Five people have gathered in a motel room in Columbus, Georgia. We are from Maple City, Bear Lake, Chicago and Seattle. We know something about nearby Ft. Benning that most Americans don't know, and we want it stopped. Here the U.S. Army quietly spends $30 million of your tax dollars each year to train Latin American soldiers at the School of the Americas (SOA). The SOA has operated for 52 years, first in Panama, and since 1984, at Ft. Benning. What do the foreign soldiers learn? The following statement is from a graduate of the SOA who was interviewed for a documentary video:
"The school was always a front for other special operations, covert operations. They would bring people from the streets [of Panama City] into the base and the experts would train us on how to obtain information through torture. We were trained to torture human beings. They had a medical physician, a U.S. medical physician, which I remember very well, who was dressed in green fatigues, who would teach the students… [about] the nerve endings of the body. He would show them where to torture, where and where not, where you wouldn't kill the individual".(1)
A 1993 report by the U.N. Truth Commission linked graduates of the SOA to numerous unspeakable horrors committed throughout Central and South America. In El Salvador alone, the list includes the murder of Archbishop Romero, the rape and murder of four U.S. women working with the church, and the El Mozote massacre, in which a village of over 900 people were brutally murdered. Only one woman survived, hidden in the bushes, and was able to tell the story.
My companions and I, along with 7,000 others, went to Ft. Benning on November 22nd to protest U.S. complicity in such terrorism. Our demonstration took place near the anniversary of the murder of two Salvadoran women and six Jesuit priests. On November 16, 1989, they were pulled from their beds at night and shot. Nineteen of the 26 men found responsible for the murders were trained at the SOA. For the past eight years, protesters have gathered each November to commemorate the dead, to expose the U.S. Army's role, and to demand closure of the SOA.
AT this year's rally, a record 2,300 people risked arrest for trespass by crossing onto Ft. Benning property in a funeral march for victims of the SOA. At last year's protest, the 601 line-crossers were arrested, and second-time "offenders" received 6-month prison sentences. Those 30 people made a personal sacrifice to speak out for justice. This year no arrests were made, presumably because our sheer numbers posed a logistical nightmare for the Army. Instead, the M.P.'s detained us on buses, then drove us off the base about a mile from the main gate and released us with an "ejection letter" from the base.
One of the perils of doing civil disobedience is a tendency toward self-congratulation for one's willingness to risk arrest and sacrifice for a cause. During the rally a Mayan woman stepped to the stage and brought the notion of personal suffering into stark perspective. She was flanked by two of her children, and by white-skinned children holding photographs. The photos were of her two other daughters, who were abducted by the Guatemalan military along with her father and sister. The woman now lives in exile from her homeland in Chicago. She believes her father was murdered, but she has returned to Guatemala several times to search for the children, still hoping they may be found alive. The connection between her tragedy and the U.S. Army SOA? The Guatemalan army has murdered or disappeared over 200,000 citizens under the leadership of General Hector Gramajo, a graduate of the SOA.
Despite the revelations of the UN Truth Commission, the Army denies any responsibility for atrocities. SOA officials state only that the school instructs foreign soldiers in human rights, combat techniques, and American culture and values. An odd curriculum indeed. Don't expect honesty if you ask why your taxes are funding the SOA &emdash; the official response is that the Army is helping to preserve democracy in Latin America. They won't tell you that none of the ten Latin American heads of state who graduated from the SOA were democratically elected. They'll tell you the SOA protects the Western Hemisphere from a Communist takeover. Remember Communism? They won't tell you that the real beneficiaries of the SOA are US multinational corporations (MNCs). The MNC's enjoy tremendous profits when indigenous peoples are forced from their homelands at gunpoint to make way for plantations and resource extraction. They profit from a captive workforce of displaced peasants. Landless and desperate to support their families, their labor is exploited by the MNC's. In return for the magnanimous US provision of military training, weapons, and advisors, Latin American armies gladly "protect" the MNC's interests from peasant activists and labor organizers.
Clearly the SOA is just one link in an oppressive imperialist chain on the necks of the Latin American people. In the book, School of the Assassins, Jack Nelson-Pollmeyer writes:
"The SOA could be closed and its deadly functions carried out elsewhere unless closing the school is linked to a fundamental reassessment of US foreign policy, including a dramatically diminished and changed role for the CIA." (2)
The problem is much more extended geographically as well. Training of Indonesian armed forces has occurred in the US (along with US weapons sales). Their abuses of the East Timorese populations, as well as Indonesian University students, is now well known. Constancio Pinto of East Timor spoke at the War Resisters League Conference in October. He had been imprisoned and tortured by the Indonesian military. One day a guard who had tortured him told him that he was leaving to go to the US for training.
Closing the SOA is clearly necessary but not sufficient. Voices for justice have to shout louder than voices of corporate greed. The Kennedy-Torres budget amendment to end funding for the SOA has been defeated three times. However, the vote in September, 1998, was close: 201 - 212. SOA Watch is focusing on Washington to win support for the bill this year. This would be a good symbolic victory and a step toward peace and justice.
What you can do:
• Contact the White House to speak against the SOA: 202 456-1111
• Contact Rep. Bart Stupak's office to thank him for his vote on Kennedy-Torres, and to request his continued support.
• Go to demonstrations planned for May 1-4, 1999 in Washington D.C. to close the SOA.
• Contact SOA Watch for more information: PO Box 3330, Columbus, GA 31903; 706 682-5369; visit their web site at: http://www.soaw.org
• Contact the Michigan Peace Team at:
1516 Jerome St.
Lansing, MI 48912
(517) 484-3178 -- Fax (517) 484-4219
michpeacteam@peacenet.org
http://www.traverse.net/nonprof/peaceteam
(1) Inside the School of the Assassins video produced by Robert Richter; available from SOA Watch
(2) Jack Nelson-Pullmeyer, School of the Assassins ©1997 Orbis Books, Maryknoll NY
Julian Lewis lives in Leelanau County, is a tax resister, an aspiring organic farmer, and recently attended the Michigan Peace Team nonviolence training at the Neahtawanta Center.