Army Closes, Reopens School Under New Name

John Donnelly / Boston Globe 13dec00

Washington -- The Army announced yesterday it would close the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., the symbol for the last decade of U.S. implication in human rights abuses in Latin America.

Demonstrators called it the School of the Assassins, because several of its 61,000 U.S.-trained graduates returned to Latin America and later tortured and murdered innocent people. Thousands of protesters annually called for it to be closed. Congress came within a few votes of eliminating its funding.

Army Secretary Louis Caldera will speak at the "closing ceremonies" Friday to honor "54 years of distinguished service."

One month later, the Army school will reopen. It will be in the same buildings and have the same instructors -- but the name will be different, as will some of the curriculum.

Starting in January, military officers from Latin America will attend the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

"We do not see this as really shutting down the School of the Americas," said the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest who has been arrested four times at the military site for trespassing on Army property. "It's business as usual. A new name, same shame."

Bourgeois said the protests will go on and even the name of his organization, SOA Watch, will remain the same. "No one in this large movement is really fooled by this. . . . It's still deadly. It's still men with guns," said Bourgeois, a former U.S. naval officer in Vietnam.

But Major Thomas W. Collins, an Army spokesman, said yesterday that the new institute will have new classes to "better address the current kind of missions and operations in the region."

In addition to courses on human rights, the institute will offer courses on disaster relief, transnational security threats, advanced anti-drug operations and "democratic sustainment," according to an Army press release.

Instead of Army oversight, the institute's operations and curriculum will be reviewed by an independent Board of Visitors, composed of members of Congress, State Department, Defense Department and civilians from academia, clergy, and international and private organizations, the Army said.

"The new school is going to continue the same vital functions the School of the Americas did," Collins said. "We see a great need to continue the same military-to-military, country-to-country contact. It's an opportunity to see American democracy and live in it."

The school has trained dozens of Latin America's most infamous criminals, including former Panamanian leader Gen. Manuel Noriega and 19 Salvadoran soldiers linked to the assassinations of six Jesuit priests in November 1989. In 1996, the Pentagon released training manuals used by the school in the 1980s that advocated torture, kidnapping and blackmail as a way of fighting insurgents.

Those manuals are no longer in use, and the Pentagon says that the school also has trained an impressive cadre of military leaders now in senior positions throughout Latin America who support democratic principles.