The School of the Americas

Every November for more than three decades, thousands of people gathered outside the main gate of Fort Benning to call out names. The names were those of people killed in Latin America by graduates of a training school that operated on the post. The crowd responded to each name with a single word: presente. It means present, still here, not forgotten.

The School of the Americas was established shortly after World War Two to train military officers from Central and South America and the Caribbean in counterinsurgency, combat, and related skills. It was originally located in Panama, moved to Fort Benning in nineteen eighty-four. Over its existence it trained more than sixty thousand soldiers from twenty-three countries.

The school's graduates included a significant number of officers later implicated in some of the most documented atrocities of the Cold War in Latin America. The murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador in nineteen eighty, who was shot while celebrating mass. The assassination of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter at the University of Central America in El Salvador in nineteen eighty-nine. Multiple officers later convicted in connection with those killings were School of the Americas graduates. A nineteen ninety-six United Nations truth commission on Guatemala found that graduates of the school were linked to massacres of indigenous villages there during that country's civil war.

Defenders of the school argued that problematic graduates were a fraction of the total trained, that the skills taught were legitimate military doctrine, and that the school contributed to democratic governance by professionalizing Latin American militaries.

The protest movement, organized by a Maryknoll priest named Roy Bourgeois under the name School of the Americas Watch, drew as many as twenty-two thousand people to the Fort Benning gates in a single year. Under sustained congressional pressure, the school was officially closed in December two thousand. In January two thousand and one, a renamed successor institution, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, opened at the same address with a revised curriculum and human-rights training added to its course offerings. Critics noted that most of the same instructors remained.