SOA Vigil at the Gates of Fort Benning

November 18-20, 2011: SOA Vigil at the Gates of Fort Benning, Georgia

STAND UP FOR DIGNITY, JUSTICE, SOLIDARITY AND SELF-DETERMINATION!

Join thousands of solidarity activists, torture survivors, union workers, people of faith, students, immigrants, veterans and others from November 18-20, 2011 at the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia to take a stand for justice, to close the School of the Americas (SOA/ WHINSEC) and to resist U.S. militarization.

This December will mark the 30th anniversary of the massacre of close to 800 indigenous villagers in the El Mozote region of El Salvador. Still, graduates of the SOA are leading the repression, killing hundreds and displacing thousands of Hondurans. Mexicans and immigrants passing through Mexico are the target of drug cartels and death squads like the “Zetas” – another product of SOA training. In the midst of the continuing war in Colombia, fueled by SOA violence, killings of trade union activists touched 51 in 2010.

In Guatemala, General Mario Fuentes Lopez was arrested for genocide against that country’s indigenous people in the 1980s; General Fuentes Lopez was a graduate of the SOA. Pedro Pimentel Rios, a member of the notorious Kaibiles (Guatemalan Special Forces), who was became an instructor one month after his participation in the Dos Erres massacre in 1982, was arrested and extradited to Guatemala. A member of the Zetas and former Mexican Special Forces member, Jesus Enrique Rejón Aguilar, was arrested and confessed that he helped to recruit Mexican Special Forces members trained at Ft. Benning. …more