Buried up to his head, a community leader stages a protest at a Catholic Church in poor neighborhood of Bogota, Colombia Wednesday, June 12, 2002. (AP Photo)
MintPress – November has become the month for activists from around the U.S. to gather in the most unlikely of places — Fort Benning, Ga. The region, home to just roughly 11,000 people near the Alabama border, has become a notorious training site here in the United States for military leaders and dictators responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians across Latin America.
Each year, more than 1,500 military personnel make their journey to the state of Georgia to attend the School of Americas (SOA) — a U.S. military base, funded by taxpayers, intended to “train” Latin American military members. Its secrecy and history of violent, anti-democracy graduates have plagued its reputation, leading activists throughout the U.S. on a quest for truth — and closure.
While the training received at the site is confidential, it has been dubbed in the past as the “school of assassins,” as many from its graduating ranks have gone on to achieve records of human rights abuses. A classified copy of its training manual released in 1996 detailed what many had known for quite some time — a curriculum of torture and armed violence and execution in the face of resistance.
Dictators have emerged from the school, as well as those responsible for religiously-motivated killings. Eleven known Latin American dictators are graduates and hundreds more have played integral roles in squashing opposition movements.
Survivors of such dictatorships have also stepped forward, telling their stories and crying out for the closure of the school, seen among many in South America as a tool that causes destruction among their own people.
The issue has gained ground among U.S. legislators, as well. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) sponsored a bill that called for temporary closure of SOA — while it fell short of votes, he received support from 64 congressional leaders.
It’s become a school that graduates Latin America’s most staunch anti-democracy rulers, so the question remains: Why is the U.S. involved in the training and support of those who fight against freedom and democracy? As the U.S. deepens its trade relations within South America, this is a question of even greater importance, especially during a time when indigenous populations are fighting to protect their resources — the very resources that businesses seek to turn a profit.
It comes down to control of resources — not just in Latin America, but throughout the world. A nationalized system of control over the logging and oil industry in Latin America would leave the U.S. out of the equation. It’s in that need for economic control and access to resources that the existence of programs, such as the SOA, are found.
Colombia, known for the worst human rights record in South America, is one location where the U.S. continues to invest. Just this year, the U.S. and Colombia signed a trade agreement that lifts tariffs on U.S. exports.
Notorious graduates
The school opened in Panama in 1946, but was later moved to Georgia, as it was banished from operating in the country any longer. During its existence, it has trained more than 64,000 Latin American military members. Its courses throughout the years have focused on psychological warfare, military intelligence, interrogation tactics and counterinsurgency techniques.
Gen. Efrain Rios Montt is just one of the 64,000 SOA graduates. After receiving training at the school in 1950, he went on to assume the role of Guatemalan dictator in 1982. He did so by overthrowing the democratically elected president, Gen. Angel Anibal Guevara.
During his time in power, his regime was notoriously linked with rape, executions, torture and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous population. It’s estimated that the war waged by the right-wing government against the indigenous Mayan population ended with more than 200,000 deaths and disappearances.
A New York Times article in 1982 quoted Montt as saying, in reference to the indigenous people, “If you are with us, we’ll feed you. If not, we’ll kill you.”
A famous massacre carried out under Montt’s reign included the massacre of 250 people who were brutally killed by the military. A witness to the massacre years later told the Inter-American Court the details of that day, claiming that before deaths occurred, young women were subject to rape, their bones were broken and their children were thrown into fires.
“They separated the girls who were 15 to 20 years old from this group and took them to Guillermo Grave Manuel’s house. They raped them, they broke their arms and legs, and then they killed them,” Eulalio Grave Ramirez testified. “The children were smashed against the floor, and then thrown into the flames together with their parents.”
That’s the legacy Montt, known as a graduate of the SOA, has left behind for the people of Guatemala.
Montt serves as just one example of those who have graduated from SOA — those whose lives are examples of anything but the American dream of freedom and democracy. And yet, they continue to train on U.S. soil, through the support of U.S. taxpayer funds.
Col. Alvaro Quijana of Colombia attended courses at SOA as recently as 2003 and 2004. He was arrested in 2007 for allegedly cooperating and providing security for a drug cartel leader in Colombia. Diego Montoya, the leader of the Norte del Valle drug cartel, is currently on the radar of the FBI.
Perhaps the most famous of SOA-linked massacres occurred in 1989, when Salvadoran soldiers opened fire on six Jesuit priests, killing them and sparking outrage around the world. Aside from leaders at that time graduating from SOA, the U.S. was also supplying more than $550 million a year in aid to the military.
The yearly pilgrimage for peace
School of Americas Watch (SOAW) is an organization solely dedicated to the exposure of the school’s practices, funding, consequences — and closure. Over the years, the organization has compiled a list of the most notorious graduates of SOA, including those originating from 17 South American states.
Each year, the organization stands at the forefront of the annual November protests, lining up speakers and calling on activists throughout the nation to make their voices heard.
This year, the protests included a funeral procession for those who have perished at the hands of SOA graduates. Speakers from South America, including Francia Marquez of Columbia and Martin Almada of Paraguay, were on hand to tell their stories.
Almada was a political prisoner, arrested and tortured by Alfredo Stroessner, a former dictator and SOA graduate. Marquez has emerged as a voice among females in Colombia against the forcible removal of its civilians, recognized throughout the world as an advocate against government corruption.
It’s stories like these that tug at the heart strings and boggle the minds of Americans. Janet Wilson, a peace activist, traveled to Georgia in November for the first time. What she witnessed was life changing — and a sign that there is still much work to be done in order to obtain peace.
“The School of Americas in Fort Benning was amazing, solemn and quite moving,” Wilson said in a statement sent to MintPress. “I wasn’t aware that this has been going on for 22 years. What hope do we have if after 22 years we cannot close this place? I realize protesting is not going to get us where we are. We must make changes at the top. The military is too powerful and the people nothing more than an annoying gnat on their body, easily swatted off.”
Medea Benjamin, co-director of Code Pink, a peace activist organization, considers the yearly trek to Georgia a sort of pilgrimage for American peace activists.
“It’s one of the few places where people congregate to talk about war and peace,” Benjamin said in an interview with MintPress.
For Benjamin, the SOA is an issue that sits closely to her heart. In the 1980s, she lived and worked in Guatemala, where she saw firsthand the negative implications of the School of Americas. Her friends disappeared, and the rape, torture and murders carried out against the indigenous population was a reality she couldn’t ignore. It was there that she was given her first exposure to U.S. foreign policy. It didn’t sit well — and it still doesn’t today.
“I learned about the School of Americas during the 1980s, I saw what was happening,” she said.
What she’s seen emanate from actions in Guatemala is a keen sense of awareness among the local population that leaders, such as Montt, were trained in the U.S. That link is more than enough to plant a seed of apprehension in the minds of Guatemalans.
“For decades now, there’s been a negative image because of past actions of the U.S.,” Benjamin said, discussing the SOA’s impact on U.S. image in Latin America.
Yet, still, the SOA remains somewhat of an unknown institution among Americans. For Benjamin, that’s not surprising. It wasn’t until her time in Guatemala that she knew and understood the program, either. It’s for that reason she was somewhat inspired by the amount of young people she saw this November at the gates of Fort Benning.
A fight for closure
Rep. Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, has been calling for the closure of SOA, citing his involvement working with El Salvadoran officials in the 1980s. He had known the six Jesuit priests who were massacred, and he had become involved with those fighting for justice in the 1980s.
“The war in El Salvador turned a spotlight on U.S. military training in Latin America, and more specifically, on the graduates of the U.S. Army School of Americas,” he wrote in a letter to SOAW. “It was the U.S.-created and trained Atlacatl Battalion that entered the grounds of the University of Central America in San Salvador that fateful night fifteen years ago — and 19 of the 26 Salvadoran soldiers directly involved in killing the six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and the teenage daughter were graduates of the School of Americas.”
McGovern introduced legislation that would have halted operations at SOA, at least temporarily. It didn’t go far, yet received support from 69 members of Congress. Yet McGovern and the SOAW continue to push forward to create change through legislative representation. In November, a delegation from SOAW, along with McGovern, met with Denis McDonough, deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama.
Also on hand during that meeting was Adriana Portillo-Barrow, who told McDonough how six members of her family, including her two young daughters, were killed by SOA graduates.
The meeting ended with McDonough claiming improvements must be made, but not advocating for closure of the school.
Without that closure, many activists don’t see a way to move forward in the Latin American world with full trust intact. Perhaps there is no way to right the wrongs, but continuing to run a U.S.-backed program that has a known reputation for graduating those responsible for mass executions certainly isn’t the step toward freedom and democracy in the world peace activists — and survivors of dictator rule — had hoped for.