Biography
Palmer Legare crossed the line at Fort Benning, Georgia during the September 2002 SOA Watch vigil to close the U.S. Army School of the Americas / WHINSEC. Sentenced to 6 months in federal custody.
Each year on the November anniversary of the assassination of six Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter at the University of Central America in San Salvador in 1989, peace activists gather at the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia, site of the U.S. Army School of the Americas / Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), to commemorate the dead and to call for the school's closure. Hundreds have crossed the line onto the base over four decades of vigils; many have served federal sentences ranging from 30 days to a year for trespass.
A July 19, 2009 solidarity post reproduces Legare’s first-person report of an arrest a few weeks earlier while organizing tenants in Westfield, Massachusetts. He alleged the arrest interfered with tenant-cooperative organizing. The account supplies no exact arrest day, jail admission, physical release or completed duration; it is separate from his Fort Benning prosecution. Contemporary source account.
