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The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas...
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The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas...
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by Lesley Gill
Sales Rank: 95033
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List Price: $21.95
$14.93
At Amazon
on 12-29-2007.
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Features
Paperback: 281 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press July 2004
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822333929
ISBN-13: 978-0822333920
Product Dimensions:
9.2 x 6 x 0.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
The U.S. Army maintains a center at Fort Benning, Ga., formerly known as the School of the Americas. It has reportedly trained 60,000 South and Central American military elites since the end of WWII and reportedly counts among its graduates former dictators Manuel Noriega of Panama and Leopoldo Galtieri of Argentina. Curricular materials involving torture techniques were found at the school in the early '90s, resulting in a small scandal that apparently led to a name change (to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) and a fight over the school's existence that continues. Though she doesn't catch anyone learning about the various uses of nudity and black hoods, American University anthropologist Gill (Precarious Dependencies) was able to examine the school's folkways and rhetoric, thanks to glasnost-like levels of administrative cooperation. Lessons in thinking in terms of how to "kill and maim" opposition and to "dehumanize" those who persist. Gill then traces the paths of various graduates of the school and links their activities directly to the torture and death of "Latin American peasants, workers, students [and] human rights activists"—i.e., "opposition."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
The memorandum to Richard Cheney, stamped SECRET, informed him that a Defense Department inquiry had discovered "improper material" in U.S. military intelligence training guides. The Army manuals -- on interrogation, the handling of sources and counterterrorism -- counseled "motivation by fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum" during questioning of detainees.
Part of the paper trail leading up to the abuses of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison? No. These were military manuals used to train thousands of Latin American officers and soldiers who passed through the School of the Americas during the 1980s and early '90s. And when this March 10, 1992, report to then-Defense Secretary Cheney was leaked to the press, the ensuing scandal helped fuel a powerful, religious-based protest movement that, as Lesley Gill writes in this small but passionate book, "transformed a relatively obscure army school into a public pariah and pushed Congress to within a few votes of shutting down the institution."
When the U.S. military opened the Latin American Ground School at Fort Amador in the Panama Canal Zone in 1946, and three years later reorganized the training center as the U.S. Caribbean School, it was indeed an obscure facility. Instructors initially trained small groups of troops on the use of advanced artillery and weapons systems that Washington began selling to Latin American countries such as Argentina after World War II. But in the aftermath of the 1959 Cuban revolution, the U.S. Southern Command significantly broadened the school's core curriculum around the military doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare and expanded enrollment to train -- "inculcate" is the word Gill uses more than once -- Latin American militaries in the cause of anticommunism. In 1963 the facility was renamed the School of the Americas, or SOA, as it was commonly known until a concerted, decade-long human rights campaign forced the Army to temporarily close it down in December 2000. In January 2001, SOA reopened under yet another name: the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
"New name, same shame," retorts SOA Watch, the organization founded by Catholic priest Roy Bourgois that has led a campaign to permanently shutter the facility. As Gill relates the genesis of this unique activist movement, in November 1990 Bourgois and two colleagues commemorated the first anniversary of the infamous assassination of six Jesuit priests and their two housekeepers by SOA-trained Salvadoran soldiers by pouring blood and planting a cross on the school's grounds. They were arrested and sentenced to several months in prison. Since then, in an annual act of civil disobedience, every November thousands of demonstrators descend on Fort Benning, Ga., where 20 years ago the school was relocated from the Canal Zone.
One of SOA Watch's singular achievements was to obtain through the Freedom of Information Act a comprehensive list of the school's 60,000 graduates. The roster of alumni is a Who's Who of the most infamous dictators, death-squad directors and mass murderers in the Western Hemisphere -- if not the world. Panama's Gen. Manuel Noriega, who now resides in a Florida prison for international narcotics trafficking, is an SOA alum. So was the godfather of the Salvadoran death squads, Roberto D'Aubuisson, who masterminded the 1980 murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero and hundreds of other killings. So was the violent former dictator of Bolivia Gen. Hugo Banzer. The list goes on and on.
Tarred with the label "School of Assassins," the facility has reformulated its course offerings (titles now include "Democratic Sustainment," "Humanitarian De-Mining" and "Civil-Military Operations"), instituted a mandatory human rights curriculum and thrown open its doors to public scrutiny. Gill, an anthropology professor at American University, was able to attend Human Rights Week at the school in February 2000 and spend considerable time with Commandant Glen Weidner, discussing his efforts to educate the Latin American corps in the concepts of the "professional soldier," military ethics and just-war doctrine. The week culminated with a special panel on the My Lai massacre that, Weidner suggested to Gill, "would demonstrate to the Latin Americans that the United States could examine its own mistakes and hold itself accountable." During another session that Gill attended, a Red Cross official led a class discussion on whether torture was ever permissible. U.S. law, the instructor counseled, "did not contain any exceptions condoning the use of torture, even in cases where life and death appeared to hang on the information held by detainees."
With the Bush administration's decision to reinterpret the Geneva Convention and authorize the physical abuse of detainees, that statement is unlikely to be repeated in future courses on this subject. Indeed, as Gill correctly points out, "September 11 has altered the moral radar of broad sectors of the American public." The danger that U.S. tactics in the war on terrorism may reinforce the proclivity of Latin American militaries to violate human rights makes her work extremely timely.
Regrettably, the case Gill builds against the School of the Americas is significantly diluted by the broader agenda of her work: to indict the United States as an imperialist power dedicated to using the facility for "training new cohorts of [Latin American] officers ready to defend the ramparts of the American empire." With some repetition and rhetorical flourishes, she revisits this theme from beginning to end; by the book's conclusion it is clear that her objective is to push the anti-SOA movement "to look beyond that one training site" (as one activist puts it) and set its goal as "ending U.S. imperialism and dismantling the military apparatus that supports it . . . " For that reason, The School of the Americas is likely to find a limited audience, albeit an activist one.
Still, in the wake of recent revelations that suspected terrorists captured by CIA and U.S. special forces in Afghanistan and Iraq have been deliberately hidden from the Red Cross, severely tortured and in some cases abused to death, this book remains immediately relevant. The questions at the heart of the controversy over the school -- is the U.S. military teaching the art of atrocity to Latin American soldiers, and do Americans bear responsibility for the horrors that many of the supposedly "professionalized" graduates of the school have committed? -- take on new meaning as the United States engages in actions that bear a damning resemblance to the dirty wars fought in years past in Central and South America.
Reviewed by Peter Kornbluh
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
America has done it again: bred killers. Lesley Gill, author of School of the Americas, and of Colombia: Unveiling U.S. Policy, has written another book on her disappointment in the U.S. government. This book is yet another revelation of how the U.S. government's foreign policy is creating more damage than is necessary in its position; the U.S. government has a predisposition to place its many hands in situations all over the world in order to `protect' its interests. In Gill's School of the Americas, she explores an area where the U.S. has interfered in the well being of a country or nation. Her book examines the military institution, School of the Americas (SOA, currently known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) that trains Latin American soldiers to learn the American way of `combating' insurgence by using violence. According to Gill, the school has become an important place for Latin American social climbers. After they graduate, they go back to their countries in order to take control of the military and political situation. There are many, many, many other problems Gill raises concerning the SOA. Nevertheless, what this book lacks is a balanced point of view. Gill, as an anthropologist, looks at interference in a negative way. The issues she brings up in her book are all masks disguising the real issue and point that she has concluded from the very start of her book; The SOA belongs to the bad people. From the very first pages of the book the SOA is immediately condemned for getting involved in Latin America. Shouldn't the U.S. government let them be? Gill's answer is evidently yes. The U.S. government should not try to get involved in Latin America and should concentrate on its own domestic policy. After all, the United States has a long history of committing to supporting dictators and abusers around the world (does Osama bin Laden ring a bell anyone?), including Latin America. The American values that are taught by the SOA to its students are horrific according to the author. America views itself as superior, due to the notion of "Euro-American" superiority, and the "self-asserted superiority has justified almost any policy that the "civilized" chose to enact on the inhabitants of the Third World, or on the slaves, immigrant laborers, and indigenous people of the Americas" (31) Granted that these values may be mystified in a way, the fact is that these students are here by choice and even though it may be another way for America to assert its Imperialism-that's how the world works. Whatever their reason is to be there, should the school be held accountable for choices a few of the graduates make when they graduate? Gill states that the "exclusive settings" in the SOA "aggravated the polarization of the world into "our people" and "the enemy," and they intensified forms of racism and class exclusion that were already widespread." (236) Here she is referring to the disconnect between these officers trained in the school and the civilians in their countries (as well as the other officers trained elsewhere). Gill seems to simplify the situation and lay blame on the school-most of these countries she is writing about are countries with military-like rule, ultimately placing the army at just about an equal status to the political leader. I'm not a supporter of the SOA and I don't believe the American foreign policy is just. But we should be able to lay the blame where it is needed. The author fails to pull herself out from the proximity of the situation to look at it from a wider perspective. Although Gill gives a somewhat sympathetic voice of the students in the SOA through the interviews, she has an incredibly one-sided argument. Her book has a strong emphasis on the students who return to their homeland only to generate more violence rather than prevent further violence from occurring. However, for the most part, all the other graduates are ignored. What are the statistics on the `bad apples' and what percentage do they constitute of all the graduates? On the last page of her book she writes "some movement activists see a positive part for the U.S. military to play in Latin America and object only to what they view as the aberrant behavior of the SOA, particularly the murder of priests and nuns by its graduates." This sentence is pretty much the vast majority of the view from the other side of the road. We do not hear much more than that and we are not given half the amount of evidence given to support her first and foremost conclusion that we encounter from the first couple of pages of the introduction. I repeat, this is an anthropologist's perspective and if you thought you were going to be reading a more balanced book that will give you insight as to what needs to be done to eliminate violent acts in Latin America but at the same time diminish the involvement of foreign powers in the region, then this isn't the book for you. This doesn't deal with much of the foreign policy and the reasons behind it. It doesn't present solutions, only problems. Is closing down the SOA a solution? Would it eliminate the violence in Latin America? The author does not present to us at what point the U.S. should draw the line on when it should involve itself in Latin America's domestic difficulties. This book simply looks at the SOA, its graduates, American values and the courses taught in the school. So, what about the most important aspect of the reason the SOA was developed, the American government?
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The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas...
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