{"id":757653,"date":"2022-07-23T18:55:49","date_gmt":"2022-07-23T18:55:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2022\/07\/congress-ny-candidate-veteran-brittany-ramos-debarros-anti-imperialism\/"},"modified":"2022-07-24T11:10:20","modified_gmt":"2022-07-24T11:10:20","slug":"veteran-brittany-ramos-debarros-is-running-for-congress-to-stop-americas-endless-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2022\/07\/23\/veteran-brittany-ramos-debarros-is-running-for-congress-to-stop-americas-endless-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"Veteran Brittany Ramos DeBarros Is Running for Congress to Stop America\u2019s Endless Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

In New York\u2019s 11th Congressional District, two veterans are competing for the Democratic nomination. One is a centrist who will strengthen the military-industrial complex; the other is a democratic socialist who built her career fighting it.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n Brittany Ramos DeBarros, candidate for New York's Eleventh Congressional District, addresses demonstrators during an Amazon Labor Union rally in Staten Island. (Victor J. Blue \/ Bloomberg via Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

During the 2020 presidential election, when millions of Americans were being bombarded with appeals from Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Brittany Ramos DeBarros called out a glaring flaw in both candidates: neither was genuinely antiwar.<\/p>\n

As an Afghanistan veteran, DeBarros could not forgive Biden for supporting open-ended warfare in the Middle East. Writing on behalf of About Face,<\/a> a network of post-9\/11 veterans and active-duty service members, the thirty-one-year-old former army captain lamented the fact that neither major party had fielded an antiwar candidate. \u201cMany of us deployed under the Obama-Biden administration,\u201d she wrote, and witnessed a supposedly anti-occupation White House\u2019s \u201cdevastating expansion of militarism.\u201d<\/p>\n

President Trump, on the other hand, was \u201cdoubling down on those wars\u201d by dropping \u201crecord-breaking numbers of bombs on Afghanistan and beyond,\u201d negotiating the largest arms deal in US history, and expanding \u201cterrifying state violence\u201d at home against police brutality protesters.<\/p>\n

Even if Biden beat Trump, DeBarros predicted, \u201cthe realities of war and militarism\u201d would remain pretty much the same. Antiwar veterans and the peace movement would still need to organize against ever-increasing Pentagon budgets<\/a> and new opportunities to project US military force around the globe, which come at the detriment of social programs and the fight against climate change.<\/p>\n

Two years later, DeBarros has made the transition from peace and social justice activism to electoral politics. Her opponent in the Democratic primary for New York\u2019s Eleventh Congressional District is Max Rose, a former Biden administration official and fellow veteran who represented the district in Congress between 2019 and 2021. In the 2020 election, Rose lost his seat to the right-wing, Trump-backed state assembly member Nicole Malliotakis, who claimed that Rose\u2019s appearance at a Staten Island protest over George Floyd\u2019s death made him a supporter of defunding the police. Trump, for his part, derided Rose as a \u201cpuppet\u201d of Nancy Pelosi.<\/p>\n

The first accusation is false: Rose does not support defunding the police. But there is some truth to the second charge. Despite his National Guard service during the pandemic and support for ending the US occupation of Afghanistan, Rose is fundamentally a centrist Democrat. The Eleventh District is New York City\u2019s most conservative, but a redistricting that brought parts of Brooklyn into the district may give voters the opportunity to replace Malliotakis with DeBarros, a left-wing Afro-Latina who says she would join the Squad in its struggle against both parties\u2019 destructive militarism.<\/p>\n

As DeBarros once wrote<\/a> from an army barracks, \u201cany of us who care about economic, racial, and gender justice must also rise up against what is nearly unchecked US military aggression.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

Afghanistan Veteran, Antiwar Activist<\/h2>\n \n

DeBarros could threaten a Trump-loving incumbent in a district with many streets named after cops and firefighters<\/a> killed in lower Manhattan on 9\/11 and residents who later died in the United States\u2019 wars in the Middle East. She grew up in a military family and in what she calls a \u201cvery Republican, libertarian-leaning\u201d part of Texas, which initially made her an \u201cevangelical neo-con crazy person.\u201d After winning a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship, she attended the University of Miami and graduated as a commissioned first lieutenant in the army.<\/p>\n

DeBarros deployed to Afghanistan as a platoon leader and strategic communications officer in 2012\u201313. At first, she believed America was trying to secure the country and help Afghan women. But she says that \u201cit soon became apparent that the US military was the wrong vehicle for achieving that mission.\u201d<\/p>\n

DeBarros was still serving as a captain in the Army Reserves when she attended a meeting of Veterans for Peace (VFP) in New York City at the invitation of former navy nurse Susan Schnall, a leader in the 1960s GI antiwar movement<\/a> and the current national president of the VFP. Two years after attending her first meeting in New York, DeBarros addressed a VFP convention in Spokane.<\/p>\n

Her speech raised questions that the organization\u2019s older members have long grappled with: \u201cHow do we move from fighting each war, one by one, and begin dismantling the system that allows these wars to keep popping up? How do we get at the roots of the system?\u201d<\/p>\n

In the meantime, DeBarros became involved with the Poor People\u2019s Campaign<\/a> (PPC), a national campaign inspired by Dr Martin Luther King Jr to confront poverty, racism, and militarism. As the sociologist Michael Messner reports in his book, Unconventional Combat: Intersectional Action in the Veterans\u2019 Peace Movement<\/a><\/em>, DeBarros\u2019s speech at a June 2018 PPC rally in Washington, DC, gave her \u201cnational visibility as a leader among the next generation of antiwar veterans.\u201d While still subject to military discipline as a reservist, she told a huge crowd that \u201cthere can be no true economic, racial, or gender liberation without addressing the militarism that is strangling the morality and empathy out of our society.\u201d<\/p>\n

After dodging a court-martial threat and being discharged from the military, DeBarros became a full-time organizer for About Face. Her work focused on exposing the political influence of big military contractors and repealing congressional authorization for open-ended warfare in the Middle East. In 2020, she helped enlist hundreds of other veterans to sign an open letter urging members of the National Guard and other military units to refuse riot duty during nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd.<\/p>\n

As she told Truthout<\/em><\/a>, \u201cI can say from experience that the moral cost, the cost to your soul, of following an order that you wish that you hadn\u2019t, is far greater and far more sustained than whatever the military can do to you in the short run.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

An Establishment Darling<\/h2>\n \n

DeBarros canvassed for Rose in 2018, when he ran against a conservative Republican and became the first post-9\/11 combat veteran to represent New York City in the House. Jon Soltz, leader of VoteVets<\/a>, hailed the former infantry officer and winner of a Purple Heart and Bronze Star in Afghanistan as \u201cone of the most energetic and exciting candidates in the country.\u201d But DeBarros says she was soon \u201cturned off by his gross nationalism\u201d and aggressive House floor criticism of a newly elected colleague, Ilhan Omar from Minnesota.<\/p>\n