This past November, over 2,000 people demonstrated in front of Fort Benning, calling for the closing of the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA). Veteran protesters were arrested for trespassing. In January, 22 of them were sentenced to six months in prison and a $3,000 fine. Six of them were friends of DGH. They were protesting the use of American tax dollars to train foreign military officers whose human rights records are among the worst in this hemisphere.

This was made clear in the March 1993 United Nations Truth Commission’s Report on El Salvador, which cited over 60 Salvadoran officers for ordering, executing and concealing the major atrocities of ten years of civil war.

At least 75 percent of the censured officers were trained at the SOA, located in Fort Benning, Georgia. In fact, most of the Salvadoran officers cited in the massacres at El Mozote, Las Hojas, San Sebastian and El Junquillo, were SOA alumni, as were those charged with the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Romero, the 1980 rape and murder of four U.S. churchwomen, and the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter.

SOA was established in Panama in 1946 to promote regional stability and train U.S. soldiers in jungle warfare. It evolved to teach low intensity conflict, psychological operations (PSYOPS), and intelligence gathering to some of the worst dictators, war criminals, and violators of human rights in Latin America. In their heydays of military abuse, Bolivia in the '60s, Nicaragua (under the Somozas) in the '70s, and El Salvador in the '80s, were all primary clients of the SOA. As the notoriety of its alumni grew, the school earned the nickname “Escuela de Golpes” (School of Coups). In 1984, when Panama ousted SOA under a provision of the Panama Canal treaty, the Panamanian daily La Prensa added another nom de guerre: “The School of Assassins.”

Four years after relocation to Ft. Benning, SOA established a Hall of Fame to honor distinguished alumni. Honorees were flown from Latin America for award ceremonies attended by local VIPs, military brass, and occasional Congress members. For its premier Hall of Fame inductee, SOA chose ex-Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer Suarez. Having come to power in a violent coup, he developed the "Banzer Plan" in the 1970s, which brutally suppressed tin miners and church workers and effectively silenced critics of his regime. Other recipients included: a drug trafficker (Gen. Humberto Regalado Hernandez), a notoriously corrupt dictator (Gen. Policarpio Paz Garcia), and a chief of intelligence who oversaw the assassination of thousands of suspected dissidents (Gen. Manuel Antonio Callejas y Calleja).

Every November, on the anniversary of the massacre of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador, hundreds gather in front of Fort Benning to protest the school that trained their killers. (©SOA Watch, 1996)

The core of SOA's curriculum, Low Intensity Conflict, is a deliberately misnamed warfare strategy designed to maintain U.S. military influence in this hemisphere without using (or losing) large numbers of U.S. troops. Instead, U.S. military personnel, aided by a handful of guest instructors from various SOA client nations, train surrogate Latin American and Caribbean soldiers in "dirty little war" techniques, including: counterinsurgency and urban counterinsurgency; irregular warfare and commando operations; sniper and sapper techniques (laying mines); combat arms and special operations; and military intelligence and PSYOPS.

Former graduates describe their courses as including brutal interrogation and torture methods (read about the SOA training manuals in the sidebar Torture 101). Such methods have often been put into action by Latin American militaries, with the full knowledge of the CIA and high ranking U.S. government officials. Students are trained in repression of subversives (with an emphasis on those associated with the church) and techniques of low-intensity conflict, such as murder, torture, and rape.

SOA graduates who go home and adequately perform their duties can look forward to returning to the SOA again and again, to receive more training, an assignment as guest instructor, or induction into the SOA Hall of Fame. In this way, SOA functions not only as a training and indoctrination center, but also as a reward to select soldiers for a job well done.

Like any elite school, SOA builds an old boys network. When it comes time for the U.S. to choose a faction in an internal power dispute abroad, it has highly placed allies whose politics it helped shape and whose loyalty it claims. The U.S. government has achieved significant economic leverage in Latin American countries by ensuring U.S. allies are ever present in these governments and that their militaries are well-equipped to handle any type of insurgency. The U.S. government has attempted to keep its training tactics as classified as possible because of the obvious implications such techniques would have on the opinions of American taxpayers. According to the Pentagon, it costs the U.S. government $18.4 million a year to operate the School.

Former SOA commandant, Jose Feliciano, who oversaw the training of hundreds of Salvadoran soldiers during his tenure, staunchly maintained that the human rights records of SOA client nations were beyond reproach. "A nation that wants to receive SOA training," he said, "has got to have a strong human rights record. We talk to people in terms of values." Col. Jose Alvarez, another former SOA commandant, maintained the same line. "SOA probably does more in the area of teaching human rights than any other school in the world." Even after the U.N. report made headlines, Alvarez maintained unabashed ignorance on what is undoubtedly the most publicized case in recent memory of human rights abuse involving SOA graduates.

Thus the School of the Americas–by honing the military skills and rewarding the atrocities of this hemisphere's most brutal armed forces–undermined the human rights it purports to instill. At best, the low intensity conflict it teaches maintains the status quo in nations with large, impoverished populations plagued by unfair labor practices, poor living conditions, and lack of education. At worst, it is a tool for achieving and legitimizing fascism. As the U.N. Truth Commission Report clearly demonstrates, SOA training does not alter the patterns of traditionally abusive militaries–it only makes the alumni more mindful of hiding their atrocities.

Attempts have been made to close the School, but have not succeeded. Rep. Joseph Kennedy has repeatedly introduced bills in Congress that would close the School. His attempts have failed by increasingly narrower margins, indicating that policy makers are awakening to the fact that taxpayer money could be better spent. You can join in the fight against institutionalized rape, murder, and torture. Write to your Congressperson and Senator and let them know that you do not support continued funding of SOA. For further information, contact SOA Watch at P.O. Box 3330, Columbus, GA 31903.

Note: Information for this article was provided by Maryann Bell, Director, Peace Studies Center, University at Stony Brook, New York, as well as the book School of Assassins by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, which can be obtained through SOA Watch.

In This Issue

Educating the Children
DGH Profile: Dr. Gavidia
Support the CIDIs: Buy a Matata
DGH Announcements
Human Rights in the Arts
Colloquium on Health and the Environment
DGH Mission Statement
Your Tax Dollars: Training Assassins
A Day’s Life... Stephen Miller

Torture 101
By Lisa Haugaard

The Pentagon revealed what activists opposed to the school have been alleging for years–that foreign military officers were taught to torture and murder to achieve their political objectives," says Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II (D-MA), who has waged a three-year campaign to close the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA). Hoping to elude media attention, the Pentagon waited until late on a Friday to release training manuals used at the school and distributed throughout Latin America that instructed officers on the use of torture, murder and blackmail in the fight against left-wing opponents.

The most egregious passages in the declassified manuals advocated such tactics as executions of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse and paying bounties for enemy dead. One of the manuals offers the following techniques to recruit a guerrilla as an intelligence source: blackmail, false arrest, imprisonment of the potential recruit's parents and execution of all other members of his guerrilla cell. Another manual contains detailed instructions for the making of Molotov cocktails.

The Pentagon released the manuals after a sustained public pressure campaign focused on the role of the CIA in Guatemala, which was the subject of a June report by the President's Intelligence Oversight Board. Since the Board's report mentioned the manuals, the Pentagon received requests to declassify them in their entirety.

The seven Spanish-language training manuals, totaling 1,100 pages, were prepared by the U.S. military and used between 1987 and 1991 for intelligence training courses in Latin America and at the School of the Americas. These manuals, with titles such as "Counterintelligence" and "Revolutionary War and Communist Ideology," were based on lesson plans used by SOA instructors since 1982.

Along with the declassified manuals, the Pentagon released two dozen excerpts from the manuals that contain "objectionable and questionable material." Yet a preliminary examination of the manuals by Kennedy's office revealed other citations that describe techniques violating human rights. The "Interrogation" manual taught military officers to gag, bind and blindfold suspects, while the "Terrorism and Urban Guerrilla" guide explains how to build mail bombs.

Analysts at the National Security Archive, a Washington-based research organization, point to sections of at least two of the manuals that equate democratic, non-violent and even strictly electoral campaigning with terrorist activity. "It is important to note that many terrorists are very well trained in subversion of the democratic process and use the system to advance their causes," one manual states. "This manipulation ends with the destruction of the democratic system. Discontent that can become political violence can have as its cause political, social and economic activities of terrorists operating within the democratic system." Another manual warns that rebels are active in political organizations, legislative initiatives and political education, and that they can "resort to subverting the government by electoral means." This sort of analysis encourages military officers to perceive democratic challenges to a government as threatening and worthy of a military response.

One manual describes '60s activist Tom Hayden, currently a California state senator, as "one of the masters of terrorist planning." It is precisely this identification of activists for social change as terrorists that led death squads in Latin America to kill thousands of religious leaders, students, union members and human rights activists.

The school's opponents are not naive. They know that closing the school would not end U.S. training of Latin American militaries and intelligence services, since these activities can and do take place in other settings. Nonetheless, they believe that it would be an important symbolic victory.

Lisa Haugaard is legislative coordinator for the Latin American Working Group, a coalition of non-governmental organizations based in Washington, D.C.

–Excerpted with permission from In These Times, October 14, 1996. To subscribe, call 800-827-0270.