SHUT AMERICA'S TERROR SCHOOL

It is agonizingly ironic that, just as a delegation of Madisonians arrived
in El Salvador to visit our sister city of Arcatao, the U.S. House of
Representatives chose once more to insult the people of Arcatao, of El
Salvador and of every Latin American nation.

By a 211-201 vote, the House refused to cut taxpayer funding of the School
of the Americas, the facility at Fort Benning, Ga., that trains military
thugs from throughout the region to torture political dissidents, kidnap
children, launder drug money, destabilize cooperatives and murder nuns and
priests.

The record of crimes committed by School of the Americas graduates -- an
elite group that includes people like former drug-dealing Panamanian
dictator Manuel Noriega and Salvadoran death squad sponsor Roberto
D'Aubuisson -- is long and horrifying.

It is also shockingly up to date. Just this spring, in Guatemala, Bishop
Juan Gerardi was assassinated two days after releasing a groundbreaking
report that linked thousands of human rights violations in that Central
American country to School of the Americas graduates.

The blood stains are just as fresh in other Latin American nations. Madison
Assembly candidate Mark Pocan, who has long been active with Dane County's
sister region of Apartado in Columbia, pointed out during a meeting this
week with U.S. officials in San Salvador that more than half of the roughly
250 military officers tied to the murderous activities of that country's
army and paramilitary death squads received their training at the School of
the Americas.

While the U.S. officials sought to argue that the school has changed its
ways -- and even that it has placed a new emphasis on human rights
instruction -- Pocan and Madison-Arcatao Sister City Project director Mark
Rosenthal responded with details that refuted the argument and that
supported Rosenthal's argument: "It's time to enter a new era. It's time to
close this school that has done so much harm.''

That harm is fresh in the memories of the Madison sister city delegation.

During their visit to El Salvador over the past six days, Madison Mayor Sue
Bauman and other members of the delegation came face-to-face with the
bitter legacy of the School of the Americas in a country that is still
struggling to recover from a long U.S.-financed war. The residents of
Arcatao, a small municipality near the Honduran border that has many needs,
went out of the way to emphasize how very important they believe it is for
Madisonians -- and all Americans of good will -- to work for the closing of
the Georgia facility.

Arcatao knows well the truth of what the School of the Americas teaches.
Human rights groups have documented the role that the school's graduates
played in the 1980 assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, the
rapes and murders that same year of four American churchwomen working in
the country, and the 1989 slayings of six Jesuit priests and two women on
the grounds of the Salvadoran equivalent of Milwaukee's Marquette University.

Those are the well-known examples of what the School of the Americas
teaches -- examples that have been extensively reported in the
international press. In Arcatao, however, the people know as well the
untold legacy of the School of the Americas.

The people of Arcatao carry with them the physical and emotional scars of
the forced dislocations, the rapes, the kidnappings, the torture sessions,
the thousands of murders of civilian men, women and children that School of
the Americas graduates committed during the 1970s, 1980s and the early
1990s in the region surrounding this remote mountain community.

Amazingly, the people of Arcatao do not hate Americans; indeed, they have
warmly embraced visitors from Madison over the past 12 years. But they do
hate the School of the Americas and they ask, with every justification,
that Americans who value humanity, justice and common decency should join
in the struggle to close this chamber of horrors.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski