Indeed, something remarkable is happening in the Southern Hemisphere, news of which we in El Norte get only in heavily filtered, ludicrously distorted doses. Women and indigenous people are suddenly ascending to ranks of power. In Uruguay, a former human-rights attorney is now defense minister. Unimaginable possibility is dawning, and the wounded and imprisoned of earlier decades are grieving openly for the first time and crying “Nunca mas!” — never again.
And three countries so far, Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay — with more, almost certainly, to follow suit — have formally declared that they will no longer send their military personnel for training at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, which is better known by its former name, the School of the Americas, housed in Fort Benning, Ga.
This barbed-wire-enclosed compound, where Augusto Pinochet’s ceremonial sword is said to hang in a place of honor, is also called the “School of the Assassins.” It’s America’s secret, long-discredited training institute for torture and repression, by which we guard our “interests” South of the Border. The only thing novel about the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo is that the torturers there are U.S. soldiers and paramilitary personnel. In fact, we’ve been in the torture business for the last half century-plus. This is our shadow foreign policy: manipulate, overthrow, rule by fear. The best-kept secret in the Land of the Free is our own hypocrisy.
So it is with gratitude and awe that I salute the recent mission of Bourgeois — who founded SOA Watch in 1990, following the slaying in El Salvador of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter, by, it turned out, graduates of the little known school — along with fellow activists Carlos Mauricio and Lisa Sullivan, to Bolivia, Uruguay and Argentina. They met with government officials, including, in Bolivia, the newly elected President Evo Morales, representing — in a way someone like, say, Condoleezza Rice is incapable of doing — the American conscience. They met to talk about SOA/WHISC.
“I’m filled with hope and inspiration,” Bourgeois said. “We didn’t get any resistance — none. Defense ministers, high-ranking military leaders . . . we got nothing but positive results. They were very aware of the school and its effect on their country — the disappeared and the massacres. They know better than us about this school.”
