School for scandal.

Report from Fort Benning

On November 22, some 2,400 of us marched in solemn procession to protest the U.S. Army's School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia. Each of us carried a cross with the name of a person whose death had been attributed to those trained at the the SOA. My cross had the name Carlos Quientero. All I knew of Carlos Quientero was that his life was taken at age thirty-nine. Was he a teacher? A farmer? Was he a father? Some woman's husband? Did he have children? I didn't know. We carried the crosses.

Porque? To honor thousands of forgotten victims and to get arrested by marching through Fort Benning's gate.

But some days you just can't get arrested! That's not to say my wife, Sheila, and I didn't give it our best shot. But after the first thousand protesters were stopped by soldiers and herded onto buses to be booked for trespassing on government property, the Army ran out of buses. Instead of arrest, all 2,400 of us (compared to 600 last year) were handed a "letter of ejection" by the Department of the Army. It read in part: "Your entry onto the Fort Benning Military Reservation to march in protest against the U.S. Army School of the Americas has resulted in your apprehension for Criminal Trespass....Accordingly, you are hereby ejected and ordered to not reenter the confines of the Fort Benning Military Reservation....Whoever reenters, shall be fined not more than $5,000 or imprisoned not more than six months, or both."

Included in our 2,400 were some who had already served sentences as well as 70 protesters from last year intending to be arrested a second time, which meant fine and imprisonment. Sheila and I had expressly come to take the place of anyone who had crossed the line the previous year, and speaking for myself, I was looking for a replacement for the following year, as I was not anxious to do six months in the slammer. Sheila would. Others did.

If you don't know about the School of the Americas, you should. Our tax dollars support it - almost $20 million a year. The SOA was established in Panama in 1946 to show soldiers from Central and South America how to counter Communist insurgency in their own countries. Over the past fifty years, an estimated 60,000 young men have been trained at the SOA, now at Fort Benning. During the cold war, this training was increasingly utilized by repressive governments to stifle the legitimate desires of the indigenous and disenfranchised peoples of their own countries and to violently suppress voices for progressive change. Thousands of declassified State Department, Defense Department, and CIA documents, as well as the UN Truth Commission, confirm U.S. involvement and complicity with death squads trained by the SOA.

Counterinsurgency techniques became a euphemism for torture, rape, assassination, interrogation, coercion, false imprisonment, and extortion. Particularly at risk were and are teachers, student activists, church workers, union organizers, health-care workers, and campesinos. When the United States Intelligence Oversight Board was forced to divulge the content of SOA training manuals in 1996, the New York Times editorialized that "Americans can now read for themselves some of the noxious lessons the United States Army taught to thousands of Latin American military and police officers at the School of the Americas...." Congressman Joseph Kennedy (D-Mass.) summarized the significance of the manuals. "The Pentagon," he said, "revealed what activists opposed to the school have been alleging for years - that foreign military officers were taught to torture and murder."

Latin American nations with the worst human-rights records have consistently sent the most soldiers to the SOA. Examples include: Bolivia during the reign of terror of General Banzer; Nicaragua during the Somoza family dictatorship; and El Salvador during its thirteen-year civil war. In addition:

* Three top Peruvian officers convicted in February 1994 of murdering nine university students and a professor are SOA graduates.

* At least nineteen of the ranking Honduran officers linked to Battalion 316 - a secret army unit that was home to Honduran death squads - are SOA graduates.

* Former Panamanian dictator General Manuel Noriega, a long-time CIA operative currently serving forty years in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking, graduated from the SOA.

* Another alum, Leopaldo Galtieri, headed Argentina's military junta during a period in which thirty thousand people were killed or disappeared.

* More than 100 of the 246 Colombian officers cited for war crimes by an international human-rights tribunal in 1993 are SOA graduates.

As Congressman Martin Meehan (D-Mass.) noted: "If the SOA held an alumni association meeting, it would bring together some of the most unsavory thugs in the hemisphere." Congressmen Esteban Torres (D-Calif.) and Joseph Kennedy, who introduced legislation in the House to cut funding, H.R. 611, observed "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." SOA courses in human rights - such as they are - were described by U.S. Army Major Retired Joseph Blair, who taught logistics at the SOA from 1986 to 1989, "as a bunch of bullshit." Blair attended one class taught by a Chilean army officer, whom he called "a Pinochet thug." According to Blair, most Latin American soldiers regard human-rights training as a joke.

Only a few of the most outrageous human-rights atrocities have made the news here at home: the assassination of Archbishop Romero; the rape, murder, and mutilation of three religious sisters and a laywoman; the gunning down of two union leaders in El Salvador; and the murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter at the University of Central America. A U.S. task force reported that the men responsible for the massacre at the university were trained at the SOA. The United Nations Truth Commission cited, as trained at the SOA, ten of twelve officers responsible for the massacre of nine hundred civilians at El Mozote, which author Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer in School of Assassins describes as "perhaps the single most horrific event of the bloody civil war in El Salvador."

It was the thousands of forgotten victims we honored in our solemn procession of crosses and coffins at Fort Benning. Our ranks included the young, the middle-aged, and the old, high school and college students from all over the country, clergy from every denomination, Veterans for Peace, Witness for Peace, Rainbow Coalition, Pax Chisti, Amnesty International, War Resisters League, trade unionists, and Native Americans.

Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois, founder of the SOA Watch, and recently released from prison (his fourth trip to the slammer) spoke "in the name of others who cannot be here." He described the SOA "as a school of terrorists that brings shame upon our country and upon us and our laws," and asked "how is the SOA curriculum healing? How does it improve the life of our sisters and brothers in Latin American? The SOA is a school of suffering...."

Four abreast, we stepped off to the measured beat of drums, carrying crosses and coffins to honor the memory of those who had been tortured, raped, kidnapped, beaten, arrested, intimidated, silenced, and murdered. Names of the dead were recited: "Anna Sanchez, age twelve," and we answered, "Presente," meaning Anna was present this day as we protested her death and remembered her. Sometimes the person didn't have a name. "Woman, age seventeen with unborn child." "Presente." Up ahead someone started singing "Amazing Grace," and we all picked it up gratefully. The song seemed comfortable and appropriate. A quarter mile into the Army base, we were stopped by soldiers and relieved of our crosses.

Brian Brown is a contributor and editorial publicist for Commonweal. He was formerly spokesman for Time magazine, editor of the Time Education Program, and publisher of Worldwise magazine.