Thousands Protest Against U.S. Army School

Thousands of protesters entered the military base housing the U.S. Army’s academy for Latin American soldiers Sunday in the largest protest ever against the school critics call a training ground for dictators and assassins.

“We do not want this school of war,” said the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, founder of the 9-year-old movement to close the School of the Americas at sprawling Ft. Benning.

“It can only be closed. It cannot be changed,” Bourgeois said at a protest to mark the 10th anniversary of the murder in El Salvador of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her 15-year-old daughter. Of 26 officers charged in the slayings, 19 had attended the School of the Americas.

About 8,000 people gathered at Ft. Benning’s main gate to demand the school be closed, according to Columbus police and military officials. About 3,100 entered the military post in a peaceful protest.

Protest organizers estimated the turnout at 12,000 and said 5,258 crossed into Ft. Benning. Military police put them on 32 school buses, removed them and released them in a nearby city park.

Fifty-four of the protesters were fingerprinted and photographed and will receive letters from the military ordering them to stay off the base for the next three years, a Ft. Benning spokesman said.

The demonstrators chanted, sang, listened to speakers and held a memorial funeral procession for people they say were killed or tortured by former students of the school. Some carried cardboard coffins or white crosses. One protester splattered himself with red paint, which dribbled down the driveway.

Actor Martin Sheen, who plays the U.S. president in the television show “The West Wing,” drew the loudest cheers when he made a mock proclamation closing the school.

“As the acting president of the United States, hence the commander in chief as well, I do hereby decree that the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia, cease and desist operations and disband forever, effective immediately,” he said.

Critics say the School of the Americas, which moved from Panama to Ft. Benning in 1984 as part of the 1977 treaty to hand over the canal to Panama, has turned out soldiers who violate human rights and are trained to battle their own people.

Former students include former Panamanian dictator Manuel A. Noriega, who is now serving a U.S. prison sentence for drug running, and former Argentine military dictator Leopoldo Galtieri.

Military officials say the school, located about 85 miles southwest of Atlanta, has helped advance democracy in Latin America and has reformed its curriculum to stress respect for human rights.

“If we are going to have a hemisphere that believes in cooperative security, there must be legitimacy, dialogue, contact and confidence-building between the militaries of the region,” Col. Glenn Weidner, the school’s commandant, said in an interview after the protest.

Of the murders in El Salvador ten years ago, he said: “There is nothing that you learn in this infantry school that would make it any easier or facilitate lining helpless people up and shooting them from a distance of three or four meters. That’s not a product of military training. That’s a product of a lack of proper military training.”