
	Web Encuentro 2007

Performance Against the SOA

The SOA/WHINSEC and the SOA Watch:

Enacting Social Change Through the Performance of Protest

The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known at the School of the Americas (SOA) is a military training school for Latin American soldiers located on Fort Benning Army Base in Columbus, Georgia and funded by United States tax dollars. Originally created to fight communism, for over fifty years the school has strived to train military men and women from Central and South America in the ways of American combat. It has come under scrunity by religious and social action groups because a large number of its graduates have committed gross human rights abuses in their home countries after training at the SOA.

As part of a movement to close the SOA/WHINSEC, a group called the SOA Watch organizes a yearly demonstration. I attended this two day demonstration in November of 2004. In this website, I have attempted to capture my experience at the November Vigil, including photographs I took and information I gathered. In my essay I explore the performance of the protest and vigil, and the performance that is the school itself.