Despite changes at Army school, opposition
grows
By LINDA COOPER
Special to the National Catholic Reporter
Its a confrontation the U.S. Army has fought hard to avoid:
the upcoming November protest at its controversial School of the Americas at
Fort Benning, Ga.
In an attempt last spring to sap the strength of the opposition to
the school and maintain the schools funding, Army Secretary Louis Caldera
pledged to make reforms at the base, which has trained some of the bloodiest
hands in Latin American militaries.
The reforms included modifying its curriculum and changing its
name -- the third name change in the schools 54-year history -- to the
Defense Institute for Hemispheric Security Cooperation. While one Congressman
called the reforms perfume on a toxic dump, lawmakers, under
considerable Pentagon pressure, narrowly voted to fund the school for another
year.
But far from silencing its critics, the Armys tactics have
galvanized the growing movement: Nearly every hotel within miles of the base
has long been booked for the weekend of Nov. 18 and 19 when more than 13,000
peace activists are expected to descend on the school.
Part of the Armys strategy is an attempt to bury the past
and paint school opponents as naïve, misguided and misinformed. Caldera
suggested they overlook recent history and allow the military to play a role in
advancing democracy in Latin America.
What were trying to avoid is a debate about the
past, he said.
His task would be much easier if the past didnt keep
erupting into the present, reminding the nation of the assassinations,
massacres and coups linked to school graduates.
In the last two months alone, Peruvian, Chilean and Salvadoran
alumni have exhumed memories that make a mockery of the schools claim of
being a linchpin for democracy.
In September, Peruvian graduate Vladimiro Montesinos, head of the
dreaded National Intelligence Service, was shown on Peruvian television bribing
an opposition Congressman two weeks before President Alberto Fujimoris
highly contested election last May. For years, Montesinos has maintained a cozy
relationship with the U.S. military and the CIA despite reports that he created
a death squad, silenced the press and political opponents, and was instrumental
in Fujimoris dissolving Congress in 1992.
Not long after the Peruvian broadcast, a Congressional
investigation revealed that Chilean graduate Manuel Contreras, the former chief
of Augusto Pinochets secret police, had close ties to the CIA before and
after he masterminded the 1976 assassination of a former Chilean diplomat in
Washington.
In October, Salvadoran graduate Gen. José Guillermo
García was brought to trial in Florida in connection with the rapes and
murders of four U.S. churchwomen by five National Guardsmen in 1980.
García, the former minister of defense, was tried with Gen.
Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, the former director of the National Guard, under
the Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows victims or their families to
sue those who bear command responsibility for acts of their
subordinates.
While the jury concluded the two generals, now living in
retirement in Florida, were not responsible for the womens murders, the
pair face another suit filed by four Salvadoran exiles who were also kidnapped
and tortured by troops under the generals command.
A U.N. Truth Commission Report on El Salvador concluded in 1993
that the two generals knew of the womens murders and organized a
cover-up. Other documents introduced at the trial showed that U.S. envoys
believed García was in fact in a position to end abuses by Salvadoran
officers.
Records show that García took a counterinsurgency course at
SOA before participating in the overthrow of another SOA graduate in 1979.
During his term as defense minister, Salvadoran soldiers assassinated
Archbishop Oscar Romero, slaughtered 300 campesinos at Rio Sumpul and more than
800 men, women and children at El Mozote.
While Vides Casanova is not a graduate, the school invited him to
be a guest speaker in 1985 -- more than four years after the churchwomen were
murdered and a year after a CBS Evening News report linked him to
the cover-up.
Montesinos, Contreras, Garcia, and Vides Casanova are four fresh
reasons Caldera would like people to ignore the past.
But the movement to close the school seems destined to grow.
Theres just been no accountability, no justice. They
simply downplay what these graduates have done, says Fr. Roy Bourgeois,
who has organized the SOA protests for the last 10 years.
Theres been so much suffering and pain and death
connected to this school and its graduates. Thousands of people continue to
grieve for their loved ones. That has not ended. Its not the
past.
National Catholic Reporter, November 17,
2000
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