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[Alexandre Moraes de Castro e Silva]

November 21, 1999


Watching What the Army Teaches


Owing to criticism and pressure, the Army is finally moving to reform a
training academy that should preferably be closed -- the long-notorious
School of the Americas. Established in 1946 to befriend and tutor members of
the Latin American military and train them in the virtues of democratic
civilian control, over the decades it became an instrument of American
cold-war policy, providing training for fighting and interrogating leftist
guerrillas.

The school became far better known for the dictators and thugs it graduated
than for any good works done. The drug-dealing Gen. Manuel Noriega of Panama
was an alumnus, as were the Guatemalan colonel linked to the killing of an
American innkeeper in 1990, 19 of the 26 soldiers who murdered a group of
Jesuit priests in El Salvador in 1989, and the late Roberto D'Aubuisson, who
reputedly organized many of El Salvador's death squads.

The Pentagon, which liked the close relationship the school gave it to Latin
American military power, has defended its usefulness for years against
Congressional critics who charged that its methods were being used in the
region to suppress democratic dissent. When it was revealed in 1991 that the
school's training manuals advocated torture, blackmail and the
"neutralizing" of insurgents, the Army gave ground. The school began
emphasizing courses in human rights and civilian control, subjects closer to
what it had been intended to teach.

But only now, after some 60,000 soldiers and police officers have passed
through its courses -- and after Congress almost closed it last fall -- is
the Army secretary, Louis Caldera, proposing to reconstitute the curriculum
and student body of the school. Still at Fort Benning, Ga., still under
control of the Pentagon, the school would recruit Latin American political
and civilian leaders as well as uniformed cadets, drop some combat
instruction, bring in lecturers from the State Department and change its
name to the Center for Inter-American Security Cooperation. The Army is
being forced to do this, various officials admitted, by the school's
notoriety.

"We are changing our focus from the cold war, and the role the school played
in the past, to this mission of helping educate military and civilian
leaders within the context of democratic principles," a senior Army official
said. This sounds more like the school's original mission, but coming so
late it lacks persuasiveness and passion. If the administration and Congress
want a school to train Latin American leaders, both civilian and military,
it should have broader sponsorship than the Army.





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