Leave us alone: a growing antiwar movement gains momentum.

After three months of hard labor, Iraq war resister and former Navy petty officer Pablo Paredes considers himself a free man. Recruited in high school, he joined the Navy but refused to board his ship headed for Iraq. During the subsequent trial, Paredes applied for conscientious objector status and was denied. Last May, however, a military judge decided not to sentence him to jail. Instead, Paredes got three months of hard labor without confinement, a reduction in rank to E-1 (the lowest rank in the military) and was discharged. It was considered a victory by the national counter-recruitment movement that has gained momentum over the last year through campaigns such as "Leave My Child Alone" and organizations like the Campus Antiwar Network.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"We have to wake up to the fact that minorities are always on the front lines of wars. We're like cannon fodder," Paredes told some 700 youth and community activists who convened last October for the national "On the Frontlines" counter-recruitment conference at the University of California, Berkeley.

With his youthful smile and baggy clothes, Paredes, who is Ecuadorian and Puerto Rican, still looks like he'd blend into the hallways where he was recruited when he was a high school senior in the Bronx. Recruiters took him out to eat. They knew about his grades and how poor his family was. They said the military would offer him a job and college tuition. This aggressive tactic is now a common story as the military ramps up its recruiting efforts in the face of a war so unpopular that there has been a sharp decline in the number of Black Army recruits. Blacks now account for 14 percent of new recruits, a drop from 24 percent five years ago. The opposite however seems to be happening for Latinos. They were just 10 percent of new recruits five years ago, but by 2004, they made up 13 percent.

It's no surprise for Arlene Inouye, a speech and language specialist in East Los Angeles, who works with the Coalition Against Militarism In Our Schools to raise awareness in more that 30 schools about recruitment. "The recruiters use good-looking Latinos to recruit," Inouye said. "They come during Hispanic Month and have war heroes speak about how to honor their country. They connect with organizations like the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) to market themselves and get into Latinos' heads by appealing to the immigrants' need to be American and be accepted in this country."

According to Inouye, there is a national effort to unify the different counter-recruitment efforts. Her group has been working with the "Leave My Child Alone" campaign to inform parents of a provision in the No Child Left Behind legislation that dictates that federally-funded schools are required to turn over private information about students to the military unless parents request in writing to "opt out." The coalition and "Leave My Child Alone" have drafted a policy with the Los Angeles Unified School district that would limit recruiters' access to classrooms. The district adopted the policy last October.

Although "Leave My Child Alone" has been able to mobilize middle-class, educated whites, the campaign is not as effective, according to Inouye, with low-income immigrant communities, where some parents are not as concerned with privacy issues as they are with revealing their undocumented status to school officials. For Inouye, the No Child Left Behind provision is also just one part of a larger trend to recruit students by any means necessary. Inouye cites tests like the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery exam (ASVAB) administered in two-thirds of the schools in her coalition to determine which job students are qualified for in the military. "It's a voluntary test, but schools administer it as if it was mandatory, and students have gotten suspended for refusing to take the test," Inouye said.

Kevin Ramirez, coordinator for the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, a group that advises and supports those in the military seeking the conscientious objector status, long ago accepted the business of the military's recruiting.

"You have to understand the recruiters," said Ramirez. "They have to direct their attention to where there's better pay-off. It's like selling drugs. You have to know your market. You're not going to sell crack where people buy heroin. They're going to go to schools where historically they have gotten more students to show up."

Ramirez works primarily in Philadelphia but also educates people from places like Florida, Arkansas and Chicago about what he calls the "poverty draft" or the military's way of enticing poor people of color with money for college, job skills and travel. He dates the ethnic-specific targeting of the military's marketing to 2000 when the military changed its slogan from "Be all that you can be" to "Army of One" and started advertising on Yo! MTV Raps and in magazines like Source, Vibe, Urban Latino and Latina. In 1999, the Navy hired celebrities like Spike Lee for its recruiting commercials and recruiters starting showing up at high schools, as part of the "Take it to the Streets" campaign, with their signature yellow Hummer blasting hip-hop music.

The growing trend in counter recruitment, according to both Inouye and Ramirez, is among college students who have also created a more unified effort, the largest being the Campus Antiwar Network, which organized the Berkeley conference and other regional conferences.

"We want to send a unified message that we don't want the military in our schools," said Snehal Shingavi, a UC Berkeley English graduate student and member of the network.

Working in nine colleges in New York City, New York University student and network coordinator Elizabeth Wrigley-Field counts among the organization's successes kicking recruiters out of a dozen schools across the country and pushing CIA recruiters off New York University along with two city colleges in New York. "We've shown the recruiters that they will face a level of opposition that makes it impossible for them to do what they have been doing, which is targeting us first."

The reality, however, is that the network and its members can only keep the recruiters at bay for so long. In December, the U.S. Supreme Court was expected to uphold the Solomon Amendment, a federal law dictating that colleges which bar military recruiters risk losing federal funds.

For Shingavi, protesting creates opportunities for the movement to continue to grow. "We want to create a movement that ends this war," Shingavi said, "and to begin a discussion of why we begin wars at all."

Kara Andrade is a freelance writer and graduate student at UC Berkeley School of Journalism.