by Kate Sopko

If you are walking anywhere on campus today, you're probably noticing a large amount of tally marks on the ground. What you're seeing is more than sidewalk art.

What you're seeing is a representation of people who have been tortured, "disappeared," or murdered by School of Americas graduates -- graduates of a U.S. tax dollar-sponsored military training ground for Latin American officers. Over its 53-year life-span, the SOA has taught some of the worst military dictators, death squad leaders and war criminals involved in the messy politics of Latin America. Each of the tally marks you see today stands for one life lost or terrorized by an SOA graduate, backed by U.S. taxpayers' passive complicity.

The "official" U.S. line on the SOA's purpose has always been to promote stability and democracy throughout Latin American countries, by professionalizing their armies with an American education.

In reality, the school's impact has been a tragic contradiction of its stated goal. SOA graduates have been linked to military coups, dictatorial regimes, massacres of entire villages, human rights violations and anti-democratic movement terrorism.

The following is just a sampling of some of the incidents and victims formally traced to SOA graduate involvement: Two-thirds of the officers cited by the violations are SOA alumni. SOA graduates were involved in the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the rape and murder of four U.S. missionary women, the massacre of over 900 civilians at El Mazote and the murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador. In Columbia, alumni participated in the Trujillo "chain-saw" massacre of 107 people, the Segovia massacre of 43 children and adults and the Uraba murder of 20 banana workers. This is a representative sample of only two countries where SOA-linked violence has occurred.

SOA alums include, among many other notorious criminals, Manuel Noriega (ex-dictator of Panama, convicted of drug trafficking), Leopoldo Galtieri (ex-leader of an Argentine junta) and Roberto D'Aubuisson (Salvadoran death squad leader). In 1996, the Pentagon released training manuals, which had been used in the SOA curriculum between 1982-1991. This declassified information alone contained sections which advocated torture, coercion, false imprisonment, arrest of relatives and "neutralization" (a euphemism for murder), as legitimate conduct. Clearly, the SOA's policies are not in line with human rights or democratic values, as much as the U.S. government might want us to think so.

So, today, Kent is engaged in commemorating the lives of those who died as a result of our country's foreign policy. Planning today's campaign, I wondered what it would be like to see this mass of markings. It will be hard to conceptualize that real people are attached to these chalkings.

The sad truth is, the only reason you are not seeing thousands of names on our sidewalks today is because there are too many for us to practically carry that out. Frankly, we do not even know the names of a good many of the SOA's victims, and due to secrecy and the chaos of war, we cannot even gauge the exact number of people who have been brutalized. We must remember, as observers of and participants in today's action, to hold these people in our hearts and minds -- to look at each mark as an identity cut short.

Further, we can take this as an opportunity to accept our partial responsibility for these deaths, as taxpayers who have supported the SOA's operations. Right now, there is a national campaign to close the school down. The Moakley Amendment, legislation that died in House Committee in mid-September, would have dramatically cut the school's training funds.

Other proposed legislation includes House bill HR732 and Senate bill S873, which would require immediate closure of the school. Evident in the Moakley Amendment's failure, these bills will not be passed without citizen action. If you do not support the actions of the SOA, make this clear to your Congressional representatives.

Please take today as a moment to learn more about the SOA and U.S. foreign policy. There are students, teachers and administrators throughout campus wearing the tally mark symbol.

These people can answer questions you may have about the SOA, today's campaign or possibilities for you to take action, as well as direct you to further information. There will also be speakers and video showings about the SOA held throughout the day. Learn more about this issue, and if you feel moved to, come to the Student Center, pick up a piece of chalk and help commemorate the victims of the School of the Americas.