March Planned Against Army School for Foreigners

Orange County activists hope to join an annual nationwide protest for the first time by demonstrating today against the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, a training program for Latin American military and police officers.

Protesters, who plan an all-day march from Santa Ana to Garden Grove to Orange, contend that the school is responsible for supporting military oppression abroad.

“This is a government institution that has thousands of human-rights violations attributed to it,” said Sue Spector of Tustin, a member of the Orange County Interfaith Council, which is organizing today’s local protests. “We are opposed to [the school] morally and as taxpayers.”

Created by the Army in Panama in 1946 to promote stability in a Cold War-era Central America, the school has graduated more than 60,000 students, including scores of whom have been accused of human rights violations. Among the graduates are Manuel A. Noreiga, the former Panamanian dictator currently jailed in Miami for drug trafficking, and the late Maj. Roberto D’Aubuisson, creator of the death squads of the 1980s in El Salvador.

The school moved to Fort Benning, Ga., in 1984 but had already become the target of the Rev. Roy Bourgeois. Bourgeois, a priest in the Maryknoll order of the Catholic Church, began investigating Central American human rights violations following the 1980 rape and murder of four Catholic churchwomen by Salvadoran soldiers. After learning that several of the school’s soldiers were involved in the 1989 execution of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter, Bourgeois moved to an apartment across from the school in Georgia and vowed not to leave until the school had closed.

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School officials point out that legislative investigations have never found clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing at the school and that it cannot be held responsible for the actions of a few of its students.

“Should we close down Harvard because the Unabomber, Ted Kaczyinski, went there?” asked Nicolas Britto, public affairs officer for the school. “This protest has been going on for 10 years. They’re accusing us of teaching torture, murder and rape. . . . If we were really doing that we’d be in jail right now.”

Britto also points to the triumph of democratically elected governments in Latin America as a sign the school is having no malevolent influence. Fidel Castro is Latin America’s only dictator, he pointed out.

This is the first time that members of the Orange County Interfaith Council will be participating in the annual protests but are not certain that turnout will be strong. “I think people are less politically active in Orange County,” said Bob Brophy of Los Alamitos, who was arrested in 1996 during a peaceful demonstration at the school. “People will take up certain causes but it’s a minority that will get involved in human rights.”

Brophy maintains that torture manuals, which were removed from the school’s curriculum in the early 1990s after a federal investigation, continue to influence the school’s graduates.

“I was talking to a doctor who ran a clinic to treat torture patients and asked him why there were still people being tortured,” Brophy said. “He said, ‘Once a torturer, always a torturer.’ Pretty haunting. It knocked me out of my senses.”

Local protests begin at 11:30 a.m. at the Federal Building in Santa Ana, continue with a march from the U.S. Army Recruiting Office in Garden Grove to the Block in Orange, and conclude with a candlelight vigil at the Orange Circle from 5 to 7 p.m.