The War Comes Home

As the War on Terrorism comes home, it trains its sights on an ironically familiar target: those who promote peace.

Case in point: Mark Colville, a pacifist jailed for trespassing at Sikorsky Aircraft in Stratford, CT, protesting the U.S.-backed war on innocent Colombians. As the Colombian military and right-wing paramilitaries—trained and equipped by our government—murder, rape and mutilate their way across the countryside, we Americans hit the snooze button. Colville wants to wake us up. The New Haven activist wants it so much that he willingly got arrested at Sikorsky last December. So much that he turned down a lenient plea bargain, went to trial, attempted to persuade a judge that international law had compelled Colville to trespass in an effort to stop the slaughter. So much that he’s now doing time at Bergin Correctional Institution in Storrs, CT.

If the prosecutor had his way, Colville would spend a year in the clink. For nonviolent trespassing. In the name of peace.

Why?

Evidently because Colville had the gall to suggest, at his trial early this month, a connection and an equivalency between U.S.-sponsored violence in Colombia and Islamic fundamentalist violence here on Sept. 11.

That, and because the prosecutor worried that Colville’s organization, the Catholic Worker Movement—committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty and hospitality for the homeless—might let itself be infiltrated by terrorists who could use anti-war demonstrations as a chance to attack U.S. targets. "I thought he was trouble. Saying that we deserved the bombing," says the prosecutor, Assistant State’s Attorney Donal Collimore, in an interview. "He could violate the law again."

Think Globally, Profit Locally

It didn’t take Sept. 11 to push America’s other war off the front pages. "Plan Colombia" was never in the headlines to begin with.

The U.S. last year agreed to spend $1.3 billion on "Plan Colombia," in the guise of the War on Drugs. Mainly, the U.S. support serves to prop up a corrupt and repressive Colombian government that’s been fighting a civil war for decades. The rebel troops commit plenty of their own brutality. But international human rights organizations say the worst violations are committed by right-wing paramilitaries, doing the work that’s too dirty even for the Colombian army and police.

Thinking globally and profiting locally, Sikorsky Aircraft has a $238 million contract to supply Black Hawk attack helicopters to the Colombian government, financed by us the taxpayers. Connecticut politicians from U.S. Sens. Christopher Dodd and Joe Lieberman to U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro back the contract, and Plan Colombia generally, as sound policy that just happens to mean jobs for voters and profits for a major campaign contributor (Sikorsky’s parent company, Hartford, CT-based United Technologies Corp.).

Colombia Action-Connecticut, of which Mark Colville is a member, holds regular antiwar demonstrations outside Sikorsky’s Stratford plant, hoping to win the attention of employees and drivers on the Merritt Parkway.

On Dec. 6, 2000, Colville and five others tried to hand-deliver a letter to Sikorsky President Dean Borgman. The letter outlined Colombia’s history of human rights abuses and asked how Borgman could justify profiting from them. "Must jobs in Connecticut be purchased with the blood of the poor?" the letter asked. (See box.)

When the six refused to leave Sikorsky property, they were arrested. Five of them accepted a deal that consisted of pleading guilty to an infraction—equivalent to a traffic ticket—and doing six hours’ community service, according to Kevin Wyer, one of the other defendants. But Colville wanted to "confront the issue," Wyer says. So he went to trial.