Teaching Torture
Congress quietly keeps School of the Americas alive
In June 2002, Colombian police arrested SOA graduate John Fredy Jimenez for the murder of Archbishop Isaias Duarte in March of that year.
In 2002, Bolivian Captain Filiman Rodriguez took a 49-week officer-training course at WHINSEC. But in 1999, he’d been found responsible for the kidnapping and torture of Waldo Albarracin, then director of the Popular Assembly for Human Rights, by a commission of the Bolivian Chamber of Deputies.
In 2003, Salvadoran Colonel Francisco del Cid Diaz was a student at WHINSEC. But the colonel commanded a unit that shot 16 residents from the Los Hojas cooperative of the Asociacion Nacional de IndÃgenas and threw their bodies into the river in 1983. In 1992, the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recommended prosecution of Col. Cid Diaz for the murders.
Representative Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) has spearheaded opposition in the House to SOA-WHINSEC, but his amendment to the Foreign Operations appropriation killing money for the school (which had 128 co-sponsors) was withdrawn at the eleventh hour last week after a bipartisan agreement limited the number of amendments that could come to the House floor. The last chance for killing the school’s money this year now rests with the Senate — but when we called Senators Boxer and Feinstein, past SOA critics, to ask them what they planned to do, the response was a deafening silence from their offices. In light of SOA Watch’s extensive lobbying, our elected representatives can’t claim they don’t know of the school’s record on torture. So this episode calls to mind Mark Twain’s observation that “there is no distinct, native American criminal class — except Congress.”
SOA Watch has called a mass vigil/protest for November 19 through 21 at the school’s home in Fort Benning, Georgia, expected to be led by Academy Award winner Susan Sarandon and Dead Man Walking author Sister Helen Prejean.
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