School of the Americas – Why we protest

Commentary by Bill Phelan

An estimated 22,000 people, including delegations from the Tallahassee area, protested Nov. 17-19 at the School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia. This included 16 activists who were arrested and face a Jan. 29 hearing in federal court in Columbus, Georgia, on charges of unlawful entry.

What is the School of the Americas and why have so many people been inspired to protest it? During the Democratic and Republican administrations from 1970 through the 1990s, the school developed a reputation of training terrorists who conducted “dirty wars” on their own people. The SOA’s 60,000 graduates include the most notorious dictators, death squad operatives and assassins in Latin American history: Manuel Noriega of Panama; Auguste Pinochet’s officers of death squads in Chile; Colonel Julio Alpirez, responsible for murders and torture in Guatemala; and General Luis Alonzo Discus, who headed Battalion 3-16, the notorious death squad in Honduras.

The SOA moved to Fort Benning in 1984 to replace the Latin America Ground School that was founded in the Panama Canal Zone in 1946. Both schools were designed to continue the U.S. government’s foreign policy of maintaining the status quo in Latin America by training soldiers in the ways and means of security.

In the dirty war in El Salvador, SOA graduates were responsible for: the rape and murder of four U.S. churchwomen in 1980; the massacre of over 1,000 men, women and children in the village of El Mozote in 1981; the murder of six Jesuit priests and their co-worker in 1989; and the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero while he was saying mass in the cathedral after he had denounced the death squads.

SOA graduates are responsible for thousands of “the disappeared” (people who were arrested and never heard from again) in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Honduras.

In 1992, 124 of the 247 officers cited for gross human rights violations in Colombia were SOA graduates. In 2001, in the face of growing evidence that the SOA was training terrorists, and after torture manuals were revealed, the U.S. Congress closed down the SOA. The school re-opened the same year with a different name – The Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). But it had the same mission: to train Latin American soldiers to maintain the status quo, and continue their dirty wars against democracy, against human rights, and against the poor.

In mid-November, 1990, three men, including Catholic priest Roy Bourgeois, entered the School of the Americas to protest the murder of the Jesuits by SOA graduates. They poured donated blood on the pictures of the distinguished graduates of the school, planted a cross at the gate, poured blood on themselves to simulate a massacre and lay down to await their fate. The three received prison sentences for trespassing and property destruction, and Father Bourgeois served part of his sentence in Tallahassee’s Federal Correctional Institution.

This was the start of SOA Watch, an organization of people of many faiths, from Buddhists to Catholics, Presbyterians to Jews, who protest the human rights abuses fostered by the training at the SOA. We believe that our tax money and our soldiers should not be used to train assassins, murderers and terrorists in the ongoing war on the poor. While we communicate and lobby with Congress through the year and have gotten over 100 co-sponsors on bills to close the SOA/WHINSEC forever, we gather at the SOA in mid-November every year in non-violent protest against the SOA and against any U.S. foreign policy that promotes violations of human rights and exploitation of the poor.

Every year, we gather for workshops for peace and non-violence in Columbus, and then rally at the gates of Fort Benning for songs and speeches of protest and social justice. The following day, we march in solemn funeral procession while the names of Latin American victims are read aloud and prayers are raised on their behalf. I find the funeral procession to be a very powerful religious experience. Each year, several protestors choose to trespass into the fort, knowing they will be arrested and sentenced to months in jail. The 16 activists who were arrested this year ranged from the Rev. Don Coleman, 69, co-pastor at the University of Chicago, to Mike Vosburg-Casey, 32, an Atlanta piano tuner and chicken farmer, to Whitney Ray, 17, an Indianapolis college student.

The protestors included military war veterans, torture survivors, civil rights leaders, hundreds of clergy and nuns, thousands of students including many from Catholic colleges, and 1,000 Grandmothers for Peace, who wore white handkerchiefs in the same tradition of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo of Argentina, who pay tribute to the disappeared. Members of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship walked from Atlanta to Columbus to attend.

Other peace and social justice organizations including Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Colombia Peace Project, Pax Christi, Amnesty International and Fair Trade distributed information and sold T-shirts and other items promoting their human rights messages. To learn more about the SOA Watch, and about the School of the Americas, you can visit the web page at www.SOAW.org.