The school of Latin America's dictators
Since so many alumni are notorious
human rights abusers, the US military should close its deadly School of Americas
Grace Livingstone
guardian.co.uk,
Friday 19 November 2010 14.00 GMT
President
Manuel Zelaya was forced into exile
after his residence was stormed by soldiers under the command of General
Vasquez, a graduate of the US Army's Western Hemisphere Institute for
Cooperation (WHINSEC). Photograph: Bebeto Matthews/AP
When the elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was dragged
from his bed and flown out of the country in his pyjamas last year, it
was no surprise to find that this classic coup was led by a graduate of
the School of Americas, the notorious army training school in Fort
Benning, Georgia. But General Vasquez was simply following a
well-trodden path for autocrats in Honduras – after all, two of the
country's most hated past dictators, Juan Melgar Castro and Policarpo
Paz Garcia, had also attended the school. More than 60,000
Latin American soldiers have been trained at the School of the Americas –
among them, the some of the region's most notorious human rights
abusers, such as Salvadoran death-squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson.
In all, 11 dictators have attended its courses: men such as Argentine
junta leader, Leopoldo Galtieri, infamously responsible for the
"disappeared" and Guatemala's Efraín Ríos Montt, whose scorched earth
campaign against indigenous villages, was classified as "genocide" by a
UN-sponsored commission.Founded
in the Panama Canal Zone in 1948, it was originally named the Army
Caribbean School. It was renamed the School of Americas in 1963, and a
new curriculum was introduced, offering courses in counter-insurgency,
military intelligence and psychological warfare. The school was moved to
Fort Benning in 1984 and, in 2001, in an attempt to improve its image, its
name was changed again to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Cooperation
(WHINSEC).Training manuals (pdf)
used at the School of the Americas were declassified in 1996. They
advocated the use of "fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead,
beatings, false, imprisonment, executions and use of truth serum", according to
a Pentagon memorandum (pdf).
The manuals also included detailed interrogation techniques and used
the term "neutralisation", which the department of defence admits is a
euphemism for illegal execution.Those manuals have now been
withdrawn from use and the anodynely-named WHINSEC offers courses in
human rights, ethics, democracy and peace-keeping. But there is very
little take up of these "soft" courses, according to institution's own
statistics released to Congress in 2000, and by far the most popular
courses remain: commando tactics, military intelligence, psychological
operations and combat training. Despite its revamped image and
promise of transparency, WHINSEC has been remarkably secretive. It
refused to publish the names of its military trainees and has turned
down numerous freedom of information requests by campaigners. Only after
a congressional vote last year, did it begin to release names and
country origins of graduates.This weekend (19-21 November),
thousands of people will congregate at the gates of Fort Benning to call
for the school's closure. The protest is called by School of Americas Watch,
a group founded by Father Roy Bourgeois, which has catalogued the
abuses of School of Americas graduates for 20 years. Protests will also
take place in 14 Latin American countries, including Chile, Honduras and
Guatemala.A vigil will take place in Colombia, which has sent
more officers to US training schools than any other Latin American
country and, today, has the worst human rights record in the region. In
the last two years, the country has been rocked by the news that the
army has been killing innocent civilians, then dressing the victims in
guerrilla uniforms. Prosecutors are investigating more than 1,700
alleged extrajudicial killings by the security forces. Who is
responsible for the grisly "false positive" murders? Well, one of the first
generals sacked for involvement was Paulino Coronado Gámez, a graduate of the
School of Americas.The
term "neutralisation" may have been taken out of the school's manuals,
but its students still appears to be carrying out what they learned on
the ground. Reason enough to close down this school for good.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/nov/18/us-military-usa?showallcomments=true
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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