Southeast Region [Formerly CITCA, Carolina Interfaith Task Force on Central America]

Come travel with us. Experience a new reality.

We are a politically independent, grassroots organization. We are people committed to nonviolence and led by faith and conscience. Our mission is to support peace, justice and sustainable economies in the Americas. We accomplish this by challenging and working to change U.S. policies and corporate practices that contribute to poverty and oppression in Latin America and the Caribbean. We stand with people who seek justice. Since 1982, CITCA [as of 2011 Witness for Peace Southeast] has organized 16 chapters across North and South Carolina. A core group of supporters, the Board of Directors, assists in guiding the group's direction and activities. Please read this brief history of our first 25 years, penned by Gail Phares. [Gail is pictured below] You may also wish to read Gail Phares's brief inspirational statement about what she does and why. In September 2011, we expanded our staff to include Deputy Director Eric Burnette and Associate Director Emily Zucchino.

Witness for Peace Travel Programs

Witness for Peace Southeast have helped to form a student network of over 100 activists. We undertake advocacy campaigns, press work, skills training workshops, public vigils, and delegations to Central America, Mexico, and Cuba. We also have a campaign to Stop the War Against the Poor, by ending the debt to poor countries, ending sweatshops and closing the School of the Americas.

Summary of the Kind of Change We Seek

We work to raise people’s consciousness and empower them to take action consciousness about root causes of the growing gap between rich and poor and empowerment to take action to change the structures which lead to poverty and oppression.

Activities

We attack the issues we concentrate on through a variety of activities:

skills training, including the annual retreat.

Annually, former delegates to Central America and other activists participate in a 2-day skills training retreat. Included are discussions of human rights issues in Latin American and Caribbean countries and how to address them. Discussion topics include human rights, canceling the debt to poor countries, fair trade, ending sweatshops, and supporting farm workers. Together the group develops tactics on how to influence action on these issues.

Delegations to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean give American adults and teenagers first-hand knowledge of conditions and issues. Members of the delegations get a variety of experiences, including visiting sweatshops and living in the countryside with poor families. One particularly important component is extensive training about objectives, strategies, and tactics to influence change upon their return. Visits by the teens with Representatives and Senators are organized after their return to discuss the issues.

The Pilgrimage across North Carolina with farm workers Each year a Pilgrimage across North Carolina is organized to raise awareness throughout North Carolina. Hispanics, Anglos and African Americans, farm workers and business people, teenagers and college students, retired people and people taking time off work, and walk across North Carolina in a Pilgrimage for Justice and Peace. We coordinate with other faith-based and human rights organizations. Each day of the Pilgrimage we give Bridge Building Workshops at churches and community centers along the way to explain that the devastating impact of neo-liberal reforms on the Latin American people has caused them to stream north in search of work. When we arrive in Raleigh on Good Friday, 150 or 200 people from many churches join us for a bilingual Economic Justice Way of the Cross.

The Fast and Vigil to Forgive the Debt Owed by Poor Countries. We are working to achieve cancellation of poor nations’ unpayable debt. Fasts and vigils will be organized all over North Carolina between to draw attention to this issue and move people to action.

Media alert mailings. We send out media alerts to over 80 media activists across the country. Topics include economic issues, the debt, sweatshops, and the School of the Americas (SOA). Media Alert Activists write letters to the editor and OP. ED. pieces. The printed newsletter is mailed to supporters four times per year. You're welcome to request a sample copy.

Root Causes of Injustice and Inequities We Are Addressing. We live in an era of rapid corporate growth and globalization. In the absence of effective democratic control and global enforcement of labor rights, economic globalization has dramatically increased the gap between the rich and poor. There is growing disparity in wealth both here in the U.S. and in Central America. In Central America and the Caribbean education and health care services have been cut, wages are decreasing, unemployment is growing. Much of the clothing we buy in retailers such as target the GAP, the Limited, and WalMart is being produced by teenage girls working under sweatshop conditions, earning $2 to $3 a day.

We are deeply involved in the:

Urgent need to help people become aware of this reality; and

Actions to organize to change it. Here in North Carolina, we are experiencing a rapid influx of people from Mexico and Central America the most profound population change, it is said, since Europeans began to immigrate to the New World. The number of recent Hispanic immigrants in North Carolina, alone, is fast approaching 400,000. Mexican people are streaming north in growing numbers because of severe economic hardship in part caused by the imposition of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) in 1994. Nearly half the Mexican population now lives in poverty an increase of 31% since 1993. Workers’ wages have declined by 60% in two years. To be approved for NAFTA, Mexico altered its constitution that historically had protected poor and small farmers through the ejido system. The change forced thousands of poor farmers off their land. Thousands are migrating to the U.S. seeking economic survival as a direct result of NAFTA. Here in North Carolina, our churches, schools and social service agencies are not prepared to receive these Spanish-speaking people. There is great need to work in cross-cultural communication, to build bridges of understanding among African-Americans, Euro-Americans and our new Hispanic brothers and sisters.

Consciousness Raising Efforts Through its delegations, annual retreat, annual pilgrimage, media alert, and debt cancellation activities, we have a program in place to achieve results. Most clearly bearing fruit, however, is the Teen Delegation to Nicaragua. Each year, we provide the Teen Delegation with a two-day training in cross-cultural analysis, structural adjustment policies of the IMF/World Bank. We provide 12 days of immersion in Nicaragua, living with families in both a rural area and a working class urban neighborhood. While in Nicaragua, students visit sweatshops. There is a daily debriefing and reflection. The last day of the trip, we provide skills training workshop in work with the media, how to give talks, and how to impact public policy. In the fall after the summer’s trip, we visit Washington, DC to meet with policy makers. The teens are invited to participate in our retreat each October and later in the fall they visit Washington, DC to meet with policy makers. Former Teen Delegates have organized Students Against Sweatshops groups at UNC-Chapel Hill and at Duke University. In recent months, they were leaders in the occupation of the office of the president of Duke University and of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, demanding that products carrying the Carolina or Duke name be sweat free, that workers receive a living wage and that companies supplying the universities disclose the location of their plants. They received broad media coverage in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Durham Morning Herald and on National Public Radio.

University students have become a strong organizing movement for change in corporate practices. Recent Teen Delegation participants have organized ongoing action groups at their high schools and have become student leaders on college campuses. A member of the 1997 Teen Delegation founded the SURGE movement (Students United for a Responsible Global Environment). The SURGE Network now connects over 100 colleges and universities all over the world with email updates on structural injustices and inequities and action alerts to address them.