Founded in 1946 and renamed in 2001 the School of Americas is where Latin America’s Dictators and Torturers are Trained in the Dark Art of Subverting the Peoples' Will
In 2001, after being in the public spotlight, the
institution where so many torturers and mad dog dictators had learnt their
skills was renamed the Western
Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. However the role it performed was exactly the
same as it had been before.
In 1961, US President John Kennedy ordered the school to focus on teaching "anti-communist"
counterinsurgency training to military personnel from Latin America. According
to anthropologist Lesley Gill, the label '"communist" was a highly
elastic category that could accommodate almost any critic of the status
quo.'
Beginning in
1961, Nicaraguan Dictator Anastasio Somoza sent Nicaraguan officers to the
school to attend a 46-week course in their final year of training. Somoza himself
made occasional visits to the school. In 1963 it changed its name from the U.S.
Army Caribbean School to the School of the Americas.
According
to Major Joseph Blair, a former instructor at the
school, "the author of SOA and CIA
torture manuals [...] drew from intelligence materials used during the Vietnam
War that advocated assassination, torture, extortion, and other 'techniques'."[ The authors of the manuals "believed that oversight regulations
and prohibitions applied only to U.S. personnel, not to foreign officers."
Use of the manuals was suspended under Jimmy Carter over concerns about
their correlation to human rights abuses but were reinstated under Ronald
Reagan.
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| For those who don't get this cartoon - pictured is George Bush whose flagship policy domestically was 'leave no child behind' in education |
Between 1970
and 1979, cadets from Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Panama, Peru, and Honduras
made-up 63% of the school's students. In 1980, the United States increased
economic aid to Honduras. Journalist Ray Bonner reported that much of this aid
would go toward training military officers at the School of the Americas and
training programs within the continental United States. Hundreds of Hondurans
were trained at the school during the 1980s, when the country became
increasingly critical to Reagan's efforts to overthrow and defeat the
Nicaraguan Sandinistas and other revolutionary guerrilla movements in the region.
During the 1980s, Mexico, El Salvador, and Colombia made-up 72% of the school's
cadets.
On September
21, 1984, the school was expelled from Panama.
School of
the Americas Watch is an advocacy organization which was founded by
Father Roy Bourgeois and a small group of supporters in 1990 to protest the
training of mainly Latin American military officers by the School of the
Americas (SOA). SOA Watch conducts a vigil each November at the site of SOA,
located on the grounds of Fort Benning, a U.S. Army military base near Columbus,
Georgia, to protest human rights abuses committed by some graduates of the
academy or under their leadership, including murders, rapes and torture and
contraventions of the Geneva Conventions.
Military officials state that even
if graduates commit war crimes after they return to their home country, the
school itself should not be held accountable for their actions. Responding to
"mounting protests" spearheaded by SOA Watch, in 2000 the United
States Congress renamed the School of the Americas the Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), rather than closing the academy.
In addition, all students must undergo a minimum of eight hours of class on
human rights and the principle of civilian control of the military.
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| One of the handbooks - subtle isn't the name! |
Inspired by the case of slain
Archbishop Óscar Romero, who said "we who have a voice must speak for the voiceless," former
priest Roy Bourgeois, Larry Rosebaugh OMI, and Linda Ventimiglia posed as
military officers and crossed into Ft. Benning in 1983. They climbed a tree
near the barracks housing Salvadoran troops and read the final homily of
Archbishop Oscar Romero through megaphones. Bourgeois and his companions were
arrested and Bourgeois was sentenced to 18 months in prison for trespassing
onto Federal property. Protesting against the teaching of torture is an offence
in the United States!
Bourgeois and his followers began
to research the School of the Americas, conduct public education campaigns,
lobby Congress, and practice nonviolent resistance at the School of the
Americas facilities.
Following the November 1989
murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter at the Central
American University in El Salvador in which graduates of the School of the
Americas were involved, SOA Watch organized an annual protest to be held on the
anniversary of the massacre beginning the next year. The event has been held
every year since then.
See The
School Of The Americas Is Still Exporting Death Squads and Controversial
'School of the Americas' Closes (in fact the only thing that changed was
the name)
Shut
Down the School of the Americas/ WHINSEC By Dévora González Azadeh
Shahshahani Jacobin
Shut Down the School of the Americas/ WHINSEC
The School of the Americas/WHINSEC in Fort Benning, Georgia, has become
notorious for training and enabling torturers, dictators, and massacres
throughout the Western Hemisphere...The school is still training...ICE and the
Border Patrol.
On November
16, 1989, the US-trained and funded Salvadoran Atlacatl Battalion entered the
grounds of El Salvador’s Central American University (UCA) and brutally
murdered six Jesuit priests, sixteen-year-old Celina Ramos,
and her mother, Elba Ramos. Nineteen of the twenty-five Atlacatl Battalion
soldiers were graduates of the US Army School of the Americas (SOA) — a combat
training institution with the ostensible aim of instructing Latin American
militaries in control tactics over armed counterinsurgent groups.
SOA was
founded in the Panama Canal Zone in 1946 and expelled
from Panama to Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia, in 1984.
The slain Jesuit priests worked in solidarity with El Salvador’s poor and
marginalized and were outspoken critics of the country’s military dictatorship.
They are among the 75,000 civilians
murdered during the US-backed war in El Salvador between
1980 and 1992.
The SOA has
trained more than 83,000 Latin American security forces since its founding. Notorious graduates of the SOA — including
nearly a dozen dictators and some of the worst human rights violators in the
continent — are guilty of using torture, rape, assassination, forced
disappearance, massacres, and forced displacement of communities to wage war
against their own people. Former Panamanian president Jorge Illueca stated that
the School of the Americas was the “biggest base for destabilization in Latin
America.” US-led and supported state violence abroad has ravaged and devastated
communities in Central and South America, many of whose people are forced to
migrate north.
On September
20, 1996, under intense public scrutiny, the Pentagon released the SOA
training manuals, which advocated torture, extortion, blackmail,
and the targeting of civilian populations. The release of these manuals proved
that US taxpayer money was used to teach Latin American state forces how to
torture and repress civilian populations.
A US
congressional task force reported that those responsible for the 1989 UCA
massacre in El Salvador were trained at the US Army School of the Americas, and
as public pressure mounted to close the SOA, the Department of Defense
responded by replacing the School of the Americas with the Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in January 2001. The measure
passed when the House of Representatives defeated a bipartisan amendment to
close the school and conduct a congressional investigation by a narrow ten-vote
margin. The opening of WHINSEC is not grounded in any critical assessment of
the training, procedures, performance, or consequences of the training program
it copies. Further, it ignores congressional concerns and the public outcry
over the SOA’s past and present links to human rights atrocities.
To this day,
WHINSEC continues to train Latin American security officers — including
immigration officials.
In 2015, the
first US Border Patrol agent graduated from the infamous training facility. On
October 24 of this year, a
contract between Border Patrol and Winchester Ammunition
became public, confirming that Border Patrol purchased 33 million rounds of
bullets and could purchase more than 330 million additional rounds over the
next five years. Training of Border Patrol staff at Fort Benning coupled with
their increased firepower is setting the stage for US state agents to wage war
against undocumented migrants and refugees at border crossings and within the
United States.
Over the
past fifteen years, nearly one hundred people have been killed
by US Border Patrol as a direct result of their excessive use of
force, including the cross-border killings of fifteen-year-old Sergio Adrián
Hernández Güereca in 2010 and sixteen-year-old José Antonio Elena Rodríguez in
2012. Both
teenagers were on Mexican soil when they were shot at and
killed by US Border Patrol agents located on US soil. Not a single Border
Patrol agent has ever been held legally accountable for these crimes. According
to a recent internal
government report obtained by Quartz, criminal misconduct by border
officers is at a five-year high.
In addition
to US Border Patrol agents now being trained at the location notorious for
instructing Latin American security forces in civilian-targeted warfare, on
September 9 of this year, an unredacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) report revealed
that ICE agents will also begin training there. The report divulged that ICE
contracted New Mexico training systems company Strategic Operations for almost
$1 million to build realistic models of US cities at Fort Benning. This will be
a training facility meant to simulate
raids that ICE teams would carry out in places like
Chicago and Arizona, and the
ICE Special Response Teams will be trained to deal with
immigrants crossing the border.
There are
already extremely
detailed designs of buildings meant to imitate the kinds of places
that ICE teams will raid, such as a two-story brick residential building
typical of Chicago and a single-family six-room home typical of Arizona,
complete with “set props” such as furniture, clothing, and toys. According to
the contract, the
plans include expansion for the future, with as many as fifty more
buildings to be added to the training facility.
ICE agents
have carried out violence against immigrants across the country. In July, video
surfaced of ICE officers in Kansas City assaulting
a man named Florencio Millan-Vazquez in front of his
children and girlfriend; they smashed his car window and dragged him out to
arrest him after claiming there was a warrant for his arrest, despite not
providing evidence of this. More recently, an immigrant man was shot
by ICE agents in Nashville, Tennessee, this past September and
had to be hospitalized. ICE remains a human rights threat across the United
States.
The United
States is directly implicated in training and financing the perpetrators of
gross human rights violations. In South and Central America, this violence is
marked by military, economic, and political intervention, in addition to
training proxy fighters at the SOA/WHINSEC. Now, US Department of Homeland
Security agents are being trained at the same location in the same tactics of
civilian-targeted warfare. The results are already clear: lethally trained and
heavily militarized state security forces that target civilian populations,
specifically communities of color, without meaningful oversight or accountability.
On the
thirtieth anniversary of the UCA massacre, human rights organizations are
continuing to call for the closure of the SOA/WHINSEC training facility at Fort
Benning. The school’s crimes aren’t just evident in the atrocities of the past
— they’re also still found in the horrors along the US-Mexico border and
through the atrocious violence of ICE today. Those who are horrified by the
crimes of the Border Patrol and ICE should join the call to shut down the SOA/WHINSEC and similar
training centers.
Dévora González is a field organizer with the
School of the Americas Watch; she tweets @SOAWatch.
Azadeh Shahshahani is legal and advocacy director
for Project South and a past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She
tweets @ashahshahani.
