THE SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

By Mumia Abu-Jamal, M A.

#495 Column Written 2/10/2001

All Rights Reserved

..."A society that becomes accustomed to using  violence to solve its problems, both large and small,  is a society in which the roots of human relations are  diseased." -- Ignacio Martin-Baró, O.J.

It is virtually impossible for anyone to consider the  horrific violence that has taken place in Central and  Latin America, without accounting for the hideous  roots of that violence, that grow and thrive in  America.

For decades, the bloody flood from murders, massacres,  rapes, torture and carnage, created a trail that could  be traced to the doorsteps of a U.S. military training  institution known as the School of the Americas, in  Fort Benning, Georgia.  Human rights activists have  held increasingly swelling demonstrations at the SOA,  and have dubbed it the "School of Assassins."  

For years the Pentagon dismissed such criticism, and  defended the SOA as an elite international training  academy for "counter-insurgency," or, more obliquely,  for "teaching democracy."  

The graduates of SOA, however, constituted a kind of  rogue's gallery of military despots and dictators,  like Bolivia's Gen. Hugo Banzer Suárez, who brutally  suppressed progressive church workers and striking tin  miners; like Guatemalan dictator Gen. Romeo Lucas  García (1978-82), whose rule saw over 5,000 political  killings and about 25,000 civilians murdered by the  Guatemalan army; and Gen. Juan Rafael Bustillo, of El  Salvador, former airforce chief, who, according to a  U.N. report of 1993, both planned and then covered up  the massacre of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper,  and her daughter, for starters.

If you mention a massacre, the chances are great that  the men who either ordered or committed the deed were  SOA grads.  The El Mozote, El Junquillo, Las Hojas,  and San Sebastian Massacres were all the work of SOA- trained "death squads."  When four U.S. churchwomen  were raped and murdered, when Archbishop Oscar Romero  was assassinated, when union members were killed, it  was SOA grads who led in the carnage.  U.S.-trained  and armed SOA people have been involved in so many  military coups that in Latin America the school is  known as the escuela de golpes-coup school.   

Recently, the Defense Department, stung by decades of  negative publicity, officially "closed" SOA, only to  immediately reopen it under the name Western  Hemisphere Institute for Security Co-operation  (WHISC).  Although not as catchy as SOA, WHISC  promises to play the same game, by another name.   Shortly after the Jesuit murders, U.S.-trained  Salvadoran troops surrounded the office of the  Catholic archdiocese, and shouted, "Ignacio Ellacuría  and Ignacio Martin-Baró have already fallen and we  will continue murdering communists! Ellacuría and  Martin-Baró were two Jesuit priests involved in  Christian base communities, where the poor learned  literacy, history and how to organize for human rights  in the midst of monstrous repression.

Martin-Baró was a brilliant liberation theologist and  psychologist, who, like the revolutionary Frantz  Fanon, chose the side of the oppressed rather than the  rich and powerful oppressors.

For this he was targeted by the U.S.-trained  terrorists of the SOA, and it is for men and women  like him, who seek an end to economic and social  oppression, that imperial training camps, like  SOA/WHISC exist.

Its name has changed, but the game remains the same.

Text © copyright 2001 by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

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