Two Providence residents are slated to go on trial within the next month for participating in a nonviolent protest last November at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in Georgia, formerly known as the US Army School of the Americas (SOA). The school has been criticized for promoting torture and human rights violations in Latin America.

In a September 2002 report, Amnesty International USA called for the suspension of the school's operations pending an independent investigation. Amnesty also called for better public disclosure of all US military training of foreign military and police. According to the human rights group, the US annually trains 100,000 foreign soldiers and police from 150 countries at 275 US schools and installations, including three in Rhode Island, two in Connecticut, and one in Massachusetts.

Katherine Brown and Judd Schiffman both of Providence, say they walked around a fence and trespassed on US Army property to protest the SOA and US foreign policy. As first-time offenders, they face possible six-month prison sentences and $5000 fines.

Schiffman, 20, a house painter, says SOA contributes to miserable conditions in Latin America, similar to those he experienced while living in Zimbawe for six months. Brown, 52, a writer and peace activist since the Vietnam War, worries about how the skills taught at SOA will be applied. "If people are trained in terrorist activity, they're going to use those skills in terrorist activities," she says.

For 11 years, demonstrations organized by Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois have been held to commemorate the anniversary of the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter in El Salvador. Of the 26 people implicated in the murders, 19 received training at SOA, according to Amnesty. Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, two of the three killers of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, and 123 of 247 Colombian army officers identified as human rights abusers in 1992, are also among the school's graduates, Amnesty says.

In addition, the Pentagon revealed in 1996 that SOA training manuals advocated torture, extortion, kidnapping, and execution, leading the US House of Representatives to come within 10 votes of closing the training center in 2000. This year, 11,000 people demonstrated at SOA, according to the National Catholic Reporter, including 86 who were arrested.

Army spokesman and former SOA instructor Kenneth LaPlante rejects calls to close the school, saying it is "a large leap of logic" to link human rights violations to several weeks of military training received years earlier. The controversial manuals, he adds, were mistakenly included in supplemental materials used by only 50 students. In a letter responding to the report, the Army also noted that information on human rights has been included in all courses.

According to Amnesty, SOA "is only one small part of a vast and complex network of US programs for training foreign and military police forces that is often shrouded in secrecy." Included in the network, the report states, are the Naval War College, Naval Justice School, and Surface Warfare Officers School Command in Newport; the Navy Submarine School in Groton, Connecticut, the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut; and the First Coast Guard District in Boston. Amnesty calls for incorporating human rights law into all training, screening students to ensure that past human rights violators are not admitted, and tracking graduates to measure the impact of training.

Issue Date: January 10 - 16, 2003