Crime of Passion (Page 2 of 3)

She also meets with friends and acquaintances to “see what the flaws are in my thinking, what are the gaps, what do I need to consider again?” Lentsch has gone through this process six times, each one ending in arrest for trespassing. Would she do it again?

“Well, I just sort of live day to day, but I would not anticipate that I would do it [again] this November. …I think after you’re in prison for six months, I think there’s a time to just kind of come back and reconnect, you know, yourself and your relationships. …Now I’m not saying I won’t do it again,” she said. The response sparks a memory, and a smile spreads across her face.

“I remember in prison the last time [in 2003], we had a meeting, and it was the warden, your counselor and your case manager,” she said. “And so we’re sitting at this round table and so one of them says, ‘So are you going to do this again?’, and I said, ‘Well, I just have to follow my conscience.’ And they didn’t say anymore on that topic.”

Trying not to sound crass, we bring up the difficulty of forcing institutional change on governments—won’t the government just relocate the school instead of shutting it down? After all, even the public uproar over the leaked SOA “torture manuals” (see below) only resulted in cosmetic changes like the name change in 2001.

“Well, if we’re going to engage in peace and justice activities in any way we need to have community. We can’t do it alone because I think that cynicism and that pessimism is so easy,” she said.

“We’re overwhelmed by all this suffering and injustice all around us…and I think it has to be sort of an optimism of David and Goliath where David says, ‘He’s so big, how can I miss?’” she said.

The documentary evidence against graduates of the School of the Americas is far too vast and varied to be included here. So we’ve compiled a very small sampling of some of the particularly compelling evidence from just a few countries.

School of the Americas In the Dock: The Evidence

Guatemala

The United Nations Guatemalan truth commission report, released in 1999, singled out the controversial U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) for its counterinsurgency training that “had a significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed conflict” that ravaged the country for 36 years.

In describing the National Security Doctrine taught at the SOA, the independent Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) report states: “By identifying all opponents as adversaries, the National Security Doctrine helped to broaden the definition of counterinsurgency and to spread techniques of persecution...within a growing atmosphere of State terror.” The CEH was established as part of a United Nations Peace Accord that ended the armed conflict in 1996.

A separate 1998 human rights report released by the Guatemala Archdiocese Human Rights Office also linked the SOA to the civilian-targeted genocide campaign. Unlike the Historical Clarification Commission which was limited by a Peace Accord agreement, the Archdiocese document, “Guatemala: Never Again”, named specific military officers responsible for atrocities.

The 1998 document cited SOA graduates for some of the most notorious human rights violations, including the murder of anthropologist Myrna Mack, the cover-up of the murder of US citizen Michael DeVine, and the torture and murder of Efrain Bamaca, husband of US lawyer, Jennifer Harbury. The Archdiocese report also named SOA graduates as top leaders in the fearsome Guatemalan military intelligence agency (D-2 or G-2) which both reports cite for horrific abuses.

Both reports concur that paramilitary groups were to blame for a large percentage of the 42,000 human rights violations.

Colombia

According to the  2004 “U.S. Department of State Country Reports on Human Rights Practices – Colombia”:

“Evidence suggested there were tacit arrangements between local military officers and paramilitary groups in some regions, and some members of the security forces actively assisted paramilitary groups by passing them through roadblocks, sharing intelligence, providing them with weapons and ammunition and joining their ranks while off duty.”