Before “Abu Ghraib” and “Guantánamo” and “extraordinary rendition” became the shorthand ways of referring to America’s torture policy, those in the know used the phrase “School of the Americas” to mean much the same thing.
The School of the Americas (now officially renamed “WHINSEC” in the same tried-and-true bad-publicity-fleeing method that saw Philip Morris transform into “Altria”) helped to train “our sons-of-bitches” during the cold war — the various military juntas and contras and such that helped keep Latin America from falling victim to Communism, organized labor, or democracy.
This training included instruction on how to use “torture, extortion, censorship, false arrest, execution and the ‘neutralizing’ of enemies” to defend the fringes of the Free World. School of the Americas graduates have been implicated in many atrocities.
The annual vigil by thousands of School opponents has become, in addition to a statement of protest against such U.S. policies and an opportunity to do some crossing-the-line style civil disobedience, a networking opportunity for the anti-imperialist set.
A group from NWTRCC was at the event. Robert Randall reports that there was a lot of interest in war tax resistance, with over a thousand people filling out NWTRCC’s survey:
I think it was one of the most exciting presences we’ve had at SOAW. Asking people to fill out the survey gave us much more interaction with folk than the leafleting which we’ve done in past years. (Our message did get out to everyone even more than if we had leafleted, though, as Ruth [Benn] put an ad in the SOAW printed program, which was handed out to all of the 20,000 people who came; we even found it available in the lobbies of the motels in town.) People asked questions, got a little on-the-spot mini-counseling, were given the materials they needed (most often the new flyer on W-4 resistance, which we used up and had to re-copy), and sometimes went away with local folk to contact from our network list.
About 50 people signed up for introductory packets, and we got 16 names on the “Don’t Pay for War in Iraq!” call to tax resistance. Our lit sales matched the best we’ve done in the past.
