Training Assassins
Panetta, Linda & Serraglio, Randy
On November 18 and 19, well over 10,000 people will gather just outside the main gate of the Ft. Benning military base to voice their opposition to the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA)....
...In response to the indigenous uprising in Chiapas, Mexico became the top client at the SOA, after only a small number of Mexicans had graduated from the school...
...Benning authorities by marching onto the base (home to the SOA) in a solemn "funeral" pro- cession...
...In 1999 the House voted 230 to 197 to cut a crucial portion of SOA funding...
...In 1998, over 7,000 rallied, and more than 2,300 crossed the line...
...Moakley assessed the effort pungently: "It's like pouring perfume on a toxic waste dump...
...last year for an action to close the "School of Assassins...
...The notoriety of the 1989 Jesuit massacre and subsequent investigation jump-started a movement to close the SOA, which had benefited for decades from a shroud of obscurity...
...It also includes one of two officers cited in the bludgeoning death of Bishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala...
...taxpayers...
...Subsequently, the Pentagon quietly resettled the school at Ft...
...SOA graduates thus continue to serve as enforcers of a U.S...
...to meet the basic needs of the people...
...A U.S...
...Randy Serraglio is the Director of SOA Watch/Southwest...
...Following impassioned testimonies of survivors of violence in Latin America, thousands plan to defy federal law and the warnings of Ft...
...The pattern is clear: SOA training has consistently been associated with the worst violence and human rights abuses in modern Latin American history...
...foreign policy that has wreaked havoc and death throughout Latin America...
...Cold War policies...
...In Nicaragua, thousands of Somoza's ruthless security forces made up the bulk of soldiers trained at the SOA in the 1970s...
...The annual November commemoration began in 1990, but during the first few years the number of protesters was small...
...T he pattern continues...
...Manuel Noriega and Peru's recently deposed intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, appear on the list as well...
...Such tactics and training are not aberrations...
...A Human Rights Watch report released earlier this year found SOAtrained officers responsible for numerous atrocities from 1997 to 1999, and directly linked them to brutal paramilitaries who tortured and dismembered their victims...
...Congressional task force, led by Rep...
...In El Salvador, two-thirds of the officers cited in a 1993 United Nations Truth Commission report as responsible for the worst atrocities during the country's civil war were trained at the SOA...
...BY LINDA PANETTA AND RANDY SERRAGLIO Additionally, a 1993 report cited 247 Colombian military officials for gross human rights violations...
...To date, at least 18 SOA graduates are top military officials in the counterinsurgency campaign in southern Mexico...
...After intense lobbying by the Pentagon and the Clinton Administration, the amendment was narrowly defeated...
...churchwomenall in El Salvador...
...The vigil commemorates the November 16, 1989 massacre of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her 15-year-old daughter-killed execution-style-by Salvadoran security forces...
...Happening as it did nine years after the 1980 rape and murder of four U.S...
...At least ten of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's top advisors were trained there...
...In Guatemala, SOA graduates Benedicto Lucas Garcia, Efrain Rios Montt and Hector Gramajo led a scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign that resulted in over 200,000 Guatemalans killed and disappeared...
...Joseph Moakley (D-MA), investigated and reported that 19 of the 26 officers responsible for the 1989 massacre were trained at the SOA...
...The SOA's roster of graduates and faculty reads like a "Most Wanted" list...
...This created a firestorm of publicity, and by 1997 the numbers jumped to over 2,000, with 601 participating in civil disobedience...
...Under intense pressure after the close call in Congress, the Pentagon reacted this year with a ploy to keep the school operating by closing it, then immediately reopening it under a new name...
...They are a fundamental part of a counterinsurgency campaign in which Latin American security forces systematically employ ruthless brutality to incite terror and to suppress dissent...
...Benning, Georgia where it operates today, training some 1,000 Latin American soldiers annually, at a cost of millions of dollars to U.S...
...In one manual, the "celebration of national and religious festivals" is cited as "indication of an imminent guerrilla attack" deserving military attention...
...Among the more than 500 cited in human rights reports are a dozen dictators, and numerous drug traffickers and death squad leaders from coun- tries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Honduras, Chile and Colombia...
...Colombia, the country with the worst human rights record, has the highest number of SOA graduates...
...Again the authorities responded by sending 25 people to prison, but this only served to galvanize the movement...
...However, that decision was overturned a few weeks later by a single vote in a HouseSenate Conference Committee...
...Over half were SOA graduates...
...Moakley offered an amendment to keep the school closed and to create a bipartisan Congressional task force to investigate links between SOA training and human rights abuses...
...The list includes those responsible for the murders of over 900 civilians at El Mozote, of Archbishop Romero, and the four U.S...
...Panama's Gen...
...The facility remains a potent tool for U.S...
...Then in 1995, 13 protesters (including a 74-year-old nun) were arrested and sent to federal prison simply for marching onto the open base...
...churchwomen and the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, this heinous crime carried a powerful message-that no one in war-torn El Salvador was safe from the systematic state repression that engulfed the country...
...Undaunted, 12,000 people gathered at the gate last November, almost half risked arrest and nine were sent to prison...
...Over the years, its curriculum has included counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics...
...Grassroots lobbying and ongoing protests greatly heightened Congressional awareness and concern...
...Some 2,000 protesters came to Washington, D.C...
...The manuals also recommend targeting those who "sympathize with or participate in demonstrations or strikes," or who make "accusations that the government has failed...
...The School of the Americas has for long been so notorious that by 1984 it was already dubbed the "School of Assassins" by leading Panamanian newspapers and others advocating the expulsion of the school from Panama...
...Even SOA supporters called the changes "cosmetic," and Rep...
...Linda Panetta is the founder and Director of SOA Watch/Northeast and producer and director of the award win- ning documentary "An Insider Speaks Out...
...hegemony in Latin America, but its continued existence is also a symbol for the impunity and denial associated with U.S...
...In 1996, following public and Congressional pressure, the Defense Department was forced to reveal that SOA's Combat Intelligence training manuals had advocated executions, torture, blackmail, and false imprisonment...
...That year, it was forced out of Panama under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty...
...The SOA was established in Panama in 1946, ostensibly "to bring stability to Latin America...
...He served a six-month prison sentence in 1998 for his activism to close the SOA...
Vol. 34 • November 2000 • No. 3
