The School of the Americas and its role today.

• Author: Pardew, Christy
• Position: Shaking Off El Norte

The School of the Americas (SOA) is a military training school for Latin American security personnel located at Fort Benning, Georgia. The school has trained over 60,000 soldiers, police and civilian forces since its founding in the 1940s. Some of the worst human rights abusers in Latin America, and no fewer than 11 dictators, including Manuel Noriega of Panama and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia, have passed through the halls of the school.

In 1996, under intense public pressure, the Pentagon was forced to release training manuals used at the school for years that advocated militaries' operating outside the rule of law as well as the use of torture, blackmail and the targeting of union organizers, religious people and those who advocate for the rights of the poor.

In 2000, Congress "closed" the SOA, only to have it reopen three weeks later with a new name, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, with a much more convoluted acronym--WHINSEC. The move was widely seen as an attempt to distance the school from its well-known connections to torture and the training of human rights abusers.

SOA Watch formed in November of 1990 when a dozen people fasted and participated in nonviolent civil disobedience at Fort Benning on the anniversary of the massacre one year earlier of 14-year-old Celina Ramos, her mother Elba Ramos, and six Jesuit priests at the University of Central America in San Salvador. Nineteen of the 26 soldiers found responsible for those brutal murders were trained--with US taxpayers footing the bill--at the School of the Americas.

SOA Watch has held an annual vigil each year since then--this year's is planned for November 18-20--and the movement to close the school has continued to grow. Last year more than 16,000 people gathered for three days of workshops, caucuses, demonstrations and civil disobedience--by far the largest and most diverse convergence to date. Besides organizing the annual demonstration, SOA Watch has active legislative and media campaigns.

SOA opponent murdered

During each of these November vigils, powerful speakers representing the communities most affected by the SOA/WHINSEC have joined SOA Watch at the gates of Fort Benning to tell their stories of repression, hope and resistance.

One of the most compelling speakers at our 2002 vigil at Fort Benning was a man named Luis Eduardo Guerra, founder of the San Jose de Apartado peace community in Uraba, Colombia. Since its founding in 1996, the...