Previous perspectives

The United States Army, at its base in Fort Benning, Georgia, trains members of Latin America’s various military branches. The training school, formerly known as the School of the Americas (SOA), was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) after the U.S. Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act in 2001. Each year thousands of people gather at its gates on the third weekend in November to protest the school and call for its closing. The date was chosen to commemorate the 1989 murders in El Salvador of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter by graduates of the notorious school.

Father Roy Bourgeois, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, became a Catholic Maryknoll priest after leaving the U.S. Navy. While assigned to Bolivia during the mid-1970s, he came to understand how U.S. foreign policy and the military supported right-wing dictators. The training of Latin American soldiers to commit torture, kidnapping, murder, and the massacre of civilians enabled corrupt governments and transnational corporations to voraciously exploit natural resources and cheap labor with little effective resistance. Many of Latin America’s dictators have been SOA-trained military officers who came to power through military coups. Other SOA graduates have led failed coup attempts against democratically elected governments.

During the early decades of its operation, supporters of SOA/WHINSEC defended the school as necessary to prevent the spread of communism and forge alliances with other governments in the hemisphere. More recently, the war on drugs is cited as the rationale for its continued existence.  Yet, some current leaders of drug cartels are graduates of SOA/WHINSEC. Col. Joe Blair, a former SOA instructor, has said that militarization has not stopped the violence or flow of drugs anywhere. The failures of Plan Colombia and Plan Mexico show that a military approach does not work. The answer is to give the police professional training, good pay and good equipment and address government corruption wherever it may be involved in drug trafficking.  

   SOA Watch (www.SOAWatch.org), an organization founded by Bourgeois, has grown from a few hundred members into a large grassroots movement. An estimated 10,000 protestors attended the vigil this year, including clergy whose friends and family members were victims of torture committed by SOA graduates.

Costa Rica, without a standing army, has sent more than 2,500 police to be trained at the school. In an effort to close the school, Bourgeois met with former President Oscar Arias in 2007 to ask him to stop sending Costa Ricans to the school. Arias initially agreed, but later changed his mind.

A local group of peace activists who meet regularly at the Friends Peace Center in San José (www.centrodeamigosdelapaz.org) is urging the Costa Rican government to find other ways to train its police force. Every year, protestors from Costa Rica travel to Fort Benning to participate in the yearly vigil, which begins with a solemn ceremony on Sunday morning, and includes two days of workshops, seminars, music and rallies. Demonstrators make small white crosses and write the names of people killed by SOA-trained soldiers. The names of thousands of victims are slowly read aloud, and the crowd responds by chanting, “Presente!”

 Then protestors walk to a chain link fence that surrounds the fort and place a cross or other memento on the fence.

Given this effort to shut down the school, it remains to be seen whether Costa Rica will finally adopt a non-military approach to police training. Or will the current calls for a national defense force and more drug interdiction lead to increased militarization of this peaceful country?

On the campus of the University for Peace near Ciudad Colón, west of San José, sculptures and profound quotes from various leaders decorate a peace garden. One quote asks, “How happy is the Costa Rican mother at the moment of birth because she knows her son will never become a soldier?”

Carol Marujo is a retired psychologist living in Costa Rica for the past seven years. She works for justice and peace with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the Friends Peace Center in San José. She lives on a small farm in Puriscal.