Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera spoke at a ceremony on the steps of the building that has been the headquarters of the School of the Americas since it moved to Fort Benning, near Columbus, Ga., from Panama in 1984.
Caldera said the decision to close the school, which has provided training for 61,000 students from 21 countries, "was a difficult one."
"The school and its graduates have done so much to foster a spirit of cooperation throughout the hemisphere," Caldera said.
The training center will reopen in January with a new name, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Responsibility for the school will be transferred from the Army to the U.S. Department of Defense.
The school has been the target of annual demonstrations by protesters who claim that former students have committed murders or torture. Caldera has called those allegations "false and overstated."
Last month, 1,766 protesters were detained and then banned from Fort Benning for the next five years for entering the sprawling military post during a protest marking the November 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teen-age daughter. A United Nations commission concluded that 19 of the 26 soldiers involved in the deaths were graduates of the School of the Americas.
The Rev. Roy Bourgeois, head of the protest group School of the Americas Watch, said the name change is transparent and meaningless. "No one's being fooled by this," he said.
Maj. Milton Mariani, a school spokesman, said classes on international law, human rights and response to natural disasters would be added to the curriculum.
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