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Thousands gathered at the Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina on November 4th to protest the presence of George W. Bush and his free trade agenda. Activists, along with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, vociferously rejected any U.S. free trade plans for the region as they believed such policies facilitate corporate exploitation. As an alternative, they advocated for a people-oriented trade block among progressive Latin American governments.

"The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) doesn´t seem like something that will help Argentina," explained 62 year old Betti Cruz, a member of the leftist Peronist political party, Barrios del Pie. "I run a food kitchen and see everyday how these policies of free trade are hurting the poor more and more."

In response to overwhelming evidence that the US Army School of the Americas has trained Latin American military personnel in civilian-targeted terrorism, representatives of the school have come up with numerous creative excuses and denials.  Perhaps the most commonly used argument is that the hundreds of SOA graduates who have become dictators and gross human rights violators are only "a few bad apples" out of the thousands who have graduated from the school. A brief overview of the involvement of SOA graduates in the most brutal period of Guatemala's counterinsurgency war shows that they were more than a few bad apples.  As is the case in most Latin American countries which have terrorized their civilian populations, the intellectual authors of systematic repression and the most brutal terrorists are graduates of the SOA.