SOA: A Thoroughly Un-American Institution

Opened in 1946 at Fort Gulick in the former US Panama Canal Zone, the School of the Americas (SOA) has, over its lifetime, trained more than 64,000 Latin American and Caribbean members of the uniformed armed forces in an extensive program of military operations.

Its graduates have included ten different Latin American military officers who would later become some of the most notorious strongmen and dictators in the

hemisphere, as well as hundreds of senior and mid-level officers who would later be revealed as gross human rights abusers, serial torturers, drug traffickers and confederates of organized crime.

Dirty practices

Torture has been considered a logical and necessary component in the expansive arsenal of dirty practices which comprise the field of special operations (commando tactics, sophisticated counterinsurgency techniques, military intelligence, covert intelligence activities, psychological warfare, psychological operations or ‘PSYOPS’, and other covert procedures), all initially honed by the British in Malaya and by the US in the Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, and more recently, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Likewise, the 1963 CIA ‘KUBARK’ interrogation and torture documents and the early 1980s torture manuals authored by the US Army for use at the SOA both document torture practices which have been central to the school’s curricula. These were being taught to thousands of officers from eighteen Latin American countries for several decades.

These materials specifically instructed their students on how to coerce prisoners into being cooperative through the use of fear, extortion, kidnapping, the administration of truth serums, beatings, rape, false imprisonment, torture of children in front of their parents and vice versa, beheadings, live burials, public execution and acts of massacre.

A 1,169 page US Army ‘Foreign Intelligence Training Program’ called ‘PROJECT X’ was designed, to develop an exportable foreign intelligence training package. to provide counterinsurgency techniques learned in Vietnam to Latin American countries. Much of the material for ‘X’ came from Army Field Manual FM 30-18, a classified intelligence operations manual.

Training materials

After being translated from English to Spanish, it was distributed to the military establishments of Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru. Its contents were also transmitted in one form or another to SOA students from Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Mexico and Venezuela.

The US Army School of the Americas used training materials that condoned ‘executions of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion, and false imprisonment,’ asserted an Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) Report issued June 28, 1996, in Washington, DC. The IOB, a four-person, independent board created by President Clinton, was assigned the task of investigating excesses and abuses by the US intelligence community.

In Latin America, the SOA was popularly dubbed the ?School of Assassins? after a 1993 United Nations Truth Commission revealed there were 19 SOA graduates among the 26 Salvadoran officers implicated in the 1989 ‘execution style’ massacre of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in San Salvador.

The U.N. Commission went on to report that three-quarters of the Salvadoran officers known to be responsible for seven other massacres during El Salvador’s bloody civil war were trained by the SOA.

Special operations

Yet, ‘The school has never taught torture and never will,’ the SOA commandant at the time, Col. Glenn R. Weidner, told a November 1998 news conference. Meanwhile, Weidner referred to the at least 500 SOA graduates found to be directly implicated in the worst documented human rights abuses recorded throughout Latin America as ‘a few bad apples’.

While that was the official line, others who were directly involved with the accused officers, revealed a quite different story. A person with close personal knowledge of the inner workings of the school, tells a story that is even more revealing:

The school was always a front for other special operations, covert operations. They would bring people from the streets into the base and the experts would train us on how to obtain information using torture.

We were trained to torture human beings. They had a medical physician, a US medical physician which I remember very well, who was dressed in green fatigues, who would teach the students “(about) the nerve endings of the body. He would show them where to torture, where and where not, where you wouldn’t kill the individual”.

Such training has been provided to Latin American militaries with the assumption that they would use these acquired skills to get the job done, to use repressive tactics to neutralize ideologies found to threaten the status quo throughout the region.

In certain instances this meant the direct physical presence of American trainers alongside their Latin American ‘students’, while the torture was in progress. Circumstantial evidence pointed to accounts given by blindfolded torture survivors who recall hearing men speaking English or broken Spanish with an American accent.

Negative publicity

The notoriety which the School of the Americas earned came, in part, as a result of the bloody fruits of its academic record in Panama from 1946 through 1984.

This is when the terms of the Panama Canal treaty were being implemented and it was necessary for the facility to relocate to Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. In December 2000, the SOA was allegedly closed in the wake of flaring negative publicity resulting from the disclosure of the torture manuals being used in the SOA curriculum, and massive protests and demonstrations outside the base’s gates.

This was just as the phalange of the institution’s opponents, which now included outspoken members of Congress who were on the cusp of representing a legislative majority ready to dismantle the SOA.

In a surprise move, the Pentagon submitted a Defence Authorization Bill for the 2001 fiscal year that put forth a name change for the SOA. The facility was then reopened on January 17, 2001 with a new name, The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, (WHINSEC). It was housed in the very same building at Fort Benning where the SOA was formerly headquartered.

The late Georgia senator, Paul Coverdell, a fervent backer of the institution, told the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer that the Pentagon name change proposal was ‘cosmetic’. Further evidence of these cosmetic changes were evident in a statement issued on December 12, 2000 by Major Thomas Collins, a US Army spokesman, “The new school is going to continue the same vital functions the School of the Americas did. We see a great need to continue the same military-to-military,

country-to-country contact”.

Advanced training

As a result of the controversial role played by the SOA and its sibling, WHINSEC, five countries, Argentina, Bolivia Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Venezuela have decided to completely withdraw their personnel from future training at WHINSEC.

The sentiments of these nations felt toward the SOA/WHINSEC were summed up by former Uruguayan Defence Minister, Azuceni Berrutti, who observed, “we have absolutely no need for training at this kind of school”. Several more nations, which have for years sent their military officers to the SOA/WHINSEC for advanced training, are now actively considering the termination of their involvement with the organization.

National security

Thousands of innocent men, women, and children have been defiled, tortured, massacred, disappeared, and executed at the hands of graduates of this now nefarious institution.

The values and principles which the United States is supposed to uphold and represent should not be permitted to be tarnished any longer by the shameful debauchery of this institution. Moreover, it is morally, as well as legally, unacceptable to argue that the national security of this country can either be justified or advanced by the repressive and anti-democratic activities which this institution has promoted through much of its history.

Consistent with the Cold War mentality and the simple-minded anti-communist policies of the post-World War II political landscape, the SOA and its successor, WHINSEC, today operate on the premise of George W. Bush’s credo, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us”.

This analysis was prepared by Louis Wolf, Editor of Covert Action Quarterly