Protesters Call Again for Closing of TORTURE SCHOOL (School of the Americas) IN GEORGIA

Carlos Mauricio, a torture survivor from El Salvador, will be among the thousands who gather at Fort Benning's main gate this weekend to call for the closing of a military school they blame for human rights abuses in Latin America.

"I was blindfolded. I was badly, badly beaten," he said. "I was tortured for nine days. I was forced to listen to the screaming of all the people being given electroshock and women being raped."

Mauricio, a high school science teacher, traveled by minivan from his home in San Francisco to join the annual protest organized by School of the Americas Watch, a group that has waged a 15-year campaign to close Fort Benning's School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

The demonstrations are held each November to mark the Nov. 16, 1989, slayings of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter in El Salvador. A congressional task force found that some of the soldiers responsible for the massacre had been trained at the School of Americas, which moved to Fort Benning from Panama in 1984.

Roy Bourgeois, a Catholic priest, founded the group in 1990 in an attempt to come to grips with the violence he had witnessed as a Naval officer in Vietnam and especially as a priest working with the poor in Bolivia in the 1980s.

"What I and others hope to accomplish is that our efforts will somehow help relieve the suffering of other people," Bourgeois said. "We're here trying to love and support people of other countries who are victims of the training at this school we're trying to shut down and our country's foreign policy."