Protests mount against ‘School of Assassins’

While momentum builds to close the infamous training school for Latin American soldiers known as the School of the Americas (SOA), renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security and Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001, the Bush administration has quietly moved to expand the number of countries eligible to participate in the program.

In 2002, Congress passed legislation banning military training to countries which did not exempt U.S. soldiers from the possibility of facing war crimes trials. Now, however, after a string of left-wing and progressive candidates have gained national office throughout Latin America, the U.S. has sidestepped a law which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described as “shooting ourselves in the foot.”

For decades, the training of these military forces has provided U.S. political and economic interests with loyal allies and surrogates in the struggle to suppress popular resistance to unchecked exploitation and rampant poverty in Latin America.

With an eye to trying to regain influence among the military and prevent the success of mass resistance, the Bush administration on Oct. 2 waived the ban on 21 countries, 11 of which are in Latin American or the Caribbean.

Some 60,000 combat soldiers and officers have been trained by the Pentagon since the establishment of this program in 1946. Relocated in 1984 from Panama to Ft. Benning in Columbus, Ga., the SOA is more commonly known as the “School of the Assassins.” Its graduates rank consistently among the most notorious mass murderers, torturers, coup plotters and dictators in the bloody pages of social unrest in dozens of countries from Colombia to Haiti, El Salvador to Chile.

Trade unionists, human rights advocates, peasant leaders, teachers, poets, students, religious figures and tens of thousands of other civilians, many from Indigenous communities, have suffered death, rape, torture and exile at the hands of SOA-trained soldiers.

On Nov. 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teen-age daughter were dragged from their beds in the middle of the night and brutally killed by a group of Salvadoran soldiers trained at the SOA. Other previous atrocities committed by SOA graduates in that decade included the murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero while he was saying mass at the Cathedral in San Salvador, numerous large-scale massacres in rural villages, and the rape and murder of four U.S. nuns.

The following year, 1990, Father Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest and Vietnam War combat veteran who had witnessed the grinding poverty and repression as a Catholic missionary in Bolivia and El Salvador, led a small group of protesters to the gates of Ft. Benning, demanding that the SOA be closed and that the U.S. end its policy of setting up puppet governments in Latin America.

By 2005, the numbers at what is now an annual multi-day event of education, civil disobedience, protest, celebration and solemn remembrance of the victims of the SOA had grown to more than 19,000 people from all across the country, with large participation by youth from high schools and colleges.

Over the years, dozens of people have “crossed the line,” bringing their message of justice and peace onto the actual base property, and then been sentenced to months in federal prisons for “trespass.”

At the protest in 2000, literally thousands of people defied orders to turn around and went onto the base, confounding military and local police who had no capacity to arrest or detain all of them.

Following 9/11 in 2001, the gates at Ft. Benning were barricaded with high fences topped with concertina wire. Helicopters hovered overhead, and hundreds of police forces surrounded the crowd, but the demand to close the SOA was undaunted.

Instead, the war on Iraq and Afghanistan, the revelations of torture at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the brutal U.S.-backed Israeli occupation of Palestine and southern Lebanon and other issues have bolstered the numbers and determination of the protest at Ft. Benning with organizers expecting over 20,000 this year.

In 2004, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela announced that his country would no longer send its soldiers to be trained in U.S.-style “human rights and democracy.” This year, the governments of Argentina and Uruguay made similar announcements.

The country which currently has the largest number of its military people learning counter-insurgency tactics and crowd control and being trained in sniper techniques and high-tech warfare, is Colombia, where a 40-year civil war pits the oligarchy, backed by huge multi-nationals and the U.S. government, against the workers, the poor and the Indigenous.

Once again, graduates of the SOA have been identified as the perpetrators of recent massacres, torture and the “disappearance” of thousands of men, women and children.

This year for the first time, simultaneous demonstrations and vigils will take place Nov. 17-19 in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Manta, Ecuador; Santiago, Chile; Bogotá, Colombia; Fort Huachuca, Arizona; and Davis, California among other locations.

For more information about SOAWatch and its ongoing efforts to close the School of the Americas, go to www.soaw.org.