December 2002 Call to Action News
Terrorism and Iraq distract U.S. from Afghanistan, Colombia, misery in Two-Thirds World
While the Bush administration labored to keep the focus on Iraq, several powerful women speakers reminded their CTA conference audiences of systemic violence and U.S. complicity in many other parts of the "Two-Thirds World" - the Global South where two out of every three persons on the planet lives, most of them in grinding poverty.
Afghanistan - Showing a heart-rending videotape she made during her last visit, Kristi Laughlin of Global Exchange exposed CTAers to the estimated three million land mines still left in Afghanistan, the 300 landmine deaths each month, the orphaned children, the missing limbs. "The U.S. spent $39 million a day during its bombing and war," she said. "There is a widespread perception that Americans don't care if Muslims die. We Christians in the West must build bridges to the Afghan people, and to Muslims everywhere."
Colombia - A native Colombian who now heads the Colombia Support Network in the U.S., Cecilia Zárate-Laun returned for the third time to update CTA on the violence being abetted by the U.S. "Plan Colombia." She was emphatic: The War on Drugs is a smokescreen for a different agenda. "The real war is between those who want to keep the status quo and those who want to change it," she said. Three percent of Colombians own 70 percent of the arable land. "The elite and the military are allies, and the paramilitaries have fascist control of the economic and social life of the villages and towns."
Colombia is third, behind Israel and Egypt, in its share of U.S. military aid. For what? "The war is actually to implement globalization. The Green Berets and the U.S. Marines are far more involved that the American public suspects. The U.S. interests are oil pipelines and the expansion of NAFTA-style free trade."
El Salvador - A native liberation theologian from the University of Central America, San Salvador, Suyapa Perez spoke through a translator as she discussed all of Latin America. The neo-liberal economic system from the U.S., she said, is squeezing the life out of poor countries by forcing them into the "new" economic order through dollarization and privatization of services. Any citizens who oppose this elite economic model are immediately branded "terrorists," - so they can be repressed under U.S. anti-terrorism.
Perez described the working theology of the grassroots church communities, rooted in the tradition of the modern prophets and martyrs like Oscar Romero, killed because "he denounced the ideology of national security as an idolatry maintained by violence."
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Scripture scholar Dianne Bergant helped CTA understand why liberation theology in the Global South insists that marginalized people must be part of the interpretive process from the beginning. "By and large, it was marginalized people who composed the biblical writings," she said.
Biblical interpretation is constantly in process, Bergant said. New experiences force us to reinterpret the text. The text in itself doesn't change, but the world in front of the text, our world, changes the way we read it. "When the horizon of the world of the text meets the horizon of the world in front of the text, that's the moment of revelation."