Bolivia will cut ties to the School of the Americas

From the School of the Americas Watch email list:

We are very excited to announce that President Evo Morales announced Tuesday that Bolivia will gradually withdraw its military from the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School for the Americas (SOA). Bolivia is now the fifth country after Costa Rica, Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela to formally announce a withdrawal from the school!

“We will gradually withdraw until there are no Bolivian officers attending the School of the Americas,” said Morales. Questioning the U.S. government’s foreign policy he noted that “they are teaching high ranking officers to confront their own people, to identify social movements as their enemies.”

This is a great victory for torture survivors, social movement leaders and human rights activists of Bolivia and the Americas. The SOA/WHINSEC has played a significant role in Bolivia’s recent political history, Hugo Banzer Suarez, who ruled Bolivia from 1971-1978 under a brutal military dictatorship attended the school in 1956 and was later inducted into the school’s “hall of fame” in 1988. The SOA has trained tens of thousands of Bolivian military officers in the past fifty years. In October of 2006, two former graduates of the SOA/WHINSEC, Generals Juan Veliz Herrera and Gonzalo Rocabado Mercado were arrested on charges of torture, murder, and violation of the constitution for their responsibility in the death of 67 civilians in El Alto Bolivia during the “Gas Wars” of September-October 2003.

In March 2006 a School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) delegation led by Lisa Sullivan-Rodriguez, Salvadoran torture survivor Carlos Mauricio, and SOA Watch founder Father Roy Bourgeois met with President Evo Morales to request that Bolivia cease to send troops for training at the SOA/WHINSEC.

Venezuela was the first Latin American country to stop sending its soldiers for training at SOA/WHINSEC (more on Argentina, Uruguay and Costa Rica’s withdrawal here and here), the so-called “School of Assassins” which has for decades had clear ties to the teaching of torture and assassination in Latin America. In addition to high profile victims of SOA violence such as Archbishop Oscar Romero, thousands upon thousands of members of the Body of Christ have been, and continue to be, victimized as a result of United States policy in Latin America through this institution. If the countless voices crying for the school’s closure (including the voices of of the martyrs) do not move the United States government to act, let’s hope that more Latin American countries follow suit and put the SOA/WHINSEC out of business by withdrawing their customers.