SOA Watch
2004 SOA Vigil at Fort Benning, Georgia
From November 19 through November 21, 2004 we will again unite our voices at the gates of Fort Benning — home of the "School of Assassins" — to transform the culture of violence and exploitation that has dominated US foreign policy for decades.
The kinds of policies that have kept the doors of the SOA open for so long are out of alignment with the values of our society: We do not want training camps where soldiers are taught to target and assassinate their own people. We do not want to support, with our tax money, the targeting of union organizers in Colombia. We do not want spending priorities that value exploitation over human needs. We do not want to see communities here and abroad destroyed by police and military repression.
Together we will create a culture of justice and peace. Together we will shut down the SOA!
Closing the United States Army School of the Americas.
History: The United States Army School of the Americas, located at Fort Benning, adjacent to Columbus, Georgia, trains commissioned and non-commissioned officers from Latin American militaries. Many of its graduates have returned to their home countries and committed such atrocities as rapes, disappearances, torture, and assassination; they have organized death squads and paramilitaries to counter insurgencies and maintain power. The SOA is accused of including torture in its curriculum, an accusation its defenders deny, although such a torture manual was released to the public in 1991. The "Hall of Fame" at the SOA includes dictators and human rights abusers, and a number of guest instructors were invited to the school's faculty after they had committed atrocities.
On Nov. 16, 1989, in El Salvador army officers trained at the School of the Americas (SOA) massacred six Jesuit priests and their two housekeepers in El Salvador. Every November since then SOA Watch, a grassroots human rights group, has commemorated that event with demonstrations and funeral processions at Ft. Benning, the home of the SOA, on the outskirts of Columbus.
SOA Watch founder Fr. Roy Bourgeois refers to the School as "the terrorist training camp right here in our own backyard."