Stirred to action after the assassination on March 24, 1980,
of Archbishop Óscar Romero by a right-wing death squad in El Salvador, Father
Roy Bourgeois founded the U.S-based SOAW, and has been campaigning since 1990.
He has called the school a “symbol of United States foreign policy whose role
is always the same: to protect U.S. economic interests and control the natural
resources of Latin American countries.”
Opponents of the school point to a number of figures in
Latin American history who have received training and then committed human
rights abuses. Recently, graduate Pedro Pimentel Ríos of Guatemala was
sentenced to a symbolic 6,060 years in prison for his actions during the 1982
Dos Erres Massacre that resulted in more than 200 deaths in that country. In
total, 11 dictators have attended the school, from Argentina’s Leopoldo
Galtieri, to Guatemala’s Efraín Ríos Montt, whose scorched earth campaign has
been classified as genocide by a U.N. commission.
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