11-24-08, 9:17 am

On Sunday, November 9, 2008 the SOA Watch came to South Florida. Even though the action followed closely on the heels of an intensely fought Presidential campaign, at a time when it might have been both tempting and easy to bask in the radiance of that win, 90 people marched on the US Southern Command (SouthCom) demanding that the “School of the Assassins” be closed and US foreign policy toward Latin American and the Caribbean be changed. Why pose these demands? Why now? Why at Southern Command?

December 2, 1980 – Jean Donovan and Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline Sister working with the Cleveland Diocesan Mission in El Salvador, went to the airport to pick up Maura Clark and Ita Ford, both Maryknoll Sisters. These four missionaries were snatched on the road by members of El Salvador’s National Guard and taken to an isolated location, where they were raped, shot, and buried in a shallow grave.

The slaughter of these four American church women did not mark the beginning of the immeasurable harm done by SOA graduates; they were four of the hundreds of thousands killed. But their murders did bring the School to the attention of the American people.

The evil represented by the SOA/WHINSEC is perhaps best illustrated with a brief review of a select few outcomes of SOA “education.” On November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests, their co-worker, and her teenage daughter were massacred in El Salvador. According to a congressional task force, the responsible parties were trained at the School of the Americas (SOA), run by the US Army, currently at Ft. Benning, Georgia.

On September 11, 1988 another SOA graduate, and leader of the Tontons Macoutes orchestrated a siege of St. Jean Bosco in Haiti that left 50 people dead and another 77 wounded. In El Mozote, El Salvador, more than 900 people – men, women, and children – were systematically massacred in one day. Nine graduates of the SOA have been implicated.

Of those responsible for the worst atrocities in El Salvador’s civil war, more than 2/3 were students of the SOA. The SOA/WHINSEC has graduated 11 dictators and some of the most notorious human rights abusers in the Americas, including Leopoldo Galtieri, Manuel Noriega, and Bolivia’s Hugo Banzer. Other attendees include Luis Posada Carriles, who now resides in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

In Doral, a suburb of Miami, a multi-ethnic, multi-racial crowd of young and old came together in solidarity with the annual SOA Watch vigil at Ft. Benning. This action brought participants from groups as diverse as the Bolivarian Circle Negra Hipolita, Miami for Peace (M4P), the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), the National Lawyers Guild, Veterans for Peace and Pax Christi. We united to raise awareness of the SOA in South Florida and call for its closure.

Passions were so aroused over the SOA that some drove for hours to participate, while others rolled wheel chairs up a grassy hill in the Florida sun to be part of the rally, march and vigil. Rally speakers gave witness to atrocities, tied together the SOA and SouthCom, and spoke of next steps to take. Orlando Collado, of V4P, spoke of seeing piles of bodies dumped daily throughout the city when he visited Guatemala. The tale of Anna, a refugee from El Salvador, a woman whose husband was disappeared, whose in-laws were slaughtered, and who fled her country mere steps ahead of the death squads was shared by Linda Belgrave, of M4P and CODEPINK.

Ray Del Papa (SOA Watch and Pax Christi) explained that as the command and control facility for the US military in Latin America and the Caribbean, SouthCom determines the curriculum and manuals used at SOA/WHINSEC. According to declassified Pentagon documents, past manuals included training in psychological warfare, assassination, and torture; these strategies are an inherent part of counterinsurgency, and, thus, still part of the curriculum, even if unofficially.

Of course the US military is not training their Latin American and Caribbean colleagues in techniques of torture and massacre for no reason. As Pedro-Jesus Romero, Southeastern Coordinator for SOA Watch, told the rally, the SOA/WHINSEC and SouthCom together protect US corporate interests throughout Central and South America, to ensure that these areas remain free-trade friendly.

It is no accident that these forces of repression target the poor, labor organizers, and anyone else who helps workers. In fact, according to Cruz Salucio, of the CIW, many of those picking tomatoes and other crops in Immokalee, Florida are here because of the situations in their home countries. Chased out of their countries, maybe undocumented in the US, these victims of free trade agreements are especially vulnerable, and subject to extreme exploitation and abuse, including modern-day slavery.

Currently, many officers of the Columbian military, as well as members of Columbian paramilitary organizations, who have been involved in murdering more than 1,000 labor organizers, have been SOA/WHINSEC graduates. Clearly, both SouthCom and the SOA/WHINSEC exist to enforce US foreign policy in any way deemed appropriate, no matter what the cost to the people of the region.

Clergy from the three counties that make up South Florida closed the rally with poignant prayers for justice in the Americas. The march to the gates of SouthCom was filled with song and chants of “Shut down the SOA! We don’t need it anyway!” At the gates of SouthCom, a solemn vigil was held; participants garbed in shrouds and masks symbolized the anonymity of victims of US policy in the Americas, as enforced by graduates of the SOA. This anonymity was powerfully contradicted by the reading of the names of victims, each name followed by the response: “¡Presente!” I am here!

The travesty of using our taxes and our name to train terrorists and death squad leaders, in the pursuit of profits, is unacceptable. It can and must be stopped. This goal has never been closer. We have a new Congress on its way in. We have a new President, a man whose promise is change. Once he is in office, Obama can close the SOA/WHINSEC with an executive order. To sign a petition for this and/or for more information, go to .