Leave us alone: a growing antiwar movement gains momentum.(news)

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.

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"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 ...