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News :: Miscellaneous |
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SOA Protest Summary |
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by Danielle Chynoweth
(No verified email address)
Address: Urbana IMC |
19 Nov 2001
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This past weekend 22 Champaign-Urbana residents joined over 10,000 others from around the country to protest the School Of the Americas, recently renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation housed at Ft. Benning in Columbus, Georgia. This was the largest protest in the eleven years of protests. |
This past weekend 22 Champaign-Urbana residents joined over 10,000 others from around the country to protest the School Of the Americas, recently renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation housed at Ft. Benning in Columbus, Georgia. This was the largest protest in the eleven years of protests coordinated by the School of the Americas Watch. The protests are held annually on November 16 the same date as the murder of six Catholic priests, their housekeeper, and her 15 year old daughter, in El Salvador in 1989. A U.S. Congressional task force which investigated the murders, found that those responsible were trained at the School of the Americas.
Since then, a 1993 United Nations Truth Commission report found that SOA graduates were also involved in the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the rape and murder of four churchwomen of the Marynoll order, and the massacre of an entire village of 900 in El Mozote, El Salvador as well as other atrocities.
Yesterday, activists held a solemn funeral procession reciting the names of those who have died - a list which took two hours to complete. During the recitation several dozen dressed in black and carrying coffins enacted a mass die-in in front of the gate of the army base. Thousands of others decorated the gates of Ft. Benning with images of those who have died, crosses bearing the names of victims, poems, and peace cranes. One woman hung her old army uniform. Two girls hung a weaving where each strip of cloth bore the name of a victim of the El Mozote massacre. A young man scattered corn seed in solidarity with the indigenous people of Chiapas who have been covertly planting seed on Mexican army bases. By the end of the day, the entire fence was covered several layers deep.
After all the names of the victims were read, participants in the mass-die in proceeded to go around the fence and enter the base. They passively resisted arrest and were carried away on buses. Several scaled the sign at the entrance, unfurled a banner, and then served up an indictment of the SOA citing violations of federal and international law, including the US Patriot Act. They accused the SOA for conspiring to commit torture and by contributing to acts of terrorism. |
