Rick Ufford-Chase was endorsed unanimously by the Presbytery de Cristo at its meeting on January 23, 2004, as a candidate for Moderator of the 216^th General Assembly.

He is the co-founder and co-director of BorderLinks, a binational organization that provides experiential education on issues such as trade and globalization and the concerns of migrants on the border. Rick is sponsored in that work as a Mission Co-Worker in the Worldwide Ministries division of the Presbyterian Church (USA). He is also a co-moderator of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship.

His address to the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship at the 215^th GA is posted here on the Witherspoon website.  It was entitled "Empire and Church: Pitfalls and Priorities for the Presbyterian Church in a time of Globalization."

His candidacy is represented on the web at www.rickuffordchase.com.

Reflecting on the recent sentencing of fellow Nashvillian Don Beisswenger for his act of civil disobedience in protest against the School of the Americas, Gene TeSelle ventured to summarize the significance of the "New American Empire" (which may not be so very new, really) in Latin American affairs.  This new empire, he suggests, is part of the context within which SOA was created and which it serves.

In the Western Hemisphere an empire has been in the making since the Monroe Doctrine was enunciated in 1823. It was accelerated a decade ago by the Clinton-Gore administration, which advocated NAFTA; now the attempt is to make it hemispheric with the Free Trade Area of the Americas. We already know the results:

And that's only the economic side of things.

The U.S. has always been concerned with the politics of Latin America, too, in the name of "U.S. interests." Of course the most insistent "U.S. interests" are always the companies doing business in Latin American countries, and inevitably U.S. policy defends them and promotes their interests.

Direct intervention in Latin America is an old story. It became explicit in the early twentieth century, when several countries were occupied and controlled by the U.S. military for years or even decades. The Cold War gave an excuse for further, more subtle kinds of intervention. The U.S. sponsored coups in Guatemala, Brazil, and Chile, and established alliances with repressive governments all over Latin America. Anyone who sought justice could be accused of being a Communist or, more broadly, a "subversive." Governments were condemned as dictatorships only when they were not solicitous about "U.S. interests."

The School of the Americas for decades has trained military leaders from all countries in the Western Hemisphere except Cuba. Its purpose is to teach "counter-insurgency warfare" and "internal security," which too often means nothing more than protecting governments against their own people. The means, which have been taught in the School of the Americas, include repression, torture, extra-judicial killings, and acts of terrorism calculated for maximum intimidation.

Policies of internal security, furthermore, have not prevented the rise of armed "paramilitary" forces, usually in the employ of large landowners. The paramilitaries represent a "privatization" of the power to coerce. " Often they work in collusion with the military, doing the dirty work when the military needs to maintain appearances.

During the Cold War, when there was competition between the two superpowers, the U.S. had to compete with the Communist Bloc in promoting justice and reducing inequalities, not only abroad but in its own land (civil rights legislation was motivated in part by the need to look good to the rest of the world). Too often its programs of land reform and labor organizing were a cruel hoax. But there was at least the appearance of democracy and social concern, even when it was undercut by the same people who administered it.

With the end of the Cold War, the emphasis has shifted to the War on Terror (which has led to assaults on civil liberties even in the U.S.) and the War on Drugs, which is being made the excuse for counter-insurgency warfare in Colombia. And now that the U.S. has no competition on the world scene, the policy of the U.S. is governed with increasing shamelessness by the ideology of the free market--the untrammeled ability of the powerful to require the unpowerful to compete against each other for small favors. The result is increased misery at home as well as abroad.