Movement Demands Closure of the
School of the Americas

December 1, 2008

On the weekend of November 21-23, 12,000 people joined in demonstrations at Fort Benning, Georgia to demand the closing of the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (SOA/WHINSEC), a U.S. army training facility for military officers from Latin America. Throughout the weekend protesters called attention to the human rights atrocities and massacres carried out by graduates of the SOA/WHINSEC. In addition to demanding that the SOA/WHINSEC be closed down, people spoke against the U.S. government's aggressive foreign policy in Latin America and elsewhere.

The SOA Watch, along with other groups, has organized demonstrations at Fort Benning for the past 19 years. The movement to demand the closure of the SOA/WHINSEC training base is an important one. Through education and agitational work, activists keep exposing the brutal legacy of U.S. colonialism and on-going U.S. intervention against the peoples of Latin America.

The SOA/WHINSEC is used by the U.S. government as a training ground for foreign military officers. Labeled by many as the "School of the Assassins," the school has produced thousands of officers subsequently linked with assassinations, "death squads," drug-trafficking, and human rights abuses in Latin America. For example, over two-thirds of the Salvadoran officers cited by a U.N. Truth Commission Report in 1993 for atrocities in El Salvador had graduated from the Fort Benning school. Nineteen of 26 Salvadoran officers cited for the massacre of 6 Jesuit priests and 2 women co-workers were also trained at the school. In October 2008, public outcry over the systematic and widespread army killing of civilians forced the resignation of Colombian Army commander Mario Montoya, a former trainee and teacher at the SOA. The school's official training manuals openly condone torture, blackmail, and assassination. This was revealed in 1996, when the Pentagon released seven training manuals used at the base, which provided instructions for murder, torture, and extortion. Currently, U.S. taxpayers contribute over $10 million per year to fund the school, which trains over 900 soldiers every year.  

U.S. imperialism uses the school to further its program of economic and military domination of other countries. During the last fifty years, U.S. imperialism has waged hundreds of counter-revolutionary wars and military interventions – in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, etc. In addition to its own troops, it has used foreign officers to help prop up the most reactionary and fascist regimes in the region. The legacy of such intervention has been to leave behind a huge trail of blood throughout the region.   

The Fort Benning "School," and others like it, must be shut down and the U.S. must end its notorious practice of training foreign military criminals and assassins.