Naming the names

     And so we begin by naming the names: Luis Abad, Gonzalo Achupallias, Segundo Acordones, Briones Acosta, Elicio Aguilar Carrion, Francisco Aguirre …

     In El Salvador, you will find lists of names, names of the dead. Names of the disappeared. Names of those who were innocents …

    … Wilfredo Almeida, A. Cesar Cruz Almeida, Rene Galo Nieto Almeida, Miguel Perez Almendariz, Luis Alomoto, Arcos Bolivas Bastidas …

     The most famous list of names can be found in the capital city, in Cuscatlan Park, where more than 35,000 names are carved into horizontal granite slabs, logging some of those who lost their lives or disappeared in the 12-year civil war that has come to define El Salvador …

     … Jose Domingo Monterrosa Barrios, Julio Valencia Gonzalez, Joaquin Valdez Gomez, Jose R. Garcia, Napoleon Garcia, Wilfredo Canales, Jorge L. Callejas …

     But the names above are not from the wall at Cuscatlan Park, and they are not victims of the war. These are among the 2,500-plus graduates of the School of the Americas from El Salvador. They took courses such as Commando Training OE-4; Combat Arms Basic Course; Patrolling Operations; Jungle Operations; Psychological Operations; and Counter-Insurgency Training.
     The great theory behind the development of the School of the Americas, from the U.S. military’s "unofficial" point of view, was that they were not only providing technical training for soldiers from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua – among many others – the U.S. military also was investing in developing friendships that would last for many years. The cadets attending the SOA programs would always have ties to SOA instructors, and military personnel from the States in turn would be able to contact the young officers trained at the school when they reached the rank of Colonel or General. We always would have a handle on what was going on with the military organizations of our neighboring countries because these were our “buddies.”
     The Salvadoran graduates of the SOA who were trained in the late 1970s and early 1980s were the understudies of U.S. trainers who had cut their teeth on truly nasty operations in Vietnam. These were the guys engaged in “black ops” that involved murdering “insurgents” in the middle of the night, razing entire villages (drain the water, and the fish will die – a tactic developed in Southeast Asia), and as we all know, Salvadoran graduates used the techniques to the extreme, costing upwards of 75,000 lives in the process.
     It is because those lives were lost, at the hands of men trained by our own military, that we gather in Washington, D.C. this weekend. We are remembering the names of the victims. We are recalling the names of the perpetrators in these killings. And we are asking our own government to stop this insidious repression that we continue to foment on the innocents of Central and South America in the name of security. Shut the school down. Shut it down!
     It was a learning point for me that nearly everyone I spoke with or listened to today when discussing the SOA made reference to the atrocities that occurred in El Salvador as being the birth of a movement against the SOA. Everyone in this “community” knew of Romero’s plea for help, and they can all recite the martyrs: Msgr. Romero, the Four Churchwomen; the Jesuits.
     I have been to the wall at Cuscutlan Park many, many times. Each visit brings a new observation. I see names I’ve never noticed before. I see flowers and notes left behind by loved ones remembering their father or mother or a sibling. And now in my mind’s eye, I see the wall; I look at it from an angle, the horizontal lines fading off in the distance and almost joining at its end. So many victims. So many killed. The last time I was there, in December, I walked along the wall with my daughter, both of us stopping to touch the carved name of a family member who had been tortured and then murdered. It was a horrible moment, and I couldn't bring myself to tell her that this was our fault.
     What a legacy for us. What shame.


(Crispas Executive Director Dennis O'Connor is blogging from Washington, D.C. during the Latin American Solidarity Conference held at American University.)