Reply #30: SOA is wrong

[ProudToBeLiberal]

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Amnesty Int’l seeks to close U.S.-funded “assassin school”
By Katie Celani
Staff Writer

Last Thursday the students of Amnesty International and Environmentalists of Columbia Organization hosted a small meeting to petition for the closing of the School of the Americas.

The School of the Americas, founded in Panama in 1946, trains 900 to 2,000 Latin American soldiers a year. In 1984, due to the Panama Canal Treaty, the school was relocated to the U.S. at Fort Bening, Georgia — the largest military base in the country. According to the U.S. government the school promotes professionalism and expands the knowledge of U.S. policies such as democracy.

However, in 1995 the Pentagon released training manuals which show evidence of training in torture, assassination and other counter-insurgency tactics. So far, over 50,000 soldiers have graduated.

The School of the Americas has been under attack by human rights activists in this country for many years. Martha Pierce, a member of the Chicago Metropolitan Sanctuary Alliance, which deals with social issues in Central America, spoke to Columbia students on Thursday about the atrocities committed by graduates of this school. In 1980, graduates of the SOA raped and murdered three Catholic nuns in El Salvador. Others were responsible for the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, and some rather infamous Latin American dictators, such as Panama’s Manuel Noriega and Bolivia’s Hugo Banzer Suarez were allegedly trained at the SOA.

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