Using fake blood and drama, a group of about 25 demonstrators joined together in front of the Federal Building in downtown Eugene on Wednesday morning to protest the opening of the U.S. Army’s Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning near Columbus, Ohio.
The protesters say the institute, which opened Wednesday, will serve the same purpose of the Army’s now-defunct School of the Americas, which also operated at Fort Benning and was believed to be the training ground for dictators and government death squads operating in Central and Latin America.
To illustrate their argument, some activists donned T-shirts with hand-drawn bullet holes, splattered with fake blood, and lay in front of the Federal Building near the intersection of Seventh and Pearl streets. Other protesters wearing black shawls cried and wailed over their mock dead bodies.
Eugene resident Portia Foster, who attended the demonstration on what was her 80th birthday, said the group had gathered to protest the brutality from graduates of the school.
“There’s lots of evidence that graduates of the School of Americas have been instrumental in death squads,” she said. “That has no place in the policies of our country.”
Army officials have long maintained that no graduates of the School of Americas are responsible for the actions the protesters claim they committed. Army officials have also said the training facility allows for other nations to have an adequate and capable military force. According to an article by Louis Caldera, secretary of the Army, the new institution will explicitly work to “solve regional problems, including resolving border conflicts peacefully, fighting drugs and organized crime, responding to natural disasters and supporting peacekeeping efforts.”
However, 20-year-old Alder Phillis, a resident of Eugene and a University student, said the institution has only changed its name and its primary goals are still the same. She said the Eugene protest was only one of hundreds simultaneously held over the country to protest the reopening of what she says was a terribly corrupt institution.
“It’s just one way to get protesters to cool off,” she said.
Phillis said she was one of a half-dozen University students who were arrested by Fort Benning police when they refused to leave a demonstration on base grounds last fall. She said she was not comfortable releasing the names of the other students arrested with her but did say they all were members of the Survival Center, an on-campus hub for progressive activism.
One passer-by, Gary Hiser, a Eugene resident and retired major in the Marine Corps, said the protesters needed to understand that the real issue in South America wasn’t U.S. intervention but was instead that most aid shipments never reached the people they were intended to help. He also questioned the logic of protesting in front of the Federal Building.
“This isn’t the federal courthouse anymore; it’s all Bureau of Land Management,” he said.
Standing behind a banner reading “Stop U.S. sponsored Torture, Close the School of the Assassins,” Phillis said she was happy with the turnout for the protest.
She said the day’s protest would be her last chance for community actions, because she was leaving to join a women’s health organization in Latin America to work on a thesis project.
Many protesters held wooden crosses on which they had painted names of people they said had been killed by soldiers who received training at the U.S. base. A few passing motorists honked in support of the crowd.
Foster said she did not understand how the United States could maintain the position that its training offered stability when, she said, it most often only produced instability.
“You may get a totalitarian state stability, but that’s only temporary,” she said. “That will just rupture.”
While she understood the need for the United States to play in active role in foreign affairs, she did not see the need for the type of intervention she said the Army’s training center provided.
“We shouldn’t have military answers to world problems,” she said. “It’s a failing policy. We need to rethink some things we’re doing.”