3 Years After Vanessa Guillén’s Murder, Calls To Shut Down Fort Hood Are Growing

In May, Fort Hood — the United States Army post located near Killeen, Texas, where two Latinas died after they said they had been sexually harassed— will be renamed Fort Cavazos. In moving away from its ties to the confederacy (the base was named after Confederate General John Bell Hood) and becoming the first U.S. military base with an honorific celebrating a Latine military man, the highly decorated war veteran and first Mexican-American four-star general Richard Cavazos, many believe the station is attempting to distance itself from its notorious record of gender violence. But regardless of what the cantonment in Central Texas calls itself, people are calling for it to shut down. 

A petition started in 2021, a year after 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier Vanessa Guillén was bludgeoned to death by soldier Aaron David Robinson, that calls for the president or Congress to close down Fort Hood has more than 1 million signatures. More recently, after the March 13 death of Combat Engineer Pvt. Ana Fernanda Basaldua Ruiz at Fort Hood, calls on social media to cease military operations at the base have soared.

Basaldua Ruiz, 20, who was from Long Beach, California, and assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division in December 2021, was found dead in a maintenance bay at the military base in Texas. Those who oversee the base preliminarily attributed her death to suicide, according to the family, who believe Basaldua Ruiz was being sexually harrassed by service members and are now looking for answers about what actually occurred. 

This incident comes nearly three years after Guillén disappeared. At the time, her family issued similar claims that Guillén had complained to them about sexual harassment from a superior before her violent death. Guillén’s case led to changes in the ways sexual harassment is reported in the Defense Department, yet one bipartisan group of senators is still demanding a “complete, thorough, and impartial investigation” into the Fort Hood death of Basaldua Ruiz, expressing concerns about the ongoing harassment problems at the Army post.

The lack of transparency and questionable investigation processes around the deaths of these two Latinas are some of the reasons why critics like Lucy Flores are demanding that Fort Hood be shut down.

“It does speak to the much larger issue that the military has in general. Even with Vanessa Guillén's murder and the subsequent policy work that was done there, we have not been able to fundamentally change the way in which accountability exists within the military system for sexual harassment,” Flores, a lawyer, politician, and CEO of the media company Luz Media, tells Refinery29 Somos. “Ultimately, you still have the military policing themselves and starting that so-called accountability process within themselves. At some point, it goes to an external third party, but it is still fundamentally broken because we're asking the alleged culprits to police themselves, their friends, their colleagues. We know this doesn’t work.” 

Around the time the base’s rename was revealed, the U.S. Army also severed ties with Jonathan Majors. The rising Creed III actor who was arrested for assaulting his girlfriend was in a new Army ad campaign. For some activists, these actions are merely performative, as nothing as dramatic has been done on behalf of the lives of young Latine women like Guillén and Basaldua Ruiz, who risk their lives to serve a nation meant to unequivocally support and care for them. 

According to a 2020 Military Times report, murder and sexual harassment rates at Fort Hood are among highest in the service: “A written survey distributed to 225 Fort Hood soldiers in late June found that 18 out of the 52 women who participated, about one-third, reported being sexually harassed,” with at least five of the eight reported deaths of that year linked to foul play. 

“All of these things are happening because there isn't a safe process currently in the military at large, not just Fort Hood,” Flores adds. “But it is particularly more egregious at a place like Fort Hood because of the culture that exists there: the culture of fear, rampant sexual harassment, assault, and death.” 

The trauma of losing a daughter or son to state violence isn’t just incredibly heavy and painful; it also places a burden on the families to fight powerful institutions in an effort to change the system for everyone moving forward. “I have felt that personally because of my own life story, where it's like you just feel so committed to preventing the things that happened to you, preventing that from happening to others, that it becomes your life's work,” says Flores, a survivor of the school-to-prison pipeline. “At the same time, the expectation that these families will continue to work on behalf of us and the greater good, I wouldn't say it's a problematic one, but I do believe that we need to really recognize how permanent and radical this can be for survivors.” 

For Black and Latina women, and especially those who have lost their lives, the biggest thing that we can do to honor them would be to prevent this from happening to anyone else moving forward, by working to achieve lasting change within the military process for sexual violence and assault. For Flores, “accountability looks like a system where women feel safe coming forward. It looks like a system where there's a true process of accountability; when women speak out, they know that their words will be taken seriously and that they won't be subjected to further harassment, fear, or violence.” 

Fort Hood officials have not yet announced an expected date of completion for their investigation around Basaldua Ruiz’s death.