AFSC Commemorates Deaths in Afghanistan

From the Interim Regional Director

On February 22, 2010, Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans

Against the War, local Quakers, and others joined AFSC in

marking the grim milestone of 1,000 casualties in Operation

Enduring Freedom (OEF, the Pentagon’s name for the war in

Afghanistan).

The event was held in front of the Veteran’s War Memorial

Building in San Francisco. Busloads of people stopped every

few minutes and took in the sight of rows and rows of

postcards, each one bearing the name of a fallen soldier. As

darkness descended, candles were lit, and page after page of

names was read. Local news, channel 2 – KTVU, covered the

event over the course of the evening.

We were successful in conveying our message: the cost of

war, both human and financial, is too high. Increased foreign

troop levels and increasing resistance to their presence has

escalated the violence in Afghanistan, jeopardizing the safety

of both the occupied and the occupier. Nearly one-third of

the 1,000 US deaths, 317, took place last year.

The exact number of Afghan casualties is unknown, but we

do know that civilians are increasingly caught in the crossfire.

On the back of each postcard was a letter to Speaker of

the House Nancy Pelosi asking her ―to stop funding failed

tools of military intervention.‖ Thousands of postcards

were delivered to the Speaker’s office in Washington D.C.

It is time for the U.S. to announce an immediate cease-fire,

pledge to stop sending additional troops, negotiate a

timeline for the removal of U.S. troops, support civilian-led

reconstruction, and support the building of a civil society in

Afghanistan.

Dear Friends,

Summer has arrived in the Pacific Mountain Region and the hopefulness of the season is evident

in our program work. Thousands of people turned out for AFSC co-sponsored immigration

rallies on May 1, partly as a protest of the new law in Arizona that criminalizes human

migration, and partly as a celebration of the communities who have moved here and are

contributing so much.

New life was breathed into our Middle East program as donations from supporters like you

have allowed us to keep doing this important work. The Middle East program staff are excited

to be supporting a speakers’ tour of the US returnees from the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, as well

as working to refresh the AFSC Middle East work in general.

The intersections between our four program areas—healing justice, economic justice, immigration, and peace work—keep

presenting themselves. As budget priorities are being set in Sacramento, we are demonstrating how housing over 14,000

prisoners in solitary confinement, as California does, costs the state tens of thousands more per prisoner, per year. More

information on this and on our other programs can be found in the pages of this newsletter.

I hope that this issue of Pacific Mountain News stirs your passion for the causes that are so important to us here at AFSC.

Many thanks!

Pacific Mountain News A M E R I C A N F R I E N D S S E R V I C E C O M M I T T E E

P A C I F I C M O U N T A I N R E G I O N ( N . C a l i f o r n i a , N e v a d a , U t a h )

S U M M E R 2 0 1 0

Above: Interim

Regional

Director

Laura Magnani.

Photo by Dawn

Marie Wadle.

Right:

Candles and

postcards at the

vigil for the

1,000th death in

Afghanistan.

Photo by Bill

Hackwell

AFSC Participates in March Fourth Demonstrations

On March 4th, 2010, AFSC

participated in a California-wide

protest against budget cuts to

education. On this page are

some of the photos from the

rallies we participated in.

The focus of the statewide

demonstrations was largely cuts

to education budgets, and part of

our contribution to the

messaging was the concurrent

(over decades) growth in prison

budgets, and the connection

between the two.

Middle, Bottom Middle and

Bottom Right photos by Alan

Benjamin.

Exciting Progress for Healing Justice

AFSC Helps Braceros Get The Money They Deserve

During WWII, over 4 million Mexican workers came to

the United States, as part of a government program, to

work on the railroads and in the fields. As an incentive for

the workers to come back to Mexico, 10% of their

earnings were put into a Mexican bank. Many of those

workers never saw their money again.

For over six years, AFSC staff members Luis Magaña and

Martin Cuevas have been fighting for the braceros to

receive the thousands of dollars they are owed.

When a few of the braceros finally heard that they would

be receiving payments and that they must travel to

Mexicali, Mexico to receive the funds, Martin Cuevas

traveled with them. The braceros will receive payouts over

the next ten years, but many may not be able to make the

trip each year, as most are now in their 80’s, 90’s, or 100’s.

In an article by Rebecca Plevin in Vida en el Valle, Luis

Magaña was quoted as saying: ―The former braceros are

very upset by the amount of money they are receiving and by

the fact that they must rely on others to transport them to

pick up very little money.‖ Cuevas added, ―It’s not so much

the money, it’s the principle...We have to keep demanding and

talking about this injustice. This is part of the fight.‖

AFSC’s three offices in California’s Central Valley focus on the

rights of farm workers and immigrants, often using popular

education to organize participants to represent concerns that

they identify.

Recently, the PMR Healing Justice staff has seen very

encouraging progress on two projects we’ve been deeply

involved in: creation of a Racial Justice Act in California, and

exposing prisoner abuses in California state prisons.

The California Racial Justice Act was introduced in

February by Senators Gilbert Cedillo (Los Angeles) and

Mark Leno (San Francisco), as SB 1331. It passed out of the

Senate Public Safety Committee (which Leno chairs) and is

currently being held in Senate Appropriations. Though the

bill may not get further through the process this year, it

represents many years of AFSC’s work planting the seeds

for a Racial Justice Act and finally seeing them take root.

Our next step will be to gather more co-authors and

partnering organizations.

Briefly, the bill, similar to one recently enacted in North

Carolina, allows defense attorneys in death penalty cases to

do a statistical examination of the prosecuting county’s

overall pattern of capital prosecutions regarding race, and to

present these findings on behalf of their clients, providing

another tool for challenging death sentences.

Similarly, the many years we have devoted to documenting

abuses in various forms of solitary confinement, and the

multiple times we forwarded our findings to UN

commissions, finally bore fruit in the form of some in-depth

investigative journalism conducted by Charles Piller and

published in multiple stories in the Sacramento Bee.

Piller’s articles have demonstrated how prisoner’s

human rights have been violated in the High

Desert State Prison in Susanville, California and several

other institutions. Prisoners have been subjected to

racist and abusive treatment, including refusal of

medical care, excessive use of violence, racial slurs, and

the repeated silencing of protest appeals.

AFSC worked with Piller to provide information on

prison abuses our staff had documented and witnessed.

Piller’s work has lead to a greater public awareness of

the issue, and AFSC called for a legislative panel to

investigate the claims of abuse. Public hearings will take

place later this summer, and Senator Mark Leno and

President Pro Tem of the Senate Darrell Steinberg have

pledged their support.

In addition to the hearings, two other investigations

have been initiated, one by the Department of

Corrections and Rehabilitation, and another by the

Senate Office of Research. Their findings will become

part of the hearings, and AFSC will also have an

opportunity to bring our own witnesses.

Please go to our website to learn more about the

Sacramento Bee investigation and how AFSC is involved

at http://afsc.org/office/san-francisco-ca and scroll down

to ―Read About our Work.‖ There you will also find

links to the Sacramento Bee online articles.

Right:

Martin Cuevas

and braceros

pick up

payments in

Mexicali,

Mexico

AFSC’s New Website has Launched

Visit the Pacific Mountain Region’s page at

http://afsc.org/region/pacific-

mountain-region

and please feel free to email us with your

feedback on the new site.

American Friends Service Committee Pacific Mountain Region 65 Ninth Street San Francisco, CA 94103

AFSC’s monthly newspaper, Street Spirit, is now

available on our website!

Street Spirit is focused on the issues affecting homeless

people in the Bay Area, and is created with

contributions from homeless writers and artists.

Check out the June 2010 issue, covering planned budget

cuts to services for low-income communities, the

privatization of public housing, living your convictions

and taking steps toward social change, Bay Area art

projects for low-income youth, and much more. Go to

http://afsc.org/region/pacific-mountain-region and click

on ―Homeless Organizing Project — Street Spirit‖ to

download this year’s issues.

Street Spirit Now Online Thanks to Friends Meetings

The Pacific Mountain Region would like to thank our

local Friends Meetings for all of their support over

the years. Specifically, we’d like to thank the meetings

listed below for contributing their time and money to

AFSC’s relief work in Haiti.

Thank you to:

Appleseed Friends Meeting

Berkeley Friends Meeting

Delta Monthly Meeting

Lake County Friends Worship Group

Monterey Peninsula Friends Meeting

Redding Friends Meeting

Sacramento Friends Meeting

Strawberry Creek Meeting

If your Friends Meeting raised funds for AFSC’s Haiti

relief and we have not thanked you here, please let us

know by contacting Julia Parish at jparish@afsc.org.