Help us go close the School of the Americas

The resent focus on child refugees in the U.S. borders have alarmed many people who are pro immigrants as well as the anti-immigration advocates. We believe that it is critical to look as to why they are coming and how U.S. foreign policies have a great deal of blame. Violence in Central America has been influence by the horrors of war during the 12 year civil war in El Salvador and wars in Guatemala, Nicaragua as well as U.S. interventions in Honduras and other parts of Latin America. We believe that the violence in Central America that is causing youth to flee today was influence by individuals that were trained in the School of The Americas in Columbus, GA. in Fort Benning.

Violence Created by People like:

In June this year, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, once a student at the school, was convicted in Guatemala City of murdering Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998. Gerardi was killed because he had helped to write a report on the atrocities committed by Guatemala’s D-2, the military intelligence agency run by Lima Estrada with the help of two other SOA graduates. D-2 coordinated the “anti-insurgency” campaign which obliterated 448 Mayan Indian villages, and murdered tens of thousands of their people. Forty per cent of the cabinet ministers who served the genocidal regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt and Mejia Victores studied at the School of the Americas.

In 1993, the United Nations truth commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war. Two-thirds of them had been trained at the School of the Americas. Among them were Roberto D’Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador’s death squads; the men who killed Archbishop Oscar Romero; and 19 of the 26 soldiers who murdered the Jesuit priests in 1989.

In Chile, the school’s graduates ran both Augusto Pinochet’s secret police and his three principal concentration camps. One of them helped to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington DC in 1976. Read more

We need to close the School of The Americas to stop the training of assassins in Latin America. Homies Unidos has advocated for just policies to deal with the issue of violence that plagues not just the streets of Los Angeles but also the streets of Central America. We will be joining School of The Americas Watch in their mission to close down this school that has trained many dictators an assassins throughout Latin America.

As part of our Youth Leadership training on civic engagement, we will be taking five youth who have graduated from our program to Columbus, GA and will be presenting on how violence from the 80’s is revelent to todays violence in Central America, how this violence affects our in Central America and youth in the streets of Los Angeles. We will be screening the Fruits of War documentary and educating people from all parts of the U.S. about the work that Homies Unidos does to reduce violence and at the same time creating leaders of our youth who at one point where disfranchised and now are developing into advocates for social justice.