For most Americans, human rights violations that occur in Latin America seem very distant, both geographically and psychologically. But American tax dollars are at work in ways which greatly affect the people of Latin America.

The School of the Americas, a U.S.-funded military training program, located at Ft. Benning, Ga., trains soldiers from Latin America in military discipline and counter-insurgency techniques.

Alumni at the school include some of Latin America’s most heinous assassins and death-squad torturers. It is for this reason that the school is commonly referred to as the “School of the Assassins,” or the “School of Coupes.” All of the following soldiers were trained at the SOA.

El Salvador: Salvadorean death squad architect Robert D’ Aubuisson; two of the three Salvadorean officers cited by the U.N. Truth Commission for the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero; three of the five officers cited for the 1981 El Mozote massacre; and 19 of the 26 officers cited for the 1989 murders of six Jesuits. During the ’80s, Salvadoran military officers made up the largest single group at the SOA, a total of one-third of the students.

Guatemala: Gen. Hector Gramajo, former minister of defense, responsible for the deaths and displacement of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Guatemalans; Col. Julio Alpirez, implicated in the torture and deaths of U.S. citizen Michael Devine and guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca.

Panama: Gen. Manuel Noriega, Panamanian dictator ousted by President Bush in 1989.

Haiti: Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, the man responsible for overthrowing democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991.

Honduras: Gen. Luis Alonso Discua, founder of the notorious Battalion 3-16, responsible for numerous disappearances of civilians, and at least 18 other ranking officers linked to the battalion.

Peru: The three high-ranking officers convicted in February 1994 of murdering nine university students and a professor at La Cantuta. And of the 10 former Latin American heads of state which SOA public relations flacks proudly tout as SOA graduates, not one was democratically elected.

Who are the “insurgents” that the soldiers are trained to torture and murder? One training manual at the school describes ’60s activist Tom Hayden, currently a California state senator, as “one of the masters of terrorist planning.” This identification of social- change activists has led death squads in Latin America to kill thousands of religious leaders, students, union members, human rights activists and peasants.

Revelations about how graduates of the school are taught to make war on their own people has brought congressman Joe Kennedy (Democrat, Massachusetts) to propose legislation to close the school. His legislation failed by a vote of 256-174 in October 1993 and 217-157 in May 1994.

Defenders of the SOA, which operates on a $42 million-a-year budget, say the school gets a bum rap. The SOA’s public relations representative, Major Gordon Martel, responded to a Des Moines Register column by saying the school is on “the cutting edge of democratic reform, the counter-narcotics effort and positive progress in Latin America. The protesters accuse fewer than 300 individuals of human rights abuses from a total alumni of almost 60,000,” he writes, going on to say that it is ignorant to blame the actions of “less than one-half of one percent of the total alumni on training at the school.”

However, the grads identified as being involved in murder and mayhem tend to be high-ranking officials and regime leaders, with a disproportionate influence in their countries, according to Markyknoll Fr. and Vietnam veteran Roy Bourgeois. Bourgeois has been protesting the school for six years and is currently serving a six-month sentence at the Atlanta Federal penitentiary for protests at the military installation that houses the school. Also, the .5 percent of SOA alumni are only those who have been investigated. Most dictatorial regimes never get human rights abuse charges brought against them. The percentage of SOA grads involved in human rights violations is probably much higher.

Bourgeois and others have long insisted that the Pentagon uses training manuals to teach students in techniques including execution, torture and beatings. After over six years of lying to the American public by denying that these torture manuals exist, on September 20 of this year the Defense Department released the training manuals.

Excerpts from the manuals include: “Another function of CI (counterintelligence) agents is recommending CI targets for neutralizing. The CI targets can include personalities, installations, organizations, documents, and materials…The personality targets prove to be valuable sources of intelligence. Some examples of these targets are government officials, political leaders and members of the infrastructure.

“Mechanical methods which could be used under certain extenuating circumstances: Sodium pentathol compound could be intravenously injected…another method is hypnotism.”

As citizens in a free society, we must speak out against this school which trains thugs to terrorize Latin Americans.

November 16 marks the 7th anniversary of the assassination of six Jesuit priests, their co-worker and her daughter in San Salvador by SOA graduates.

On November 13-16 at Fort Benning and across the country, peace and justice activists will be holding vigils, prayers, and protests to shut the school down. One such protest will be held here on the Iowa State campus next Friday.

This is not just about atrocities of the past. As you read these words, SOA graduates are actively violating human rights and dignity in Mexico, Columbia, Guatemala and elsewhere. Educate, agitate, write your member of congress. The School of the Americas must be closed.

---

Andrew Chebuhar is a senior in journalism mass communication from Muscatine.