SUBSIDIZING INTERNATIONAL CRIME: Time to Close School of the Americas
U.S. Taxpayers Pay for the Training of Killers and Rapists
Frank Lingo is a columnist for the Kansas City Star.
Call it "Torture Tech" -- teaching techniques of terror with our taxes.
It's the U.S. Army's School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, where
Latin American soldiers are trained in torture and execution of political
rivals. The United Nations Truth Commission for Human Rights found that over
two-thirds of El Salvadoran officers cited for abuses are graduates of the
school. Our tax dollars have paid for this suppression of democracy for over
half a century.
In May, the House of Reprehensibles' ruling Repugnicans voted by a close
margin to continue funding the school. But the House decided to spruce up the
school's image. It'll now be known as the Defense Institute for Hemispheric
Security Cooperation. Isn't that grand? This week, the U.S. Senate takes up
the issue. There's still time to let your senators know if you'd prefer that
your tax dollars not be devoted to training terrorists.
The 1980 rape and murder of four American churchwomen, and the 1989 murders
of six Jesuit priests along with their housekeeper and her daughter -- by
Salvadoran soldiers who were School of the Americas graduates -- motivated
Father Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest then in Minneapolis to visit Fort
Benning and find out what was going on there.
Thus was born the School of the Americas Watch, which held its first protest
vigil outside the fort in 1990 with about a dozen participants. That year,
some folks went on a thirty-five day water-only fast to protest.
By November 1999, the annual protest had grown to 12,000 people outside Fort
Benning, with many arrested for marching into the fort. On Thursday June 8,
ten individuals, including a recipient of the Congresssional Medal of Honor,
will be sentenced to jail time for their peaceful protest.
Father Bourgeois is no stranger to the slammer either, having spent a
cumulative three years behind bars for his efforts to close down the school.
A Navy Vietnam veteran himself, Bourgeois was influenced by a Maryknoll
priest devoted to helping the poor. Later, Bourgeois followed suit and took
his vows with the Maryknolls, who have supported him in his decade of
non-violent resistance.
Advocates for the school say it's the key to winning the war on drugs. But
less than five percent of the school's trainees even take counter-narcotics
classes.
When President Clinton went to Central America last year, he mentioned with
that soulful sadness of his the mayhem our military has visited upon the
region. Empty words because his administration has pushed hard to continue
the terror training. In 1996, the Pentagon released to the press the manuals
used at the school. The manuals advocate anti-democratic activities like
infiltrating labor unions and political parties, as well as old-fashioned
torture and execution.
Over five decades, numerous graduates have become dictators and high-ranking
army officers who have killed thousands of people all over Latin America.
Whatever miserable excuse our army may have had for running the school, such
as the need to have pro-American regimes -- no matter how murderous -- to
combat communism, those days are long gone. Now, advocates for the school say
it's the key to winning the war on drugs. But less than 5 percent of the
school's trainees even take counter-narcotics classes, as if the massive
corrruption in the drug trade could be controlled anyway.
So what reason could there possibly be for supporting the school? Father
Bourgeois says the School of the Americas provides muscle for the sweatshops,
the multi-national corporations and the World Bank to defend an economic
system which keeps a small elite very wealthy and the vast majority very
poor.
On Memorial Day, we honored those who died for our freedom. When we hear of
former enemies Japan and Germany whitewashing their atrocities in teaching
history to their children, it makes us angry. Let's not be like them. Let's
admit we were wrong to contribute more grief to the families of
freedom-seekers in Latin America. Then let's stop.
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