Common Ground and The Nicaragua Club Target Controversial School of the Americas

Plymouth State University student organizations, Common Ground and the Nicaragua Club, have been working in tandem to highlight what they see as a “terrorist” training school in the United States: the congressionally approved and taxpayer funded School of the Americas (SOA) in Columbus, Georgia.In a recent panel discussion, members of both organizations presented a series of stark facts and statistics concerning what they call the brutal and deplorable actions of SOA alumni. The school’s mission, as posted on its website, is to provide “professional education and training to military, law enforcement, and civilians to support the democratic principals of the Western Hemisphere” and to “promote democratic values, respect for human rights and knowledge and understanding of U.S. customs and traditions.” Critics of the SOA claim the reality of their record is one of flagrant and brutal human rights abuses coupled with proactive anti-democratic behavior. Graduates of the SOA include some of the most notorious figures in South America’s modern history of oppressive regimes and state sponsored terrorism.According to a pamphlet published by the SOA watchdog organization, School of Americas Watch, soldiers-predominantly recruited from South America-are “trained to protect the interests of U.S. corporations and maintain the economic status quo for the few rich and powerful in the U.S. and their cohorts in Latin America.” The purpose of what they refer to as the School of Assassins is to “control the people of Latin America through military repression.”The SOA Watch’s branding of the SOA as free market bullies was officially substantiated in a recent report to Congress. The Pentagon defended the school by stating that part of its mission is to protect “the supply of strategic natural resources and access to the markets.”To drive their point home, the pamphlet uses excerpts from SOA training manuals. The pamphlet claims students are encouraged to “target” those who support “union organizing or recruiting,” those who distribute “propaganda in favor of the interest of workers,” those who “sympathize with demonstrations or strikes,” and those who make “accusations that the government has failed to meet the basic needs of the people.”With these instructions, critics say the SOA has an entirely different definition of democratic principals. For example, in 2002, SOA graduates Efrain Vasquez Velasco and General Ramirez Poveda helped lead a failed coup to oust the democratically elected President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. In 1993, the United Nations Truth Commission Report on El Salvador cited the officers responsible for the worst atrocities committed during that country’s brutal civil war. According to the report, over two-thirds of those named were trained at the School of the Americas.In December 1981, more than 900 civilians, mostly women and children, were massacred in El Mozote, El Salvador. A group of twelve soldiers arrived at the small village in the morning, locking the women and children in houses and the men in the church. They first machined gunned all of the men in the church, then took the women and children to the nearby woods and machine-gunned them, burning the bodies. Out of the entire village, only one woman survived to describe what happened. Out of the twelve officers who performed the systematic massacre at El Mozote, ten were graduates from SOA. On November 16, 1989, in San Salvador, El Salvador, a Salvadoran Army patrol entered the University of Central America and murdered six Jesuit Priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter. Nineteen of the officers involved in the brutal murders were trained at the SOA.General Hector Gramajo, graduate of the SOA, drafted genocidal policies while in power of Guatemala from 1980 to 1991, resulting in the torture, rape, murder, and displacement of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people throughout the country. Following his rule, courts in the United States found him guilty of numerous war crimes. Disturbingly, not too soon after that, General Gramajo was an “honored” guest speaker at an SOA graduation ceremony.In 1988, SOA graduate General Carlos Ospina Ovalle massacred at least eleven people and burned down forty-seven homes in El Aro, Colombia. In fact, Columbia has sent more troops to train at the SOA than any other Latin American country. Out of the 247 officers cited for human rights violations in the 1993 human rights report on State Terrorism in Columbia, just over one half of those cited were Graduates of the SOA.One officer in the report, General Farouk Yanine Diaz, was involved in the 1998 Uraba massacre of twenty banana workers, the assassination of the mayor of Sabana de Torres, and the massacre of nineteen businessmen. In a U.S. State Department Report, General Diaz was also accused of “establishing and expanding paramilitary death squads, as well as ordering dozens of disappearances, and the killing of judges and court personnel sent to investigate previous crimes.” After participating in said massacres and assassinations, General Diaz was an honored guest speaker at The School of the Americas in 1990 and 1991.Defendants of The School of the Americas say that graduates who perform acts of brutality are not a product of SOA training, that any military institution is bound to crank out a “few bad seeds.” In response to this commonly used defense, the SOA Watch, a watchdog group specifically targeting The School of the Americas, published a statistical study that tested if the “bad seed” theory held water.The study, by University of Wisconsin student Katherine McCoy, is titled Trained to Torture: A Statisctical Analysis of Human Rights, Violations Committed by Graduates of the U.S. Army School of the Americas, 1960-2000, found that statistically the more classes a student takes at the SOA, the more likely that student is to commit human rights violations.McCoy ran the statistical data of SOA grads through a number of variables-like type of training, country of origin, time period of attendance, and rank-finding that soldiers who took two or more courses were almost four times more likely to have committed human rights violations than soldiers who took one course. After a number of public revelations in the late nineties concerning the questionable actions of SOA grads, the School of the Americas was replaced with the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC), in January 2001. The now deceased Georgian Senator Paul Coverdell, a supporter of the SOA, characterized the change of the SOA to the WHISC as purely cosmetic. In essence nothing has changed about the SOA accept the name, and the grassroots movement to shut down the School of the Americas is gaining more and more support in the House of Representatives. HR1258, the bill that would close down WHISC, now has over one hundred sponsors. For more SOA history, detailed statistics and a bar graph from the McCoy study, and information about House Bill HR1258, visit the official School of the Americas Watch website at www.soaw.org. Common Ground and The Nicaragua Club also participate in the annual march on the SOA, in Columbus, Georgia. The march has grown in recent years to over 10,000 people. For information on next year’s march, contact Common Ground at x2457, and The Nicaragua Club at x2498.