A Persistent Witness

The images leapt to life on our television screens over the past five years. From Manila to Moscow and Berlin to Budapest the nonviolent power of the people toppled governments and international security alliances like so many dominoes. As a result, pundits across the United States rediscovered the political potency of nonviolence. But their "find" still left them a fair bit behind friends south of the border.

As Relentless Persistence, edited by Philip McManus and Gerald Schlabach, ably demonstrates, the poor of Latin America have successfully utilized nonviolence for quite some time. Forced to the margins by a political and economic system designed to benefit small numbers of Latin Americans and large numbers of North Americans, the people of Latin America often wage their battles for peace, dignity, and human rights with nonviolence as the central tactic.

Relentless Persistence may be the most important book on nonviolence published in the United States since Gene Sharp's seminal three-volume study, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973). The first section of this book consists of case studies of nonviolent action in Latin America written--for the most part--by those who were in the thick of those struggles.

Here we have revisionist history at its most significant. Not only do the various authors tell the little-known story of Latin America's poor and marginalized, preserving it for a history that would otherwise likely ignore it, but the case studies recall instances of the poor organizing to be personal and collective agents of social change, becoming nothing less than subjects of their own history.

This book delivers the hard-to-find details of relatively well-known actions and campaigns like the Argentinean "Mothers of the Disappeared," who gathered outside the Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires every Thursday for years, demanding information about their disappeared loved ones. It is precisely these human details that inspire, details about how ordinary people fueled by faith and love create their futures in extraordinary ways.

Many of the chapters also tell tales of nonviolent actions that are unknown to most North Americans, like the provocative campaign for human rights education in Uruguay by SERPAJ (Service for Peace and Justice)-Uruguay, and the 23-day hunger fast in 1978 begun by four Bolivian women. The women were married to tin miners banned from work due to labor union activity. The women's courage inspired 1,380 Bolivians to publicly join them in their fast during the Christmas and New Year holiday season. They were eventually granted all of their demands by the military dictatorship of Gen. Hugo Banzer.

The book is adorned with many wisely chosen photographs, including stunning reminders that the practice of nonviolence often requires sacrifice and suffering on a par with that required by those who pick up a gun. One such photo shows a line of Chilean demonstrators protesting torture; they are being sprayed with water cannons. While this is a police tactic familiar to veterans or students of the U.S. civil rights movement, the Chileans added a macabre twist: They used foul sewer water or water laced with dangerous chemicals.

THE CASES ASSEMBLED IN this book educate, offering examples of nonviolent theory in action. And they inspire, providing moral witness to the often surprising power of nonviolence in the face of the superior physical and military force of the state. After chronicling the creative and politically astute "lightning actions" by Chilean women, we are reminded that "Pinochet's apparatus of repression, his police, and his control of the means of communication were of no use to him because they failed to intimidate the people."

Here is the heart of nonviolent people power: the willingness to act even in the face of fear. Taken together, these stories point to a continent-wide movement where people are becoming economically and politically self-reliant, shaking off doubt, reclaiming their cultural identity in ways large and small, and building a new, more just social order in the process.

Gerald Schlabach argues that Latin American nonviolence "fundamentally involves the building or rescuing of community." If cultural identity, human dignity, and community are restored, the people will discover and create the nonviolent strategies necessary for the particular task at hand. The focus is not on tactics; it is on rebuilding the social structures that eventually make a wider choice of tactics--including nonviolence--possible.

Schlabach's epilogue is a useful reflection on the intersection between Latin American liberation and North American nonviolence. That can be a confusing intersection, especially for North American pacifists committed to nonviolence as a moral imperative. But Schlabach's essay points the way to a viable accommodation, one that just may be capable of birthing substantive social change in this country as well.

Buy this book and read it with a local study group. Then act together on your learnings and come to know hope as Aristotle did, as a "waking dream."

PATRICK G. COY was the national chair of the Fellowship of Reconciliation-USA, and editor of A Revolution of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic Worker (Temple University, 1988) when this review appeared.

Relentless Persistence: Nonviolent Action in Latin America. Edited by Philip McManus and Gerald Schlabach. New Society Publishers, 1991. $14.95 (paper).