Shut down the SOA

They put the Cameron Crazies to shame. Thousands of people converge in Fort Benning, Ga., every November, for an entire weekend. Some have come from the nearby area; others have flown or driven hundreds of miles to be at this annual event. All around, people carry signs, posters, even full-sized puppet figures, singing and shouting slogans and generally making their voices heard. But they're not rooting for a basketball team. In fact, this has nothing to do with sports. This is the annual November vigil to shut down the School of the Americas.

The School of the Americas, or the School of Assassins as its critics call it, is a U.S.-operated military training institute that instructs Latin American military officials. From its description, you wouldn't assume that the School of Americas has a reputation for spreading torture and violating human rights. But, as a proposed congressional bill pointed out, "some of the worst human rights abusers in our hemisphere" have been graduates of the SOA, including Panama's dictator Manuel Noriega, two of the killers of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador and numerous leaders of various Latin American death squads. The alumni list for SOA reads like a blueprint for Latin American atrocities of the past several decades. Meanwhile, the SOA takes the tongue-in-cheek approach of claiming that "just as any college or university cannot guarantee that some of their students will not someday commit crimes, neither can we."

But the school isn't just apathetic towards the egregious human rights violations perpetrated by its students; it actively encourages torture and violence against Latin American citizens. The New York Times ran an article in 1996 after examining the SOA training manuals, which refer to informers or captured insurgents as "employees." There are such gems as: "The C.I. [counterintelligence] agent could cause the arrest or detention of the employee's parents, imprison the employee or give him a beating as part of the placement plan of said employee in the guerrilla organization" or "if an individual has been recruited using fear as a weapon, the C.I. agent must be in a position of maintain[ing] the threat." The rest of the manuals are found to include: "torture, extortion, censorship, false arrest, execution and the 'neutralizing' of enemies."

The SOA changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001 in an effort to shake off the bad press. But the scars it has inflicted on Latin America still remain. It was just this month that a Colombian Army commander, Mario Montoya, resigned over his involvement in a campaign of "extrajudicial killings." Montaya was both a student and an instructor at the SOA.

Thousands are expected to show up this weekend to protest the School's continued existence. The protests began in 1989, after Salvadoran soldiers (the majority of which were SOA graduates) murdered six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her young daughter. The vigil, then, is not just a protest, but an annual reaffirmation of the lives of the SOA's victims.

I haven't met many Duke students who plan to attend this year's vigil, and I doubt that my column will make you decide to drive down to Georgia in order to participate (though I wish it would). So I can only conclude by asking you what you will be doing in place of attending the vigil. The amazing thing about Duke is that we are constantly offered the opportunity to learn something new about how other people live their lives, and to advocate for policies that would help other people. It seems like every day there's an event on campus that helps us better understand and advance issues of social justice, human rights and human equality. As students in general, and as Duke students in particular, we have a powerful voice to advocate for those that cannot be heard.

Starting this Friday, thousands of people will meet to advocate for human rights and human dignity, here in the U.S. and across the Americas. What are you doing this weekend?

James Tager is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Wednesday.