Twenty-two thousand demand SOA closing

BY DON IRISH

It's been an annual get together of kindred spirits for close to two decades, and this year was 22,000-strong. Every fall, the week before Thanksgiving, thousands of anti-war activists celebrate life and call for an end to the School of Americas at Ft. Benning, Ga.

The USA installed the SOA in Panama in 1946, where it operated until 1984, when Panama expelled it. That same year, the SOA was moved to Ft. Benning, Ga. SOA “graduates” were involved in many assassinations, massacres and torture in the Latin American civil wars of the 1980s. Of the three murderers directly involved in the killing of the four American religious women, two were SOA graduates. Of the five accused of murdering the six Jesuit priests, their co-worker and daughter, three were SOA products. Of the 12 soldiers responsible for the massacre of more than 700 villagers at El Mozote, also in El Salvador, 10 were SOA-trained. Dictators such as Noriega (Panama), Banzer (Bolivia), and Gramajo (Guatemala) were honored with photos on the walls of the School of the Americas. The SOA has trained tens of thousands of Latin American military personnel in counter-insurgency techniques and equipment, torture techniques, and other means of population control, enabling them to return to their homelands and suppress the less privileged in their struggles against the controlling elites, multinational corporations and U.S. policies.

The SOA Watch campaign began in 1989-1990 with a few people dramatizing the assassination of the six Jesuit priests by lying on the lawn at the Ft. Benning entrance. By 1998, 4,000 citizens from across the USA walked onto the base until stopped by the military police. Subsequent years brought increased intimidations and restrictions—fences multiplied to preclude ready entrance to the base, and helicopters flew overhead.

Federal Judge Mallon Faircloth began giving six-month prison sentences for the misdemeanor offense of trespassing. In 2001, the city passed an ordinance forbidding the demonstration to be held. An appeal to Judge Faircloth brought his injunction against the city, granting that the Constitutional right to assemble to address citizen grievance could be permitted, whether in wartime or not.

Since the beginning of the SOA Watch, 286 individuals have been given prison sentences, totaling 92 years. Fourteen Minnesotans have served prison sentences, five more were placed under “house arrests.” Minnesota usually has one of the biggest contingents at the annual demonstrations, over 150 by bus this year, plus those who came by plane or by car.

The vote to cut the funding of the SOA in the last Congress failed by 16 votes. Now that 34 of those who voted against terminating the SOA were defeated in this November’s elections, their replacements will be solicited to “sign on.” ||