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GRETA CUNNINGHAM: With news from Minnesota Public Radio, I'm Greta Cunningham. Governor Ventura will look at flood damage this afternoon in Roseau. 13 counties in Northwestern Minnesota have been declared federal disaster areas due to recent flooding.

Twin Cities residents can now get traffic updates using their cell phones. The state transportation department today unveiled expanded 511 service that gives callers real-time traffic updates over the phone. People who don't have a cell phone can get the same information from any phone or the internet.

A fire in the Black Hills of South Dakota has the highest federal priority in the Rocky Mountain region. A federal forest fighting team has taken over the management of what's called the Grizzly Gulch fire. The fire grew from 4,500 acres overnight to 6,200 acres this morning. Mark Johnson is an information officer with the National Guard. He says the historic gambling town of Deadwood and neighboring Lead remain evacuated. Johnson says two homes and six outbuildings have been destroyed.

MARK JOHNSON: The damage, if it weren't for the efforts of the firemen, would have been significantly more. The fire literally came down onto the town of Deadwood and was repelled.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: The fire is burning to the Southeast. Winds are expected to shift this afternoon to push the fire back toward an area already burned. So far, the fire has forced the evacuation of about 15,000 residents and tourists from Deadwood.

The forecast for Minnesota calls for a heat advisory for parts of East Central Minnesota today. It'll be partly cloudy, breezy, and humid statewide. There is a chance of some thunderstorms this afternoon in the north. Highs today from 88 in the north to 98 in the south.

Right now, Little Falls, it's fair and 91. Worthington reports fair skies and 84. It's partly cloudy in Duluth and 83. In the Twin Cities, fair skies, a temperature of 87. That's a news update. I'm Greta Cunningham.

Programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by the Sierra Club, educating consumers on issues related to the use of antibiotics and healthy livestock. Antibiotic-free barbecue, July 2, Boom Island in Minneapolis, 612-379-3853.

GARY EICHTEN: 6 minutes now past 12. And good afternoon. Welcome back to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary Eichten. 33 years ago, James Shannon shocked American Catholics when he resigned as a bishop because of the church's stance on contraception.

14 years ago, Pam Costain began calling attention to America's involvement in wars in Central America. This is director of the Resource Center of the Americas. Both people have made a big difference in the state of Minnesota. And today on our Voices of Minnesota interview series, we're going to hear from both Shannon and Costain. Host of today's program is Minnesota Public Radio's Dan.

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DAN OLSON: This hour on Voices of Minnesota, James Shannon and Pam Costain describe how the strength of their personal views has shaped their public lives. Shannon had a promising future in the church hierarchy. He had a PhD in American studies from Yale.

He was president of the College of St. Thomas. He became one of the country's youngest bishops. All signs pointed to higher office in the church. Then in 1968, while a parish pastor in Minneapolis, he advised a mother that contraception to save a marriage was acceptable.

JAMES SHANNON: She said, we cannot go on like this. Could we practice contraception? And I said, absolutely. She went out the front door happy. And I went out the back door, got in my car, and went to see my archbishop and told him what I've just told you. And he said, Jim, you have no choice.

DAN OLSON: Shannon's advice contradicted church teaching and left him no option, Leder said, but to follow Catholic doctrine. Pam Costain grew up in North Dakota, the daughter of a schoolteacher who was shocked that an African American colleague was denied a hotel room in their hometown. The incident influenced Costain's thinking as she became an educator, then an advocate for Spanish-speaking Minnesotans.

PAM COSTAIN: In some cases, meatpacking companies and others were literally going to Mexico and recruiting in villages and bringing people up here. So we have people here without documents. People without documents are also human beings. And they have the right to the same human rights as other people do.

DAN OLSON: This our, conversations with James Shannon and Pam Costain. James Shannon marched with civil rights protesters in the early 1960s. He was a critic of the Vietnam War. He was the first American bishop to resign because of a disagreement with the Catholic Church's stance on contraception in 1968.

Shannon described the events leading up to his decision in a conversation with Minnesota Public Radio's Krista Tippett. First, they talked about the issue at or near the top of the agenda for most of the country's Catholics, the sexual abuse by priests of young people.

KRISTA TIPPETT: As you watch what's happening in the Catholic Church now, how are you making sense of this and thinking about what it means?

JAMES SHANNON: Let me say, I hope that the present moral scandal within the Catholic Church regarding pedophilia and related crimes will be the occasion for the Catholic Church to re-examine its understanding of pedophilia, of sex, of celibacy.

I'm optimistic that that will happen. I think that these scandals are very serious. They're enough to break your heart. And they have broken many hearts. But I think that the dialogue that is beginning to open up between certainly the bishops of this country and the Vatican, that change is desirable.

The business of dialogue within the Catholic Church is not our leading virtue. We haven't been a great dialogue church. But the severity of this situation is forcing us to have open public dialogue about these issues and to examine what we can do in the natural order about our style of administration to cope with these things.

KRISTA TIPPETT: You are somebody who has lived this. And you've actually lived both sides of it. I think you must be the only person I know who's been a bishop and has also been subsequently married for 33 years. Is that a distinction that you have?

JAMES SHANNON: I'm not the only one, but let's assume I'm one of a small group.

KRISTA TIPPETT: One of a small group. You were a bishop at a young enough age to be able to have such a long married life also later.

JAMES SHANNON: Yes. Yes, that's true. And it's been a very, very happy married life with a great woman.

KRISTA TIPPETT: And when I read your memoir, you talk about the dark-eyed Irish beauty with whom you fell madly in love in the eighth grade. It's clear that this was also part of your identity as any healthy young man. And so how did you think about celibacy when you first became a priest? Was it a sacrifice? Would you put other more complicated words around it?

JAMES SHANNON: Maybe I didn't know enough at that time. But I didn't regard it as a great sacrifice or as an impossibility. There's much more discussion of that now than there was in my day as a young priest.

KRISTA TIPPETT: About whether it's even humanly possible or?

JAMES SHANNON: Not so much whether it's humanly possible but whether it's desirable and necessary. The reasonable basis upon which celibacy is commended to all of us is that it would allow the priests the opportunity to focus on their ministry and not on the matters of family, a spouse and children and these things. And a spouse and children and the economies of running a house are admittedly other kinds of duties.

KRISTA TIPPETT: You could almost see them as competing vocations, I think.

JAMES SHANNON: Well, I think that there is some reason to think that. I think both of those could be maintained if we had some method whereby priests could opt to live a celibate life or to marry as the Orthodox Church has.

DAN OLSON: You're listening to a Voices of Minnesota interview with James Shannon. Later this hour, a conversation with Pam Costain. She's leaving her job as head of the Resource Center of the Americas, where she's worked for human rights causes here and abroad.

James Shannon resigned his post as Catholic bishop after breaking with the church's stance on contraception. He became a lawyer, led the Minneapolis Foundation, and after that, the General Mills Foundation. Shannon grew up in South St. Paul. He told Krista Tippett his parish priest was an early influence on his decision to follow a religious calling.

JAMES SHANNON: I was a student in the Catholic grade school in South St. Paul, St. Augustine's school. Our pastor was an Irish-born priest, Father Jeremiah O'Callaghan. And he's a big buddy of my dad's. They played handball together.

And we lived only a block from the rectory. And he would often call on me in school or out of school to help on some kind of a chore. And I remember when I was thinking of it this morning, there were two brothers in our parish who were farmers. They were unmarried. And they had a big potato farm in the southern part of the city.

And in the depression, they didn't have customers for their potatoes. And they told the pastor they'd come and bring them and dump them on the playground, the blacktop playground. And then he called two or three of us who were altar boys and asked us to come and help the people who needed potatoes. And we would shovel them into gunny sacks or cardboard boxes and put them on coaster wagons.

Somehow I got the notion doing chores like that, that the church was basically a place that helped people who needed to be helped. This is vintage gospel. But I didn't then and didn't for a long time see the church in its theological dimension or in its liturgical dimension. That's not what made me be interested. It was the attraction of doing something on a regular basis to help people.

No one in my family ever encouraged me to become a priest. A lot of people think that you get brainwashed in your family. I was the youngest of six. And one of them, one of my brothers, as a matter of fact, my oldest brother, sat down with me when I came home from college and said that I was going to apply for the seminary.

And he told me that maybe wasn't the right thing to do. And he was speaking of the opportunities in business and professions and things like that. And I said, well, I've thought about those things. But this is what I want to do.

KRISTA TIPPETT: You talk about this turning point you had of an insight, which follows very much from what you just said, that the big givers are the richest people. You then made intellectual and moral commitments and decisions on the basis of that insight.

JAMES SHANNON: I was enormously impressed in the first two years of college. I was studying for my degree in classics, Latin and Greek. And I was enormously impressed by the content of many of the things we read. The dialogues of Plato would stand out in this regard, Aristotle, Homer.

And regularly, these authors focused on what is the good life. And it became clear to me that it's not necessarily owning something or gaining something. The good life is basically a life in which you use whatever gifts and talents you have to help other people actualize whatever gifts and talents they have.

And I had seen it work. I was a student at Crichton High School for two years with the Christian Brothers. And I went to that school with the notion that people who followed a religious life were leading a life of penance.

And I found that these men were young, athletic, full of life, happy. And there was no sign of penance. They were doing what they wanted to do. And they were doing it well by taking youngsters and shaping them and helping them actualize their potential.

So there was reinforcement with my siblings at home, with my parents at home, with my pastor at home, then with the Christian Brothers, that you could be happy and you could be effective. This kind of thinking took place in my first and second year of college.

KRISTA TIPPETT: Right now, there's a phrase in the newspapers a lot as people are examining the priesthood, talking about the sense in the Catholic Church that there is an ontological change, that you are in some sense a different human being after the rite of ordination than you were before.

JAMES SHANNON: There is serious debate among serious theologians that there is an ontological change in being ordained to the priesthood. You're aware of this?

KRISTA TIPPETT: Yes.

JAMES SHANNON: This is much too rarefied for me. I read their stuff. And I'm never quite sure what they're talking about. My namesake, who was a priest in Rochester, New York, Monsignor William Shannon, has written an article in the last year or so that I read on the misuse of the term ontological, that there's an ontological change in a person. He does not believe that.

I define it in my own terms as a deliberate acceptance by the candidate for ordination that he wants to use his time and his talent and his energy from that point forward to enable other persons to actualize all of their potential, to realize their gifts from God, to appreciate those gifts from God, and to use them as God intends that they should be used. That's my simple step-down transformer from high-line theology.

KRISTA TIPPETT: OK. Do you have a simple answer to the question, why did you stop being an active priest and bishop?

JAMES SHANNON: Well, I think I say at one point in the book that I reached a point in my priesthood at which I was unable to deliver the kind of work that was legitimately expected of me by my superiors, my archbishop, the apostolic delegate, the church. That condition came about when I sat down and realized how much I had disappointed people who in a way deserved better from me.

Let me give you specific examples. I didn't wake up one morning and say, I'm through here. But it was several mornings apropos, half a dozen different things. I thought we had been subtly reassured that there would be a shift that would mollify, that would soften the Catholic Church's total prohibition of contraception.

That had been enunciated in 1931 by Pope Pius Xi in his encyclical Casti Connubii, which said that contraception is a serious mortal sin every time. And I was confident that that would be softened.

But the real trigger for me came when I was a pastor. A woman came to see me for counsel in our parish rectory. And she said, I have read and reread the encyclical. And I'm here to get your help. I've been told by friends of mine that you could help me.

And she said, my husband and I have been married four years. He's a very good man. He's a good husband. I love him dearly. We have two beautiful, healthy, happy children. And we have a very modest income.

He had only a grade school education. They didn't expect he would have a better job in the future than he had then. And they tried in their first few years of marriage to practice rhythm and not have intercourse during her fertile periods. Then bingo, after one year, they had a baby.

She was delighted. I think she would have been glad to have 10. But then they went back to rhythm, and then bingo, again, she was pregnant. And they just couldn't afford more babies. And the husband very reluctantly agreed to the wife's interpretation of the encyclicals. She said, we have to practice contraception. And she wouldn't have it any other way.

And she said to me, I came-- she said, yesterday was his birthday. And he came home last night and I had all of his favorite things. I had candles and wine and a lovely dinner. I'd put the babies to bed early. And he saw what I had for him. And he came up behind me, put his arms around me. I was at the sink. And he kissed me on the back of the neck. And I burst into tears and ran into my bedroom and cried myself to sleep.

And he ate his dinner alone. She said, we cannot go on like this. Could we practice contraception? And I said, absolutely. That's the first time those words had ever crossed my mouth. She went out the front door happy. And I went out the back door, got in my car and went to see my archbishop and told him what I've just told you.

And he said, Jim, you have no choice. You promised, meaning that when I was ordained a priest and when I was ordained a bishop, I promised to teach and support and evangelize the people on the doctrine of the church. Well, this was a doctrine of the church. So I told myself, your future in this church is very dim if you're going to go around saying things like this.

DAN OLSON: James Shannon talking with Minnesota Public Radio's Krista Tippett about the events leading up to his resignation as a bishop in the Catholic Church. Eventually, Shannon's views landed him in deep trouble with American Catholic hierarchy. Cardinal James McIntyre said he should be censured. Later, McIntyre accused Shannon of heresy. Shannon recalls his critics use the word Americanism to describe his heresy.

JAMES SHANNON: No one has ever defined that heresy. But if it were to be given a loose description, it is used in the Vatican and in other places in France and in Italy to describe Catholic teaching in this country, which they allege shaves Catholic teaching to make it more palatable to Protestant America.

I was never guilty of that. John Ireland, the first Archbishop of this diocese, was responsible for the coining of that name, I suppose, because he was so grateful that his immigrant father and mother and he coming from Ireland would be received in this country.

So he was a red, white, and blue American. And his critics in France and in Rome developed the term Americanism to define his writing. And he went to Rome to answer that. It's curious that only two bishops in history have been accused of the heresy of Americanism, John Ireland and Jim Shannon. And we're both from Minnesota.

Some of my friends kid me and say, what is it about Minnesota? And I say, it's mother's milk or it's the water in Minnesota that make us this. But my relations with McIntyre, his reporting me to the pope as a heretic, and my stand on the encyclical.

And also I got in deep water with the apostolic delegate, Archbishop Vagnozzi, when he was the delegate in Washington by being the first bishop in the country to say publicly in print that I thought the war in Vietnam was unwinnable. I did not, we did. Eight Catholic college presidents came out with a joint statement in the press in 1967. And I was one of them. But I was the only one who was a bishop.

KRISTA TIPPETT: And that's when you were still president of the University of St. Thomas?

JAMES SHANNON: No, by this time I was the pastor of St. Helena's in Minneapolis.

KRISTA TIPPETT: Now, I think that that is perhaps more significant than it might sound because by just war theory, which is part of Catholic tradition, if the war is unwinnable, that also starts to question the justness of the war. Is that right?

JAMES SHANNON: Yes.

KRISTA TIPPETT: So that was grave.

JAMES SHANNON: Yes, that was grave. And Cardinal Spellman was the head of the military chaplains. It was his duty to recruit those chaplains. And he was very deeply committed to the war in Vietnam. And he went there for Christmas midnight mass every year that war was going on.

And he took a very dim view of young bishops like me saying, we have reached a point at which we cannot win this war. We have to negotiate it. That was the letter that we published. Whether the war in Vietnam was a just war, a term that is not used much anymore but was then, whether it was just war or an unjust war became, in my view, a moot question when Pope Paul VI came out very clearly and flatly and repeatedly in two different printed documents and in three different speeches.

He said, it is time for that war to be settled by means other than arms. And that's what I was saying. So when the delegate called me, invited me to Washington to defend my position, I said, archbishop, it strikes me as strange that you are the personal representative in this country of the Holy Father. This Holy Father has publicly, repeatedly, and clearly said that war has got to be settled by some kind of diplomacy.

And I said, that's what I'm saying. But you don't agree with the pope. And he said, no, no, no, I do agree with the pope. I said, I don't think you do. That's when our conversation ended. He said, I'm giving you notice now that you could have a great career in the Catholic Church. You could be an archbishop. But you can't be an Archbishop if you go around antagonizing the cardinal archbishop of New York and the cardinal archbishop of Los Angeles.

DAN OLSON: You're listening to a Voices of Minnesota interview with James Shannon on Minnesota Public Radio. Shannon resigned as a Catholic Bishop, married. However, he says he's never left the Catholic Church. Here's the rest of his conversation with Minnesota Public Radio's Krista Tippett.

KRISTA TIPPETT: As you have said, you are still once a priest and a bishop, always a priest and a bishop. And I'm curious about how you've experienced your vocation to be lived out in the other careers you've had as a foundation executive, as a lawyer, as a teacher.

JAMES SHANNON: There is a well-established myth in the Catholic Church that any priest who leaves the ministry after accepting ordination is destined to become a derelict. And that's the word that's used.

When I was a young bishop at one of the bishops meetings in Washington, Bishop John Wright, who is now deceased, but he was a Cardinal by the time he died, he was then the Bishop of Pittsburgh. He was the favorite scribe for-- not scribe. He was the author for many of the bishop's pastorals.

And he read us a draft of a pastoral he wanted us to sign. And he used that expression. He called the priests who left their ministry a derelict. And I rose and asked the chairman of the meeting if I could go to the microphone. And I begged with them. I said, please don't use that term. These are our brother priests. And they are good people. And they're not derelicts. And we have no right to penalize them this way.

Well, I think that word stayed in that issue because that's really what they wanted to say. I was not afraid that I would be a derelict. I had enough confidence in myself and my training. I had a doctorate in American history from Yale. And I felt I had-- I didn't ever have any worry about money.

KRISTA TIPPETT: You'd been a college president as well. I mean--

JAMES SHANNON: Well, I had been a college president for 10 years at St. Thomas. That's right. And I had administrative experience, so I thought I was in pretty good shape. But after a year at St. John's College in Santa Fe, I realized that was not my calling.

And with some apprehension, I told my dear wife that I thought I would like to go to law school. I was 49 years of age. And God bless her. She said, I think that's a great idea. She had wanted to go to law school herself and didn't do it.

She went back to work. She doesn't like to have me say that she put me through law school. But there's no other way to say it. She was the breadwinner for the three years that I was in law school. Then after I finished law school and practiced law in New Mexico for two years, I was invited to come back to Minnesota to be interviewed for the presidency of the Minneapolis Foundation.

There's a pastoral dimension to being a senior officer in a foundation. But that was a calling for me. And I was president of that foundation for four years. And then for 10 years, I was president of the Minneapolis Foundation.

KRISTA TIPPETT: General Mills?

JAMES SHANNON: General Mills. And those two positions gave me the opportunity to exercise my pastoral ministry. And I was very happy. They were very good assignments for me.

KRISTA TIPPETT: Well, I think back to the first story you told me about in your childhood, how your overriding impression of the church was it was a place that helped people. It helped people get what they needed. And in some sense, that's what the General Mills Foundation was doing as well.

JAMES SHANNON: The ideal way to look at a good foundation is that it uses its resources to make a level playing field for people who haven't got a level playing field. Now, that's a very big definition. But that's what they do.

KRISTA TIPPETT: By way of closing, I'd like to ask you, looking back on your whole life in the church and what's happening today in the largest possible sense, I mean, not just the things that are going wrong, what is your deepest sadness? And where is your greatest hope?

JAMES SHANNON: Good question. My greatest disappointment is that the Catholic Church has not been able to do as well after Vatican II as it did during Vatican II. I've said that before in this interview.

I think if you read the life of Pope John XXIII-- Peter Hebblethwaite has written an excellent life of John XXIII. And his expectations were grand. I don't think they were unreasonable. And they have not been realized.

The Vatican Council is still a subject of argument in the Catholic Church. We haven't done a good job of translating it. And that's a great sadness for me because we were well on the road. When that council ended, we thought we were in for a wonderful new era of life and joy and renewal.

That hasn't happened. It's been started. We shouldn't knock it. And I'm not knocking the council. And my greatest hope is that it's not too late. John had the principles right. John was an apostolic delegate in Bulgaria, in Turkey, in Greece, in Paris. And then he was the Cardinal Archbishop of Venice before he became pope, so he really did know the church. And he really had the best interest of the cause of Christ at heart.

KRISTA TIPPETT: All right. That's your worry and your hope really mixed into one, isn't it?

JAMES SHANNON: You asked me what was my greatest disappointment. I deliberately steered clear of saying my greatest disappointment is this current sexual scandal. But in the long life of the church, bad as this is, we have survived eras which were just as bad in the past, if we would be candid.

And I can't quite understand the people who are quoted in the press about every day, the Catholics who say, I can't stay in the Catholic Church anymore. The Catholic Church is not just the actions of the bad people in the church.

The Catholic Church is the living ongoing attempt to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. And it isn't that gospel that we're rejecting. We're rejecting people who violate that gospel. And I think that the church still has a chance for another shot at the Vatican Council maybe with these documents, maybe with some new documents.

DAN OLSON: James Shannon, his autobiography detailing the events leading up to his resignation more than 30 years ago as a Catholic Bishop is titled Reluctant Dissenter. Shannon talked with Minnesota Public Radio's Krista Tippett, the host of First Person-- Speaking of Faith.

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You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

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Pam Costain's human rights work has taken her from Minnesota classrooms to coca-growing regions in Colombia. Costain is ending 14 years as executive director of the Resource Center of the Americas. The Minneapolis-based center was started 19 years ago to protest US military action in Central America. These days, the Center focuses on the effects of a global economy and is an advocacy agency for human rights here and abroad.

Earlier this year, Costain visited South America to see the effects of the US government's coca eradication effort as part of Plan Colombia. Costain says the spraying to kill the coca plants and convincing peasant farmers to convert to alternative crops isn't going well.

PAM COSTAIN: I think what anybody who is very honest about this would say is that coca production has not diminished in the whole of South America in the last decade despite literally billions of dollars of aid going into the drug war.

The reason it hasn't is when coca is disrupted in one part of the continent, it simply moves to another part and another part. And so while they may diminish the crops in Colombia, it may move to Ecuador.

The problem is, is unless poor people, extremely poor people, have some way to survive and coca is their way to survive, they will continue to find ways to plant it. The other issue, really, in terms of the fumigation strategy that the US is using is that it's destructive not just to coca but to the natural environment all around.

So regular food crops are affected. Animals are affected. Increasingly, they're seeing birth defects in the population as well. So it's both a failed strategy in terms of diminishing the quantity of coca. And it's a failed strategy in terms of it has tremendously negative impacts for the people of Colombia.

DAN OLSON: The assertion by the White House Drug Policy Office is that neighboring Bolivia's production is way down. They cite that country as a model of how to eradicate or decrease coca production. So are there models in South America for how to get rid of coca production and try to decrease the amount of cocaine coming out of South America?

PAM COSTAIN: Well, interestingly enough, I've actually been in Bolivia as well. And as production went down in Bolivia, that's when we saw the really rapid rise in production in Colombia. So that's exactly the case in point, that while the US was focused on Bolivia, the production then moved to another country. While they're focusing on Colombia, I believe that now we're seeing production coming back to Peru and to Ecuador.

So again, unless the US is willing to commit to a long-term economic development strategy which will allow people to have some alternative crops, it's very unlikely that this strategy is going to work. And that's a shame for everyone because drugs are of concern to people in this country. And they're concerned to people in Latin America. But the question is, how do you deal with both consumption in the United States and really deal with production in the other parts of the world?

DAN OLSON: Just staying for a moment in South America. So we have spent apparently some millions of dollars encouraging alternative crop production. And what's the record there? What's happening?

PAM COSTAIN: Well, the record is pretty dismal with alternative crop production. One of the reasons is in most of these countries, there's so little infrastructure to actually help the countries with alternative crops. So they might be growing nuts or palm or hearts of palm or bananas or oranges. But oranges are a very perishable crop. And if people can't get those oranges to market very quickly, then it's not a good strategy.

And so, again, this is what I'm talking about, about a long-term development plan. Absent one where there is infrastructure development and agricultural extension service and working with farmers and that kind of thing, these alternative crops are actually doomed to failure because there's not enough of the elements in place to make them work.

It's also true that the inputs for most so-called legitimate crops are very, very expensive. And so the farmer, not unlike in the United states, spends an enormous amount of money with fertilizer and other inputs to grow their crop. And then the world market price for their crop is actually really low. So coca, on the other hand, unfortunately, grows anywhere and everywhere. And the price is very high.

DAN OLSON: When you were in Colombia, did you see signs that indeed, while it will be a very long road, that in fact, the spraying, arming, and training of troops and law enforcement will over a span of what, a decade, a decade and a half be a part of a program along with the introduction of alternative crops, the building of the infrastructure that you've described, the demand reduction in this country, including treatment, which you've described, will be an essential part of a program to address the drug problem?

PAM COSTAIN: I think that there's no question that eradication is an issue. But the question is how you eradicate. And people on the ground in Colombia who I trust and my own instincts would say that eradication has to be manual eradication with the communities involved so that they actually participate in this decision. They're given some control over what happens. And they're given legitimate avenue on the alternative crops.

So I'm actually very, very pessimistic right now about Colombia. What we're seeing is instead a rapid increase in the militarization of the society, a military approach to a social problem. And I just don't see that we're going anywhere but to greater engagement and greater military activity.

And I would predict actually in 10 years that you're going to see US troops in Colombia, not an eradicated coca crop but the US actually involved in a long-term entanglement in that region of the world. And I don't think it has to be that way.

DAN OLSON: Pam Costain, the outgoing executive director of the Minneapolis-based Resource Center of the Americas. The Center sites Central America as another region of the hemisphere harmed by American foreign policy. Costain says the US-supported wars in Central America left devastated economies and fractured governance.

PAM COSTAIN: In Guatemala, there is increasing repression. Just in the last couple of months, a person associated with the office of Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú was assassinated. Father Geraldo was assassinated in Guatemala. People associated with the truth and reconciliation commissions and human rights work are under death threats all the time.

So what we're seeing, unfortunately, in Guatemala is a rapid rise in repression. They have not been able to, in a way that perhaps we could say South Africa has, really deal with the perpetrators of human rights abuses in the past. And so they're coming back around again in the society.

DAN OLSON: What's happened to El Salvador?

PAM COSTAIN: Well, El Salvador could perhaps be characterized most by being an export processing zone, though these export processing factories, everything from clothing, to shoes, to small kinds of appliances, and that kind of thing, are made throughout Central America. El Salvador is perhaps the strongest in that.

So what you have is a situation in which the vast majority of people who are employed work in export processing zones where the wages are very low. Most of the employees are women, many of them very young women. And they are producing goods for the US market.

There have been a number of labor struggles that have occurred in El Salvador trying to get unions in these plants or just more just wages or whatever. And by and large, those are very, very difficult struggles to wage.

What we began to understand when we changed from the decade of the '80s to the decade of the '90s is the military wars were over. The US had recognized and several of the bodies in Central America had recognized that a military strategy wasn't going to work.

But what has replaced it is an economic strategy of domination so that we have, instead of the US military, we have corporations that have come into these countries, not all of them US corporations. There are US corporations. But there are also Taiwanese and Korean and Spanish and multinational corporations from all over the world who have come in and basically dominate these economies.

It's very, very difficult for Indigenous by meaning just from that country business person to compete with the international capital that's in these countries. And most of the goods that are produced are produced for the export market. So they're not for the needs of the people who live there. But they're instead for us in this country.

DAN OLSON: That does seem to be a necessary rung on the ladder for the economies of many of these countries that granted a lot of the wealth may get shipped overseas. But it does have the effect of creating the start-up jobs that an economy needs to get itself going 5, 10 years down the road. Is that a kind of evolution that you foresee?

PAM COSTAIN: Well, I think this goes to the whole question of globalization. And where is globalization going in the world today? And the perspective that we have at the Resource Center of the Americas is that globalization is a fact of life. It's happening. It's been happening for more than a decade in its current form. And it will continue to happen.

So it's not a question of shall we trade with other countries? Shall we be buying products back and forth? It's really a question of, who benefits and who loses in the globalization scheme? And for us, we would insist that with globalization must be regulation of capital as it moves. Just a century ago in the United states, we eliminated child labor. We got an eight-hour working day. We got the breakup of the trusts and that kind of thing.

What we're seeing is that dynamic is now going on a global scale. And financial interests are saying, I get to do what I want, where I want, when I want it. And nobody can tell me any differently. And citizens in the United States and across the world are saying, no, you can't.

An economic system is a system that all people participate in. And we have a right to regulate that economic system. We have a right to insist that labor laws be respected, a right to insist that human rights are respected, a right to insist that the environment is protected, whether or not it's in Mexico or the United States.

So there's a great global struggle going on, not against globalization as it's sometimes defined, but about the terms of globalization, who's going to be a winner? And who's going to be a loser? And those of us who are on the critical side of the corporate globalization process say that we really have to use a criteria of how human beings benefit from this in order to determine.

So, for example, while it's true that in many countries there are jobs and there may not be jobs there, the question really has to be, what is the quality of those jobs? And what is the long-term prospect of advancement for the people who have those jobs?

And our conclusion right now is it's virtually nil. The race to the bottom is very dramatic. Right now there are companies that are leaving Mexico to go to China because the dollar a day in Mexico is not as cheap as the $0.32 a day in China, et cetera. And so we have a race to the bottom going on. And we don't see it as a question of jobs or no jobs. We see it as a much bigger question of, who's going to control this process?

DAN OLSON: I don't see as many of my fellow Americans really having much interest in that issue of the $0.32 a day being earned by some workers in China as the fact that their shirts, their underwear, their DVD players are affordably priced, affordably in their mind. That is to say the lowest possible price at their local discount store.

PAM COSTAIN: Well, actually, I think you're wrong. I think that there's an incredible level of interest in these issues. We find it all over. For example, we work with young people. We have a project that's a youth organizing project, peer educators who go into the classroom of their fellow teenagers and middle school students and talk to them.

And we have literally thousands of kids in Minnesota alone-- and we're just doing this work in Minnesota-- who are concerned about the fact that the clothes they wear and the shoes they wear and the soccer balls they kick are actually made by other children and other teenagers in parts of the world who ought to be going to school but who do not.

So we actually find a great deal of interest in this. We also find a great deal of interest in this amongst working people because there is direct competition for jobs. And people understand that if a corporation can pay even $8 a day in another country, as opposed to $100 a day here, that jobs are threatened. So we see an incredible interest in this amongst working people.

We also are finding a lot of interest in the faith community because this is really a moral issue. Do we want to construct our well-being in this country on the work and the labor of other people who don't even get enough to eat in order for us to have cheap goods?

So that's one answer. The other side I would say to this is that actually marginally increasing the wages and the respect for laws in other country will not in fact affect the price of the goods in this country.

What affects the price of the goods in this country is actually the greed of the corporations that are selling it. The margin is so great that whatever it would take to pay a few pennies more per hour around the world would actually not affect-- should not affect the price that we pay as consumers.

DAN OLSON: You're listening to a Voices of Minnesota conversation with Pam Costain. She's ending 14 years as executive director of the Minneapolis-based Resource Center of the Americas. Costain says the center became an advocate for Spanish-speaking residents when census numbers showed their prevalence in Minnesota.

PAM COSTAIN: There were many people, perhaps up to a half of the Latinos in Minnesota, who were here without documents. They're here because they're recruited to come here by businesses, because we've had a relatively strong economy, because the economy of Mexico is actually, contrary to popular belief, in absolute shambles.

People are very desperate economically in Mexico. And Minnesota provided a way out. In some cases, meatpacking companies and others were literally going to Mexico and recruiting in villages and bringing people up here.

So we have people here without documents. Our point of view is that people without documents are also human beings. And they have the right to the same human rights as other people do, that they have a right to dignity, that they have a right to be treated with respect.

And if we want their labor, which we presumably did, then we also should listen to who they are and attempt to get to know these people. And fundamentally, then we believe there will be a change in immigration law.

It's really upsetting to us that we would think that it's OK for people to come here and roof our houses and landscape our gardens and clean the kitchens in all our restaurants. But if those people ever assert their right, their right not to be cheated out of their wages or their right to have a finger treated when it's cut off, if those people assert those rights, they have the right, in our opinion, to be respected.

So what we did was create a project in which we work with low-wage immigrant workers without regard to what their legal status is, to help them understand how to be treated fairly in the workplace in this society.

DAN OLSON: Grading, no doubt, on the minds of a lot of white Minnesotans is that many of the Spanish-speaking people coming to Minnesota are not making a steadfast attempt to learn English, to integrate themselves more with the economy by adopting American culture, whatever American culture is deemed to be. What is your experience?

PAM COSTAIN: Well, first of all, my experience is that there is actually a great deal of openness to the newcomers in Minnesota. I think certainly, there are people who oppose this wave of immigration. But we find a tremendous interest.

We teach Spanish here. And we teach it because there are so many people of Anglo English-speaking people who want to know their new neighbors. And so it may be because they live in their neighborhood or because their children are in their school or whatever.

So one thing I would say is that we have seen a real genuine openness to the newcomers here. It's been very rewarding to see that. And in fact, we moved into the Longfellow neighborhood precisely because the neighborhood approached us and said, we're a changing neighborhood. Spanish-speaking people are moving into our neighborhood. And we would love to have an organization such as yours help us make this be a positive change.

They saw us as a bridging organization between communities. So I love this tradition of Minnesota, this tradition that we care about other people and that we really want to figure out a way to constantly work with diversity so that it's a benefit for everybody.

DAN OLSON: Pam Costain, I'm trying to remember the Resource Center of the Americas' involvement with a man by the name of Rene Hurtado, who came to Minnesota from a Central American country and became a cause because the federal government wanted to send him back.

PAM COSTAIN: The story with Rene Hurtado is worth remembering and reflecting on. Rene Hurtado was a young man who was drafted into the Salvadoran army, a peasant man who had very little options in his country.

And when he witnessed torture and other repression by the Salvadoran military, he said, as a matter of conscience, I cannot do this. And he left El Salvador. And he came to the United States. And he was given sanctuary at St. Luke Church in Minnetonka.

And his story became a really important story about the wars in Central America and the US funding. Subsequently, Rene was affected by a more than decade-long battle with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to be able to stay in the United States.

DAN OLSON: Is he still here, by the way?

PAM COSTAIN: He is still here. He's an incredible person in our community. He came to the United States with very little formal education. He managed to get himself a GED and a college degree and is studying law.

And so we should be very, very proud that this community embraced Rene Hurtado and gave him the benefit of the doubt and gave him the promises of the United States that people can escape political repression and make something of their lives.

DAN OLSON: Pam Costain grew up in Minot, North Dakota, the daughter of educators. As an adult, Costain became an adult literacy teacher for Vietnam War veterans and others. She says her mother's example influenced her attitudes about human rights. What was growing up in Minot like?

PAM COSTAIN: Well, it was a town of about 30,000. It was a rural community. There were not very many people that were not Norwegian farmers. We were Lake Wobegon in many ways. But there was one kind of diversity in Minot. And that was a fairly strong Native American community but invisible, absolutely invisible to the non-Native community. So that's one thing.

And one of the formative things in my life is my mother was a junior high social studies teacher. And I'm very proud to say that my mother taught Native American history long before multiculturalism was on the screen.

She just really respected and admired and the contributions that Native people had made. She knew a lot about Native people in North Dakota and she taught it. So one of my formative experiences was being in a household of somebody who just cared about Native American history.

But another formative experience that I will never forget about my mother was that when I was in fifth grade, there was a teachers' convention in North Dakota that took place in Minot. And one day I came home to my little room in our apartment. And there in my room was a middle-aged African American woman.

And so I went to my mother and I said, what is this woman doing in my bedroom? And she said that she was a teacher from another town, probably one of less than a half dozen Black teachers in the state. She'd come to Minot for the teachers convention. And no public accommodations would be available to her.

Now, this is not the deep south. This is Minot, North Dakota. This is probably 1960. And so my mother was horrified just at an instinctive human level that someone would be denied a place to stay. And she invited the woman to come stay in my bedroom.

And so I always remember that because, well, my mother was not somebody who associated with the civil rights movement. I didn't have a family that was politically oriented at all. I think I came from a family that really believed in basic human decency and had in some ways, the same racial attitudes that mainstream white America has and in other ways were very, very different.

I mean, they were a unique combination of some fairly backward-thinking but also some just basic decency that allowed them to overcome that racism that I think is so prevalent in white America.

DAN OLSON: Why have you stuck with social causes? You could have had a much more secure and comfortable environment, which would have involved a lot less fundraising, for example, something which I'm sure you must enjoy very much.

PAM COSTAIN: For one thing, I love the people that you meet when you work on social justice issues. It's a community of incredibly committed, dedicated, thoughtful, compassionate people. I also do this work because I see change happening. And I believe in change. And I think it's very hard for many people in our culture not to feel quite distracted and alienated and just adrift in the world in which we live.

And I feel engaged every day. I feel like there is-- I can look around and there are dozens of things that need our attention. Because I'm keyed into that. I see thousands of people working on those issues, whether or not it's working on their public school system or working to keep their neighborhoods safe or working to bring development into the city or the park's clean or global justice.

I see people working all the time in these issues. And that keeps me going. I'm a person who firmly believes that all authentic change comes from the bottom-up. And I really believe in a grassroots approach to change. I think history bears me out. And I think my own experience bears me out.

DAN OLSON: Pam Costain, thank you very much for your time.

PAM COSTAIN: You're welcome. Thank you for inviting me.

DAN OLSON: Pam Costain is the outgoing executive director of the Resource Center of the Americas based in Minneapolis. You've been listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

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