This November 17-19, for the seventeenth annual time, an estimated 20,000 marchers will convene on Fort Benning, Georgia, home to the infamous school for Latin American military soldiers, the School of the America’s (SOA). As part of their protest to shut down the SOA, the marchers will line up at the gate of what critics call the "School of Assassins," and will, as they do every year, perform a ritual: holding small white crosses, one for each of the more than 300,000 estimated victims of SOA-trained soldiers since the School’s beginning in Panama in 1946, a march leader will call out the name of each victim (it takes several hours), to which the crowd will shout back, "Presente!" But this November, something will be different: the ghosts of Latin America’s dictatorships past, as well as their living descendents, will also shout back, in unison with the voices of the marchers: "Presente!"

History of Brutality

43 year-old Gonzalo Guevara Cerritos looked like your average blue-collar janitor, working for his daily bread along with thousands of other recent Latino immigrants in Los Angeles. His constant nervousness and avoidance of social interaction could have been chalked up to his discomfort

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