Close the SOA!

John Dear is a Jesuit priest, peace activist, and the author of more than 20 books, including most recently, You Will Be My Witnesses, Living Peace, The Questions of Jesus, and Mohandas Gandhi. He has served as the director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the largest interfaith peace organization in the U.S., and after 9/11, as a coordinator of chaplains for the Red Cross at the New York Family Assistance Center. From 2002-2004, he served as pastor of four churches in New Mexico. He has traveled the war zones of the world, been arrested some 75 times for peace, and given thousands of lectures on peace across the country. He lives in the high desert of northeastern New Mexico. For information about his books, articles and speaking schedule, see: www.fatherjohndear.org. Read Fr. John Dear's weekly column, On the Road to Peace, on NCRcafe.org every Tuesday.

Each year around Nov. 16th, nearly 20,000 people gather at Fort Benning, Ga., outside the gates of the notorious "School of Americas." The school has trained some 64,000 Central and South Americans, many of whom have gone on to commit murder and torture as members of Latin American death squads -- a sinister distinction that has earned the place the more infamous title, the "School of Assassins." The yearly protests are by now as rooted as the Georgia pines and have the Pentagon on the defensive. The Pentagon's first official response was a PR move. They changed the school's name to "The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation."

The name has changed, but nothing else. The place still trains the aristocracy's thugs to brutalize the campesinos. There soldiers enroll in such courses as Counterinsurgency, Psychological Warfare, Military Intelligence and Interrogation Tactics. There soldiers study how to target Latin American educators, union organizers, catechists, student leaders, human rights workers, priests and nuns.

We teach Latin American soldiers learn how to arrest, torture and behead. They learn how to stealthily assassinate a solitary target and massacre dozens in a village. To learn the art of killing, the SOA is the place to go.

Of course the sepulcher is whitewashed. The place runs a calculated pretext. Underlying the curriculum of killing is the mantra: "to maintain our way of life" -- a way of life available to the aristocracies to the South who lend the U.S. their cooperation. But "our way of life" is the way of death. The phrase throws up smoke to obscure new-age colonialism. It obscures America's ambition to dominate the hemisphere and extract its resources.

The place runs, too, on millions of U.S. tax dollars. Our hegemony is worth the price, insists the Pentagon. And it's worth the taking of lives. Thus, like hounds of hell, SOA graduates are unleashed. Archbishop Romero, four U.S. churchwomen -- Ita Ford, Jean Donovan, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel -- and on Nov. 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests -- friends of mine -- their co-worker and her daughter -- they all died at the hands of assassins trained at the "Institute for Cooperation." How many thousands -- hundreds of thousands -- of others have likewise died? We may never know.

The protest is organized every year by Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois and the SOA Watch. It is one of the best organized and more hopeful events in the church and the country. And it is one of the best examples of active nonviolence in our history. Plus it is a beautiful and urgent liturgy of peace and conversion.

This past year, Fr. Roy and his colleagues took their movement directly to South America and convinced the governments of Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia not to send their troops to Georgia. And pressure grows in Congress for legislation that will put the SOA out of business.

"Every known terrorist training camp must be shut down," said President George W. Bush. And every year around this time we go to the SOA and demand just that. Let the SOA be the first to close.

So let me urge you. If you're anguished over our sisters and brothers in Latin America, and with America's pursuit of torture, then study the materials on this website. If you're concerned about murder and war upholding "our way of life" and enlivened by the Gospel's call to be peacemakers, come to Georgia on Nov. 17-19 and join the protest.

Come and remember the martyrs. Join the campaign to close our national terrorist training camp. You'll be hastening the advent of a world without war or injustice. You'll learn anew what it means to follow Jesus. And you'll be greatly blessed.

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John Dear is a nationally known peacemaker, Jesuit priest and author, most recently, of You Will Be My Witnesses. For more info, see: www.fatherjohndear.org. For info on the School of Americas, see: www.soawatch.org or order a copy of the book School of Assassins: Guns, Greed and Globalization by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, (Orbis, 2001).