PROTEST COULD HAVE A DIFFERENT TONE

The activists in town today for the annual protest against the U.S. Army
School of the Americas at Fort Benning, a weekend event that has grown in
size and national recognition over the years, just might have something to
celebrate this time.

Because whatever one thinks of the Rev. Roy Bourgeois' SOA Watch and its
case against the school -- and we continue to believe the School of the
Americas has a legitimate and effective foreign policy function beneficial
to our Latin American allies as well as to U.S. interests -- events
unfolding in Washington leave no doubt that the movement has been successful.

The school is not yet closing, nor is it abandoning the most controversial
part of its mission -- military training of its students, some of whose
behavior upon returning to their own countries has given the installation
its notoriety.

But as reported by Steven Lee Myers in Thursday's New York Times, The U.S.
Army School of the Americas is on the verge of reincarnation as the Center
for Inter- American Security Cooperation, with decreased emphasis on the
commando stuff, more attention to human rights and civilian control of the
military, and more civilians from the participating nations on its boards
and involved in its curriculum decisions.

Among the 10,000 or so protesters who were expected in town for today's
march to Fort Benning, there is likely to be at least as much skepticism as
celebration. Bourgeois and other outspoken foes of the school have
repeatedly made it clear that nothing less than a full shutdown will
satisfy them. To the Maryknoll priest and his SOA Watch co-director, Carol
Richardson in Washington, as well as to many within the movement, Latin
America's worst social and political wounds are inflicted by military
regimes, and therefore there can be no military solution, however well
intended -- and SOA Watch concedes the school few if any good intentions.

"The great majority of its courses," Bourgeois said this past summer, "have
to do with death, not with democracy," and the curriculum is largely a
"message of hatred."

School of the Americas defenders and officials, including Army Secretary
Louis Caldera and school Commandant Glenn Weidner, routinely respond, in
terms whose diplomatic buffers tend to vary with the speaker and the
circumstances, that Bourgeois' claim is rhetorically overheated -- that
despite the horrific atrocities committed by a relative handful of the
school's 60,000-odd graduates, the School of the Americas is in fact among
the most fertile seedbeds of nascent democracy in the region.

Be that as it may, the political heat has been on the increase for some
time now. Funding for the school was cut by Congress last year, only to be
restored at the last minute in a House-Senate committee budget compromise.
The protest movement has grown not just in size, but in prestige, now
counting among its ranks 130 Catholic bishops, one of the two major
branches of the Presbyterian Church, the NAACP and several American Indian
activist organizations, and most of the executive council of the AFL-CIO.
That the school is being forced to make changes -- which its foes no doubt
see as mostly cosmetic -- suggests that some concession, if only to avoid
closing, may be inevitable.

Asked in an interview last year what the Latin American students at the
school are taught about the SOA protest movement, Weidner said they are
taught that dissent is an essential component of democracy that must be not
just tolerated, but actively encouraged.

Maybe that just means we can expect more of the same old arguments, the
same old rhetoric that we've heard for 10 years now, and that some people
whose support both sides would like to enlist stopped listening to long ago.

But compromise, like dissent, is also an essential component of democracy
- -- what George Will has called "the slow politics of the half loaf." The
Army has taken the first step toward the middle ground, and opponents now
have an opportunity to reciprocate with some real dialogue, some real
movement toward what both sides claim to want: freedom for the oppressed
peoples of Central and South America.