ON THE LINE
ON THE LINE Colombian Tribes vs. U.S. Radar Base The human-rights arm of the Organization of American States is considering a petition by a group of indigenous people in Colombia who want a U.S....
...The base overlooks the Ca-queta River in the midst of the Monochoa Indigenous Reserve...
...Built in 1992, the base at Araracuara is operated by fifty U.S...
...Washington has consistently downplayed rights abuses in Colombia to ensure Colombian cooperation on drugs and free trade...
...It has proposed to close these areas (including roads) to the public, evacuating citizens from the zones during launches, and using helicopter clean-up teams to clear the areas...
...representative at the Geneva meeting, Geraldine Ferraro...
...Its purpose is to detect airborne shipments of coca paste from Peru and Bolivia to cocaine laboratories in Colombia...
...We just want to be treated with respect...
...Public opinion hasn't lined up with the Army, either...
...pany's proposed return-to-work procedure, which would have wiped out every worker's seniority...
...While they carry their campaign to federal agencies and even Bayou's board, which heard a union presentation at a January shareholders meeting in New York, union members and their families are struggling to get by...
...The missile contained 300 to 900 bowling-ball-sized bomblets that fell, along with other debris, about one and a half miles from the surprised and angry rancher's home...
...For more information, contact Community Impact, Columbia University, 204 Earl Hall, New York, NY 10027...
...Karl Bermann U.S...
...Several of the impact zones are on federal land managed by the Department of Interior and the Bureau of Land Management...
...and Colombian military officers: The United States gives more military aid to Colombia than to any other country in the hemisphere, despite Colombia's abysmal human-rights record...
...Organizers hope to obtain at least 50,000 signatures on the declaration before presenting it to Congress...
...The CDI does not call itself a "peace" organization, but it states openly that the Pentagon has a strangle-hold on the American political agenda and on taxes...
...Terence Ripmaster Free the Planet More than 1,500 students from around the nation attended the Emergency Campus Environmental Conference at the University of Pennsylvania on the weekend of February 25...
...If anybody had a motive it would be the scabs in the plant who will lose their jobs when we come back...
...LaRoque retired in 1993, but stays involved in the Center...
...Student participants went home to organize events on campuses around the nation on and before Earth Day...
...The group plans to present this list as a petition to Newt Gingrich and Congress, and to call on them to pass it as part of an Earth Day 1995 action agenda...
...Topics addressed lions, anu matting ci a _ rnrr yiir pi oury iupiLa auuicssci grassroots, political- Hit rliHBU . , at the conference in action event," says ^^L^^ eluded organizing on Liz Hitchcock, the administra live director of the U.S...
...The Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are also investigating union complaints...
...The Army has identified a number of "impact zones" in western New Mexico and southeastern Utah where it predicts the rubble will land...
...For more information, contact Earth Day Resources, 116 New Montgomery, Suite 530, San Francisco, CA 94105...
...The overriding philosophy of HIB is that mainstream media control and distort the news and information about the democratic movement in Haiti," says Robert Duval, the bureau's director...
...It includes no pay raises for six years (substituting incentive pay tied to performance), requires workers to pay part of their health-insurance costs, and allows the company to bring in temps to supplement union workers...
...In 1991, Congress directed the Army to develop a "theater missile-defense program...
...Jones's coalition has been working with the Navajo and Zuni Indians and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance to prevent the mock missile war...
...Should anything go wrong in the air, the missile's flight would be terminated, showering the ground with more debris...
...A recent issue covered conventional-arms sales around the world...
...The idea caught fire because students began to realize that this Congress is about to roll back twenty-five years of environmental regulation...
...It was not until a year after the base was built that Colombian army officials came to explain its purpose, the protesters say, and that meeting took place only after they had filed a law suit...
...Now military spokespeople concede that up to an acre of land could be affected, she says...
...Ironically, while radar interception has cut the flow of coca paste into Colombia, growers within the country have picked up the slack, and Colombia is now believed to have surpassed Bolivia as the number-two coca producer after Peru...
...At the governor's-mansion meeting last March, Ferraro agreed to bring the company's offer to his members for a vote...
...The Army at first told her that the 3,000-pound discard would make only a four-foot crater...
...We believe that the entire flow of information locally and abroad needs to be 'democratized' so that decisions about what to report and how to report it are made with participation from the grass-roots level...
...Mostly military people serve on the Center's board of advisers...
...radar station and airstrip removed from their homeland deep in the Amazon jungle...
...Pleasants says he is "wary of the pitfalls of didactic art" but "to be intimately involved with a tragic social problem, and with the people it affects, and not to plead their case" would be inexcusable...
...212)854-1429...
...Grassroots reporters file stories by letter, cassette tape, and telephone...
...Having exhausted the legal remedies in Colombia, the national indigenous organization took its case to the OAS...
...Chris Seymour Civilian Missile Defense Ram ah, New Mexico Mary Lou Jones has her eyes on the western skies...
...More than 100 missiles could be launched between 1995 and the year 2000, under current plans...
...The Center for Defense Information opened in 1972 as a result of the war in Vietnam...
...Articles from the U.S...
...The police have not identified a suspect in the shooting...
...The bureau has an office in downtown Port-au-Prince and "verbal stringers" in the provinces—members of unions, peasant groups, neighborhood organizations, and other people in the movement for democracy...
...Further tests were subsequently banned...
...Hearts of Steel, a support group made up of union members' wives, has sold over 2,000 copies of a book of recipes, organized holiday parties for children, and galvanized community support for the strike...
...Participants signed a declaration of welfare and employment rights and responsibilities, calling for recognition of individual rights along with societal responsibilities to the poor...
...Robein says the company has often used such "bait and switch" bargaining tactics, which are the main basis for a series of unfair-labor-practice charges the union has filed with the National Labor Relations Board...
...military personnel, and guarded by 250 Colombian troops...
...The Andoke, Huitoto, Muinane, Nunuya, and Yukuna peoples Some 500 New Yorkers—academics and people on welfare—got together to discuss the Republican assault on welfare embodied in the Personal Responsibility Act at Columbia University on February 16...
...Box 407139, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33340...
...One Utah poll found 63 percent of the state's southeastern residents opposed to the launches...
...Community Impact, a student community-service organization, planned the event...
...More than twenty-five schools and organizations participated, including the Homeless Awareness Committee, Hunger Action Network of New York, Human SERVE, and Enfranchise America...
...Calling the presence of U.S...
...For more information, write the Haitian Information Bureau, c/o Lynx Air, P.O...
...Recently, Johnson says, the retired admiral came in to fire up the staff, "imploring them to get CDI information into the hands of the new people in Congress...
...On Strike in the Bayou La Place, Louisiana Whoever shot at Hank Vasquez, Bayou Steel's chief negotiator, from the tall grass in a secluded spot not far from the steel mill hurt the union, says R°n Ferraro...
...Local 9121 says workers are exposed to dust containing toxic levels of cadmium, chromium, arsenic, and lead, and that toxic waste is illegally stored and buried on site...
...Jones says she won't stop even if the plan is approved: "If I have to stand on the corner and sell cupcakes, we're going to sue the Army...
...The conference was part of the Free the Planet Campaign, an effort to "relaunch the envi ronmental movement" for the twenty-fifth anniver sary of Earth Day on April 22,1995...
...That and other "offensive" provisions, he says, turned members against the pact, and they voted it down 272-2...
...When the union's contract expired in 1993, the company made an offer even Vasquez concedes is "pretty aggressive...
...The newsletter is available via mail, electronic mail, and by fax...
...Moreover, they say the base has contaminated their water supply, interferes with traditional hunting practices, and blocks an important road...
...The Center for Defense Information has little good news about the military contract with America, or about the Clinton Administration, which recently called for a $25 billion increase in the Pentagon's budget...
...Arms sales mean big corporate support, and look at Gingrich's record in his home state with Lockheed...
...She's one of the leading opponents of a Star Wars plan for firing Scud-like missiles from northern New Mexico and southern Utah and then shooting them down over the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico...
...It appears likely, however, that the United States will oppose the move...
...Still, Johnson thinks the Contract with America's signers face a dilemma, since many people in the Pentagon oppose the balanced-budget amendment...
...human-rights groups...
...has appointed special rapporteurs only for countries with military dictatorships, such as Uganda under Idi Amin and Chile under Pinochet...
...As part of his previous works, Pleasants designed and built affordable shelters for homeless people to live in, invited the homeless to speak with gallery visitors who came to see his work, and asked viewers, as part of one piece, to distribute leftover supplies from the Persian Gulf War to homeless people...
...Since local reporters who rarely do original reporting on sensitive topics are willing to quote foreign journalists, information on Haiti that appeared first in The Nation and The Village Voice has thus made its way back into print in Haiti...
...To make matters worse, the Colombian military plans to relocate a major air-force base to Araracuara, with 3,000 military and civilian personnel, and to turn it into a "development pole" for the region...
...The kitchen table in Jones's home near Grants, New Mexico, is piled high with documents detailing the missile proposal...
...Public hearings in nine different communities, part of the environmental-impact-statement process, also revealed widespread opposition...
...For more information, contact the Colombia Support Network, P.O...
...Vasquez contends that the company can't afford to be more generous because of intense price competition among mini-mills like Bayou, most of which are not unionized...
...16 / April 1995...
...It's insane to test weapons over people," says Jones, who is the president of the 500-member Zuni Mountain Coalition...
...Despite this discontent, the Army "is not listening to the people," Jones says...
...Fer-\ T*f raro is the president Mfejjafl of United SteelT I workers Local 9121, which represents 220 workers who have been on strike against the Louisiana steelmaker for two years...
...In a test last October, a missile blew up over a New Mexican rancher's land...
...Most strikers have been able to find construction work in the area, thanks partly to help from area building-trade unions...
...To receive The Defense Monitor, write to Center for Defense Information, 1500 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, D.C...
...The booster rockets, dropped during all the launches, will fall from a height of twenty to sixty miles in the air, Jones says...
...Members stop by the office in search of documents or books, and to get help with press statements, newsletters, and reports...
...Johnson believes the military budget DWELLINGS Artist Craig Pleasants uses found objects in his sculptures to address the problem of homelessness...
...They open the top-floor windows of the furnace and disconnect the vent system, and it [the dust] just goes billowing out the windows in a huge brown cloud," Valenti says...
...Public Interest Research Group, which helped organize the conference...
...She and her husband, Scott, have been speaking out and organizing protests against the missile plan ever since they realized the military was going ahead with it...
...No way will the Gingrich people stop this," Johnson says...
...Local 9121 attorney Louis Robein says that just before the vote, Vasquez sent him the comHAITI'S INFORMATION LINE Since 1991 the Haitian Information Bureau has served as a clearinghouse for the democratic movement...
...who inhabit the reserve regard the site as sacred...
...It's like, 'We're the Army, we don't have to.' " The Army will make a final decision in the spring...
...We videotaped it...
...Its first director, Rear Admiral Gene LaRoque, was considered a traitor by many of his colleagues in the Pentagon for disseminating information on military spending and Pentagon policies...
...Previously the U.N...
...Bayou Steel's position has basically not moved since a contract was offered at the governor's mansion one year ago," Bayou President Jerry Pitts says...
...We have our work cut out for us," he says...
...alternative media have found their way back to Haiti by way of the bureau...
...But the incident is only the latest evidence of mounting tension and frayed nerves in this industrial Mississippi River town...
...Box 1505, Madison, WI 53701...
...The OAS secretary-general is Cesar Gaviria, who, as president of Colombia, originally approved the Araracuara base...
...But I don't want to go back for less than what we were making before...
...20005...
...One of them, Vice Admiral John Shanahan, recently took over as the Center's director...
...It's about taking Earth Day back from corporations, and making it a helped organize the event...
...While the OAS is considering the Araracuara case in Washington, the U.N...
...will not be cut, and in fact will increase to about $270 billion in 1996...
...The twenty-five-member staff conducts research and publishes a monthly newsletter, The Defense Monitor...
...Nobody took it seriously at first, it was such a goofy idea," she says...
...Human Rights Commission will be meeting in Geneva to take up a request by Colombian human-rights groups that it appoint a special rapporteur to monitor the overall rights situation in Colombia...
...The Haitian Information Bureau produces a four-page newsletter in English, Haiti Info, every two weeks for subscribers in about two dozen countries...
...We're so close to a settlement—our people are not going to jeopardize that" by attacking a company vice president, Ferraro says...
...military engineers at Araracuara an "invasion," indigenous leaders say they were not consulted or even warned about the pending arrival of foreign troops...
...Colombia's Constitutional Court ultimately turned down the suit, ruling that the fight against drug traffickers takes precedence over indigenous rights...
...Will Fantle The Truth About the Military Washington, D.C...
...None of the current military-testing ranges is sufficient for realistic testing of "defensive intercepts," so the Army is studying the White Sands site and three other locations for possible use...
...When it comes to military spending, Clinton and the Republicans in Congress are running for the next election and don't want to be perceived as "soft on defense," says David Johnson, the Center's research director...
...Activists in the United States have been campaigning for a yes vote by the U.S...
...She edits and publishes the coalition's lively paper, the Zuni Mountain News...
...We're not lazy people...
...Crushed Angel," made from tin cans and a bed frame (top) and "Methane Generator," made from a steel chair, cow dung, clay, and straw (bottom) are two of his works that appear in the show "Dwelling" at the Anderson Gallery in Richmond, Virginia...
...The current Colombian government's stance on human rights is a step in the right direction," Ferraro wrote in a letter to U.S...
...This task fell to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the successor to Star Wars...
...At forty-five, Maurice Simoneaux, a twelve-year veteran of Bayou, is worried about the future if he can't go back to work soon...
...Colombia is a nominal democracy...
...The missiles' 200-to-400-mile flight path would carry them over her home and other populated areas, Indian reservations, and national forests and monuments...
...The radar base at Araracuara is one of several the United States has built in Colombia under the "Andean Strategy" launched by President George Bush, which is supposed to stop drug trafficking at its source...
...Along the way, booster rockets weighing as much as 3,000 pounds would fall to the earth...
...Participants in the Free the Planet Campaign have drawn up a list of twenty-five simple things Congress can do to save the environment, including preserving the Endangered Species Act and passing a national bottle bill...
...Student Environmental Action Coalition, Campus Green Vote, and Green Corps also campus, fundraising, building a sense of community, and fighting corporate power...
...415)495-5987...
...The company also disputes Ferraro's assertion that a settlement is near...
...Appointment of the rapporteur would be a serious blow to the country's image abroad...
...Up to seven times more lead escapes Bayou Steel's emissions-control system than goes up its smokestack, says union safety expert, Jim Valenti...
...And the Navajo Nation Council told the Army that the missile plan "conflicts with Navajo traditional beliefs, interferes with Navajo culture, and adversely impacts the Najavo nation's health, safety, welfare, economy, and environment...
...Both of these agencies have registered solid opposition to the Army plan, citing concerns over damage to ecologically sensitive areas...
Vol. 59 • April 1995 • No. 4
