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September
24, 2006
VOL.
44, NO. 15Oakland,
CA
Activists urge no students for U.S. military school
LIMA, Peru
(CNS) -- Church activists campaigning to close the Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the
Americas, are now targeting the countries that send military students
to the school.
A team from School of the Americas Watch, or SOA Watch, led by Maryknoll
Father Roy Bourgeois, was visiting Ecuador, Peru and Chile in late August
to raise public awareness and meet with human rights activists and government
officials.
A similar swing through Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia in March and April
resulted in pledges from governments to stop sending military officers
for training or reduce the number.
The school, which opened in Panama in 1946 and moved to Fort Benning,
Ga., in 1984, “has trained many soldiers who have been implicated
in torture and death,” Father Bourgeois told Catholic News Service.
“Many people we have met with (in Latin America) know the school
very well.”
Efforts to close the school have “a powerful faith dimension,”
he said. Many SOA Watch supporters in the United States are priests, religious
and active laypeople.
In some of the best-known cases involving graduates of the school, the
murdered victims -- who in El Salvador included four U.S. churchwomen,
Archbishop Oscar A. Romero and six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and
her daughter -- have been church workers.
Military officers associated with a clandestine death squad linked to
Peruvian government security forces during the 1980s and 1990s trained
at the school, as did officers implicated in several massacres of civilians
in rural areas.
The visit to Peru comes as human rights activists and relatives of people
who were killed or disappeared during the conflict between government
forces and the Shining Path guerrillas and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement
prepare to mark the third anniversary of the release of the report by
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated human rights
violations during those decades.
Nevertheless, Father Bourgeois said, the reception has been cooler in
Peru than in other countries he and his team have visited.
Because the history of violence is so recent, “Peru may be at a
different moment,” said Lisa Sullivan, Latin America coordinator
for SOA Watch.
Students from Lewis University in Romeoville, Ill., join
the Nov. 20, 2005 protest against the Western Hemisphere Institute for
Security Cooperation at Fort Benning near Columbus, Ga., that trains military
personnel from Latin America. Some of its graduates have been implicated
in the murders of priests, nuns and other church workers.
CNS photo from Catholic Explorer
