The School of the Americas

Contents

1 The School of the Americas

2 Latin America
Nicaragua
Honduras
El Salvador
Argentine
Chile

3 Review

4 U.S. self-conception - Liberal Imperialism

References

1 The School of the Americas

“Chartered by the U.S. Congress, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC – former: the School of the Americas) provides professional education and training for civilian, military and law enforcement students from nations throughout the Western Hemisphere”^[1]. The Institute's Mission according to the self-projection on the website of the WHINSEC is the following:

“Our mission comes directly from the Congressionally approved legislation that authorizes and directs WHINSEC's existence (10 U.S.C. § 2166).

The purpose of the Institute is to provide professional education and training to eligible personnel of nations of the Western Hemisphere within the context of the democratic principles set forth in the Charter of the Organization of American States (such charter being a treaty to which the United States is a party), while fostering mutual knowledge, transparency, confidence, and cooperation among the participating nations and promoting democratic values, respect for human rights, and knowledge and understanding of United States customs and traditions.”^[2]

The WHINSEC is an U.S. Army facility at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. A precursor – the Latin American Ground School – was established in 1946 in the Panama Canal Zone. After some changes this U.S. Army facility, training especially Latin American military personnel, became the School of the Americas (SOA) in 1963. In 1984 it was relocated to Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. As Lesley Gill points out “the establishment of the Ground School coincided with renewed U.S. expansionist ambitions in the Americas and partially filled a power vacuum created by World War II, which ruptured long-standing military ties between European imperial powers – particularly France, Italy, and Germany – and Latin American.”^[3] Further she argues that, “the Ground School, however, did much more than train students in the tactics of warfare. It initiated their incorporation into the ideology of the “American way of life” by steeping them into a vision of empire that identified their aspirations with those of the United States, a process that, […] continues today.”^[4]

Under increasing pressure of the public to close the School of the Americas it was renamed in 2001 in the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) [2001 National Defense Authorization Act] trying to establish the illusion that something important changed within the School.

The controversy of the School is that some of the graduates of the School of the Americas were involved in the worst human right atrocities in South America during the cold war. Lesley Gill examines this involvement and questions the U.S. foreign policy.^[5] Her concern is to shed light on this confusing net of continual impunity, human right violations, involvement of the U.S. in training the culprits, silencing and disguising the past.

With changing the name all students of the facility are now required to attend at least eight hours of instruction in human rights, the rule of law, due process, civilian control of the military, and the role of the military in a democratic society. Further issues like leadership development, counter-drug operations, peace support operations or disaster relief are now the centre of the instructions^[6].

The underlying sense of assimilating these issues in the training of the soldiers was to achieve a good public relation and in fact the attitude towards human rights has not changed at all. In one of the interviews Lesley Gill was talking to the navy major René Maradiaga, “it became clear that his concerns [about human rights] focused less on the well-being and protection of Honduran civilians than on the integrity of the armed forces and the protection of their members.”^[7] I am sure that this navy major and his point of view towards human rights is no individual case at the SOA/ WHINSEC and demonstrates that the new assimilated courses do not have the effects that they should have.

2 Latin America

The counterinsurgency warfare became dominant under President Kennedy’s administration after the Cuban revolution. It combined publicized civic action programs with covert terror and violence under the roof of the Alliance for Progress. In the 1970s U.S. military backed dictatorships ruled in most of the Latin American countries and their security forces were mostly trained by the SOA. The International Military Education and Training (IMET) program supported the training of Latin Americans at the SOA through providing grants to their governments. The IMET was implemented by the Defence Department.^[8]

“[…] according to numerous truth commission reports from the 1980s and 1990s, state security forces were responsible for the vast majority of massacres, murders, disappearances, and extrajudicial executions that characterized the twentieth-century Latin American “dirty wars”, when many countries suffered under the boot of military dictatorships. [..] Although limited democracy has replaced military rule, abusive, U.S.-trained armies and counternarcotics police forces are still responsible for most of the human rights violations in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia.”^[9]

Following some examples of the atrocities committed in cold war Latin America under U.S. entanglement.

Nicaragua

The U.S. under the Reagan administration launched covert attacks from bases in Honduras and Costa Rica to topple the Sandinista government. The paramilitary forces organized by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were not the only assistance from the U.S. they also channelled million of dollars worth arms to the Honduran security forces.^[10] The in 1981 launched anti-Sandinista military force – known as counterrevolutionaries fought against what the Reagan administration perceived as a rising tide of communism. This was a total war on a grassroots level and causes anxiety and depression as well as economic long-term effects – it left the country ruined. People get terrified from this “low-intensity-warfare”. The strategy was “to paralyse… life, to silence individuals and communities, to deny hope that personal struggle could ever bear fruit and to insist that revolution could not live up to its promises”^[11]. Nicaragua responded taking the United States into the World Court and the Court ordered the United States to terminate the crime and pay reparations for this “unlawful use of force” but the United Stated dismissed the court. Further Nicaragua went to the UN Security Council and to the General Assembly but the United States did not accept any of the jurisdictions.^[12]

[...]

^[1] Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation: A welcome from the commandant (https://www.benning.army.mil/whinsec/about.asp?id=33)

^[2] Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation: The institutes mission (https://www.benning.army.mil/whinsec/about.asp?id=13)

^[3] Gill, Lesley: The School of the Americas. Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. p. 62.

^[4] Ib. p.65.

^[5] Cf.: Ib. p. 137.

^[6] Cf.: Ireland, Doug: Teaching Torture. In: LA weekly, 22 July 2004. (http://www.alternet.org/rights/19313/)

^[7] Gill, Lesley: The School of the Americas. Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. p. 156.

^[8] Cf.: Ib. p. 78.

^[9] Gill, Lesley: The School of the Americas. Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. p. 11.

^[10] Cf.: Ib. p. 83.

^[11] Quesada, James: Suffering Child: An Embodiment of War and Its Aftermath in Post-Sandinista Nicaragua. In: Ib. p. 292. coll.2.

^[12] Chomsky, Noam: The New War Against Terror: Responding to 9/11. In: Ib. p. 218.