Article: Thousands Protest SOA

By Patrick Mulvaney, The Nation

More than 16,000 people converged on Fort Benning this past weekend to protest the School of the Americas, a US-run training camp for Latin American soldiers. Officially renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001, the SOA was founded by the US Army in Panama in 1946 and moved to its current location at Fort Benning, near Columbus, Georgia, in 1984.

Graduates of the facility return to their countries to utilize their training domestically and are consistently cited for human rights violations throughout Latin America. Its alumni include many notorious human rights abusers, including Manuel Noriega, the former Panamanian dictator, and Roberto D'Aubuisson, the late Salvadoran death squad leader.

The protest marked the fifteenth annual demonstration of its kind, and was the largest ever, a welcome sign that progressives aren't lying down in despair after November 2. "I'm here because there's been no accountability for manuals that were found here," said Laura Slattery, an activist from Oakland, California, referring to SOA instructional material advocating torture that was first revealed in Pentagon documents released in 1996. "And I'm concerned about the fact that we're teaching military skills to soldiers in Latin America," she continued, "and, in turn, they're using those skills to kill the poor, labor union leaders and church leaders."

Indeed, throughout the decades, countless atrocities in Latin America have left trails of blood leading to the SOA. In one of the most widely publicized cases--the midnight massacre of six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter in San Salvador in 1989--a UN Truth Commission implicated twenty-seven soldiers, nineteen of them graduates of the school. And in Peru, Honduras, and throughout the hemisphere, human rights groups have repeatedly linked SOA alumni to heinous crimes. As Linda Aguilare, a student activist whose family members in Guatemala were tortured and killed by the military, said simply: "It's a school of assassins."

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