SOA Watch holds vigil outside Fort Benning gate

The 1983 protest of Salvadoran soldiers training at Fort Benning was remembered Friday just outside the post’s south gate on Benning Road.

The Rev. Roy Bourgeois, one of three protesters arrested and sentenced to 18 months in prison for dressing as Army officers and blaring the sermon of a slain archbishop on post, led a handful of School of the Americas Watch supporters with banners and crosses while Department of Defense police officers watched from inside the gate.

“We are here to keep alive the memories of the thousands killed in places like El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras,” said Bourgeois, wearing a straw hat and black T-shirt with the photo of slain Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. “We are here as U.S. citizens to remember.”

Thirty years ago, the former Catholic priest recalled the protest against 525 Salvadoran soldiers on post as one that started a movement for the nonviolent grass-roots organization. The protest came just three years after Romero was killed on March 24, 1980, and the deaths of four U.S. church women who had gone to El Salvador at the invitation of Romero. All were killed by members of the Salvadoran military, he said.

Bourgeois said he and other protesters, Linda Ventimiglia and the late Father Larry Rosebaugh, came up with the daring idea to wear Army uniforms during a protest in front of the post before entering the installation at nightfall. Bourgeois said he was a colonel and the others were lower-ranking officers.

They found the barracks housing the soldiers, climbed a tree and played a taped sermon Romero preaching to soldiers the day before he was killed.

“Bishop Romero was like Martin Luther King Jr. where he was preaching to stop the killing, lay down your weapons,” Bourgeois said.

A year after the protest in 1984, the School of the Americas moved from Panama to Fort Benning, where the post trained Latin American soldiers and law enforcement personnel until December 2000 before closing. It reopened in 2001 as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a school SOA Watch supporters want to close with annual protests outside the gate in November.

While the institute states that it trains students on Democratic principles, there are also elements training people for more war-like activity, said H. Berrien Zettler, a supporter of SOA Watch.

“I think war is evil,” he said. “I can’t think of any justification for modern warfare. When you see what we are doing now with all the extreme measures that we are taking and we don’t even have a war.”

Zettler, who is also active with One Columbus, NAACP, Homeless Resource Network and other community groups, pointed to the use of drones and the secrecy of using such weapons. “All of that stuff is to protect I think our own tendency toward violence,” he said. “We are trying to control everything.”

This story was originally published August 9, 2013 at 11:15 AM with the headline "SOA Watch holds vigil outside Fort Benning gate."