The School of the Americas is a military school that has trained more than 61,000 Latin American officers in combat techniques, command tactics, military intelligence, and techniques of torture. SOA is an official program of the U.S. government, funded by the government and run by the U.S. Armed Forces since 1946. (SOA’s name was officially changed to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, WHINSEC, in 2001.)

SOA graduates have been implicated in terrorism, human rights violations, coercion, and atrocities committed against civilian populations across Latin America. SOA graduates brutally murdered six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador in 1989 and took part in the massacre of 900 people in El Mozote, El Salvador. SOA alum Byron Lima Estrada was convicted of murdering Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998. Another SOA graduate commanded the unit that carried out the 1994 Ocosingo massacre in Mexico. During the 1980s, SOA manuals recommended blackmail, torture and execution of political dissidents.

The Minnesotans at Fort Benning, like the rest of the 20,000-plus protesters, came from a wide spectrum of the population. Young people included a school-sponsored delegation from Cretin Derham Hall in St. Paul as well as many other high school and college students. Minnesota Vets for Peace brought a busload of people, and others drove or flew to Georgia.

Some Minnesotans have been coming for years. The Minnesota SOA Watch table has a photograph of the late Mary Swenson, who was among the early organizers of the movement to close SOA, and who brought many Minnesotans into the movement. Each person comes with their own story – nuns who have spent time in jail, military veterans who draw connections between the Vietnam war, the SOA and the war in Iraq, children brought by parents, parents introduced to the movement by their children, survivors of Central American wars now living in Minnesota.

“Our youngest daughter was in high school in 1999,” recalled Mary Beth Poferl of St. Paul. “She was coming to Fort Benning, and Amnesty International asked Greg to chaperone the group, and that’s what started us.” Greg Poferl has missed only one year since 1999, and served three months in a federal correctional facility after “crossing the line” in civil disobedience in 2003.

Patricia Hartshorn, a fellow parishoner of the Poferls at St. Mark’s Catholic church, is here for the first time. Hartshorn, a member of the IBEW union, says she learned about SOA from labor unions. Union members are historic targets of the right-wing militaries trained at SOA, as are religious workers, human rights activists, educators and students.

The protesters at Fort Benning see closing the SOA as a necessary first step, but only a first step. Carlos Mauricio, himself a victim of torture by SOA graduates in his native El Salvador, tells the assemblage that the United States is funding a police academy in El Salvador, the Institute for Law Enforcement Assistance (ILEA), which will “train” police from across Latin America. He is clear that such “little SOAs” must also be stopped.

This year, the Fort Benning SOA protesters were connected with thousands of anti-SOA protesters across Latin America in actions and vigils in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Peru and Paraguay, and also with protesters in Ireland and Canada and in other U.S. cities. In addition to the sixteen people arrested for peaceful protest at Fort Benning, two priests were arrested at Fort Huachuca in Arizona.

Reprinted from the Twin Cities Daily Planet community news website, www.tcdailyplanet.net