Spanish group honors SOA Watch

By LINDA COOPER and JAMES HODGE

National Catholic Reporter

January 14, 2005

SOA Watch, the peace organization that has sought for 14 years to close down a notorious U.S. Army school for Latin American military officers, has been awarded the 21st International Alfonso Comín Foundation human rights award.

In a December ceremony in Barcelona, Spain, Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois accepted the award on behalf of SOA Watch, which he founded in 1990 after graduates of the School of the Americas were linked to the assassinations of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador. Barcelona Mayor Joan Clos and Comin’s widow, María Luis, presented the award with the city council.

The private foundation cited SOA Watch for its efforts to change U.S. foreign policy and to close down the school, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

Earlier recipients of the Comín award include Nelson Mandela, who was honored while imprisoned in South Africa for opposing apartheid, and Jesuit Ignacio Ellacuría, the rector of El Salvador’s University of Central America who was assassinated a short time later along with five other priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in 1989. Twenty-one of the 26 officers found responsible by the U.N. Truth Commission are SOA graduates, including former Defense Minister René Emilio Ponce who ordered the assassinations (NCR, Dec. 10).

Bourgeois said he accepted the award “on behalf of the scores of activists who have gone to prison to shut this school down as well as the thousands who make up the movement.”

“I felt I was standing in a sacred place,” he said, “where Ignacio Ellacuría had accepted the award just 10 days before he was assassinated by SOA graduates.”

In his remarks, Bourgeois not only thanked the foundation for the award, but praised Spanish citizens for successfully pressuring their government to pull its troops out of Iraq. He also made a special appeal for human rights activists in Spain to help SOA Watch pressure the Chilean government to stop sending its officers to the U.S. Army school, housed at Fort Benning, Ga.

Bourgeois said he was heartened by the response to his appeal, which reflected Spain’s special interest in Chile. A few years ago, Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzón made international headlines by trying to extradite Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to have him stand trial on charges of murder, torture and kidnapping. At least 79 Spanish citizens died under Pinochet.

In 1998, Bourgeois testified before Garzón in the case, documenting that the School of the Americas had trained key officers in the Pinochet regime along with four Chilean officers implicated in the 1976 murder of Spanish U.N. official Carmelo Soria, whose neck was broken during a torture session.

At the award ceremony, Bourgeois said that SOA Watch hopes to repeat its success in Venezuela, which last April became the first Latin American nation to announce it will no longer send its military officers to the school. The announcement came after Bourgeois made an appeal on Venezuelan national television and then met with President Hugo Chávez.

Several U.S. Army and school officials downplayed the loss of Venezuela, saying its military was ineligible for U.S. training because its government refused to sign an Article 98 waiver. Countries signing the waiver agree not to extradite U.S. officials and military personnel implicated in war crimes to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Getting Chile to join Venezuela, Bourgeois said, “would have a tremendous impact, since Chile is one of the school’s top two clients.” The other is Colombia. From 1996 to 2003, the school has trained 1,167 Chilean officers and 1,206 Colombians. Mexico ranks a distant third, with 733.