Protesting at the fort

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 8, 2000 by Pat Marrin

Peace and justice demonstrators again sound call for Department of Defense to close `School of the Assassins'

In a crowded coffee shop at the Howard Johnson motel on Veterans Parkway here, three young Argentinean women huddled in final preparation for a long day in the rain. Paula and Eva Urrita were just toddlers in 1977 when police burst into a coffee shop in Buenos Aries and shot their mother in the legs and took her away in a van. The youngsters never saw her again. She was one of 30,000 victims of the "dirty war" waged against civilians by the military under Gen. Leopaldo Galtieri.

The Urrita sisters, who now live in Canada as political refugees, work with a human rights group, known by the initials H.I.J.O.S., for the children of the "detained-disappeared." Paula and Eva, along with another Argentinean, Veronika Mirales, whose family also fled to Canada, were here Nov. 17-19 with members of the Vancouver chapter of the Christian Task Force on Central America. The three joined an estimated 10,000 other protesters at Fort Benning, home of the School of the Americas, a U.S. Army training school for soldiers from 18 Latin American countries. Six hundred graduates of the school, including Galtieri, have been linked to human rights violations throughout the hemisphere.

"Our lives, our memories and personal histories were taken from us by the violence," Paula later told thousands of protesters at the main gate of the fort. She said she had come as a witness to the long-term trauma inflicted all across Latin America by security forces, police and paramilitaries who have benefited from combat training at the school.

In 1990, a handful of protesters gathered here for a 35-day fast to call attention to the school, which was founded as an anti-commununist tool. Protesters have returned every November as part of a larger movement aimed at shutting down the school. In the past five years, the crowds have grown enormously as thousands showed up from around the country and overseas.

As in recent protests, this year's symbolic funeral procession at Fort Benning again commemorated the 1989 murders of six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter by Salvadoran commandos who had just returned from training at Fort Benning. School of the Americas graduates have been implicated in the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the rape and murder of four U.S. churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980, and other documented human rights atrocities throughout Latin America.

Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois, a Vietnam veteran and former missionary in Bolivia, has been determined to close the school since the mid-1980s, when he first learned of the U.S. Army's link to the violence in Latin America. He cofounded SOA Watch in 1990 and, when not in federal prison for his part in protest actions, has lived in a small apartment just outside the main gate at Fort Benning. Annual protests in Columbus and at the Pentagon and an intense lobbying effort nearly succeeded in getting Congress to cut funding to the school in 1999. Stung by the criticism and the threat to its funding, the Army last year proposed changing the name of the school to WHISC (Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).

The name change becomes effective in January, With administration shifting from the Army to the Department of Defense.

Calling the name change cosmetic, Bourgeois said his protest would continue. "New name, same shame. The school is still about men with guns providing the muscle behind the exploitation of our brothers and sisters in Latin America," he said.

Strategy and counterstrategy

The decade-long standoff at Fort Benning has turned into a war of nerves and a contest Of strategy and counterstrategy between SOA Watch organizers and Fort Benning. The fort, after years of pushing harsh prison sentences for trespassers and seeing that this did not deter the growing movement, in 1998 and 1999 took a different tack and began simply busing thousands off the base without processing anyone except a targeted few.

The city of Columbus, which has provided police to maintain safety at the protest site, showed signs of warming to the protesters, praising their cooperation, nonviolence and commitment and the fact that they leave the site litter-free at the end of the protest. Local media began calling the annual protest a festival and reported that local merchants were welcoming it as the largest "unofficial convention" Columbus sees each year.

But this year, continuous rain and temperatures in the upper 30s seemed to mark both a return to colder tactics by Fort Benning and a bracing rebaptism for the thousands who again gathered to listen to speeches and music at the makeshift stage near the main gate. The steady rain turned the grassy median and boulevards on both sides of the road into reddish mud. Hundreds of umbrellas sprouted over the swelling crowd, which sported all manner of color and costume, including trash-bag rain gear. Buses, vans and cars from Wisconsin, New York, California, Pennsylvania and Oregon and most other states poured newcomers into the mass of people converging on the stage.