‘Like a bomb was dropped in the region’

Teresa Gutierrez

Following are excerpts from a talk by Teresa Gutierrez, a national organizer for the Troops Out Now Coalition, to an anti-war conference in New York City on Sept. 10.

I’ve traveled to many places in Latin America, and to Iraq, but I have to say that the few days that Johnnie Stevens and I spent in Texas and Louisiana as part of the Troops Out Now Coalition and International Action Center delegation were probably the most profound and life-changing experiences I’ve had.

So I want to put my comments within the context of a challenge to the anti-war movement and progressives and activists, not only in this room but across the country, to take what we have to say here today and get the message out to the millions of people around this country who will need the analysis and perspective.

We don’t want to give the impression that this is a definitive report from the Troops Out Now Coalition. And in fact when we set out to conduct a lot of interviews via video, we found that it was a little bit insensitive to pick up the camera every single time. We were not journalists. It was important to document, of course, but that wasn’t what we were there for.

So I want to just give you a flavor of some of the interviews and the discussions. The discussions can’t even begin to reflect the horrors and the turmoil that was sweeping the area.

I compared the tragedy of what happened there to some of my experiences in Latin America. It felt in some ways the same as when the U.S. dropped bombs in Panama, and in some ways it actually felt worse. This is obviously an anti-war issue because indeed a bomb was dropped in the region. It was not an actual bomb, but it was a bomb of negligence that has resulted in catastrophic conditions.

There are many homeless people who know exactly what we’re talking about. Imagine that you have a roof over your head, and you have running water to bathe, wash your hair, brush your teeth. The home may be poor or not, maybe it’s a nice house, maybe it’s not, maybe it’s an apartment or you live in a housing project. But you have something; there’s a community.

And then all of a sudden, almost over night, that is lost. The natural disaster of the hurricane was bad enough—but it was intensified because of the neglect, and because of the damage to the environment.

What was not natural is that money was stolen from the levee for other priorities and that caused the break. What was not natural was how the government handled the crisis. It was an evacuation that if you had a credit card, a car and money to buy gas, you could do so. But if you didn’t, then you had what you see now.

The government made a decision from the highest levels to the lowest levels to let that tragedy happen. And so the folks that we talked to, in addition to being stunned for losing their homes, are also stunned because there’s a feeling that: Why were the buses waiting outside the region? Why weren’t the buses coming in to pick us up?

Imagine then, this was one of the most shocking and moving things about all the interviews and all the people that we talked to. This feeling of: Could it really be that the government wanted us to die?

Some people were very conscious and very understanding of the role of the government historically. Others were not. So it was a very shocking experience. I’m not a psychologist, but I can guarantee you that every single person from this tragedy is going to need some major support, psychologically.

There was the story of a man who, as he was swimming away from his house, kept hearing this “thump, thump, thump.” And he turned around and the thump was the body of someone who was floating into the second floor window of his house. And you know that this man will live forever with that “thump, thump, thump” in his head.

He goes to the Superdome in New Orleans and he sees the repression and that the National Guard was obviously not there to help people. He saw two youth, who were trying to break the soda water machine so they could get drinks out, shot to death right there. He said he heard a baby in a stroller crying and crying, and then it stopped crying and the little baby was dead.

These were just some of the shocks, and knowing that the government was allowing this.

Occupation, militarization of area

When we drove from Houston to New Orleans, there were caravans and caravans of military trucks.

And on a lot of the trucks, there were chalk messages written by the soldiers. One of them said, “We’re going to kick butt in Louisiana.” Another: “My mom told me not to hit women, but Katrina is one woman I’m going to beat.” This is the kind of occupying, military mentality that they have.

When we went to the [Houston] Astro dome, everyone was, like I said, terrorized. In shock.

People told us these kinds of things. A bus came in to pick up only women to take them to another state. And the women, everyone, were saying, “Why only the women?” And the people were kind of afraid. So they refused to go in that bus.

We talked to a young man who lost his mother. He doesn’t know why, because they showed up in the same area. But later they brought him to Houston and took his mother to Alabama.

That’s one of the many, many, many examples. That measly, piddly $2,000 that people are supposed to get—the ones that do get it—will probably go for a lot of people just to get their families back together.

A woman told us that they brought her to the Astrodome but she has a lot of family in Baton Rouge. So in the bus she and several people were begging the military driver to please stop [in Baton Rouge]. And any other kind of system, a more humane, not profit-driven system, would have, yes, stopped the bus.

Another family drove several hours to come pick up their loved ones, evacuees, at the Astrodome and they arrived 15 minutes or half an hour before the so-called curfew at 11 p.m. And the guard told them, “Well everybody goes to bed at 11:00. You’ll have to come back in the morning.”

And one of the volunteers who told us about this said, “Are you kidding? There’s 25,000 people there—all the lights are on. People don’t go to sleep.”

So it meant that the family had to pay for a motel that night, if they had the money. Or if they didn’t, they had to sleep in their car.

Again an example of the repressive character of this occupation of the people who have gone through such horror in recent days.

When they were giving out the $2,000 pittance on Sept. 9, folks were lined up and somehow there was some disorder—folks got angry, impatient. And so they shut down the volunteer center, got everybody out and wouldn’t let any volunteers go in. Forty-eight people, because of supposedly acting out, they didn’t want to stand in line, or whatever, were taken to jail. Another act of inhuman behavior. I mean how the hell are you supposed to act after days of starving, not having water?

Again, in another system, you would be patient, you would organize the work, you would understand this frustration. Instead they haul you off to the Houston jail.

Movement can push this back

I want to mention when we were in Lafayette we stopped at this truck stop and were handing out fliers for Sept. 12. One of the people turned out to be a Latino and he had lost everything in New Orleans. And when he saw me and Johnnie together, he came up to us and he was hugging Johnnie, saying, “Black and Latino—we have to be together. Bush ordered that levy to fall because he wanted to kill the Black and Latin communities. We’ve got to stand together.”

We hardly saw any Latinos. It may never be known how many undocumented workers died as a result of that hurricane. Because of the way that they live. We don’t know their names.

We have heard that the immigration officers were sending INS officers to the Louisiana-Missis sippi region and you know that they are not going there to help the undocumented or immigrants. They’re going there to find the ones they can find and they’ll probably be deported.

We should turn the Sept. 16 events that were called to protest the Minutemen into events in solidarity with the Black community, because of the racism of this tragedy towards the immigrants of the Gulf Coast and towards all oppressed immigrants.

We arrived in Camp Casey—as you know Camp Casey is the people’s Sheehan movement. And they were doing great work. And so many of the people at Camp Casey, anti-war activists who were all white, most of them were so sure what this was all about. And there was all this discussion that it was an ethnic cleansing, about the redevelopment is going to be to push out the poor and Black community of New Orleans. They were very clear and very angry.

So we left around 8:30 a.m. on Wednes day morning on what should have been a trip of an hour and a half to get to Algiers, La. By 6 p.m. that evening we were still not able to arrive.

The main problem was the troops at the major stations. They would just close all the streets and when we would ask for directions they were like, well the hell with you, just get going, and start picking up their guns. It was that kind of climate. So it took us forever and finally we couldn’t get through. You couldn’t make a phone call. You couldn’t get phone calls.

What I want to close up with is that when we were in the car for all those hours, nothing was said on the radio stations about how the U.S. government had allowed the Black community, the poor community, the immigrant community of this region to be wiped out overnight.

And so it’s the challenge of the anti-war and progressive movement, of all of us who think the way we do, to never get the issue off the front pages. To make sure that we document the truth about what really happened there. That we find all the folks who want to struggle.

Because what is happening right here today is like what happened in the Trail of Tears of the Native American population. That kind of displacement.

But this is not the 1800s. This is 2005 and the level of consciousness of the move ment can push this back. Can expose what is really happening in New Orleans and Loui siana today. And this should be the beginning of the decline of this government and this system that has allowed this tragedy to happen. And we have to make this the number one task of the movement: never to forget what happened in Loui siana and the Gulf Coast.

We must never forget and allow the government to be off the hook.