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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
Weekend
Edition
November 18 / 19, 2006
The School of the Americas and Memory
in Latin America
Ghosts
of Dictatorships Past
By WES ENZINNA
"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.
In response to this laundry
list of dirty deeds, in 1990 Roy Bourgeois, an indefatigably
spunky Mary Knoll Priest who was kidnapped in Bolivia during
Hugo Banzer's 1971- 1978 dictatorship, moved into a tiny apartment
in Fort Benning, Georgia, right outside the gates of the SOA,
to start School of the America's Watch (SOAW), with the goal
of shutting down the SOA.
Since then, SOA-W has expanded
from a one-man operation to an international movement with 30,000
unofficial members. Their successes have been numerous: they've
tirelessly dragged the School's skeletons out of the closet and
into the pages of countless magazines and newspapers; they forced
the School, in 2001, to change its name to the Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation in an attempt to avert negative
public attention; they've brought together a diverse coalition
of Christian peace advocates and youth social justice activists
at the annual marches at Fort Benning, where each year a handful
of participants voluntarily go to prison for six to twelve months
to raise public awareness about SOA--in 2005, for example, thirty-seven
people went to jail, some of them over seventy years-old; and
they've provided the steam behind several Congressional bills
to pull funding from SOA, one of which, in 1998, lost by only
eleven votes--and with recent Democrat victories in the midterm
elections, twenty House opponents of the new "close SOA"
bill, HR 1217, have lost their seats. Accordingly, SOA-W activists
are predicting success.
Getting
to the Root of the Problem
However, while SOA-W haven't
slowed their demonstrations or lobbying efforts, in the last
year organizers have pioneered a new--and dramatically successful--strategy.
The new strategy involves directly
working with Latin American social movements and sympathetic
governments to get them to agree to stop sending troops to the
SOA. To this end, in past months SOA-W activists have traveled
to Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador,
meeting with movements and urging governments to deprive SOA
of students. "The thinking behind this new Latin America
strategy' was simple," writes Lisa Sullivan, one of the
key organizers of this new campaign and who, to better coordinate
with Latin social movements, has recently opened an SOA-W office
in Caracas, Venezuela. "If there were no more students,
there would be no more school."
To date, they have made vital
steps towards this goal. In recent months, the Defense Ministers
of Venezuela, Uruguay, and Argentina have all agreed to stop
sending troops to the SOA. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez had Bourgeois
and Sullivan on his weekly television show, "Hello President,"
to talk about SOA, before announcing Venezuela's boycott of SOA.
Uruguay, which has not sent troops since the inauguration of
President Tabaré Vásquez, made its abstention from
sending troops official with a public announcement. Argentina,
which has typically sent 10-20 troops a year, made a similar
public announcement, timed to coincide with the thirty year anniversary
of the 1976 military coup.
In Bolivia, President Evo Morales
has promised to dry-up Bolivia's stream of soldiers to the School,
500 of whom have been sent in the last ten years. However, the
more than $100 million in US aid money the poor Andean country
receives a year has made a total withdrawal difficult.
In Peru and Ecuador, SOA-W
has made vital links with activists there who are spearheading
movements to force their governments to stop sending troops to
the SOA; in Chile several members of Congress have offered to
introduce a bill to demand President Michelle Bachelet withdraw
troops from the School. "We have been astounded with the
success of this new strategy," Roy Bourgeois told me last
March in Argentina.
But while props certainly go
to SOA-W, the success of their new Latin America strategy has
as much to do with the historical moment in Latin America today
as with the well-crafting of SOA-W's new program.
From the 1960's to the 1980's,
the vast majority of Latin Americans lived under the cloud of
brutal dictatorships. When these dictatorships collapsed, with
something of a domino effect occurring throughout the 80's, newly
elected democratic governments almost unequivocally took a soft
approach to punishment for ex-dictators--whether because of remaining
ties to these dictatorships, or because of fear or threats of
renewed coups, these governments, from Argentina to Guatemala,
gave sweeping impunity to ex-dictatorship members--let the past
be past, work towards "reconciliation," these governments
argued.
Yet, in recent years this has
all been changing. Critics in Latin America are arguing that
"reconciliation" is just another word for "impunity,"
and that, in the name of building strong democratic institutions,
citizens need to critically engage with their past, especially
the legacy of the past in the present. And just what is the legacy
of past-dictatorships in present democracies? For many, it is
a continued excess of power of the military in civil society.
In an attempt to hold both
past and present human rights violators accountable, grassroots
social movements from north to south have been successfully demanding
past-dictators and present military offenders--often ex-members
of authoritarian old guards themselves--be punished. In Argentina,
this past September, prosecutors won the first significant conviction
of an ex-member of the 1976-1983 dictatorship there when they
sentenced ex-Police Chief Miguel Etchecolatz, responsible for
the torture and murder of twenty high school students in 1976,
to twenty-five years in prison; Pinochet, after years of stalled
efforts to bring him to trial, is likely to be judged for crimes
against humanity in a Spanish court; in Bolivia, a strong movement
has emerged to extradite ex-President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada
for his role in the 2003 massacre of over sixty protestors in
the city of El Alto; in Peru, the National Supreme Court has
authorized the extradition of ex-Army Major Telmo Hurtado, who
now lives in the US and has confessed to involvement in the 1985
massacre of 74 children, women, and old men, in an Andean village.
The message Latin American movements are sending is clear: the
era when the military, or anyone else, could torture and kill
without fear of justice is over.
And here is where the SOA ties
in to the new Latin American movements against impunity. The
Latin America strategy of SOA-W has found such success because
as Latin American movements fight against and work to build accountable
and democratic governments, SOA's role in both dictatorship and
democracy-era military violence comes up again and again.
Guevara Cerritos is one example
of an SOA-graduate turned human rights violator. Noriega, D'Aubiosson,
and Hurtado are others. Leopoldo Galtieri, a chief architect
of Argentina's 1976 military coup and close associate of Etchecolatz,
is also an SOA graduate. More recently, in the post-dictatorship
era, the suspected kidnappers of Julio Lopez, an ex-torture victim
who testified against Etchecolatz in Argentina, have ties to
SOA; in 2000, a Guatemalan SOA graduate, Colonel Byron Disrael,
was arrested for the 1998 murder of Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi,
who was documenting Disrael's and the Guatemalan military's crimes
committed during the country's thirty year civil war; and it
has just been discovered--SOA keeps its students names confidential--that
two officers, Generales Juan Veliz Herrera and Gonzalo Rocabado
Mercado, involved in the October 2003 "Gas War" massacres
in Bolivia, are also SOA graduates.
In short, SOA-W's new campaign
has met such success because of the coalescence between its goals
and the anti-impunity mood in Latin America. "Everywhere
we've traveledin South America, we've been amazed to realize
that people are fully aware of the reality of the School of the
America's," says Lisa Sullivan. "They have experienced
firsthand the horrors of the tortures, detentions, imprisonments
and disappearances' caused by its graduates."
The Dead
Shout Back
Of course, not all Latin Americans
favor punishment for past human rights violators, least of all
those implicated in the violence. These detractors argue that
the trials and demonstrations just put salt on old wounds and
make it difficult for contemporary society to live together peaceably.
They propose "reconciliation" through focusing on the
present, charging that anti-impunity movements are living in
the past.
Indeed, perhaps the defining
characteristic of the new movements against impunity as well
as the movement to shut the SOA, is their focus on remembering
the victims of state and military violence. After all, what is
the SOA "presente" ritual, or the giant tapestries
woven with the names of the dead in Chile, or the towers of photographs
of those "disappeared" in Argentina made by the Mothers
of the Plaza de Mayo, but acts of remembrance? We could even
say that the ability of any given civil society to bring ex-human
rights violators to justice is directly correlative to the degree
of historical consciousness of a regime's victims in the country,
that is, the degree to which the history of the victims is not
obscured and repressed. Thus, this also points to the importance
of grassroots movements focused on creating memory, such as HIJOS,
an organization in Argentina made up of the children of people
disappeared,' who do street-festival-slash-public-denunciations,
called escraches, in front of ex-dictators houses.
This whole politic, I think
we could say, is characteristic of these new movements, of what
I want to call a "politics of remembrance," the tools
of which are the truth commission, the trial, the march and the
escrache.
It is possible this politic
represents a new type of Latin American social movement. In a
January 2002 article by James Petras, the author argues that
there have been three waves of social movements in Latin America
in recent years. The first were the "new social movements"
of the 1970's and 1980's, focused on "challenging the military
and civilian authoritarian regimes of the time;" the second
are the movements, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Brazilian
Landless Workers Movement, running from the 1980's to the present,
"united in their opposition to neoliberalism and imperialism;"
and the third are the new urban, neighborhood-based social movements,
such as the FEJUVES that have come out of the city of El Alto
in Bolivia. The new "politics of remembrance," shot
through with characteristics of these other movements, can be
seen as a sort of "fourth wave."
While this "fourth wave"
of movements is clearly focused on the past, far from just being
about a narrow idea of punishment, they actually have the potential
to reinvigorate and open new possibilities for today's left.
Latin America is in a profound moment of self-reflection, interrogating
the past to open up the question, what kind of future do we want?'
These movements and their "politics of remembrance"
have the potential to act as a source of rejuvenation for left
politics by virtue of their ability to draw out connections between
yesterday's dictatorships and today's dominant economic and political
order and by bringing up profoundly new questions and challenges
in the present.
It seems clear that here at
the "end of history", with state communism de-legitimized
on both the right and the left, leftist movements have found
themselves profoundly lacking orientation and direction. In an
interesting way, looking to the past gives coherence to the kind
of future and goals the left pursues. In the first place, the
practice of a politics of remembrance is a negative practice.
It is about looking at the past--dictatorships, violence, militarism--and
saying, we don't want that.'
It is also, more importantly,
about locating and rooting out the presence and weight of that
history in the present. One example already mentioned is how
the legacy of dictatorships has been preserved in the present
in the form of impunity and unchecked military violence, and
how remembering the victims of these regimes has highlighted
the roots of this violence. In fact, the very language activists
use to talk about the present-day persistence of rogue military
violence demonstrates the importance of the past for understanding
this violence--the dictionary defines "impunity [as] exemption
from punishment"--we must not preserve impunity, activists
say. This points to how today's violence is rooted in the past.
Public and collective actions of remembrance bring this relationship
between past and present into clear focus.
Another way in which practices
of remembrance are challenging the present is by bringing up
critical questions about and challenges to neoliberalism and
US imperialism in Latin America. In remembering dictatorships,
social movements focused on ending impunity have highlighted
how neoliberal economic policies were first implemented during
dictatorships under protection of military governments--"armed
privatization," as Naomi Klein calls it.
This sheds a critical light
on the present reality of the Washington Consensus in Latin America
by highlighting the undemocratic nature of neoliberal policies;
it draws a connect between how they were implemented (un-democratically)
and who they benefit (a small elite), between how, as Noam Chomsky
says in a recent article, "Latin American elites and economies
[have] linked to the imperial powers but not to one another."
This historical connection and its invocation has strengthened
and legitimized anti-neoliberal movements, and more clearly shown
the political reality of neoliberalism--each protest that highlights
this connection further popularizes the idea that, as Grandin
writes, "the kind of free-market absolutism advocated by
the Chicago School [of neoliberal economists] was only possible
through repression." Chomsky further explains how the development
of this historical consciousness relates to the growth of democratic
movements: "the new wave of democratization [in Latin America]
coincided with externally mandated economic reforms' that undermine
effective democracy." Thus, "to have [historical and
political] consciousness," political philosopher Wendy Brown
writes, "is to live actively with--indeed, to activate politically--the
spirits of the pastthe bearable and unbearable memories of the
past."
This drawing out of the connection
between dictatorial repression and neoliberalism in Latin America
has allowed Latin American social movements to more clearly characterize
neoliberalism for what they believe it to be: a new face of the
same old imperialism, the "3rd Conquest of Latin America,"
as historians have phrased it. Thus here, in the way that it
is the popular and collective act of remembrance that highlights
connections between dictatorships and neoliberalism, we can see
how intimately the politics of remembrance are related to what
Chomsky says are the continents "new independence movements,"
to the myriad new movements for sovereignty over natural resources
across the hemisphere. Critical historical consciousness, German
philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin argues, is developed
through the cultural work of mourning.
The SOA, of course, figures
prominently in all of this. It is tied to Argentina's 1976-1983
dictatorship, where Washington-backed Finance Minister Martinez
de Hoz experimented with radical new free-market policies as
SOA graduates like Galtieri butchered real, imagined, and potential
critics to these policies. It is tied to Chile, where Pinochet's
regime, with Washington's full support, overthrew the democratically-elected
Salvador Allende and replaced his moderate social-democratic
economic policies with a revolutionary new economic free-market
program designed by University of Chicago economists, who also
directly trained Pinochet's Chilean economists on a US government-funded
scholarship; here too, approval of the policies was achieved
not through democratic means but through the massacre of critics--SOA
and other US-trained soldiers helped achieve consensus for these
new economic policies at the barrel of a gun.
Thus, it becomes clear that
the murder of a whole generation of activists and labor leaders,
Grandin explains, made it possible to implement the first neoliberal
economic policies. SOA is of course not any sort of monolithic
explanation for all or any of this. Rather, through its very
real connection to countless of the murderers, it is accurately
and viscerally representative of Washington's role in Latin American
neoliberalism, and how the northern neighbor uses its military
influence in the Western Hemisphere.
Of course, in concrete terms,
the legacy of US imperialism and militarism in Latin America
are much bigger and bloodier than just the SOA. As Friday Berrigan
writes in "Beyond the School of the Americas," "the
scope of [US] military training programs [in Latin America] is
extensive--as many as 100,000 foreign police and soldiers receive
training from the US government each year. There are more than
150 military institutions that train foreign officers in the
United States. In addition, US military officers lead countless
training programs in other countries."
And SOA-W is very aware of
this. Carol Tyx, an English Professor who participated in the
2006 march in Georgia, is quoted in a recent Z Magazine article
saying, in regards to shutting down the SOA, "If we close
the School, you know, that wouldn't change Plan ColumbiaNot that
closing the School is not important [but] we're trying to change
a whole foreign policy, a whole attitude about militarism. And
the School almost feels symbolic."
For their part, the main organizers
of SOA-W's Latin America strategy also recognize this. In addition
to their efforts to get Latin governments to stop sending troops
to SOA, Sullivan and company have been mobilizing, alongside
Ecuadorian social movements, in opposition to a US military base
in the city of Manta, as well as against a US military base,
called "Nuevo Horizonte," in Peru, where Southern Command
is training Peruvian soldiers. Sullivan characterizes these bases
as "different chapters of the same book," and insists
upon the need to organize in opposition to all of them. Accordingly,
this November 17-19, as US marchers convene on Georgia, there
will be simultaneous demonstrations in Manta, Ecuador, San Salvador,
El Salvador, Asuncion, Paraguay, and in Columbia. Activists will
also gather to protest Arizona's Fort Huachuca, in Colorado.
"When [activists] stand at the gates of Fort Benning this
November," the SOA Watch website proclaims, "[they'll]
be standing together with thousands of people in Central and
South America calling for an end to US militarism and intervention
and for closure of the School of the America's."
SOA, then, is perhaps best
thought of as a window through which to look back into the past
in order to make a political demand on the present--an occasion
to "activate politically the bearable and unbearable memories
of the past." The politics of remembrance--of remembering
dictatorships' victims, of remembering SOA's victims--is about
bringing the dead back to life, resurrecting them, digging up
their bodies so that their once-buried voices can be heard. In
this sense, actions of remembrance give the left a sense of values
to fight for. Wendy Brown again provides illumination: this kind
of "justiceis less institutionalthan temporal: it pertains
almost exclusively to a practice of responsible relations between
generations. Justice concerns not only our debt to the past but
also the pasts legacy in the presentJustice demands that we locate
our political identity between what we have inherited and what
is not yet born." In this case, what kind of values do the
dead have to offer us? Values of tolerance, peace, and justice
in opposition to those of violence, militarism and injustice
embodied in Latin American dictatorships and US foreign policy.
"My daughter," a woman said at an event in Buenos Aires,
"fought for economic and political justice, she fought for
democracy, and that is why they killed her. I am carrying on
her struggle for a peaceful and just tomorrow."
This November 17-19, activists
in Georgia will also be carrying on the struggle already taken
up by thousands of Latin Americans, the struggle for a peaceful
and just tomorrow. When activists in Georgia march, call the
names of SOA's victims, and shout back, "presente,"
they will be echoed in their call by a thundering chorus of Latin
Americans--both live and dead. Increasingly, their roar is harder
and harder to ignore.
Wes Enzinna is an independent writer, activist,
and international man of leisure. Comments are welcomed at wes_enzinna@hotmail.com
Visit the SOA Watch website
at www.SOAW.org for more information.
Article originally published
by Toward Freedom.
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