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Presente! By Sam Costello The first things we noticed when our van rolled into Columbus, Ga. were the strip clubs and pawn shops. There was practically one on every block. We couldn't figure out why, until someone pointed out that this was an Army town, and when you needed quick money, or quick entertainment, those were the places a he or she could go. And just about nowhere else in Columbus. But we weren't there for money or fun, we were there for the soldiers. The movement against the SOA has been growing fast in the last two years. The School is a U.S. taxpayer-funded institution where U.S. Army officers teach officers from Latin America how to torture, rape, and kill their own people. The school was built to fight communists in the '40s, '50s, and '60s. Since then, and especially after the disappearance of the communist threat, anyone who opposed ruling regimes was labeled "subversive," including democracy activists, peace workers, bishops, nuns and union members. Graduates of the SOA are responsible for some of the most famous human rights violations in the last thirty years: the assassin of Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero was a graduate, a picture of graduate Manuel Noriega hangs in the School's Hall of Fame, the soldiers who raped and murdered four nuns in El Salvador came out of the SOA and the battalion who slaughtered over 900 people, including over 120 children under 12 at El Mozote, El Salvador, was taught at taxpayer expense. (More information on this can be found at the U.N. Truth Commission or the SOA Watch website, http://www.soaw.org) It was approaching Thanksgiving 1998, and over 50 people from Ithaca had made the two-day journey to the School to protest. What we found there was greater than we had expected. In 1997, 2000 people had attended the protest, with over 600 being arrested in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience, walking onto the base with crosses bearing the names of those killed by SOA graduates. The year before only 250 had attended. In 1998, over 7000 people came to Georgia, and nearly 2400 crossed the line, with the full intent of getting arrested. We crossed the line, four abreast, with 7000 people chanting "presente!" after each name of a SOA victim was read. Walking down the bases' winding central road, media personnel bordered us on one side, trees on the other. TV and video cameras, as well as still cameras, were a common sight, though we were happier to see a TV camera than to be taped by the video cameras being used by the police. We rounded a bend and saw the buses, they were going to put us into and arrest us. The road was lined with more than 20 of them. By this time, we couldn't hear the chanting crowd at the front gate anymore. "The chants," said IC student Anne Bacon, "gave us something to do." And now we couldn't participate because we couldn't hear them. We just walked in silence, some visibly tense, others more relaxed.
It was a victory, no doubt, but we have not won. The School is still open, and is still teaching soldiers, mostly Mexican and Colombian these days, its shameful lessons. But our victory is not far off. There will be another protest in May, in Washington, D.C., there will be a vote in Congress, and this year we might finally shut the SOA down. Sam Costello is a junior media studies major at Ithaca College. Ethan H. Palmer is a photographer and student at Ithaca College. |
