Students travel for protest

El Salvador, 1989: six Jesuit priests are slaughtered in the dead of night at the University of Central America. Eight years earlier in the same country, 767 people, including women and children, are murdered in El Mozote and nearby villages. And in 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero, while holding communion bread and wine, is shot through his heart, mixing real blood with the transubstantiated.\nThe common thread that links this violence, as reported by the United Nations Truth Commission Report on El Salvador, is that the soldiers who took these innocent lives were trained in military tactics on U.S. soil.\nAnd it is because the list of casualties from incidents like these keeps growing that concerned citizens, including those from IU, are gathering at Fort Benning, Georgia this weekend to protest. \n"I find the techniques and tactics that they teach at the SOA (School of the Americas) morally offensive and highly unconscionable," junior James Bourke said. "This is being done in our name, and we have the duty -- the moral obligation -- to put a stop to it."\nBourke and others are part of an IU contingent of more than 15 students that is leaving campus Thursday night and Friday morning to make the eight-hour drive to Fort Benning, Ga. in a van provided by the Collins Living-Learning Center.\nThey are travelling to protest the operation of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a facility that trains military forces, law enforcement and civilian personnel from throughout the Americas. WHINSEC opened Jan. 17, 2001, replacing the former U.S. Army School of the Americas, which closed in 2000.\nAccording to the school's records, since 1946, more than 63,000 officers and soldiers from the United States and 22 Latin American countries have trained at WHINSEC and its former incarnations. About 1,000 military personnel enroll at WHINSEC each year, matriculating in subjects such as infantry development, counterdrug operations, military intelligence and commando operations, and a required eight-week course in human rights, according to the 2001 WHINSEC course catalog.\nUpon graduation, they bring newfound skills back to their country of origin, usually rejoining national armies, although some graduates eventually join other warring factions in the often constant civil unrest of Latin America. \n"Of the 63,000 graduates of the SOA, less than one percent have been convicted of any crime," said Gina DiNicolo, a contractor with the U.S. Army Office of the Chief of Public Affairs. "But just one is too many.\n"The people who went through the old School of the Americas went through the same courses," DiNicolo continued. "It's the individual that chooses what they're going to do. Can you control the free will of individuals going back to a sovereign nation? If I had oatmeal this morning and it rained -- did it rain because I ate oatmeal? No. There's no cause and effect."\nBut those who will travel miles this weekend to protest disagree.\n"When spending time in Latin America last semester, I witnessed firsthand what SOA students are being trained for, and it truly is a reign of terror," senior Nancy Steffan said. "And it's not over yet."\nThese incidents and many others of their kind have been closely watched by the opposition group School of the Americas Watch (www.soaw.org). \nThe SOAW is one of the leading organizers of the Nov. 15 to 17 protest, which will include a Sunday vigil, Saturday rally, benefit concert -- featuring folk duo The Indigo Girls -- and numerous teach-ins and meetings. The vigil features a procession of protesters carrying coffins bearing the names of those killed by graduates.\nThe protest drew 10,000 in 2001. Thirty-seven protesters were arrested for crossing into Fort Benning, whose grounds are officially closed to the public. Dorothy Hennessey, an 88-year-old Franciscan nun, served six months in prison for crossing into the base during the 2000 protest. But this weekend, a series of open houses to be conducted to will allow citizens to enter and tour WHINSEC.\n"It's ironic that at a time when the country is reflecting on how terrorism has impacted our lives, dedicated people who took direct action to stop terrorism throughout the Americas are on their way into prison," Hennessey said, in an SOAW statement.\nIn some cases, massacres were undertaken directly following explicit training. In the mass murders at El Mozote, El Salvador, the Azatctl Battalion was trained as a "Rapid Deployment Infantry Batallion," taught "counter-insurgency warfare" by the School of the Americas, and deployed under the foreign policy directives of the Reagan administration. "Operation Rescate" was exposed in 1982 by The New York Times and The Washington Post, when the world learned of the villages where 767 died.\nAugusto Pinochet, dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990, was a graduate of the School of the Americas, and came to power in an overthrow aided by the CIA. The coup ousted Marxist leader Salvador Allende as part of the CIA's suppression of nationalist and communist revolutions.\nPinochet's regime left Chile with an estimated 2,095 dead by torture or execution, and an additional 1,102 "disappearances," according to a 1996 report of Chile's Commission for Truth and Reconciliation.\n"Was the SOA a Cold War school?" DiNicolo asked. "Yes. But was the SOA bad? No. Did some of the graduates go on to do horrendous things? Yes. Could they have twisted some of the stuff that they learned to do bad things? Probably."\nWHINSEC said they support the SOAW's position on human rights. Both organizations have an official statement that is concerned with gaining and protecting the human rights and dignity of the peoples of Latin America.\nHowever, protesters still hold the school and the U.S. government accountable for the actions of its graduates. \n"If citizens don't take responsibility for their country's actions, Sept. 11 will happen again," junior Douglas Briney said.