Courage...

Appleton activist accepts sentence
Schwaller, 81, sought to call attention to human rights abuse
By Ed Lowe Post-Crescent staff writer
APPLETON — Days before the start of his prison term, 81-year-old human rights activist Delmar Schwaller isn't going quietly.
"I don't regret it one bit," said Schwaller, whose two-month sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Oxford, 60 miles north of Madison, begins Tuesday.
Schwaller, a Christian missionary, World War II veteran, former Appleton alderman and community volunteer, was convicted of a federal misdemeanor charge of trespassing after entering the U.S. Army training facility formerly known as the School of the Americas, at Fort Benning, Ga., on Nov. 20.
"The reason I did it was to call people's attention to what is happening at this school," now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation, he said.
"Eight or nine people out of 10 still do not know that our tax dollars are paying (the school) to train people from Central and South America in terrorism, torture, kidnapping and a whole array of human rights abuses at the same time we are trying to tell the world we are a great country."
Schwaller is among 40 demonstrators arrested at the most recent annual gathering of School of the Americas Watch, a nonprofit group bent on changing the school's methods or closing it down. Most of those arrested, like Schwaller, were charged with trespassing.
The prison sentence means Schwaller will forfeit "a little over $3,000" in Social Security income. It also has cost the retired engineer opportunities to travel to Central America with other members of a Fox Valley missionary group.
"I've had eight years to think this over," Schwaller said.
"I think I've learned the situation pretty well when I was in those countries.
If I can make an a little bit of an impression on the how people view this country, it will be well worth it."
School of the Americas Watch was founded in 1990 soon after the massacre of six Jesuit priests and two companions in El Salvador.
A U.S. congressional task force said the group's killers were trained at the U.S. Army school. Discoveries of the school's use of military manuals describing torture methods helped prompt its temporary closure and name-change in 2000.
A House bill seeking an independent review of the school's teaching methods has 123 cosponsors, including U.S. Rep. Tom Petri, R-Fond du Lac.
An e-mail from the military training school's public affairs officer, Lee Rials, criticized the protest group's tactics as irresponsible and slanderous.
"The truth is, not one person has ever been shown to have committed a crime using what he has learned at SOA or its successor, WHINSEC —not even one!" Rials wrote The Post-Crescent in response to a story on Schwaller's arrest.
Schwaller, seeing the school in a harshly different light, said prison cuisine will suffice.
"I'm sure it will be better than the rice and beans we get in Central America," he said.