 Media Credit: KELLY MCCARTNEY Kelly Dalton, A&S '09, places a cross in the gates of Fort Benning, Ga., at a protest in honor of those Latin Americans allegedly killed by soldiers associated with the SOA.
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COLUMBUS, Ga.-Eight hundred miles from Boston College, 32 BC students gathered with thousands at the gates of Fort Benning in Columbus, Ga., to stand in protest against the former School of the Americas (SOA), now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).
The SOA was founded by the United States in Panama in 1946, relocated to Fort Benning in 1984, and was renamed WHINSEC in December 2000. Originally founded to help combat the spread of communism in Latin America, the school, which offered classes mainly in Spanish, was created to offer training for Latin American soldiers. The school has been accused of training soldiers in questionable techniques and has been linked to multiple human rights violations in various Latin American countries.
For the ninth consecutive year, the Rev. Donald MacMillan, S.J., and a campus minister, led a group of students to the annual SOA protest and Ignatian Family Teach-In in Columbus, Ga. The events, held concurrently each year, mark the anniversary of the assassination of six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper in El Salvador in 1989. Of the 29 men allegedly involved in the assassination, 21 had taken classes at the SOA.
"My personal motivation in going on this trip would be to honor the memory of the Jesuits and Celia and Elba at the UCA," MacMillan said. "When it happened back in 1989, I was very much taken by the tragedy. My motivation has now expanded beyond just remembering the Jesuits to include the people I've met in El Salvador who live with the shock and the scars of the war in the country."
The participants in this weekend's events protested far more than the death of the Jesuits in El Salvador. Members of the SOA have also been accused and in some cases convicted of involvement in human rights atrocities all around Latin America. During yesterday's protest, each participant carried a white cross decorated with the name of one of the people whose death had been linked to an SOA graduate. Protestors carried the crosses in a procession as the names of the dead were read in the background.
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