by Gina Vodola (a Mercy college student)

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Last November I had the privilege of going to my first protest march in Fort Benning, Georgia. This non-violent protest march is held every year outside the gates of the army base, which houses the School of America (SOA). Even though there were 11,000 participants in last year's demonstration, I was astonished at the number of Americans that did not know about this school, especially when U.S. tax dollars are the primary source of funding for such a school. In this paper my intentions are to educate the reader about the school, its history, funding, and global influence.

The SOA was established in Panama in 1946 as the Latin American Ground Division. This school, training mostly Latin American officers (in Spanish only), "provides principal training elements-joint and combined operations, special operations and civil military operations, noncommissioned officer professional development, and recourse management (1)." Some of the opposition tends to describe the school as training ground for learning "how to torture, assassinate, and sometimes wipeout whole villages (2)." In 1984, the school site in Panama was shut down and moved to Fort Bennings, Georgia where now more than 60,000 cadets have graduated.

What do these graduates do when they are finished their training? According to Nathan Perz (3), once the cadets graduate from the SOA, they return the their home country, frequently becoming members of secret police and/or death squad units. Here is where they get to use the scare tactics learned such as: "kidnapping, torture, murder, infiltration and spying... (3)" among others. Perz also goes on to describe the SOA as the "military wing of the IMF and the World Bank (3)." "The SOA is a product of the larger policy goals established after WWII. The IMF and World Bank work to maintain climates friendly to freely transferable investment capital...done through "structural adjustment programs". "Since these measures tend to place the heaviest burden on the poorer people, they then usually resist in the usual ways: forming unions, joining oppositions parties, advocating populist reforms for the general good, etc. (3)."

This is where the SOA graduates come in. Their job is to use military tactics to suppress the people. The uprising of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, which was symbolically staged for the first day that NAFTA began, is an uprising that took place due to the affects of globalization. This uprising took ten years for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). Their struggle is for democracy, freedom, and human dignity, for land, for an end to free market reforms or what many Mexicans call "savage capitalism" (4). According to the SOAW (School of America Watch is a nonviolent organization dedicated to close down the SOA), "at least 18 top military officials who played a key role in the civilian-targeted warfare were SOA graduates (5)."

Many other human rights violation cases concerning SOA graduates in Latin American countries are starting to be documented as well. El Salvador is a country with many examples of violent and hellish SOA murders, including the murder of Archbishop Romero, the rapes and murders of four churchwomen (from the U.S.), the El Mozote Massacre, all in 1980, and 1989 murders of six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter, at the Jesuit-run University of Central America (nineteen of the 26 soldiers involved in the murders were graduates of the SOA).

"The soldiers from the Atlacatl Battalion came at seven in the morning. They said they had orders to kill everyone. Nobody was to remain alive. They locked the women in the houses and the men in the church. There were 1,100 of us in all. The children were with the women. They kept us locked up all morning. At ten o'clock the soldiers began to kill the men who were in the church. First they machine-gunned them and then they slit their throats."

"By two o'clock the soldiers had finished killing the men and they came for the women. They left the children locked up. They separated me from my eight-month old daughter and my oldest son. They took us away to kill us. As we came to the place where they were going to kill us, I was able to slip away and hide under a small bush, covering myself with the branches. I watched the soldiers line up twenty women and machine-gun them. Then they brought another group. Another rain of bullets. Then another group. And another."

"They killed four of my children: my nine-year-old, my six-year-old, my three-year-old, and my eight-month-old daughter. My husband was killed, too. I spent seven days and nights alone in the hills with nothing to eat or drink. I couldn't find anyone else; the soldiers had killed everyone. God allowed me to live so that I can testify how the Army killed the men and women and burned their bodies. I didn't see them kill the children, but I heard the children's screams." --Testimony of Rufina Amaya, the sole witness to the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador in which at least nine SOA graduates were implicated (5).

Along with El Salvador and Mexico, Columbia, Guatemala, Haiti, Peru, Argentina, and Honduras all house graduates of the SOA within their countries.

One might ask where the funding of this school comes from if it is housed on U.S. soil but trains Latin American military. The schools budget for 2000 was estimated at $4.455 million and monetary backing came from two sources: the first being the Operations and Maintenance, Army (OMA), which runs through the Defense Department. This funding covers cost for civilian pay, guest instructor costs, and supplies and equipement among other things, totaling approximately $3.117 million. The second source for funding is reimbursable funds granted to Latin American countries under the United States Foreign Military Sales (FMS), International Military Education and Training (IMET), and International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) programs (totaling roughly $1.250 million) (1). In the early 1990's, it was recorded that $30 million U.S. tax dollars was used for renovations and new buildings for the school (3).

Since 1993 there have been congressional votes every year (except 1995 and 1996) to either cut off or restrict funding for the SOA, and every year this has been voted down. In 1999, feeling pressured to take some form of action against growing concern, the Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera proposed a plan to restructure and rename the school, making it more academic and recruiting civilians from Latin American governments as well as military students from the region (1). Through this proposal the name of the School of America to Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001, almost immediately after the 2000 congressional vote to close the school, which was only voted down 204-214.

At this year's weekend of protest in Fort Benning, I looked around and could not believe the thousands of people that were their working in solidarity against the SOA. There were groups from every state, every country, dozens of colleges and high schools, peace and justice activists, veterans groups, churches, clergy and sisters and a wide range of faith-based and other human rights organizations. In one-way or another, the school and the graduates it produces influence all of these people's lives. At first thought, one might not understand just how much this school, and the products of it, affect the world as a whole.

These graduates excel in suppressing the poor people of these Latin American countries, then allowing the U.S. to: set up maquilladoras and other factories, eliminating legitimate labor unions, paying workers "competitive wage" instead of fair wage, and ignoring safe working conditions for workers. This allows companies to close factories in the U.S. only to move them elsewhere, for a cost next to nothing. This takes jobs, benefits, and the way of life, as most know it away from our own brothers and sisters.

The 1989 murders of the Jesuits in El Salvador is what inspired Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois to begin his campaign against the SOA. This was the birth of the SOA Watch. The goals of the SOA Watch are as follows: to close the SOA, change U.S. foreign policy in Latin America by educating the public, lobbying Congress and participating in creative, nonviolent resistance (5).

Hopefully I have done my job of educating the reader about the SOA, its history, funding, and global influence. This past November, I was one of the first three students that Georgian Court University had students attend this rally. This Fall along with Sister Marie Cook I will introduce the students of GCU to the SOA and the November Vigil through a power point presentation. I am hoping that more students will get involved with these issues of social justice and actively take a role in the changes that need to be made in our world.

(1) Grimmett, Richard F., and Mark P. Sullivan. "U.S. Army School of the Americas: Background and Congressional Concerns." CRS Report for Congress Updated August 2 2000: CRS 1- CRS 14.

(2) Seeger, Pete. "Singing against the school of the Americas." Sing Out! 48 (): 68-69.

(3) Perz, Nathan. "Paved with good intentions: a profile of the School of the Americas." Synthesis/Regeneration (): 20-24.

(4) Coyne, Thomas. "The Zapatista Movement." 07 Aug 2004.

(5) "SOA Country sheets." School of the Americas Watch. SOA Watch. 04 Aug 2004 <www.soaw.org>.

Referenced Material:

Marrin, Patrick . "12,000 call for closing of SOA ." National Catholic Reporter (1998). 07 Aug 2004.

Buckely, Gail Lumet. "Over Two-thirds of the officers cited for The worst atrocities are graduates of a school located in the United States and funded by taxpayers." America May 9 1998: 5-6.