For immediate release<br>
Sunday, November 22, 2009 <br><br>

<h3>Father Roy Bourgeois and SOA Watch Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize</h3>
Father Roy Bourgeois, MM, and School of the Americas Watch (SOA Watch)
have been nominated for one of the most prestigious awards in the world
- the Nobel Peace Prize - for their sustained faithful nonviolent
witness against the disappearances, torture, and murder of hundreds of
thousands of civilians (peasants, community and union organizers,
clerics, missionaries, educators, and health workers) by foreign
military personnel trained by the U.S. military at U.S. taxpayer
expense at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. <br><br>
The candidacy of Father Roy and SOA Watch for the 2010 Nobel Peace
Prize has been officially submitted to the Nobel Committee in Oslo,
Norway by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Nobel Peace
Prize Laureate. The official announcement was made by AFSC
representative John Meyer on Sunday, November 22 at 9am at the gates of
Fort Benning (home of the School of the Americas) during the annual
November vigil to close the SOA. <br><br>

<b>&quot;We are deeply honored, and deeply humbled, to be nominated for this prize for peace,&quot;</b>
commented Bourgeois, a Vietnam veteran, Purple Heart recipient and a Catholic priest, who helped found SOA Watch.  <b>
&quot;This nomination is a recognition of the work of the thousands struggling against militarism across the Americas.&quot;</b> <br><br>
SOA Watch is a nonviolent grassroots movement that works through
creative protest and resistance, legislative and grassroots media work
to stand in solidarity with the people of Latin America, to close the
School of the Americas (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for
Security Cooperation) and to change oppressive U.S. foreign policy that
institutions like the SOA/ WHINSEC represent. <br><br>
This weekend, SOA Watch is gathering by the thousands at the gates of
Ft. Benning to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the killings of
14-year-old Celia Ramos, her mother Elba Ramos, and the six Jesuit
priests she worked with at the Central American University in San
Salvador in November 1989. Human rights defenders from Colombia and
Bertha Oliva, founder of human rights organization COFADEH, Committee
of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras, which
has been actively resisting the SOA graduate-led coup as part of the
resistance front. <br>