A SCHOOL THAT SHOULD BE CLOSED

Massive crisis and rebellion shook the foundations of the Latin-American
society over the last year. These tumults may have scared U.S. politicians
into feeling that their grip on power in Central and South America could be
slipping.

In Venezuela, where the United States gets more oil than from the Middle
East, output has fallen by 9.6 percent in the second quarter of this year,
and the economy is expected to contract by 6 percent overall. Last winter,
President Hugo Chavez was brought to power from the popular discontent that
these conditions have caused. About one-third of all Brazilians now live in
poverty due to dropping wages and unemployment. Banks in Ecuador have
collapsed, and the country has cycled through four presidents in the last
four years. In both of these countries, workers have staged mass strikes
and demonstrations in protest of austerity measures designed to bring in
the International Monetary Fund.

At the center of this is the large-scale crisis in Colombia, which is
experiencing its worst recession since the 1930s. The largest rebel
guerrilla group in Colombia, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, now
controls almost half of the towns in the country. Twelve major strikes have
happened in the last year, which have involved millions of workers.

The U.S. government is worried about losing its influence in the region --
sparking its $289 million in military assistance to Colombia this year,
which they are quickly stepping up. The U.S. military has also been
training special groups of Colombian soldiers to raid rebel areas, while
remaining silent to the butchery of the right-wing death squads. These
death groups, according to the Colombian government, are responsible for 80
percent of killings in the civil war. All this is happening under the guise
of a war on drugs -- even though the death squads have been linked to large
scale drug-trafficking operations while the head of the Drug Enforcement
Agency as well as the president of Colombia have both said that they have
no proof that the rebels are involved in any.

This cooperation with the Colombian government's repression is a
long-standing tradition of the United States' Latin-American strategy. For
decades, the United States has backed butchers from Argentina to Haiti to
keep areas safe for its business interests.

A key part of this process is the U.S. Army School of the Americas, a
training center for Latin-American and Caribbean military and police
officers. The school was originally in Panama but has been relocated to
Fort Benning in Columbus, Ga.

In 1996, the Pentagon declassified manuals used at the School of Americas
instructing torture, false imprisonment, bounty hunting and blackmail.

In 1997, the U.S. government was forced to admit to running a school that
has trained some of the most notoriously brutal dictators, generals and
death squad leaders who have committed atrocities in Central and South
America.

Some of the most famous graduates of the School of the Americas include
Roberto D'Aubuisson, leader of death squads in El Salvador that were
accused of killing Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980. Leopold Galtieri is
another graduate; as leader of the Argentinean military junta, he oversaw a
regime where more than 30,000 people either disappeared or were killed.
According to an organization of mothers of disappeared Argentineans, the
Argentinean military would fly victims out over the ocean and dump them alive.

Diana Ortiz brought her story to the White House several years ago about
suffering at the hands of Guatemalan security forces lead by School of the
Americas graduate General Hector Gramajo: "They took me to a clandestine
prison where I was tortured and raped repeatedly. My back and chest were
burned by cigarettes. I was lowered into an open pit packed with human
bodies -- bodies of children, women and men, some decapitated, some lying
face up and caked with blood, some dead, some alive -- and all swarming
with rats."

The U.S. government defends the School of the Americas, saying that it is
an institution that brings democratic, American values to regimes in Latin
America. The justifications for intervention have changed over time. The
anti-communism of the Cold War has given way to the war on drugs and
humanitarian intervention of today. No matter what the current rhetoric is,
the United States' need for the School of the Americas boils down to the
crisis and conflict that began this article; the school has trained more
officers in the Colombian military than anywhere else.

Last November, more than 7,000 people, including students from this campus,
traveled to Fort Benning in Georgia to demand that the school be closed
down. This year, organizers are predicting that the protest will be even
bigger.

Latin America is a powder keg. The government knows that -- that's why they
have the school and the cynical tactics that they are using in Colombia. We
know that -- that's why we are building opposition to its sick military
machine.

Everyone who is on the side of the jailed -- and not the jailers of Latin
America -- should go to Fort Benning from Nov. 19 to 21 to shut down the
School of the Americas.