Deyssy Jael de la Luz García, Centro de Estudios Ecuménicos/Iglesias por la Paz.
The Caravan for Peace crossed Arizona and Texas, and is now in Georgia. Along the route they have been received by churches and community organizations, shared stories of struggle, and participated in public awareness activities and ecumenical worship. Here is a reflection from Friday August 31 in Atlanta.
One of the places that the Caravan for Peace in USA could not ignore while in Atlanta, Georgia, was the School of the Americas, now under the name of Institute for Hemispheric Security Cooperation (SOA).
Founded in Panama in 1946, it moved to Fort Benning, Georgia in 1984, the SOA is a military academy which for decades has trained thousands of military and police personnel from Latin America in counterinsurgency tactics.
At School of the Americas
Its alumni include the Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, the Salvadoran military personnel who killed the Jesuit priests, the murderers of Bishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala, and those who have participated in military dictatorships, coups, forced disappearances and human rights violations throughout contemporary Latin American history. Many of the current members of the Mexican military AND of organized crime in Mexico have trained here, including members of the most violent criminal cartel in Mexico, Los Zetas.
Members of the Caravan for Peace marched outside the facility to denounce it. We heard speakers from the Association for the Advancement of the Rights of Colored People, the Alliance of ex-Police officers in the fight against drugs, and Javier Sicilia. Similarly, some families of the disappeared, or those forced into exile by military threat and violence, gave their testimonies. All demanded that the SOA be closed immediately, as it is a training center for institutionalized violence. “Institutions like the SOA,” said Sicilia, “are threatening democracy in Latin America, and it is justified in the name of the fight against drugs.”
Members of the Caravan acted out a public performance in which we simulated being dead illustrated the thousands of deaths that have resulted from the training at SOA.
“An act like this has never been done before at SOA,” said one of the participants, “Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Argentineans, Chileans, Colombians, have come to demonstrate, but today, Mexicans have encarnated those who have died as a result of the SOA and were not able to confront their murderers. ”
For more information on the Caravan see http://www.globalexchange.org/mexico/caravan/
En Español, vease http://iglesiasporlapaz.blogspot.mx/