Protests against the institution formally known as the School of the Americas(SOA) occur every year at Fort Benning, Georgia. This coming weekend will be no exception as people plan to descend upon the site by the thousands. Additionally simultaneous protests are scheduled to tale place in Santiago de Chile, Bogotá Colombia, San Salvador El Salvador, among others. So what are the protests about? From The Nation:

The SOA has trained more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers in military and law-enforcement tactics. The Pentagon has acknowledged that in the past the SOA used training manuals advocating coercive interrogation methods and extra-judicial executions, and over time SOA alumni have been linked to many of Latin America’s most heinous human rights atrocities, from widespread torture to massacres of young children.

While some Latin America countries like Venezuela, Uruguay, and Argentina have stopped sending their soldiers to the SOA, now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, concern among activists have been heightened by President Bush’s decision to grant a waiver that allows the United States to resume training militaries from 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries. This allegedly is being done as a reaction to the rise of leftist heads of state in Latin America including the recent win of former Sandanista, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.

I certainly am not surprised by Bush’s recent move which can be seen as nothing less than an attempt to gain more control in Latin America, which is nothing new.

Via / Tha Nation and USA Today

Image Via / SF Indymedia