Could this be the year the SOA is shut down?

[Judi Lynn]

Could this be the year the SOA is shut down?
Written by Dan Bacher
Tuesday, 20 February 2007

This may be the year that the infamous SOA of the Americas (SOA), implicated in massacres and human rights violations throughout Latin America, is finally closed. The prospect of an impending vote in the U.S. Congress, combined with a steady movement of Latin American countries withdrawing their troops from the school, makes the shut down of the school very possible in 2007.

The SOA in 2001 changed its name to WHINSEC, the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation," in response to international criticism of the school that trained hundreds of army officers and death squad leaders responsible for genocide, assassinations, torture, disappearances and other human rights violations throughout Latin America. However, only the name changed and the school continued its deadly mission of training Latin American soldiers in "counter-insurgency" techniques.

Venezuela, the first country to pull its troops out of the SOA in 2005, was followed by Argentina and Uruguay last year. Fr. Roy Bourgeois, the founder of SOA Watch, recently returned to Bolivia, where he was kicked out when working with the poor as a Maryknoll Missionary. Bourgeois and a SOA Watch delegation met with Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia, a coca grower, union leader and leftist.

"It was so good to go back to Bolivia where I lived and worked as a missionary during the Hugo Banzer dictatorship. It was a joy to see my friends working now at a clinic and a day care center," he reflected.

"When I was in Bolivia, people were being tortured, disappeared and forced to leave the country. I left Bolivia at a time of fear and despair and it was a wonderful thing to find hope and joy when I finally returned. Who would have thought this would have ever come to pass?" he emphasized.
snip/...)

http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/983/1/



Fr. Roy Bourgeois

[John Q. Citizen]

1. Fr. Roy Bourgeois is a good man. He spoke to a class I took and

he was riveting.

[Demeter]

2. Ain't Gonna Hold My Breath, For Sure!

There is no fool like an old fool, for insisting on doing the wrong thing because we've always done it that way....