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Imagine that numerous US military officers were trained at a foreign military academy. Imagine that when those officers returned to the US they formed death squads and elite battalions. Imagine that these tortured and disappeared labor organizers and massacred small farmers. Imagine further that the officers then went on to assassinate religious leaders and politicians campaigning against the party in the White House.

Such a scenario hasn't happened in the US. But for decades variations of it have been happening throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. The "foreign military academy" is the US Army's School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. That school for terrorism is funded with our tax dollars and supported by the White House and by many of our Congressional representatives.

Since its founding in the 1940s, SOA graduates have been key players in many of the violent anti-democratic coups and most of the major human rights atrocities in Latin America. In the seventies Somoza's National Guard was trained at the SOA. In the eighties El Salvador's Atlacatl Battalion, responsible for the 1989 slaughter of six Jesuit priests and their two co-workers, trained at the SOA.

Colombia, the country whose military in recent decades have perpetrated the largest scale human rights abuse south of the Rio Grande, has had over 9000 soldiers trained at the SOA. In Colombia, not one or two or a handful of opposition candidates have been assassinated, but hundreds.

Mexico, whose military are occupying Chiapas, is currently the country with the most students at the SOA. The military officer who in January was arrested in Guatemala for the 1998 killing of Bishop Gerardi trained at the SOA. There literally isn’t space here to fully list SOA graduates and their crimes against their own people.

Last September Louis Caldera, Secretary of the Army, declared on the Jim Lehrer News Hour that if Congress closed the SOA, the US Army Southern Command would open it elsewhere the next day. This is how important the SOA is to the Pentagon. This is how contemptuous our own military establishment is of our Congress and the Democracy it is mandated to preserve.

Why, in the face of ten years of persistent criticism and devastating exposure, does the White House and the Pentagon refuse to abolish this utterly discredited institution? For the politically unaware or for the willfully blind, the SOA is a mysterious aberration. In fact, the SOA from its beginning has played a single-minded historic role.

So US boys don't have to come home in bodybags, the SOA trains Latin American soldiers to intervene in our place, to do our dirty work in their home countries. Whether marketed as "fighting communism" or "the war on drugs," that dirty work's real purpose is to maintain stability.

"Stability" is code for conditions assuring lucrative investment opportunity for US multinational corporations:

1. a vast supply of cheap, docile labor (unencumbered by unions and pesky regulation); and
2. compliant national governments to negotiate grossly unequal trade terms, terms resulting in cheap exports for US consumption.

SOA repression is the military flipside of the economic repression engineered by the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank.

For video documentaries, country-by-country fact sheets, and other resources, contact the SOA Watch national office: PO Box 4566, Washington, DC 20017, phone (202) 234-3440, e-mail soawatch@knight-hub.com. For news and alerts, check www.soaw.org. With your help we'll close this heinous school.

With Peace Brigades International, Ed has provided protective accompaniment to threatened human rights workers in Haiti, Guatemala and El Salvador. In 1994 he and 12 others fasted for 40 days on the steps of the Capitol to expose the SOA. Ed has since served 14 months in federal prison for nonviolently protesting the SOA at Fort Benning. Contact him at edkinane@a-znet.com or call (315) 478-4571

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