant of Lebanese extraction who is Britain's honorary consul-general here, "we have the honor of the Space Center...
...state...
...We depend on France and France is putting money in this country...
...As doctors amputated her leg above the knee, they also pondered who should break the news that the six-month-old fetus in her womb was dead...
...But he says the French welfare net has at least one benefit: "All AIDS patients are cared for by the Health Ministry...
...But he cites the Information Bulletin on AIDS in French Guiana, published in March...
...Navy ships and parading along the Marina waterfront with banners reading No War for Oil...
...But today the populations of Guyana, formerly British Guiana, and of Suriname, formerly Dutch Guiana, are shrinking as their peoples seek better opportunities elsewhere...
...The population has doubled within a generation and per-capita income, just over $3,700 yearly, is the highest on the continent...
...Until the late 1970s, French Guiana was notable for only one thing: Devil's Island off its coast...
...They sit together, with Al-catraz and Angel Island in the foreground...
...His one-year-old brother was killed while cradled in his mother's arms...
...Pra-dinaud, noting that much of the Third World does a poor job of keeping track of AIDS cases...
...The right half of Erick's face bears a cicatrix where a bullet hit him, and his right shoulder has been shattered beyond repair where a second bullet came to rest on October 29, 1988...
...Since 1984, the Bay Area Peace Navy—comprised of forty to a hundred vessels, including schooners, dinghies, kayaks, and zodiaks—has crashed the party with a simple message: Peace...
...This is the visual manifestation of a crazy society," Willson remarks as a guided-missile-equipped destroyer powers by...
...It shows that as of the end of last year, French Guiana had 191 AIDS cases and a rate of 159 per 100,000 people...
...This is where city officials and Navy brass wave to the battle group that has invaded the Bay...
...All this costs money, more than $500 million a year, with France picking up just under half the tab, West Germany 20 per cent, Italy more than 10 per cent, and the other nations splitting the remainder...
...The latest Ariane 4 launch, the thirty-seventh, came on July 24, and thirteen more are scheduled until November 1992, carrying twenty-four more satellites...
...As a helicopter flies above the yacht, Erick scrambles to the deck to see...
...Promptly at 10 a.m., there's a curt blare and a 300-foot naval carrier exudes a black cloud from its stack before leaving its berth...
...His mother, Dora, was hit in the leg and lost her left eye when the shrapnel that penetrated the baby's skull splintered in her face...
...The Socialist Party dominates here, and we have two deputies in the National Assembly and a senator in the Senate...
...Erick tugs at Will-son's elbow and the conversation rolls back to Nicaragua...
...There's very little push for independence from France— unlike Guyana, which gained independence in 1966, and Suriname, in 1975...
...Willson explains it was a helicopter that transported Erick to help two years ago...
...Of thirteen children admitted that day, only two were hurt by the hurricane...
...The sailing is smooth today, but skipper Bob Heifetz says it hasn't always been...
...In the 1970s, after checking out fourteen possible sites, they settled on 200,000 acres of coastal bush near Kourou, forty miles from Cayenne...
...Treatment is completely free...
...Music drifts up from the bow as Country Joe, a singer and activist, is accompanied by the Haight-Ashbury Free Band in a chorus of antiwar songs from the 1960s...
...Perhaps that's because we count so well," says Dr...
...The man and boy observing from the ketch have a special interest in peace...

Vol. 54 • December 1990 • No. 12


 
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