Katherine Hoyt *, Nica Notes, May 30th 2024
https://afgj.org/nicanotes-if-the-us-invades-central-america-we-pledge-to-resist-2024-marks-the-40th-anniversary-of-the-pledge-of-resistance?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=bacc1dfe-a18d-45dc-916e-695998b67587
“If the US Invades Central America, We Pledge to Resist:” 2024 Marks the 40th Anniversary of the Pledge of Resistance
As many as 80,000 people all over the US signed the Pledge of Resistance.
Here, Kathy Hoyt speaks to a crowd of protestors in Detroit.
In 1984 I started work as Coordinator of the Michigan Interfaith Committee on Central American Human Rights (MICAH) in Detroit. MICAH was doing excellent education and lobbying work on Central America issues, was an active participant in the Sanctuary Movement, and the group had just taken on the job of coordinating the brand-new Pledge of Resistance for the state of Michigan. The Sanctuary Movement was a network of places of worship which gave refuge to those fleeing repression in El Salvador and Guatemala. My co-worker Sara Murray was in charge of the Sanctuary work and I did “the Pledge.”
As many as 80,000 people all over the country signed the Pledge of Resistance in which they promised to take civil disobedience action or support civil disobedience action if the U. S. invaded Central America. As an illustration of our opposition to U.S. – funded bombing in EI Salvador and numerous votes in the U.S. Congress approving aid to the Nicaraguan contras, we often had as many as 2,000 people arrested in different parts of the United States within a period of a few days.
Naturally, the Reagan Administration was not pleased and took to harassing us. ABC’s Peter Jennings later called it “intrusive surveillance.” Our office phone was tapped and they did not care if we knew it. Both Sara and I were followed by men in suits who wanted us to know that they were there. It was later revealed that the FBI had taken more photographs in Detroit than in any other city to get pictures of trade unionists and religious people involved in protest demonstrations. But, most frightening of all were the death threats received by Sara as a result of her Sanctuary work. They scared her but did not stop her from her Sanctuary organizing!
Local paid activists work all day for their organization and then spend the evenings in meetings with members who have “regular” day jobs as accountants, teachers or businesspeople and thus can only meet in the evenings. Many of the people involved in Central America solidarity at that time were single as well, which meant that their obligations at home were not great. I was working fifty or more hours a week and not spending as much time with my children as I would have liked. I dragged them to newsletter mailings on weekends but some evenings, with one meeting at 5:00 and another at 7:00, I did not get home for dinner at all. One evening I came home for a minute to pick something up and found my twins sitting on the floor in front of the television eating macaroni and cheese with their fingers. After that, I became more assertive about saying that I could not make it to 5:00 o’clock meetings! Most evenings, I rushed home at 6:00 and whipped something together very fast (thank God for instant mashed potatoes!) and we all sat down to dinner before I rushed out again to a 7:00 or 7:30 meeting. A couple of years later, some of those young single people started getting married and having babies. When I would see them at gatherings, of which they attended fewer now, they would say to me, “Kathy, we didn’t understand; it’s a whole different world with a child!” I refrained from reminding them that I had three.
The children had by this time learned a great deal about life in the United States, having lived in both the small town of Enumclaw, Washington, and the big rust-belt city of Detroit. Before the children came to the United States to live, the U.S. had been a wonderful place where their much-loved grandparents lived and where they came every few years for Christmas and snow. They found it hard to believe that what the Sandinistas said about Ronald Reagan and the U.S. establishment could be true. However, as a student at Holy Redeemer High School in Detroit, my older daughter wrote this poem entitled “Democracia”:
Democracia
Allá las casas son de cartón
y aquí son de ladrillo
allá las casas no tienen techo
y aquí no tienen calefacción.
Cuando llueve allá
el piso de tierra se vuelve lodo
y el niño se muere de diarrea.
Cuando nieva aquí
y hace frio
se muere congelado
un pobre anciano.
Es universal. . .
solo que aquí
le llaman Democracia.
Here I have translated it into English:
There, the houses are of cardboard
Here they are made of brick
There, the houses have no roofs
Here they have no heat.
When it rains there
The dirt floor turns to mud
And the child dies of diarrhea.
When it snows here
And gets cold
A poor old man
Dies frozen to death.
It is universal
Except that here
they call it democracy.
One of my most vivid memories of the children in Detroit is of the day in 1985 when the Detroit Pledge of Resistance closed down Michigan Avenue for 45 minutes during the rush hour to protest the approval by Congress of $27 million for “humanitarian aid” to the contras. My daughter stood on the sidewalk holding her sign which said “Reagan’s foreign policy: Hire the poor to kill the poor.”
The Detroit Pledge was divided into what were called “Day Groups” based on the day each group would do civil disobedience and support civil disobedience following any US invasion of a Central American country. Day Zero was composed of those who would do civil disobedience on the day of the invasion. There were only twelve on the Day Zero list, including three nuns and four ministers and priests. Several of them had frozen small containers of their own blood which they would pour out to symbolize the innocent blood shed as a result of United States policy. Almost every issue of the MICAH newsletter, “Voice of the Voiceless” included a coupon which people could use to sign up for the “Pledge.” As the numbers of people expanded beyond the day groups, several local organizations such as the Central America Solidarity Committee (CASC) and Witness for Peace formed affinity groups. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) was involved as was the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Nationally, the Pledge was mobilized by a committee [including the Nicaragua Network] from the founding organizations in Washington, DC. That committee then notified the Mid-West coordinator, who notified us state coordinators. My job was then to call my contacts In Lansing, Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo, Flint (that was Michael Moore, later of “Roger and Me” fame), and 14 other Michigan cities including far-away Sault-Sainte-Marie on the Upper Peninsula, to alert them to what was happening so they could plan their actions in accordance with others around the nation. In Detroit, the local groups met to organize our events in the city.
I helped plan many protests that included civil disobedience and took the non-violent training several times. I never did civil disobedience, however, because the children were frightened by the idea and it seemed one more strain on them and one that was unnecessary. I told people who did civil disobedience, like our MICAH Steering Committee members Sister Kit Concannon and Rev. Bill Kellermann, that they were doing it for me, too.
Fifty people in the Detroit area, including Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, fasted for 48 hours in July of 1985 in union with the fast “for peace, in defense of life and against terrorism” of Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Father Miguel D’Escoto. Father Miguel had announced on July 7 that he was asking for a leave of absence in order to begin an open-ended fast for peace. He said that all other means to stop the U.S.-financed war against his people were already being used to their fullest and that now it was necessary to use “means of struggle which emanate from the gospel.”
Our fast began at a service at St. Rita’s Catholic Church in honor of a National Sanctuary Caravan of Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees which passed through Detroit on July 16. A prayer service was held for the fasters at the Episcopal Church of the Messiah in the middle of the fast and many then broke their fast at the July 19th dinner and program celebrating the sixth anniversary of the Nicaraguan revolution. I, however, had broken my fast after only one day when I couldn’t stand and walk in the morning. And I had been drinking several types of liquids! My only justification for not being able to measure up to the many famous Nicaraguan hunger-fasters was that I was trying to work whereas they always suspended work when they began their fasts. I was one of the principal speakers at that CASC dinner celebrating the anniversary of the revolution. It was in that talk that I first described my experiences during the final offensive of 1979. People responded very positively; they had not had the opportunity before to hear about the final offensive from a North American who had lived through it.
Continuing to struggle for justice requires keeping your perspective. In June of 1986 we were walking up and down with our signs in front of the old Federal Building in Detroit waiting for the release of twelve of our members who had been arrested protesting the approval by Congress of $100 million for the contras. That vote was so shocking that the Day Zero activists had decided that they should carry out the protest they had planned for a U.S. invasion. Several of them poured their blood on the contact paper crosses with names of contra victims that they had stuck to the walls of the Federal Building. They were immediately arrested. I’ll always remember what Rudy Simons, one of our most active MICAH board members, said as he watched the Federal employees stare at us as they came out of the Federal Building. “Kathy,” he said, “We’re not the crazies, they are!” Father Tom Lumkin, one of those arrested, stated “I do this to show that our government bears deep responsibility for their deaths,” referring to the names written on the crosses. “I have marked the Federal building in real blood, appealing to all to recognize the real spilled innocent blood behind the government’s sanitized rhetoric.”
People were arrested all over the United States, including some at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, DC. Rev. Jesse Jackson visited the protesters at the Capitol, and before leaving told them that he had to make a trip to Detroit but wanted to continue to express his o utrage at the approval of the $100 million by Congress. He was told to call MICAH in Detroit. The Rainbow Coalition office called us and we set up a press conference for Rev. Jackson to speak. I introduced him and he made a strong statement against aid to the contras whom he tied in with drug trafficking:
“This week the U.S. Congress joined President Reagan in declaring war in Central America. We have hired the Contras as our surrogates: we are using the Contras as mercenaries. …We should use this $100 million to attack the drug flow into our country at the point of supply…. Contra aid has been approved in contempt of American public opinion, which has repeatedly expressed opposition to Reagan’s efforts to overthrow the Sandinistas. … The Contras are being funded regardless of their continuous record of systematic human rights violations and criminal activities…. The Report of the General Accounting Office as to the Contra’s misuse and embezzlement of U.S. taxpayers’ monies has also been ignored, as have been the serious allegations of Contra involvement with drug trafficking inside the United States.” More revelations came out later about the serious nature of Contra drug involvement carried out with a wink from the CIA.
We later learned from retired United States Army officers that the U.S. military would have played a much greater direct role In Central America if it had not been for fear of “all those nuns sitting in at Congressional offices.” It was the Pledge of Resistance that organized all those nuns, priests, ministers, students, housewives, businesspeople, teachers, trade unionists, health workers, etc., etc. and prevented a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua or El Salvador. Eventually, release of Federal documents will shed much-needed light on this troubled period in American foreign policy.
* This article is taken from Thirty Years of Memories: Dictatorship, Revolution, and Nicaragua Solidarity by Katherine Hoyt, published by the Nicaragua Network in 1996. Katherine Hoyt lived in Nicaragua for 16 years. She is a retired Co-Coordinator of the Nicaragua Network/Alliance for Global Justice and a current board member. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and is the author of The Many Faces of Sandinista Democracy among other publications.
(Do you have memories from the Central America peace movement of the 1980s? Write an article for NicaNotes! Let’s compile those memories before we all die out! Write to kathy@afgj.org)