Namaste,

        As you read the story of the Tree of Peace, which is the story of my parents, you will be listening to the song, “Lagrimas”, which I wrote for six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter, who were slain in El Salvador in 1989. Seven of them — tortured, the women raped — were killed so that the assassination of the intended target, Fr. Ignacio Ellacuría, Dean of the American University in San Salvador, would leave no witnesses  — eight martyrs among the myriad victims of our adventures in Central America in the late 1980s. In recent times, that policy has been reflected in the use of a term for terror by assassination. It is called the “Salvador Option.”

Peace with justice,
Daniel ben Avram

[Photo by Bruce Knopf, used by permission, click on to enlarge]

      The mid- to late 80s were a relatively somnambulant time, as far as most Americans were concerned. For the people of Central America, however, it was Vietnam.
     We did not employ soldiers of our own — we used proxies.
     In Nicaragua, they were the Contras; in El Salvador, they were D’Aubisson’s death squads and the Salvadoran army itself; in Honduras, it was the notorious Batallón 316.
     I say “proxy” because we funded and armed them and provided munitions, transshipped through the Naval Weapons Station, Concord. Among the munitions were phosphorous bombs, incendiary ordinance which, upon contact with the skin, burns inward until it hits bone — essentially the napalm of the 80s.

      As we all know, war means killing civilians. It always has, always will. The purpose of those wars was to “stop Communism”. For that noble cause, nuns, priests, nurses, doctors, teachers were targeted. (A friend of mine going down there, a Unitarian Universalist minister, was advised to wear a lot of makeup — for her safety, so as not to be mistaken for a nun. Ironically, she was among the Witnesses For Peace who were kidnapped by Ronald Reagan’s own Contras, Americans threatened by American surrogates. Gratefully, she returned home safely.) And not just in those three countries. Our Ambassador to Honduras, as of this writing Deputy Secretary of State, John Negroponte, “ran” a campaign of terror throughout Central America.

      Tens of thousands of civilians were imprisoned, tortured, assassinated and disappeared in that holocaust.

     But there were those who, throughout America, sought valiantly to stop the madness.
     And if there was one single place, one touchstone commemorating that effort, it was the railroad tracks in front of the Weapons Station where Vietnam Army intelligence veteran Brian Wilson was run over by a munitions train, losing both his legs, in protest of those wars. It became known throughout the world, attracting the likes of actor Martin Sheen, who was making a movie in Germany when he heard of the occurrence, and arranged to visit the site, and Joan Baez and Holly Near, who sang there.

       The section of track is still there, though unmarked. What is marked is a tree which my father planted next to the chapel on the base, August 17, 1992, a cutting from the olive tree in our front yard. In August of 1993 the “Tree of Peace” was dedicated to my father, with base Commander Richard Owens of the Naval Station in attendance, nine flowers planted around it, one for each decade of my father’s life.

      Throughout history America has strayed from its path. Yet the promise of America has always been one of liberty, of justice, of compassion for our brothers and sisters. We mobilize hundreds to save the life of a few, or even just one. We reach out when tragedy strikes another part of the world. Americans willingly lay down their lives to protect, or in service of others, even ones in other lands.

     To wage a war of any kind, but especially a war of terror, against another has always been antithetical to the values of America, and so when we act so egregiously towards a whole region of other countries, it behooves us to commemorate that act, so that we may, eventually, learn to no longer tolerate such a crime against humanity.

      There can be a no more fitting monument to the cause of peace in that turbulent time than the Tree of Peace, and so it deserves to be preserved — and it will be, in memory of so many lives destroyed, and in the hope of a future of peace with justice.

Respectfully submitted,

Daniel B. Zwickel ben Avram
Pittsburg, Sacramento Delta Bio-region,
California, Friday, September 19, 2008