EffrainBamaca Velasquez is dead. And the taxes I paid helped to pay for his murder.
These are the irrefutable facts. And Effrain Bamaca Velasquez is just one of thousands of Guatemalans who have been killed by death squads my tax dollars helped to finance. I only know his name, his story and his fate because he was married to an American. There are thousands more in El Salvador and East Timor and Kurdistan and countless other countries around the world who have met the same fate at the hands of soldiers armed and trained by the United States government.
The United States is now the largest exporter of weapons to poor countries, controlling 70 percent of the international arms market -- and most of the countries that buy American weapons are ruled by undemocratic governments which have no qualms about killing their own citizens. These arms "sales" are subsidized by taxpayers like me, because the United States has a "national interest" in protecting the interests of the multinational corporations which make money by exploiting the labor of the poor. If the trade unions in Guatemala are crushed, wages will stay down. If popular movements demanding agrarian reform are suppressed, the land will remain in the hands of the rich. Reppression is good for business.
And yet, knowing all this, two weeks ago I signed and mailed in my tax return. This is the banality of evil -- without a second thought, I became an accomplice to mass murder.
And we are all complicit in countless ways. Although Dartmouth College refuses to make its investments public, because the arms export industry is a lucrative industry and Dartmouth has no policy barring it from investing in the arms industry, chances are we are heavily invested in the companies that make the weapons that are used to kill the poor.
And many at Dartmouth have taken part in the research that lead the development of the technology used in these weapons. These things are done in our name, and whenever we fail to speak out against them we tacitly support the murder of innocent people.
Nothing can bring back Effrain Bamaca Velasquez, and nothing can wash his blood from my hands. And there is no way I can ask the IRS to give my tax money back. But I can speak out against the continuation of the United States' murderous policies.
It's time for all of us to begin to reflect on the choices we make and the violence we do every day. We must stop allowing ourselves to become accomplices to murder by default. Not all of us are called to become tax resisters, but everyone can find her or his own way to speak out against this violence.
In "Neither Victims Nor Executioners" Albert Camus wrote, "All I ask is that in a murderous world we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice." That is the least we can do.
