Annotation must be at least 150 words but no more than 500 words.
Each article will be explained in the document about the arguments made in the articles
rather than opinion based and must have its own individual citation.
The annotations must show understanding of the basic arguments and methods used
by the author.
Citations should be in APA format.
Cutting Through Topologies: Crossing
Lines at the School of the Americas
Sara Koopman
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada;
sara.koopman@gmail.com
Abstract: The School of the Americas (SOA) is a U.S. Army school that trains Latin American
military officers. Manuals released detail torture techniques once taught at the school, and
thousands of graduates have been linked to human rights abuses. The annual vigil in front of
Fort Benning is the largest ongoing protest and civil disobedience against U.S. imperialism being
held within the U.S. The movement to close the SOA traces the twisted lines of the topology
that shapes spaces of exception in Latin America. It traces those lines back to the SOA, and cuts
through them with its own counter-topographical lines of connection to those Latin Americans
that are made into ‘bare life’ by those topologies. This essay looks at the doings of protest space
as a form of resistance to the space of exception, and how personal stories, and mourning, can
put us beside ourselves, with one another.
Keywords: space of exception, bare life, topology, counter-topography, resistance, protest
space
Crossing
At first there was nothing but the sign marking the entrance: “Welcome
to Fort Benning”. Then, in 1999, a white line in the road. In 2001, there
was a temporary fence. In 2003, a permanent fence. Then in 2004 a
second, temporary, fence, covered with tarp(aulin), topped with huge
rolls of razor wire. There was another line of smaller fencing out around
the welcome sign, and it was also covered with a tarp. I stood outside
that fence cheering as two other activists crossed over it, took down
the tarp, and uncovered the welcome sign. They poured (real) blood on
it, and covered it with a banner: “Close the School of the Americas!”
Then they put on gloves for the barbed wire, picked up a cross with the
name of a person disappeared by a graduate of the school, and carried
it over the next fence, and the next, and were arrested in acts of civil
disobedience.
The next year, 2005, there was, astoundingly, a third fence with more
barbed wire, well outside of the tell-tale sign. Again, the fence was
covered with tarp so that we could not see through. Again, activists cut
that tarp off, and two were arrested for doing so. Liam O’Reilly served
three months in prison simply for cutting a one-inch tear. That time the
outside fence was so high that instead of going over, activists found
Antipode Vol. 40 No. 5 2008 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 825–847
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00639.x

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places where the fence did not quite reach the ground, folded it back,
and went under it.
In 2006, rather than put a tarp on the outside fence, the military tarped
the fence closest to the base. Since activists who crossed were arrested
after crossing the first fence, they did not have a chance to get to that
third fence and take down the tarp. There were also several new side
fences to prevent activists from crossing where they had before, south
of the main gate. The night before the action a rip “appeared” in the
fence just north of the gate, and the next day activists crossed through
the hole onto the base. In 2007 there were rolls of razor wire on the
ground between the three fences, as well as orange traffic barriers in
front of the fences. Activists still managed to put crosses through the
fence. Those who crossed onto the base had to do so several miles away,
far from the view of other protesters.
There have recently been various useful takes on the space of protest,
and how protest reworks space (see Glassman, Wainright and Prudham
2000; Herbert 2007; Routledge 2004; Wainright and Ortiz 2006). This
article looks in particular at protest space as a form of resistance to the
space of exception, and of the doings of space with which the movement
to close the School of the Americas (SOA) engages in that resistance. I
turn to Agamben’s thinking, and his topology metaphor, for new ways of
understanding this struggle and for greater clarity about our strategies. I
engage in this thinking as part of my longstanding political and academic
focus on decolonizing solidarity organizing. Yet Agamben has little to
say about how to resist, much less how resistance is happening, and I
also hope to contribute to growing discussions about how the space of
exception can and is being resisted (Gregory 2006; Papastergiadis 2006;
Perera 2006; Pratt 2005).
For Agamben a space of exception is an “inclusive exclusion” (Ek
2006). It is a space that is neither in nor out, but caught in a twist
of what Agamben calls a topology. Topology is a mathematical term
for stretching and bending forms, for turning squares into circles, for
twisting the mobius strip. The space of exception is one that has been
caught in these twists and created by the sovereign as a non-place, where
people are ever actively abandoned, turned into non-people (Agamben
1988, 2002; Gregory 2007a). They can be killed at any moment, but
it will never be murder; there will be total impunity for their deaths
because their lives do not count. They are exposed, “bare life”. Their
bodies (zoe, biological life) do not count, nor do they count as citizens
(bios, political life). They are caught in a twist in between where they
are neither. This split between what Bernstein (2004) calls the sweet
life and the good life is both the cause and effect of abandonment, and
as Pratt argues, this is a profoundly gendered process, though Agamben
elides this (Pratt 2005:1057). Agamben’s other term for bare life is homo
sacer. He names “the camp” as the quintessential space of exception.

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In mathematics a topology can be endlessly stretched and twisted, but
once it is cut, crossed such that its properties change, it is no longer a
topology, no longer the same space (Oxford World Encyclopedia 2005).
How might we, then, cut into, and out of, the space of the exception?
Those on the inside too often find no other avenue but cutting
themselves, sewing their mouths in protest, or committing suicide.
From the outside in Australia activists have been resisting by literally
cutting the fences of refugee camps (Papastergiadis 2006). At the vigil to
close the SOA we resist not in front of the space of exception itself, but
in front of the sovereign, in front of not the torture chamber but the
military base. Agamben, with all of his focus on the camp, never pulls
back to trace the historical, political and geographical lines that twisted
to create such a space (Bernstein 2004, Gregory 2006). Yet how can
we resist a space of exception without a sense of how, and where, it is
created? Gregory’s (2006) analytical unfolding of the topological lines
that shape Guanta?namo exemplifies the power and importance of this
work.
Once we have traced those lines, how do we cut them? Our strategy
has been to physically go to one of the sites where those lines begin, the
SOA, and to there create a space, the annual vigil, from which we draw
our own lines. Ours are lines of connection, countertopographical lines
that tie us to those inside the space of exception, and in so doing, cut
across the lines of the topology and work to open it.
Cindi Katz uses the term “countertopography” to describe drawing
contour lines between places. These lines represent not elevation but
particular relations to global and systemic processes (2001:1229). Katz
uses this metaphor for seeing how different places are affected by global
processes in analogous ways, and argues that in seeing the connection
between distant places we can also infer connections with uncharted
places in-between. Katz offers this as a research method, and it is an
analytical tool that is useful for deepening the work, but international
solidarity activists have long been drawing these lines politically. The
world social forum process has also been precisely about forming and
strengthening these translocal and cross-movement connections. In the
movement to close the SOA we draw these lines not only analytically
and organizationally, but with hearts and bodies. It is with testimony
and mourning that we draw a line between San Jose?, Colombia and
Columbus, USA.
First, however, let me trace the lines of the topology that the SOA
is twisting. I will then turn to the doings of space that the movement
to close the school engages in to cross those lines, in particular how
we struggle over watching, speaking, and other practices, productions
and performances of that space.1 What does it take to draw countertopographies with hearts and bodies? What is risked? In arguing that the
state tries to turn the vigil itself into a paler sort of space of exception,

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I argue that there can be degrees of such a space. It is not the all or
nothing that Agamben sometimes (though not always) portrays it as
(Pratt 2005:1074). We are all potentially homo sacer because the lines
of the topology are always moving, but we are vulnerable to different
degrees (Gregory 2007a). They key is to resist before becoming homo
sacer.
It is not simply a matter of drawing in those who have been excluded—
for those in the space of exception are already both in and out. We open
a space for stories, for “beloved community”. We draw lines that put
us beside those who have been killed and tortured by graduates of the
school. We mourn, and as Butler (2004) argues, this puts us beside
ourselves with anger, grief. We are beside ourselves, with one another.
Our connections cut through the fence. Our counter-topographies cross
the line, to close the school.
Teaching
In the 1980s the line connecting death and torture in El Salvador to
training at the School of the Americas was not hard to trace, as thousands
of troops were being trained there. Over the years, countries with the
worst human rights records have consistently been the ones sending
high numbers of students to the school during peaks of repression.2
The SOA, in Fort Benning, Columbus, Georgia, is a US Army
school that trains Latin American military officers in counterinsurgency
warfare.3 The SOA is the most elite and prestigious site of this training
that happens widely throughout the Americas. It was founded in Panama
in 1946 and moved to Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia in 1984. The
long string of notorious graduates includes Manuel Noriega (military
leader of Panama), Roberto D’Aubisson (leader of the Salvadoran
Death Squads) and Efrain Rios Montt (former dictator of Guatemala).
SOA graduates have played key roles in nearly every coup and major
human rights violation in Latin America in the past 50 years (Kepner
2001:476–477), including the massacre of the six Jesuit professors, their
housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador in 1989 (in their memory
the annual vigil is held on or near 16 November, the date of this attack).
In 1993, the United Nations Truth Commission Report on El Salvador
cited the officers responsible for the worst atrocities committed during
that country’s brutal civil war. Over two-thirds of those named were
trained at the SOA (Nelson-Pallmeyer 2002:27).
In 1996, after copies were leaked, leading to intense grassroots and
Congressional Freedom of Information Act pressure, the Pentagon
formally released seven training manuals used for nearly 10 years
at the SOA.4 The manuals explicitly recommend targeting union
organizers and those who say the government is not meeting the basic
needs of the people. The manuals detailed forms of torture, advocated

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“neutralization” (ie execution), and tactics such as arresting the relatives
of those being questioned (Haugaard 1997; Quigley 2005).
The lines of this topology go further back. The manuals were compiled
from lesson plans used at the school for years that were based on
torture techniques developed as part of “Project X” in the 1950s by
the CIA, which spent billions of dollars to research and develop a
new psychological torture paradigm whose basic techniques of stress
positions, sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation are meant to make
victims feel responsible for their own suffering (Quigley 2005; Klein
2007; McCoy 2006). The manuals suggest that insurgents do not carry
legal status as prisoners of war, and recommend false imprisonment
to create a climate of fear. The only thing new about the Abu-Grahib
torture is that the photos got out (Klein 2005). Latin Americans working
for justice have always known about these tactics, the point is for the
population to know just enough about them to be afraid.
Why torture? Why create bare life? It is only with this sort of
repression that governments can impose radical structural adjustment
policies. In shutting down dissent, they open the way for neoliberal
economic domination, for accumulation by dispossession (Harvey
2003). Neoimperialist militarism is the handmaiden of global capital,
and has a long and ugly history in Latin America of being used to
impose a fundamentally violent capitalist order (Grandin 2006; Klein
2007)
It is, then, no great mystery why the US would be interested in
teaching such techniques and building close ties with Latin American
militaries. Indeed, so close that Lesley Gill (2004) argues that the lines
between US and Latin American militaries blur, and the Latin America
Working Group, a coalition of solidarity groups working to change
US foreign policy, actually titled their report on US military training
programs “Erasing the lines”.5 Perhaps, however, it is more useful to
see the lines as entangled, twisted—and see the lines as stretching on
out from the militaries to the ground, twisting a topology that trains
thousands of mini-sovereigns to turn those who resist, those who work
for justice, into bare life.
The army claims that the torture detailed in its manuals is no longer
taught at the SOA. It is indeed likely that given the scrutiny the movement
has put on the school, the more sinister forms of training have been
moved to more discreet sites (Gill 2004), much like detainees are being
shifted from Guanta?namo to the network of CIA black sites (Gregory
2006). The movement does talk more and more about those other sites,
and the school as a symbol of US militarism in Latin America and
around the world. The school continues to serve as a symbol because
even if it were true that only surveillance techniques, say, are being
taught at the SOA today—they are being taught to militaries that we
know are likely to put those skills to horrific use. These days most

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of the students are from the Colombian army, which has an appalling
record of killing teachers, journalists and union activists. The school
also continues to train individuals who already have known human
rights violations (Quigley 2005). They may be more careful now, but
still teach courses that can be reverse engineered (Gill 2004), and send
mixed signals, for example with discussions of how to respond to false
human rights violation allegations (Blakeley 2006).
There has been no accountability in the US for the atrocities
committed by past graduates. Those who wrote and taught from these
manuals faced no disciplinary action (Haugaard 1997). There has
been no acknowledgment by the Army of wrongdoing, no full public
investigation into the school, no reparations for victims (Quigley 2005).
As Amnesty International argued in their report, “the failure of the US
Army to hold anyone accountable for the preparation, dissemination
and use of training manuals advocating torture and other human
rights violations . . . sends a signal to other militaries that impunity for
violations [of the international laws on human rights, humanitarian law
and civil military relations] is acceptable” (Amnesty International USA
2002:30).
Indeed, abusers are still featured as SOA guest speakers or instructors,
and notorious graduates, such as dictator Hugo Banzer (Bolivia),
continue to hang in the School’s “Hall of Fame”. There has, however,
been some attempt to clean the blood off the school and its image.
In 2001 the school was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for
Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). The army portrays this as a new
institution, though it is in the same building, with the same teachers. Even
their Congressional supporters admit that the change was “basically
cosmetic”.6 The movement to shut it down resists this new world order
doublespeak and continues to call it the SOA, as I do here.
Gathering
Why did they change the name? Why do they keep putting up more
fences? The army is responding to a growing movement calling for
the closure of the school, and an end to the US military training and
involvement that it represents. This movement began in 19837 with a
bold entry. Three activists snuck deep onto Ft. Benning at night, crawled
up a tree next to the barracks where the Salvadoran army was housed,
and loudly played Archbishop Oscar Romero’s last sermon, in which he
pleaded with men in the army to stop killing their brothers and sisters
(Hodge and Cooper 2004) (Monsen?or Romero was assassinated by an
SOA graduate just days after giving that sermon).
In 1990 three activists got into the school’s “Hall of Fame” of
graduates and poured blood on photos of dictators. In 1994 five activists
made it deep on to the base and chained themselves to the front door of

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the school’s building. The first large gathering was in 1997, 2000 strong.
During what became the now-annual funeral procession, marching
solemnly to a long litany of the names of victims of graduates of the
school, a group of 601 kept on marching and entered the base, planting
there a cemetery worth of crosses with the names of those dead at the
hands of graduates. Twenty-five of those who crossed had previously
been banned from the base and were sentenced to six-month prison
terms. Since then larger and larger crowds have been gathering each
year. Every year activists have continued to cross onto the base in acts of
civil disobedience. The largest group of crossers was in 1999, when 4408
of the 10,000 gathered walked half a mile onto the base before being
stopped. First-time crossers were then taken by bus to an inconvenient
place far away. Since 9/11 crossers have received prison terms for their
first crossing, rather than being banned from reentering. The movement
continues to call it crossing the “line”, although technically it now
involves crossing three fences (although for the last few years the police
have been waiting past the first fence). Unable to create a cemetery on
the base, we all “cross” the fence now with the crosses that we carry,
with the names of the dead and disappeared. We turn the fence into an
altar (see Figure 1). In 2006, nearly 22,000 gathered, and 16 crossed on
to the base. It was the largest protest in front of a US military base since
the Vietnam War. As of January 2008, 226 individuals have collectively
Figure 1: The fence as altar (photo by author)

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spent over 95 years in prison. Over 50 people have served probation
sentences. This is the largest ongoing act of civil disobedience in the
US today.
This movement is a hub and spokes network of groups involved
in many other peace and solidarity projects. Activists from this
movement struggle against the prison–industrial complex, against
welfare “reform”, and for low-income housing, for subsidized childcare.
Activists from this movement have also fasted in front of Guanta?namo,
gone on peace delegations to Iran, and served as accompaniers in
Palestine. During the weekend of the vigil itself, other events are held
across the US, many at other military sites. In 2006 Louis Vitale, 75, a
Franciscan priest, and Steve Kelly, 58, a Jesuit priest were arrested
(and later sentenced to 5 months of federal prison) for doing civil
disobedience at Fort Huachuca (the home of Project X) on the weekend
of the vigil (Quigley 2007). The sites of militarism and sovereign power
are widely dispersed and connected. So too is our resistance.
This movement is increasingly connected to movements across
the Americas working for justice and against US militarism. Social
movement leaders from across the Americas come to participate in the
vigil. In 2006 another 25 coordinated protests were held on the same
weekend of the vigil in 10 countries. There were 11 across Colombia
alone. After coordinated pressure from activists North and South, the
presidents of Venezuela (in 2004), Argentina, Uruguay (in 2006), Costa
Rica, and Bolivia (2007) announced that they will no longer send troops
to the school.
My body does not hover above this crowd, surveying this scene. I
am on stage. My voice follows that of survivors, as I interpret their
testimonies into English. I am in the meeting room. I have been a core
activist for eight years on the Translation and Interpretation Working
Group, and for several years have represented our group on the vigil
coordinating committee. I am in the movement. This is the primary
gathering of the North American movement in solidarity with Latin
America, which I have been active in for 20 years. I theorize this work
not to distance myself from this activism, but as a form of engaging in
it.
Watching
The military presents the school as transparent space. They host an
“Open House” during the vigil, or you could “go” virtually on any day
through the “video tour” on the website.8 The tour, video and the entire
website emphasize the human rights courses that are taught. One gets
the impression that far more is offered than the current eight hours in
a 12-week course (Blakeley 2006)—but then, this is rightswashing, not
watching.

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What the army offers is actually a constricted vision, carefully
constructed so as to not show connections (Gregory 2007a). We are
invited to look only where they point. Indeed, the sign on the fence
warns, “Photographing or making notes, drawings, maps or graphic
representations of this area or activities is prohibited unless specifically
authorized by the commander”. We are allowed fleeting glimpses of
the traces to terror, just enough to be carefully deniable, yet enough to
grow a reputation that conjures fear throughout Latin America in those
who face units led by officers trained at the SOA (Gregory 2006:421).
These traces are not meant to be invisible, but rather at edge of visibility
(Papastergiadis 2006:437). We are meant to see enough to be afraid, but
not enough to cut through them with our own lines of connection.
We focus on these lines, and work to trace them out. We file
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the full names, rank
and country of origin, and dates of the students that have attended
the SOA/WHINSEC, and we connect this information to dangerous
and painstaking work done by human rights groups throughout Latin
America who take testimony from survivors and document military
abuses. We trace the twisted lines of this topology.
We call our organization the SOA Watch. We see more than they
would like us to see. After several years of granting this annual FOIA
request, the 2005 request, no different from the others, was denied.
Legal appeals faced delay tactics, but the movement won an important
victory in 2007 when grassroots pressure on Congress led the House of
Representatives to pass a report accompanying the FY 2008 Defense
Appropriations bill that requires SOA/WHINSEC to release the names
of all students and instructors who attended the school during the fiscal
years of 2005 and 2006 and requires that information be available to the
public in all future fiscal years.
For watching the sovereign, we are watched back. We are tracked
into boxes in databases in far more sophisticated ways than those of
the FBI agent who, in the mid 1980s, took down the license plates of
cars with “no war in El Salvador” bumper stickers outside of Seattle
CISPES9 meetings. Where I fly, use my credit card, cell phone, email
and filtering software that tracks key words in my email (but which?)—it
all makes the little rolling watchtower at the vigil seem almost retrocute (see Figure 2). The videotaping of the vigil from an open door of
the thumping-loud low-hovering military helicopter is creepier, since
it mirrors the way machine guns are regularly pointed out these same
helicopter doors throughout Colombia. Of course the army intends to
intimidate. In 2006 they had a new mechanical platform that went up and
down behind the third, tarped, fence. Every time it came up it seemed
to carry a new officer watching the vigil through binoculars, flanked by
men in camouflage and black berets, their arms crossed (see Figure 3).
This is not a pan-opticon trying to draw us in and involve us in power,

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Figure 2: Rolling watchtower (photo by author)
but as Deleuze puts it, a ban-opticon, which works to disengage and
abandon (cited in Diken and Lausten 2006 :449).
It used to be, argues Foucault (1977), that the sovereign was visible,
and the individual was lost in the masses, but now it is the individual
that is made ever more visible, and the sovereign less so, the better to
control us. Certainly Bush is plenty visible, ever more so as commanderin-chief. Yet in new ways this analysis holds, for now sovereign power
is ever more dispersed into all of the sites of our life. The pomp and
bluster of the presidency serve to distract from its many other guises
(Gregory 2007b). We turn around this equation of visibility. We question
our status as overwatched, and try to watch the state in its many forms
as best we can. Foucault talks of sovereign “eyes that must see without
being seen” (1977:171)—but we do see at least some of those eyes. We
watch the watchers.

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Figure 3: Mechanical platform (photo by author)
The low flying helicopter is not hard to see. In one sense the state
openly menaces us, visibly flaunts the law’s capacity for violence. In
other ways, however, it works to hide its violence. It withholds the list
of graduates, it claims that changing the name cleared the school of any
connection to its past. We see not only the helicopter in Georgia, but the
connection to the helicopters strafing the peace community of San Jose?
de Apartado? in Colombia.
In 2005 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), as part of a
national campaign to expose domestic spying, received (heavily blacked
out) documents which show that not only does the FBI watch the SOA
Watch, but the agency bumped up its concern about the movement
to “priority” level and began “counterterrorism” surveillance, though
nothing in the FBI files offers a basis for such spying. The files
themselves consistently describe the vigil as “peaceful”. Maybe they
meant to say that we were countering state terror.
Who can see more clearly? Ed Lewinson is a 75-year-old retired
history professor from New Jersey (Holden and Williams 2004). Ed is
blind, but he seems to see through the fog better than most. He crossed
on to the base in 2005 for a third time. Again, the army refused to
charge him with a crime. It seems they do not want to have a blind man
that can see that well in their prisons. They watch us from above, from
their helicopter, from their watchtower on wheels, from their platform,
“blind man getting ready to cross fence in the East corner, large blue

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puppet standing behind him”. Our angle of vision is on the ground, in
our bodies, emotional.
The movement to close the school looks wide, and sees the lines of
blood that lead behind the fence. We see that this is not a clean space, but
deeply involved in a dirty war. We see it through testimony from those
who have survived torture and massacres by graduates of the school.
Speaking
The army may present the space of the school as transparent, but they
present conflict in the South as unseeable, as a “fog of war”. They
claim they cannot trace, and are not responsible for, what happens when
students leave. A space of state terror is created as a space of invisibility,
with no names, and no witnesses. Torture is done in secret. The whole
point of that terror is that it is unknowable, a fog, what Agamben (1998)
calls a zone of indistinction, a space of exception. Those few who survive
are too “terrified” to tell. You are meant to hear only whispers of it, just
enough to terrify you. But at the vigil we create a space safe enough for
telling whole stories, for naming names. We not only look into the base,
at the sovereign—we look south, we hear people, and their stories help
us see through the fog.
Carlos Mauricio, a Salvadoran torture survivor, said at the vigil that
it took him 15 years to be able to tell his story, of how he, as a biology
professor, was in the middle of teaching class when the army burst in
and took him away, then tortured him in a secret basement cell for
weeks on end. He said that when, after years, he started trying to tell
his story he got choked up, but little by little he was able to tell more
of it. “One of the facts from torture is that they make you not want to
talk about it . . . I realized that telling my story to others is important,
not only because it’s important to know what happened in El Salvador,
but also because in that way you are really out of prison.10 In fact he
was brave enough to say it in court, and amazingly in 2002 he and two
other survivors won a civil lawsuit against the Salvadoran generals who
ordered their torture (one an SOA graduate, the other a guest speaker
at the school) (Gill 2004:12). Carlos, and the movement, now wants a
truth commission on the School of the Americas. For closure, we want
full disclosure, and an end to impunity. Carlos warns that if we forget
the horrors of El Salvador we are bound to keep repeating them, as we
have been. As Carlos said of Abu-Ghrahib, “I can tell you, that’s torture
by the book”.11
Patricia Isasa was disappeared in Argentina when she was 16. Her
crime? Being active in student government at her high school. She was
held for two and half years in a clandestine cell, tortured and raped.12
Patricia is one of the lucky few who reappeared. When she was released
they told her, “If you tell this story no one will believe you”. With

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tips, and a lot of digging in recently released archives, she was able
to build a paper trail to prove her story. With the initial help of the
Spanish judge Baltazar Garzo?n, and the revocation of impunity laws
by President Kirchener, nine of the 11 responsible for her kidnapping,
imprisonment and torture are now in prison awaiting trial. Once Patricia
opened the case, however, she began receiving death threats. These are
all the more serious since Jorge Julio Lopez, another torture survivor,
was disappeared in September 2006 after testifying in court against his
torturers. Patricia fled to the US to await the trial, but without her there
it languished. In February 2007 she returned to Argentina and is in
the witness protection program, with four bodyguards at all times. The
leader of Patricia’s torture was trained at the School of the Americas,
and Patricia testified on stage at the vigil in 2005 and 2006.