Nicaragua withdraws from School of the Americas

[eridani]

http://www.nationofchange.org/nicaragua-withdraws-school-americas-we-have-been-its-victims-1349534498

After a meeting on September 4 with international peace activists from School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) and Nicanet, president Daniel Ortega announced that Nicaragua would withdraw its troops from the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC)—formerly and more widely known as the School of the Americas (SOA). A combat training school located in Fort Benning, Georgia, the WHINSEC is notorious for training Latin American military personnel in techniques of repression, including human rights violations such as torture, forced disappearance, and selective assassination.

Although four countries in South America have already withdrawn troops from WHINSEC—Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Ecuador—Nicaragua is the first Central American country to do so. Since its founding in 1949, the school has graduated approximately 64 thousand alumni, including some of Latin America’s most notorious dictators, generals, and soldiers. Among the latest to be connected with the school is the recently sentenced Pedro Pimentel Rios, a Guatemalan soldier sentenced to 6,060 years for the Dos Erres massacre of 1982, as well as Rito Alejo del Rio, the Colombian general recently sentenced to 25 years for murder. Graduates of the school have also been connected to the Honduran coup of 2009.

“The SOA is a symbol of death, a symbol of terror,” president Ortega said. “We have been gradually reducing our numbers of troops at the SOA, sending only five last year and none this year. We have entered a new phase and we will not continue to send troops to the SOA. This is the least we can do. We have been its victims.”

[Judi Lynn]

1. "We have been its victims.” He's got that right. About time someone mentioned the truth. n/t

[newfie11]

2. Good for him

but you gotta wonder how long before there is an uprising against him (CIA instigated of course)

[Judi Lynn]

3. Reagan unleashed hell upon him already. Ortega and the poor have been through hell.

Apparently their goal is to kill all the indigenous they can in the rest of the Americas, too, just the way they did it here.

Hateful, filthy, sub-human, lying, cheating, torturing, monsters. They are going to lose their heavily armed, dirty grip on the world in time.

It's bound to happen, although the costs are always born by the helpless, aren't they?

[sabrina 1]

4. I think they West has finally lost control in that region of the world. He is probably

safer now than he would have been even ten years ago. The entire region has united against the kind of terror they were subjected to under the control of brutal regimes backed by the West.

Killing him now would only consolidate even more support for the Independence of Latin America so it would be a very stupid thing to do. Times have changed and the old cold war policies are pretty much ineffective in Latin America now, not they have given up but they have far less support there.

The prosecution of old war criminals too has had an effect, late though they have been, in discouraging those who might have emulated the old dictators who thought they were above the law.

Why there is still a School of the Americas at all in this country, is a mystery to me. There are not as many Dictators around who need the torture training. It's a stain on this country just like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

[eridani]

6. The West has turned the Eye of Sauron to the Precious in the Middle East

--leaving the hobbits alone to pursue their own missions.

[sabrina 1]

7. Yes, in a strange way I suppose Latin America can thank the Bush war mongers

for giving them the opportunity to finally get out from under the thumb of Global Corporate power.

[Agony]

5. Bravo! one more step in the fight against the US terror machine