Saturday, Nov 3 --- Day 1

Thank you for visiting the first official Journey for Justice blog page! While the Tour celebrates its fourth year of travel, this is the first that it comes to you via the world-wide-web. We hope you enjoy...


The tour officially began at 9:30 am in front of the Dolores Mission Church in the Mission District of San Francisco. Friends and supporters turned out to send us off with prayers and goodwill. Local SF musician Francisco Herrera led the group in several songs on the bright Bay-Area morning.



















Two participants departed from the Bay Area. Carlos Mauricio, main speaker and 4 year veteran of the trip, is a Salvadoran torture survivor and respected social activist. While Carlos has made San Francisco his home, he spends much of time travelling and working to promote human rights in the Americas. Joe O'Neill (blog author) is a recent graduate of Holy Names University in Oakland, CA. This is his fourth trip to protest the SOA/WHINSEC, and first year on the Journey for Justice tour.

Now that you've met the two of us, I (Joe) will be writing in the 1st person, because narrating in the 3rd is just plain awkward!

We drove south on the I-5 to the small town of La Paz, in the hills about an hour outside of Bakersfield. Cesar Chavez, renowned leader of the UFW, is buried in La Paz, and it has become custom for the tour to visit this site to remember the spirit of Chavez as we begin our journey across the United States.

La Paz was in the middle of a Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration, and there was music and dancing at the labor museum. We met with Dolores Velasco, widow of the late Pete Velasco, also a leader of the UFW.























From La Paz we travelled south to Los Angeles, arriving at 6 pm for Carlos to speak to a group composed of SOA Watch LA members as well as Salvadoran FMLN supporters living in the city.
Attendees at that meeting invited us to join them later in the evening at the Los Angeles convention center. The 2009 FMLN presidential candidate for El Salvador would be speaking to Salvadorans living in the area... so we went along and watched the event. Afterwards, our group held up our "close the soa" banner as the participants exited the lecture hall, and we were greeted with numerous cheers and thumbs-up.







Finally we returned to the Los Angeles Catholic worker, where we will be staying over the weekend.