Thousands Protest Army School

Monday, November 20th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

COLUMBUS, Ga. (AP) â€” Wearing white masks and black robes and carrying cardboard coffins and crosses, thousands of demonstrators marched slowly through the gates of Fort Benning.

As they've done every year since 1989, they came Sunday to demand the closing of the Army's School of the Americas, which trains Latin American soldiers. Critics blame the school for human rights abuses committed by some of its graduates â€” charges the Army calls absurd.

``I'd characterize it as false and as propaganda,'' Maj. Gen. John LeMoyne, the post commander, said.

Police arrested 1,700 protesters, including actor Martin Sheen â€” about half the number that entered the west-central Georgia post Sunday. An estimated 3,000 others continued the protest outside the gates.

Most of those arrested were charged with trespassing, given a warning and released, said Col. G.T. Myers, Fort Benning's provost marshal. Some who poured fake blood on the street were charged with damaging government property, he said.

The annual demonstration commemorates the Nov. 16, 1989, killings in El Salvador of six Jesuit priests, to which some of the school's graduates have been linked.

Though the school is scheduled to close Dec. 15 and be replaced by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, opponents vow to keep up the protests.

``We see this as cosmetic,'' said Roy Bourgeois, a co-founder of School of the Americas Watch who has spearheaded the protests. ``It's like taking a bottle of poison and writing `Penicillin' on it.''

The new school will be run by the Defense Department, under guiding principles of the Organization of American States.

The demonstration Sunday took place in near-freezing temperatures and occasional rain. Many protesters, wearing plastic parkas, shivered as they marched to a point where they were halted by police.

Sheen, who plays the nation's president in the hit TV show ``The West Wing,'' has joined the protests the past three years. Myers said he did not know what laws the actor was accused of breaking.

Those arrested were given letters barring them from visiting Fort Benning for five years. They could be subject to a year in prison if charged with trespassing on the post again within that period.

Sister Mary Johnalyn, 68, of West Allis, Wis., said she was photographed, fingerprinted and given a letter barring her from the post. She said she was charged with damaging U.S. property for spilling fake blood.

``I was a missionary in Mexico and I found those people so loving,'' she said. ``I don't want them to come up here and learn to be ugly murderers.''

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On the Net:

School of the Americas: http://www.benning.army.mil/usarsa

School of the Americas Watch: http://www.soaw.org