School of The Americas Watch: Thousands to Rally in Georgia to Demand Closure of School of the Americas
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NOVEMBER 8, 2007
2:31 PM
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CONTACT: School of The Americas Watch
Joao Da Silva
202-234-3440/202-302-4706
media@soaw.org
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Thousands to Rally in Georgia to Demand Closure of School of the Americas
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WASHINGTON - November 8 - On the weekend of November 16-18, thousands of human
rights advocates from across the U.S. and Latin America will converge at
Fort Benning, Georgia to demand a dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy
and the closure of the controversial U.S. Army's School of the Americas
(SOA).
The annual Vigil to close the SOA at Ft. Benning has grown from a dozen
people in November of 1990 to more than 20,000 in 2006. The annual event
is held on the anniversary of the November 16, 1989 massacre at the
University of Central America (UCA) in El Salvador where Julia Elba
Ramos, her fourteen year old daughter Celina, and six Jesuit priests
where brutally murdered by the Atlacatl Battalion, a unit of the
Salvadoran army. A U.S. Congressional Task Force reported that those
responsible were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA).
The SOA, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation (WHINSEC), made headlines in 1996 when the Pentagon released
training manuals used at the school that advocated torture, extortion
and execution. Despite this admission and hundreds of documented human
rights abuses connected to soldiers trained at the school, no
independent investigation into the facility has ever taken place.
Thanks to an ongoing grassroots campaign, support for the SOA/ WHINSEC
continues to erode. In 2007, Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and
Oscar Arias of Costa Rica announced that they would cease to send
military and police to the school, becoming the 4th and 5th countries
after Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela to withdraw from the U.S. Army
training facility.
The events will culminate on Sunday, November 18 with a symbolic funeral
procession to the gates of Ft. Benning. Many will negotiate a
barbed-wire fence to enter the military base in an act of nonviolent
civil disobedience. Since protests against SOA/WHINSEC began more than a
decade ago, 226 people have served federal prison sentences.
On June 21, 2007 a McGovern/Lewis amendment to the FY 2008 Foreign
Appropriations bill that would have prohibited funding for the
SOA/WHINSEC lost by a margin of only six votes. 203 members of Congress
voted in favor of the amendment to cut the funding for the school
quoting its connection to human rights abuses throughout Latin America.
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