Record numbers protest SOA

22,000 people from across the Americas gathered on Nov. 19 outside the gates of Ft. Benning, GA, to demand the closure of the US Army academy known as the School of the Americas (SOA), a combat and counterinsurgency training school for Latin American soldiers whose graduates are regularly implicated in major human rights abuses. The demonstration was the largest yet in a 17-year history of opposition to the school. Sixteen demonstrators, including two grandmothers, got around, under, or over three chain-link fences–one topped by coils of barbed wire–and were arrested for trespassing. Each could face up to six months in a federal prison and a fine of up to $5,000. "I'm all for it," local resident Michael T. Turner said of the protest. "The US shouldn't be training soldiers who go back and use the tactics they learn in such a negative way… You can take a life; you can't give it back." Jesus Bocanegra, a first-time attendee and former soldier recently back from combat in Tikrit, Iraq, agreed. A member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, he linked his group's protest against the US occupation of Iraq to the protest against the SOA. "It's all part of the same thing," he said. "The same global war." Simultaneous protests and vigils were held throughout the Americas. Actions protesting US militarism and calling for the closure of the SOA took place in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Paraguay and Peru. Thousands of women took part in a protest in Barrancabermeja, Colombia. Official support for the SOA is eroding, as well. In 2004 Venezuela said it would no longer send troops to train at the school. Earlier this year, the governments of Argentina and Uruguay followed suit. The SOA narrowly averted closure earlier this year when a bill to cut funding to the school lost in the US Congress by a margin of 15 votes. Recent US elections saw 34 representatives who opposed the bill lose their seats. The SOA, a military training facility for Latin American security personnel, made headlines in 1996 when the Pentagon released training manuals used at the school that advocated torture, extortion and execution. Despite this and hundreds of documented human rights abuses connected to soldiers trained at the school over its 60-year history, no independent investigation into the training facility has ever taken place. Events outside the gates of Ft. Benning culminated in a funeral procession led by Latin American torture survivors and social justice movement leaders, among them Renato Antonio Areiza from San José de Apartadó, Colombia, whose sister was one of eight people killed there last year (including two young children and an infant) by troops under the command of an SOA graduate, Gen. Héctor Jaime Fandiño Rincón. "This is about men with guns," said Roy Bourgeois, a priest who founded SOA Watch in 1990 in the effort to close the school. "People of these countries are hungry. "You can't eat guns. You can't eat bullets. They want food... medicine. They need schools for their children."