http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/497/1/Ghosts of Dictatorships Past: The School of the Americas and Memory in Latin America
"Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past--which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments"
--Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
This November 17-19, for the seventeenth annual time, an estimated 20,000 marchers will convene on Fort Benning, Georgia, home to the infamous school for Latin American military soldiers, the School of the America's (SOA). As part of their protest to shut down the SOA, the marchers will line up at the gate of what critics call the "School of Assassins," and will, as they do every year, perform a ritual: holding small white crosses, one for each of the more than 300,000 estimated victims of SOA-trained soldiers since the School's beginning in Panama in 1946, a march leader will call out the name of each victim (it takes several hours), to which the crowd will shout back, "Presente!" But this November, something will be different: the ghosts of Latin America's dictatorships past, as well as their living descendents, will also shout back, in unison with the voices of the marchers: "Presente!"
History of Brutality
43 year-old Gonzalo Guevara Cerritos looked like your average blue-collar janitor, working for his daily bread along with thousands of other recent Latino immigrants in Los Angeles. His constant nervousness and avoidance of social interaction could have been chalked up to his discomfort living in a foreign land, or to his less-than-perfect English. Or it could have been chalked up to the fact that in 1989, while sub-lieutenant in El Salvador's counterinsurgency Atlacatl Battalion, he had taken part in the massacre of six Jesuit priests, a housekeeper, and her 14-year-old daughter, and was wanted by Salvadoran authorities for these crimes. As it turns out, the latter was the case, and Guevara Cerritos was arrested this October 16 by Los Angeles Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, tipped off by another Salvadoran who had recognized Guevara Cerritos' face. He is currently awaiting deportation.
As part of Ronald Reagan's Cold War-era Central America policies, throughout the 1980's the White House supported an array of death squads and dictators - such as the Atlacatl Battalion - in the name of "rolling back" communist influence. The US infamously funneled money and guns to the Contras in Nicaragua, as well as to right-wing death squads in Honduras, Guatamala, and El Salvador. As historian Greg Grandin points out in is new book, Empire's Workshop, "U.S allies in Central America during Reagan's two terms killed over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands, and drove millions into exile." They also supplied Central American forces with instruction manuals in psychological torture, as well as tools such as cattle-prods for torture of the more corporeal kind.
In 1988, one of the instruction manuals, titled Human Resource Exploitation, surfaced during a Congressional hearing sparked by a New York Times allegation that the US had trained Honduran military officers involved in mass torture. It also came out that these manuals were based in part on SOA classroom lesson plans.
But it was the 1989 massacre of six priests, a housekeeper, and her daughter in El Salvador that galvanized US public opposition to the SOA--Gonzalo Guevara Cerritos was trained at the Fort Benning, Georgia School. Also bad for SOA's press was its connection to the 1980 rape and murder of four American Mary Knoll nuns in El Salvador, as well as to Panama's dictator Manuel Noriega and Salvadoran death-squad architect Roberto D'Aubuisson, in addition to the killers of beloved Salvadoran Archibishop Oscar Romero--all SOA graduates. In the end, it is estimated that the 64,000 Latin American troops trained at SOA since the 1960's have been involved in around 75,000 murders in El Salvador, 200,000 in Guatemala, and thousands more in other violence-torn countries such as Columbia.
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