To the Editor:

The Reverends Johnson and Booker-Hirsch are to be commended and thanked for their courageous and powerful witness against the School of the Americas, which is known throughout Latin America as the "School of the Assassins."

If nothing else, this school has been a waste of our tax dollars, because it has failed miserably to bring either stability or real democracy to Latin America. Its 50-plus year history has seen war, oppression, and terror reign in the countries where SOA graduates have operated. Although only a small percentage of graduates have been linked to human rights atrocities, this is largely because only a small percentage of abuses are every thoroughly investigated. In fact, whenever human rights abuses have been investigated in Latin America, SOA graduates are almost always implicated.

Not all of us believe that the teaching of torture is the main problem with the SOA. For me, the main problem is that we are providing military training to corrupt armies who are not accountable for how they use the skills we have taught. Soldiers selected for SOA courses are the protégés of the brutal thugs who terrorize their own people in places such as Bolivia and Colombia. The abuses are not a thing of the past - they are occurring now. Colombian police have just arrested a man accused of the murder (in March) of the Archbishop of Cali. He is John Fredy Jimenez, and he is a graduate of the SOA. In 1992 he took the cadet combat course there.

The idea that the SOA, or WHISC, can reform these armies makes about as much sense as thinking we could reform the Mafia by sending them to law school.