The Bill Motto VFW Post 5888 sent a U.S. military veterans' delegation to southern Mexico, April 7--April 24, 1997, to (1) examine allegations of substantial Mexican militarization and repression of Indigenous and poor communities, and (2) to determine the nature and extent of any U.S. complicity in this militarization and repression with provision of military equipment, training and surveillance resources, and counterinsurgency and low-intensity warfare ideology. A delegation report, "NAFTA versus Life: U.S. Complicity with Mexico in Waging a Final Solution (Genocidal War) to the Indigenous Problem," is available for $2.00. For copies of this report, contact Quartermaster, Bill Motto VFW Post 5888, P.O. Box 664, Santa Cruz, CA 95061.

About the Author

S. Brian Willson, a lawyer and criminologist by training and a long-time peace advocate, was an Air Force combat security officer in Vietnam. He is a member of the Bill Motto Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) "Wage Peace" Post 5888, Santa Cruz, California, and of Veterans for Peace. He has been an inside observer of and advisor about the criminal (in)justice system, a dairy farmer, a legislative aide, a small business owner/operator, a town tax assessor, and a veteran's advocate. He has traveled to more than two dozen countries examining the role and effects of U.S. political, economic, military and clandestine policies, while observing the severe social, cultural, and ecological costs imposed by neoliberal, "free" supermarket global economics. As a result of his personal experiences in Vietnam and other U.S.-subsidized war zones, he has chosen to be an active war tax refuser for many years.

He is a founder of the Veterans Education Project that provides U.S. military veteran speakers to schools offering an alternative perspective to that presented by military recruiters. He was a participant in the four-member, 47-day, water-only Veterans Fast For Life in 1986 in Washington, D.C., protesting U.S. policy in Central America, and was a founder of the Veterans Peace Action Teams working in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and of Nuremberg Actions, blocking weapons shipments in California intended for Central America. He has been an intermittent college instructor. Currently he participates in and facilitates groups of men seeking emotional honesty.

The estrangement Brian experiences stems from his comprehension of the documented, incontrovertible historical evidence of the continuing international lawlessness and pattern of criminality of the nation of his birth, the United States of America. As a result, he has begun to experiment with revolutionary nonviolence as a practice for inspiring mindfulness and courage while tendering a respectful spirit in seeking profound healing from the sickness of injustice and the fears that underlie acts of violence. His philosophy has been subjected to the severest test. In 1987, while peacefully and publicly protesting movement by a U.S. munitions train in Concord, California, of weapons intended for murdering innocent civilians ("Communists") in Central America, he was assaulted, instead of arrested as expected. He was run over by the speeding (over three times the speed limit) train and was nearly killed. He suffered a fractured skull and amputation of both legs below the knees, among other injuries. He now walks with two prostheses and has a plate in his skull.

In 1992 he published an autobiography, On Third World Legs (Charles Kerr Publishing, Chicago). He lives bicoastally, part of the time in his straw-bale constructed, all-natural house on a group-owned land trust in rural Wendell, Massachusetts, and part of the time in the Santa Cruz/Monterey area of California.

Dramatic economic restructuring (under the zealous religion of "neoliberal" global corporate economics) has produced a nucleus of aggressive, wealthy businesspeople who have accumulated large--incredibly large--fortunes in record time. In Mexico this phenomenon has been aided from A to expanding Z by the still dominant Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

The rich few have become extraordinarily richer, and the throngs of poor have become extraordinarily poorer. Mother Earth cries out in pain and threatens through "chaos" to heal the wounds inflicted by Homo hostilis. The poor, too, sometimes revolt. On January 1, 1994, the Mayan Indigenous collectively rose up under the name "Zapatistas," demanding genuine self determination (democracy), enforced justice (i.e., enforcement of the national Constitution), and preservation of their economic and cultural autonomy (sovereignty). They choose not to participate in an economic policy to which they had no say, a policy that dooms them as wage slaves, if they have employment at all, in a "free" cash economy; a policy that dooms them to be landless, homeless les miserables. They choose a primarily subsistence to an export economy, where their local needs are known and can be met. They want to preserve their sacred communities, territories, and land, as well as the fruits of their labor. Such autonomous philosophy of locally empowered communities confronting the tyrannical, homogenous model of neoliberal materialism (wholesale liquidation) that requires compliant, automaton sheep, is an example for others, and therefore a serious threat to the powers that be.

The U.S. support of the system of economic and political elites in Mexico, as well as elsewhere, is absolutely consistent with the history of U.S. domestic policy, and foreign policy throughout this Hemisphere and the world. The January 13, 1995 Chase Bank memo summarizes joint Mexican domestic and U.S. foreign policy: "The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and security policy."

This booklet, The Slippery Slope, attempts to describe the nature and extent of U.S. destructive policy in relation to Mexico. How can a knowing people allow such incredibly demonic policies to be made in our name? Where lies our honor, our dignity, our integrity? Where might we acquire the courage to stand up to the economic and political forces of our own nation and declare, "You will not, shall not, continue to be a lawless, brutal, heartless government acting in our name as citizens of the United States, and of Planet Earth!"?!?

--Brian Willson