School of the Americas, School of Shame

I’ve been following the saga of the School of the Americas for the last four years or so and have come to some conclusions about this “school.”

It either needs to be closed down, or totally transformed, and the U.S. government needs to take responsibility for what the school has helped to bring about in Latin America.

This is not good.

To give you some background, the school is located at a U.S. military base in Fort Benning, Georgia, and was started in 1946 to professionalize Latin American and Caribbean armies. In 1963, the school was renamed as the “School of the Americas” by President Kennedy’s administration and the new focus was on resisting communist aggression in central and south America as well as in the Caribbean. Their new Cold War mission was to train anti-communist Latin American army units in the arts of counter-insurgency, infantry tactics, military intelligence, counter-narcotics operations, and commando operations.

It became a goal of the United States government to keep neutral and friendly countries from falling under the USSR’s influence and so the school’s mission changed to accomplish that goal. The results were much different than what was intended.

Instead of helping preserve democracy and freedom, SOA graduates led military coups and were responsible for massacres of hundreds of people. Among the SOA's nearly 60,000 graduates were notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, and Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador. SOA graduates were responsible for the Uraba massacre in Colombia, the El Mozote massacre of 900 civilians in El Salvador, the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, and the Jesuit massacre in El Salvador, the La Cantuta massacre in Peru, the torture and murder of a UN worker in Chile, and hundreds of other human rights abuses over the years.
In 1996, the U.S. government released seven Spanish-edition manuals to the media and the true horror of what our military was teaching to the participants became known. The techniques in the manual included instruction in interrogation techniques like torture, execution, blackmail and arresting the relatives of those being questioned. This is wrong.

The system turns out professional terrorists and kidnappers, not professional soldiers! This was not intended, but the system was not changed when the results of the training became known. So the U.S. government has some work to do.

It’s time to change the SOA into a military police academy, or a training center for the new Iraqi army, or SOMETHING other than what it is currently being used for. If the cause of freedom and democracy are not being advanced, then it’s no good.

Most Americans have developed a natural hatred of terrorists, so why, then, are we producing them? It makes no sense!