Courtesy of Chris Peck
Remembering Victims: Thousands protested in November at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, which critics say has helped train soldiers from Latin America who have been linked to human rights violations.
Bellarmine student works to close military training school
WG residents say U.S. has contributed to suffering in L.A.
By Kate Carter
Chris Peck Jr., is willing to get arrested if it will help keep people from getting killed. And he's willing to talk about his experience at a demonstration in Fort Benning, Ga., on Nov. 19, at the U.S. School of the Americas located there, if it will help people understand they are supporting what he calls the violent suppression of poor people in Latin America.
"The fact is that the United States prides itself on promoting democracy, and yet we have this school on U.S. soil," Peck says. "I just think that is ridiculous. I just want to get more people aware of the problem so they can make their own decision about it. Hopefully, someday it will be shut down and we won't need to have the protest anymore."
Peck lives in Willow Glen and is a senior at Bellarmine College Prep. He went to Fort Benning this fall to join thousands of others to protest the military training school. It was his second trip to the demonstration, but his first time committing a federal offense by "crossing the line" onto the school's property.
"You think about it and you realize, what the United States is known for is having democracy," he says, "The school that we're fighting against is promoting almost the exact opposite of that. For U.S tax dollars to be supporting it, especially when hardly anyone knows anything about it, is just horrible. If someone sees on CNN that 4,000 people are lining up to be arrested, maybe they'll at least look into it."
The demonstration is an annual event that began in 1990 on the first anniversary of the brutal slayings of six Jesuit priests and two women at the University of Central America in El Salvador. A special committee of the U.S. Senate investigated the incident and found those responsible included graduates of the SOA, Peck says.
Critics of the school say its graduates are also responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in El Salvador and other parts of Central and Latin America, including El Salvador's Archbishop Romero in 1979, four American churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980, and the massacre of perhaps a thousand people in the El Salvadoran village of El Mozote in 1991.
Peck says he first learned about the school two years ago when a teacher at Bellarmine, Larry Lauro, talked about attending the demonstration and crossing the line. He says he became interested in finding out why one of the Jesuit high school's teachers would risk arrest, and so he began asking some questions and reading about the School of the Americas.
What he learned prompted him to join Bellarmine's trip to the demonstration against the school the following year.
The School of the Americas was founded by the United States at the beginning of the Cold War to help stem the tide of communism that officials worried could soon flood through Latin America and into the United States. It was first built in Panama as a school to train military personnel in countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua to suppress uprisings by suspected communists, Peck says.
When the Panama Canal returned to Panamanian control, the school was relocated to Fort Benning. But its mission and activities haven't changed, even since the end of the Cold War, Peck says. He says many of the current students are soldiers in the war on drugs in Colombia and increasingly are part of the Mexican military to stop the uprising in the state of Chiapas. But Peck says only 5 percent of the SOA's students took counter-narcotics courses there in 1999, and of 31 courses offered, only five relate to human rights and democracy.
What students really learn, he says, are ways to violently intimidate and silence those who speak out against the powerful. And the United States supports the powerful because they are friendly to American companies and businesses, he says.
"It's not about communism anymore" but about consumerism, Peck says.
Willow Glen resident José Molina teaches math at Bellarmine, but he lived in El Salvador until 1980, when his family chose to come to California because of threats his mother, a high school teacher, received from the military. She was perceived as being part of the resistance to the 14 families that had ruled in the country since it became independent in the early 1800s.
"She did basic things like telling her students to believe in themselves" he says. "That's seen as dangerous."
He and other teachers at Bellarmine took a group of students to El Salvador for 10 days last June to learn about what happened to the country during the war.
"The purpose of the trip is to learn about social justice and the injustices that have happened throughout the history of El Salvador," he says. "If you go to the country and let the people tell their stories, it's only natural that they're going to break your heart. It's only natural that you're going to question what humanity's about."
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Vocal: Chris Peck talks about protesting at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga.
Although Molina says the situation in El Salvador has improved since the end of the war, since the country is now a democracy, those who control the country's government are still those who were in power before the war.
And although the Cold War is over, the School of the Americas continues to operate as before, Molina says.
The U.S House of Representatives voted three times in the last year on a bill to close the school or cut its funding and, although the bill never passed, the body is getting closer to closing it, he says.
However, the school will be renamed the Defense Institute for Hemispheric Security Cooperation next year, a change designed to prevent it from losing funding, both Molina and Peck say.
"It's largely cosmetic," Peck says.
Peck went on the trip with Molina, visiting El Salvador and the sites of some of the massacres that happened there during the country's civil war in the 1980s and early '90s.
Peck says the group met people who live with the aftermath of the war that ended in 1992. "They grow up with that," he says. "For them, it's just the way life is."
That experience, he says, led him to decide to join this year's demonstration, planning to cross the line.
"Being down there and actually seeing what kind of impact the SOA has had, you want to go back and do something about it," Peck says. "You have to do something. This time, I had to cross the line, after seeing what the SOA had done."
Because students who went with the Bellarmine group are not allowed to risk arrest, Peck chose to go with a group from Santa Clara University.
At the demonstration, Peck says the thousands of people who walked across the school's boundary responded by raising crosses and saying "Presente" after the name of each person killed by SOA graduates is announced.
"I mean, these names just go on for two hours," Peck says. "They could go on longer, just of all the people who've died." Once on the school's campus, Peck says he spent hours with the other demonstrators.
"Once you cross the line, it's pretty peaceful," he says. "Everybody's just happy to be there."
Police then told the demonstrators that if they didn't cross back out of the school they would be arrested.
"We crossed the line for a reason," he says. "So we got on the buses (waiting for the protesters) and were processed."
Peck says he was photographed, fingerprinted and given a "banned and barred" letter saying that he was not welcome back at the school, but he wasn't arrested. If he were to return and cross the line onto the school's campus at a demonstration in the next five years, he could receive six months in prison or a $5,000 fine, he says.
Peck says he'll return to the demonstration next year, but he probably won't cross the line.
Molina says he hasn't yet been able to attend a demonstration at Fort Benning, because he is coaching soccer at that time of year. He says he would like to go someday, but he's not sure he would cross the line as Peck did.
"I admire that," he says of Peck's commitment. "It's our responsibility to be the voice for those that are being killed by graduates of the SOA. Sometimes the best way to say what you want is civil disobedience."
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
