I first heard about the School of the Americas (SOA) in 1996 on Pacifica news shortly after the Pentagon was forced to release several training manuals. Established in Panama in 1946 to provide military training to people from all over Latin America in order to combat Communism, the SOA trained Manuel Noriega so well in the arts of counter-insurgency, torture and execution that he successfully took over that country in 1984. (which forced the school to relocate to Fort Benning, GA that year) There is a long list of unsavory characters trained at the school (at US taxpayer expense) who have proceeded to use the skills gained there to devastating effect in El Salvador and Columbia and across Latin America. The school gained so much bad press that Congress voted to close it in 1999. Never actually closed, the school was simply renamed to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001. Aware of it’s bad reputation, WHISC added a human rights and democracy class to its curriculum but this seems too little, too late. WHISC claims to have as its goal the “strengthening of democracy in the region [Latin America]“, and it’s motives may be entirely innocent (though I don’t believe so), but its legacy has been one of death and given the school’s original intent to oppose Communism, it seems outdated today.

The School of the Americas was just another story to me until I met a native of El Salvador several years ago who told me he was trained there in 1985. He says he left after only a year of training and talked to me about the things they taught in the classes. The training he described was not the kind of “boot camp” many of my military friends experienced which at least in theory instills a sense of national pride as well as discipline and order. The SOA offered intensive courses in how to take over villages with a small group of men, or how to torture or kill people in many different ways. His experience was one of military training for its own sake, without much thought to command structure or honor or duty to country. He got the feeling he was being trained so he could go back to his country and kill peasants (who were largely poor and Communist). His experience at the school was enough to make him into a Communist!

The Latin America Military Training Review Act of 2003 (HR 1258), sponsored by Rep. James McGovern (D-MA), calls for the closure of WHINSEC and a full assessment of all Defense Department training in Latin America. You can search for the Bill’s text here. “I am deeply disturbed by the recent revelations that known human rights abusers have been chosen to receive U.S. taxpayer-paid training at the WHINSEC. Coupled with other information — like Katherine McCoy’s ground-breaking statistical study on how training at the School affects a graduate’s human rights record and the continuing poor record of more recent graduates — I remain more convinced than ever that the WHINSEC needs to be shut down. Our brave men and women in uniform do not need this unnecessary and unwelcome stain upon their own honorable record and traditions.” Stated Rep. James Mc Govern sponsor of HR 1258