COLUMBUS, Georgia--Roughly 15,000 people marched on the entrance to Fort Benning Sunday calling for the closure of the School of the Americas (SOA). Many of the protesters carried aloft small white crosses inscribed with the names of victims of Latin American soldiers who have been trained at the school.
Eleven people were arrested for illegally entering the base and face federal prison sentences of as long as six months.
“God does not bless war. God does not bless killing. We are here in solidarity with the people of Latin America and Iraq,” said Fr. Roy Bourgeois, founder of School of Americas Watch. “We are awakening to the lie and we say 'No, no more. Not in our name.’”
Founded in 1946, SOA (or the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation as it was renamed in 2001) has provided training in various counter-insurgency tactics such as commando operations, military intelligence and torture to over 60,000 graduates since its inception. Organizers of Sunday's event have long pressed Congress to close SOA and this year the U.S. House of Representatives came within six votes of cutting off the school’s funding.
Some of SOA's more notorious alumni include El Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, former Guatemalan military dictator Efrain Rios Montt, former Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer, former Argentinian dictator Leopoldo Galtieri and key members of the Atlacatl Batallion which was responsible for the 1981 massacre of 900 men, women and children in El Mozote, El Salvador and the 1989 slayings of six Jesuit priests, also in El Salvador.
Sunday marked the 18th consecutive year a memorial vigil has been held at Fort Benning. Clean-cut college kids, puppetistas, radical grandmothers, nuns and priests and people from all walks of life packed the road to Fort Benning while a lone helicopter circled overhead. For two and a half hours, columns of marchers descended on the base’s gated entrance as a quartet of speakers sang out the names and ages of hundreds of victims of SOA graduates, each time evoking a call-and-response: “No mas, no more, we must stop these dirty wars.”
Arriving at the gate, marchers attached crosses, photos, flowers and hand-written messages to an eight-foot high chain-link fence topped with three lines of barb wire. Before leaving, I tore a page out of my reporter’s notebook, wrote the name of an old friend— “Bradley Roland Will, 36, Indymedia”—rolled up the piece of paper and wedged it into the chain-link fence between three small white crosses that bore the names “Jesus de Antonio Garcia, Colombia”, “Israel Marquez, 80, El Mazote” and “34-year-old pregnant woman, El Salvador.”
A moment later someone left a brightly scribbled sign at the base of the fence that read, “Only when the love of power is overcome by the power of love will we have peace.”
Meanwhile, a nearby loudspeaker droned on: “The commanding general of Fort Benning has ordered that all personnel must enter by manned access points. Any person who comes onto the base by any other means will be in violation of Title 18 U.S. Code … and will be subject to fine and imprisonment.”
“It's sad, very hard,” said Josefina Lopez, a leader of a Salvadoran street vendors union who carried a cross inscribed with the name of Msgr. Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran archbishop murdered by a rightwing death squad in 1980. “But how beautiful that so many are here.”
“I felt sadness. It's heartbreaking,” said Laine Morgan, a sophomore from Regis University in Denver. “It's going to take a lot more to change this.”
Morgan was one of droves of college students who traveled to Fort Benning. Many were from Catholic campuses like Regis where the legacy of martyrs like Romero, the six Jesuits and four U.S. churchwomen who were raped and murdered by Salvadoran security forces in 1980 still burns bright.
''It (SOA) is a gateway drug for thousands of young people who go onto a lifetime of activism,'' said veteran organizer David Solnit of Courage to Resist, an Oakland-based group that works with GI resisters.
Ismat Yassin, a junior at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, CA., had wanted to come to the SOA protest since she first heard about it in high school. After going through an application process, she was one of five students from her school selected to attend this year's event along with two faculty members.
“It's by far the biggest protest I've ever been to. It's amazing. It's so planned and detailed,” Yassin said. And she added, “I've always been concerned about issues of war and injustice [and] I hope to spend most of my life fighting for peace.”
Marcia Rundle of San Diego first heard about SOA several years ago from a Maryknoll nun who spoke at her church. The 59-year-old grandmother of seven said the tipping point in her decision to make the trip to Fort Benning was reading Naomi Klein's ''The Shock Doctrine'', which details how U.S. leaders have used war, natural disasters and—when necessary—torture to advance free-market economic policies around the world.
''It makes the connection between the economics of multi-nationals and our role in the world,'' she said. ''I believe in government of, by and for the people and we're so far from that. Most Americans have no idea what their government is doing.''
For Thom Pate, 28, of Columbus, the SOA protest is a welcome break from his city’s unflinching pro-military culture.
“I think it’s fantastic,” he said. “I wish it would happen more often.”
Shortly after the official procession ended, a noisy contingent of a couple hundred people arrived at the fence led by drummers banging on plastic barrels and buckets. A young woman emerged from the crowd and bounded over the barbed wire fence to a roar of applause before being quickly handcuffed and led away by military police. The ten other arrestees had entered the base earlier in the morning.
Loud, raucous chanting began again and dozens of people shook the fence trying to tear it down. Julienne Oldfield, 70, of Syracuse, New York watched from a distance. She was arrested at the 2006 SOA vigil and finished a three-month prison sentence in July. When a reporter suggested the fence could be brought down with a couple of ropes, she gently dismissed the idea.
“What we have to do is make them (the military) take the fence down,” she said. “That's how we're really going to change things. That's the power of non-violence.”
By 3 p.m., most demonstrators had left the site and soldiers and city workers were quickly tearing everything down from the fence and loading the debris into a giant dump truck. Tense and testy, the Columbus police pushed stragglers further and further away from the fence.
“They [the military] have to take it down in two hours,” Pate explained in his easygoing southern drawl. “It scares them having this many people here. They can’t deal with it. It might be subconscious or something they never talk about, but it scares them.” He then added, “On some level we’re all human. The cops all watched it (the procession). You can’t tell me at least a couple weren’t affected.”
Moments later the dump truck shifted into gear and disappeared down a winding road leading into Fort Benning, searching in vain for a place where the crosses (and the stories they bear witness to) could be disposed of and quietly forgotten.
Eleven people were arrested for illegally entering the base and face federal prison sentences of as long as six months.
“God does not bless war. God does not bless killing. We are here in solidarity with the people of Latin America and Iraq,” said Fr. Roy Bourgeois, founder of School of Americas Watch. “We are awakening to the lie and we say 'No, no more. Not in our name.’”
Founded in 1946, SOA (or the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation as it was renamed in 2001) has provided training in various counter-insurgency tactics such as commando operations, military intelligence and torture to over 60,000 graduates since its inception. Organizers of Sunday's event have long pressed Congress to close SOA and this year the U.S. House of Representatives came within six votes of cutting off the school’s funding.
Some of SOA's more notorious alumni include El Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, former Guatemalan military dictator Efrain Rios Montt, former Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer, former Argentinian dictator Leopoldo Galtieri and key members of the Atlacatl Batallion which was responsible for the 1981 massacre of 900 men, women and children in El Mozote, El Salvador and the 1989 slayings of six Jesuit priests, also in El Salvador.
Sunday marked the 18th consecutive year a memorial vigil has been held at Fort Benning. Clean-cut college kids, puppetistas, radical grandmothers, nuns and priests and people from all walks of life packed the road to Fort Benning while a lone helicopter circled overhead. For two and a half hours, columns of marchers descended on the base’s gated entrance as a quartet of speakers sang out the names and ages of hundreds of victims of SOA graduates, each time evoking a call-and-response: “No mas, no more, we must stop these dirty wars.”
Arriving at the gate, marchers attached crosses, photos, flowers and hand-written messages to an eight-foot high chain-link fence topped with three lines of barb wire. Before leaving, I tore a page out of my reporter’s notebook, wrote the name of an old friend— “Bradley Roland Will, 36, Indymedia”—rolled up the piece of paper and wedged it into the chain-link fence between three small white crosses that bore the names “Jesus de Antonio Garcia, Colombia”, “Israel Marquez, 80, El Mazote” and “34-year-old pregnant woman, El Salvador.”
A moment later someone left a brightly scribbled sign at the base of the fence that read, “Only when the love of power is overcome by the power of love will we have peace.”
Meanwhile, a nearby loudspeaker droned on: “The commanding general of Fort Benning has ordered that all personnel must enter by manned access points. Any person who comes onto the base by any other means will be in violation of Title 18 U.S. Code … and will be subject to fine and imprisonment.”
“It's sad, very hard,” said Josefina Lopez, a leader of a Salvadoran street vendors union who carried a cross inscribed with the name of Msgr. Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran archbishop murdered by a rightwing death squad in 1980. “But how beautiful that so many are here.”
“I felt sadness. It's heartbreaking,” said Laine Morgan, a sophomore from Regis University in Denver. “It's going to take a lot more to change this.”
Morgan was one of droves of college students who traveled to Fort Benning. Many were from Catholic campuses like Regis where the legacy of martyrs like Romero, the six Jesuits and four U.S. churchwomen who were raped and murdered by Salvadoran security forces in 1980 still burns bright.
''It (SOA) is a gateway drug for thousands of young people who go onto a lifetime of activism,'' said veteran organizer David Solnit of Courage to Resist, an Oakland-based group that works with GI resisters.
Ismat Yassin, a junior at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, CA., had wanted to come to the SOA protest since she first heard about it in high school. After going through an application process, she was one of five students from her school selected to attend this year's event along with two faculty members.
“It's by far the biggest protest I've ever been to. It's amazing. It's so planned and detailed,” Yassin said. And she added, “I've always been concerned about issues of war and injustice [and] I hope to spend most of my life fighting for peace.”
Marcia Rundle of San Diego first heard about SOA several years ago from a Maryknoll nun who spoke at her church. The 59-year-old grandmother of seven said the tipping point in her decision to make the trip to Fort Benning was reading Naomi Klein's ''The Shock Doctrine'', which details how U.S. leaders have used war, natural disasters and—when necessary—torture to advance free-market economic policies around the world.
''It makes the connection between the economics of multi-nationals and our role in the world,'' she said. ''I believe in government of, by and for the people and we're so far from that. Most Americans have no idea what their government is doing.''
For Thom Pate, 28, of Columbus, the SOA protest is a welcome break from his city’s unflinching pro-military culture.
“I think it’s fantastic,” he said. “I wish it would happen more often.”
Shortly after the official procession ended, a noisy contingent of a couple hundred people arrived at the fence led by drummers banging on plastic barrels and buckets. A young woman emerged from the crowd and bounded over the barbed wire fence to a roar of applause before being quickly handcuffed and led away by military police. The ten other arrestees had entered the base earlier in the morning.
Loud, raucous chanting began again and dozens of people shook the fence trying to tear it down. Julienne Oldfield, 70, of Syracuse, New York watched from a distance. She was arrested at the 2006 SOA vigil and finished a three-month prison sentence in July. When a reporter suggested the fence could be brought down with a couple of ropes, she gently dismissed the idea.
“What we have to do is make them (the military) take the fence down,” she said. “That's how we're really going to change things. That's the power of non-violence.”
By 3 p.m., most demonstrators had left the site and soldiers and city workers were quickly tearing everything down from the fence and loading the debris into a giant dump truck. Tense and testy, the Columbus police pushed stragglers further and further away from the fence.
“They [the military] have to take it down in two hours,” Pate explained in his easygoing southern drawl. “It scares them having this many people here. They can’t deal with it. It might be subconscious or something they never talk about, but it scares them.” He then added, “On some level we’re all human. The cops all watched it (the procession). You can’t tell me at least a couple weren’t affected.”
Moments later the dump truck shifted into gear and disappeared down a winding road leading into Fort Benning, searching in vain for a place where the crosses (and the stories they bear witness to) could be disposed of and quietly forgotten.
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