Witness for Peace

Witness for Peace was founded in 1983 by faith-based activists, in response to U.S. funding for the Contras in Nicaragua. Protesting all the injustices committed under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and [Page 1474]since then under each successive U.S. administration, Witness for Peace (WFP) has remained close to its original goals. Intensive campaigning across the United States is combined with fact-finding visits for students and others to Latin American countries. WFP groups may be joined by anyone at the WFP website to gain exposure to the realities of life on the ground for Latin Americans exposed to the war on drugs or other forms of low-intensity warfare conducted by the United States.

Contras kidnapped a WFP activist in 1985, bringing further publicity to the organization and its promotion of nonviolence. Ten years later, a WFP group organized one of the first nonviolent protests ever at the World Bank in Washington, setting an important precedent for later social justice and peace movements by linking development policies directly with anti-war and peace campaigning. The World Bank was more often the focus of WFP attention during the 1990s as multilateral institutions increasingly took on the neoliberal role played more directly by the U.S. administration during the 1980s. The priority countries of WFP have included Cuba, Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Mexico, and a recent focus of protest is the plan to further militarize the U.S.-Mexican border. In 1991 and again in 2003, WFP was prompted to declare its position on war in Iraq.

Gail Phares is a founding member of Witness for Peace. During the 1960s she was a Maryknoll sister in Nicaragua, where she had worked with Sister Maureen Clarke, one of four churchwomen raped and killed in El Salvador in 1980 by soldiers trained in the School of the Americas. These women's deaths led to closer scrutiny of U.S–Latin America policies worldwide, including inside the United States. In 2006, Gail Phares was one of 29 people in School of the Americas Watch arrested and sentenced to terms in prison from 1 to 6 months for acts of civil disobedience. Quakers, Gandhians, Anabaptists, Catholics of all shades—especially Franciscans, Pax Christi members, and Catholic Workers, as well as retired and active nuns, and priests—writers, war veterans, landscape gardeners, full-time activists, and other spiritually inspired people cooperate on WFP protests. WFP also joins broader alliances, notably the Latin America Working Group, which brings more than 60 organizations together to promote a change in U.S. policies toward Latin America, policies based on human rights and nonviolence, social and economic justice, and sustainable development. Witness for Peace is at the more spiritual end of the campaigning spectrum; among its members are those ready to be arrested and imprisoned for their beliefs.