RIGHTS: Campaign Against School of the Americas Lobbies El Salvador
By Raúl Gutiérrez*
SAN SALVADOR, May 7 (IPS) - Representatives of School of the Americas Watch visited El Salvador to ask the incoming government of the leftwing FMLN, which will take office in June, to stop sending military officers to the U.S. army academy, which has long been accused of teaching torture techniques.
El Salvador has a special significance for School of the Americas (SOA) Watch, because the movement was founded in 1990 by Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois (a former naval officer and Vietnam veteran) in response to atrocities committed during this country’s 1980-1992 civil war.
Bourgeois became an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America after four U.S. churchwomen – two of whom were friends of his - were raped and killed by Salvadoran soldiers in December 1980. The November 1989 murders of six prominent Jesuit priests, along with their housekeeper and her teenage daughter, then became a catalyst for the emergence of SOA Watch.
SOA Watch has offices outside of Fort Benning, Georgia – where the SOA, renamed the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation" (WHINSEC) in 2001, is located - and in Washington, D.C.
"The light of our movement was switched on in El Salvador, where the killings of the priests helped open our eyes to the way the U.S. army was using our taxes," Lisa Sullivan, SOA Watch’s Latin America coordinator, told IPS.
"Our money was used to train members of the Salvadoran military in how to kill peasants, priests and nuns," said Sullivan.
The 12-year war between government forces and the leftist FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) guerrillas left 80,000 people dead or disappeared, mainly at the hands of the armed forces and far-right death squads.
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http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46759
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