The School of the Americas opened its doors in 1946 with the purpose of training Latin American military personal in anti-communist counter-insurgency training. This amounted to lessons in torture, extra-judicial killings, death squads and in general the skills involved in going to war against the masses of workers and farmers.

Throughout the 1980s the SOA trained hundreds of Latin American personnel including some of the continent’s most notoriously repressive, notably Argentina’s military regime, Colombia’s death squad-linked military and even the founders of the Zetas drug cartel in Mexico. In 2000, SOA was forced change its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. It receives its $14 million budget from the federal government. More recently their trainees have had a hand in the failed coup attempts in Venezuela.

A group of nine activists from Tampa, Florida went to the SOA protest, as representatives of the immigrant rights group, Raices in Tampa. They were among few immigrant rights groups that attended the protest and they made the connection between imperialism and the migration from Central and South American to the U.S.

Having trained police, military, government and narco elements alike in Mexico and Colombia, the SOA is a good target for immigrants rights groups. “It was a great experience for me because I got to meet a lot of dedicated individuals like myself who are willing to go anywhere to defend the oppressed,” said Oscar Hernandez, local organizer with Raices in Tampa.

Individuals were present from all over the world, including the Latin American countries most affected by SOA’s doctrine of state-sponsored instability. Raices in Tampa attended a workshop given by representatives of Colombia’s popular movement Marcha Patriotica. Here connections were made between the U.S. prison system and its plans to export this prison system to Latin America and Africa. The majority of prison personnel trained at SOA are Mexican and Colombian.

“As a Honduran is very hard to see how my country is used by the U.S, how they are training my people to kill each other. I'm hopeful that one day this will stop. I was glad of being part of SOA protest and see so many people that shared my emotions,” said Alicia Gazga, also with Raices in Tampa.

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These vigils have been happening for 18 years and are a time for all those concerned with social and economic justice in Latin America to come together. On the third day of the vigil, Sunday, Nov. 18, the atmosphere was somber when the names of those people who have been killed by graduates of the institute were read.

Jeremy Miller, a member of the University of North Carolina at Asheville Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was moved during the Sunday event, saying, “All this murder and injustice that the U.S. is perpetrating in Latin America, it makes me sick, and I think specifically of the billions spent on Plan Colombia. I think it’s our duty as American people to speak out against it, like the people here are doing, and we have to show solidarity with the people of Latin America and their fight to be free from U.S. imperialism.”

Chapin Gray from the Tuscaloosa chapter of SDS, who spoke to the crowd on Sunday, later said, “SDS comes to the SOA Watch vigil see the SOA terrorist training camp shut down, but beyond that to take a stand against the U.S. government and what the multinational corporations are doing in Latin America. In our individual chapters we try to do actions in solidarity with Latin America, like our protesting Drummond coal corporation for its murders of trade unionists in Colombia. SOA, Drummond, Iraq they are all intertwined in the broader picture of U.S. imperialism. That’s what we are trying to fight against.”

This year eleven protesters aged 25 to 76 bravely crossed the barriers into Fort Benning to demand the school’s closure. Many who have done so in the past have received months-long sentences for trespassing. The police also arrested four individuals who were carrying white crosses, each having a name written on it of one of the victims of SOA graduates. The police said the crosses were beyond certain allowed dimensions and that they could have been used as ‘deadly weapons.’ They were charged with obstructing a police officer.

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