School aims at military control: SOA identified with massacres, rights abuses - U.S. Army School of the Americas - Cover Story

National Catholic Reporter, April 8, 1994 by Tim McCarthy

FORT BENNING, Ga. -- When six Jesuit priests and who women helpers were hauled from their beds and blasted into oblivion in San Salvador in November 1989, the shots echoed all the way to Georgia and they are echoing still. Five of the nine Atlacatl Battalion soldiers convicted of the Jesuit murders were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas here. Nineteen of the 26 Salvadoran officers implicated in the planning and subsequent cover-up of the murders were SOA graduates.

That was no surprise to the activists who had been protesting against SOA for years, but the murders gave a macabre, high-profile twist to an old story of oppression and human rights abuses by U.S.-trained soldiers throughout Latin America. Pressure to close the school has been mounting ever since.

SOA has been called a "school for dictators," a "Cold War dinosaur" and an "academy of torture." Its defenders say SOA reinforces U.S. influence in Latin America, where the military is often a major political and economic player. Established in the Panama Canal Zone in 1946, SOA has trained more than 58,000 soldiers from about 23 countries. The current annual rate is around 2,000.

Under the terms of the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty, the school left Panama in 1984 and moved to Fort Benning. Former Panama strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega, now serving 40 years for drug trafficking, may have had mixed feelings about the SOA move. He was a graduate.

These days it is hard to find anyone outside the school -- apart from a few resident of nearby Columbus who "feed at the (SOA) public trough," as one local observer put it -- who will defend its existence. According to one insider, even the Fort Benning high command "only tolerates" the school. Several sources said the despite an almost constant round of dinners and cocktail parties, the school is pretty much isolated from the Fort Benning community. The post, which has a long and proud tradition as an infantry headquarters, receives little benefit and a lot of headaches from its presence.

Last year, Rep. Joseph Kennedy II, D-Mass., tried to have SOA's $2.9 million operation and maintenance budget cut from the defense appropriations bill. The amendment failed 256-174, but Kennedy aide Bill Spencer said another congressional attempt to close the school will be made later this spring. With that in mind, SOA opponents plan a 40-day fast and lobbying effort on the steps of the Washington Capitol, April 11 through May 20.

In a statement on SOA issued last November, Kennedy said that by "any reasonable standard, the extensive record of abuse by the school's graduates demonstrates that it has failed in one of its central missions -- teaching respect for human rights and civilian authority. Through the school, the United States continues to be associated with those abuses."

But many critics of SOA argue that "teaching respect for human rights and civilian authority" was never a serious part of the school's central mission. They say the United States has accommodated and covered up many of those abuses and SOA has publicly lauded some of the worst perpetrators, often at U.S. taxpayers' expense.

Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois, who has served major jail time of protests against the school, sees SOA as a symbol of this country's age-old attempt to impose its political and economic will upon Latin America by maintaining the lucrative gap between rich and poor, North and South.

Bourgeois , 55, founded SOA Watch at the gates of Fort Benning shortly after the Jesuit murders in 1989. With the help of Vicky Imerman, a former soldier at Forth Benning, he has been keeping close tabs on SOA ever since. "This is a teaching moment," Bourgeois said in a recent interview. "We can teach people about our (U.S.) relationship with Latin America by teaching them about this school in our own back yard."

Human rights report card

Imerman and others have painstakingly documented human rights violations by SOA graduates. SOA chief of staff Lt. Col. John Bastone pointed out that groups such as SOA Watch, the Washington Office on Latin America and Americas Watch combined "have identified approximately 71 individuals, who are graduates of different SOA courses, to be guilty of human rights violations. Of the 58,000 graduates since 1946, that accounts for .12 percent," Bastone said.

Imerman called Bastone's statement misleading. SOA Watch is primarily concerned with violations during the last 20 years, not back to 1946, she said, and "we have identified about 100 Colombian soldiers alone. I don't know where he got that figure."

Bastone went on to boast that "SOA alumni have attained positions of prominence, which include 10 presidents of the republic, 15 ministers of national departments, 23 ministers of defense" and many others.

Apart from Noriega, those esteemed graduates include Gen. Hugo Banzer Suaez, Bolivian dictator 171-78, who brutally suppressed progressive church workers and striking tin miners; Gen. Romeo Lucas Garcia, Guatemalan dictator 1978-82, whose bloody reign saw at least 5,000 political murders and up to 25,000 civilian deaths at the hands of the military; Gen. Policarpo Paz Garcia,