Foes aim anew at Army school

COLUMBUS, Ga. (AP) — Thousands of demonstrators yesterday paraded, chanted and raised white crosses outside the Army’s Fort Benning as they continued a 17-year-long effort to close a military school they blame for human rights abuses in Latin America.

“This is about men with guns,” said the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Catholic priest who spent five years as a missionary in Bolivia and founded the group SOA Watch in 1990 in the effort to close what was then known as the School of the Americas.

“People of these countries are hungry,” said Father Bourgeois, a naval officer during the Vietnam War. “You can’t eat guns. You can’t eat bullets. They want food … medicine. They need schools for their children.”

The Army’s School of the Americas moved to Fort Benning from Panama in 1984 and was replaced in 2001 by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), under the Defense Department. The school trains Latin American soldiers, police and government officials.

Officials of the Muscogee County Sheriff’s Department estimated the crowd size at 14,000, but Eric LeCompte, events coordinator for SOA Watch, which organized the protest, said they counted 22,000.

Sixteen demonstrators, including two grandmothers, got around, under or over three chain-link fences — one topped by coils of barbed wire — and were arrested for trespassing on military property. Each could face up to six months in a federal prison and a fine of up to $5,000.

Among the demonstrators were toddlers led or carried by their parents, senior citizens, Catholic nuns and priests, and military veterans. Others included members of a group called 1,000 Grandmothers and a civil rights group known as “Living the Dream,” which it says is dedicated to Martin Luther King’s dream of a unified, nonviolent world.

Living the Dream ended a weeklong pilgrimage from Selma, Ala., at the three-day demonstration.

The demonstration concluded yesterday after a solemn procession honoring victims of killings, assassinations and other human rights abuses purportedly committed by Latin American soldiers.

The demonstrations were timed to commemorate six Jesuit priests who were killed along with their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador on Nov. 19, 1989. Some of the killers had attended the School of the Americas.

The military has acknowledged that some graduates committed crimes after attending the School of the Americas, but says no cause-and-effect relationship has ever been established.

The new Western Hemisphere Institute has mandatory human rights courses, but the demonstrators contend changes at the school are only cosmetic.