Asad Ismi: School of the Americas, School of Terror

"It is hard to think of a coup or human rights outrage that has occurred in [Latin America] in the past forty years in which alumni of the School of the Americas were not involved."
Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1995

"They were the brains of the revolution," said one of the Salvadoran army officers who killed six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter
on November 16, 1989. He was explaining why the priests had been shot in the head. On November 16, 1997, 601 people were arrested at the U.S. Army's
School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia for protesting this crime. Nineteen of the 26 Salvadoran officers convicted of the killings
were trained at the SOA (also known as the School of the Assassins, the School of the Dictators and the School of Coups). Eighteen protesters were sentenced to six-month prison terms and fined $3,000. None of the Salvadoran army killers have served a day in jail.

MASSACRE 101

One of those imprisoned is Father Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest and founder of SOA Watch (which organized the protest), a nation-wide network of activists determined to close the School. Formed in 1990 in response to the Jesuit murders, SOAW critiques and investigates U.S. foreign policy and military training, and educates the public about the SOA's deadly legacy. The School has trained 60,000 Latin American officers in counter- insurgency techniques during the last 50 years. These include murder, torture, extortion, blackmail, kidnapping and arresting the relatives of those being questioned, according to seven manuals declassified by the Pentagon in 1996. With such instruction, SOA graduates have been responsible for the bloodiest massacres in Latin American history as well as thousands of assassinations and disappearances, and military coups in Panama, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and Argentina.

SOA alumni include:

--Roberto d'Aubuisson, organizer of El Salvador's death squads, who is held responsible for the assassination of Archbishop Romero in 1980.
--Three of the five officers cited for the rape and murder of four U.S. churchwomen in 1980 in San Salvador and ten of the 12 officers cited for the massacre of 900 civilians at El Mozote, El Salvador. In 1993, a U.N. Truth Commission cited 60 Salvadoran officers - 49 of them SOA graduates - for carrying out the worst atrocities during ten years of civil war.
--General Hector Gramajo, Guatemalan Defense Minister, who instigated the death of thousands and is held responsible for the rape and torture of Diana Ortiz, a U.S. Ursuline nun.
--Guatemalan Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, who was implicated in the murder of U.S. innkeeper Michael Devine and the torture and murder of Efrain Bamaca, a guerrilla leader and husband of U.S. lawyer Jennifer Harbury.
--Nineteen of the ranking Honduran officers connected to death squad Battalion 3-16 (a military counter-intelligence unit trained by the CIA),including its founder General Luis Alonso Discua. Battalion 3-16 killed hundreds of civilians.
--Former Panamanian dictator and CIA asset General Manuel Noriega,who is now serving 40 years in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking.
--Argentinian dictator General Leopoldo Galtieri (1981-1982), who directed the last two years of the six-year "dirty war" when 30,000 people were tortured, murdered and disappeared.
--Bolivian dictator General Hugo Banzer Suarez (1971-1978), who brutally suppressed clergy and tin miners and developed the "Banzer Plan"
to silence church workers. The plan became a blueprint for repression throughout Latin America. Banzer also sheltered Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie.
--Over 100 of the 246 Colombian officers cited for war crimes by an international human rights tribunal in 1993. In 1992, Colombian Lt. Col.
Victor Bernal Castano was given permission to attend the SOA in order to escape a criminal investigation of his role in the massacre of a peasant family.
--Mexican General Juan Lopez Ortiz, who commanded troops responsible for the massacre of suspected Zapatistas in Ocosingo in 1994.The victims' hands were tied behind their backs before they were shot in the head.

Consistently, Latin American countries with the worst human rights records have sent the most soldiers to the SOA:Bolivia under Banzer,El Salva dor during the most violent years of repression, and Nicaragua under the Somozas, were all top SOA clients. Continuing this trend, Colombia, which has had the worst human rights record in Latin America during the 1990s,sent the most soldiers to the SOA until 1997 (see list). In that year Mexico surpassed Colombia for the largest number of entrants, as human rights violations linked to official military forces have escalated in Chiapas where the Mexican army is fighting the Zapatista uprising.

A MASS MOVEMENT

"The SOA is being used to target the poor in Latin America and anyone who fights on their side, while protecting the wealth of the elite," explains
Father Bourgeois, a former naval officer and Vietnam veteran. "The U.S.is training military killers to maintain an unjust economic system through atrocities. Our campaign against the SOA is a way of raising awareness about the destructive effects of U.S. foreign policy and a first step towards changing it."

Bourgeois' latest jail term is his fourth. He has spent three-and-a-half years in prison for various protests at the SOA. "It's a joy to go to prison in solidarity with the poor," says Father Bourgeois. "Latin Americans have been killed for what I'm doing. We will go on educating people about the viciousness of U.S. policy even from prison. Together, we will shut this school down."

There is some basis for Bourgeois' confidence. A mass movement seems to be developing in the U.S. aimed at closing the School. In 1996, 300 people protested at Fort Benning. The number shot to 2,000 in 1997. Many religious denominations across the U.S. are calling for the School's closure. A bill in the House of Representatives to ensure this was defeated by only seven votes (210-217) last fall. The sponsor of the bill was Representative Joseph Kennedy II, who has become a prominent SOA critic and has visited Bourgeois in prison. A similar bill in the Senate is being sponsored by Senator Richard Durbin.

Many newspapers including the New York Times, The Washington Post and the Boston Globe have also called for the School's closure. During April, U.S. public television stations aired Father Roy: Inside the School of Assassins, an hour-length documentary about the SOA narrated by Susan Sarandon. This coincided with a massive grassroots rally at the White House and at the steps of the U.S. Capital and vigils at U.S. embassies in Latin America during April 26-28. As one protester put it," Nearly every kind of American wants the SOA closed."

NATIONAL SECURITY STATES

The School of the Americas was established in Panama in 1946 (it moved to Fort Benning in 1984), with counterinsurgency as the main curriculum.
Soldiers were trained in commando tactics, military intelligence,psychological operations and interrogation methods. The instruction emphasized war against internal enemies, not defending borders, and blurred the distinction between armed combatants and civilians. The enemy could be anyone. As the declassified manuals state: "The Counter Intelligence (CI) Agent should consider all organizations as possible guerrilla sympathizers." "Youth, workers, political, business, social and charitable organizations" were suspect, as were religious groups. Militaries had to "infiltrate and suppress even democratic political dissident movements and hunt down opponents in every segment of society."

Such training encouraged the emergence of military-dominated "national security states" (NSS) all over Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. Military dictatorships took power through coups, and in the case of Argentina and Chile, carried out SOA instructions by killing 60,000 people. Military dictatorships in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Central America slaughtered at least 270,000 people, while the carnage continues in Colombia and Mexico today.

The 1980s variant of counter-insurgency was Low-Intensity Conflict(LIC), which incorporated the lessons of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. According to defense analyst Michael Klare,LIC "is that amount of murder,mutilation,torture,rape and savagery that is sustainable without triggering widespread public disapproval at home."

A recent book on the SOA published by the Maryknoll order revealed that once their opponents were eliminated, U.S. and Latin American military leaders "concluded a secret defense plan at a series of meetings in Argentina in 1987 by stating their opposition to a new wave of military coups." They preferred "a permanent state of military control over civilian governments while still preserving formal democracy." This state of affairs characterizes most Latin American countries today, which remain national security states.

The NSS's creation was necessitated by the U.S.'s refusal to tolerate any major redistribution of economic resources in Latin America in the post- war era.Faced with deep impulses for social change fed by hunger,poverty and inequality,the U.S relied on military repression to maintain a stable investment climate for multinational corporations. Latin American officers trained at the SOA were instruments of U.S. foreign policy, equipped to preserve this climate and the importance of the School grew as social problems worsened in the continent.

TORTURE

In addition to massacre (which the SOA curriculum encouraged), the other main component of the NSS was torture; this too was taught at the SOA,which the Pentagon admitted in 1996. "We were trained to torture human beings," one SOA graduate told Father Bourgeois. According to this alumnus, people from the streets of Panama were brought to the School and used as human guinea pigs for torture. He stated: "Some of them were blindfolded and they were stripped and ...tortured. At the same time they had a ... U.S. medical physician ... dressed in green fatigues who would teach the students in the nerve endings in the body, he would show them where to torture, where you wouldn't kill the individual. He would tell them how much the heart can tolerate." Five
people in Panama confirmed that they knew about torture training at the SOA when it was located there.

Jose Valle, an SOA graduate and member of the Honduran death squad Battalion 3-16, described torturing as "a job, something I did to give food
to my kids. I took a course in intelligence at the School of the Americas.The SOA had a lot of videos which showed the type of interrogation and torture they used in Vietnam. Although many people refused to accept it,all this is organized by the U.S. government."

MEXICO

Mexico now sends the most officers to the SOA. The increase began after the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994. Since then,Mexico has undergone a massive militarization, using millions of dollars in U.S. military aid and training. This has been the Mexican government's response to economic and social problems. The Indians in Chiapas rose up against NAFTA because it allowed foreign multinationals to buy their formerly protected communal lands. The Zapatistas also demanded autonomy, an end to the grinding poverty that leaves 80 percent of Chiapas'children malnourished and the provision of education and health services.

The Mexican government answered these demands by blanketing Chiapas with 40,000 troops and sending paramilitary death squads into villages to
massacre civilians. These groups are linked to the Mexican army and the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The massacres are aimed at depopulating villages seen as loyal to the Zapatistas and filling them with PRI supporters.

On December 22, 1997, Red Mask, a paramilitary group connected to the PRI, killed 45 Tzotzil Indians (20 women, 18 children and seven men)and wounded 25 others in the community of Acteal. Four-year-old Zenaida Perez was left blind from a bullet that destroyed part of her brain. Her mother, father, brother and two sisters were murdered. Two thousand people have been killed in such massacres since May 1995 when death squads first appeared in Chiapas. With names such as "Peace and Justice" and "The Throat-slitters," their members come from the PRI and the police. These paramilitary groups are part of the Mexican army's counter-insurgency strategy in Chiapas.

SOA graduate General Jose Ruben Rivas Pena helped design this strategy. According to Proceso, the main leftwing magazine in Mexico,included in his detailed plan are directives to censor media, "secretly organize sectors of the civilian population and conduct psychological operations against civilians." Thirteen SOA graduates who are now top military officials have played a key role in the conflict in the southern Mexican states. They include Colonel Julian Guerrero Barrios, who has been charged with the crime "violence against the people" and for his leadership in the torture and massacre of more than 12 young men in Jalisco.

"The message we get from our Latin American sisters and brothers is a simple one," reflects Father Bourgeois. "It's about suffering and death. It's about people who struggle for just wages. It's about people like us who are struggling for schools, adequate housing and medicine for their kids. And it's about a school training soldiers who return to their home countries and who keep the poor impoverished and living on the edge, struggling for survival. As Archbishop Romero said, `We who have a voice will no longer be silent.' We are growing in number and we are not going to stop because the work we are doing connects us to the poor and the oppressed, whose voices have been taken away."

SOA Enrollment
Nations Graduates since 1946 (partial list)

Argentina..... 1,031

Bolivia........4,349

Brazil........ 455

Chile..........2,805

Colombia.......9,679

El Salvador....6,776

Guatemala..... 1,676

Mexico.........766

Nicaragua......4,693

Panama.........4,235

Peru...........3,997

Published in:

Briarpatch, May 1998

Americas Update, Summer 1998

Index on Censorship (on website) www.indexoncensorship.org, May 1998


	SCHOOL OF TERROR

"It is hard to think of a coup or human rights outrage that has occurred in [Latin America] in the past forty years in which alumni of the School of the Americas were not involved." Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1995 "They were the brains of the revolution," said one of the Salvadoran army officers who killed six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter on November 16, 1989. He was explaining why the priests had been shot in the head. On November 16, 1997, 601 people were arrested at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia for protesting this crime. Nineteen of the 26 Salvadoran officers convicted of the killings were trained at the SOA (also known as the School of the Assassins, the School of the Dictators and the School of Coups). Eighteen protesters were sentenced to six-month prison terms and fined $3,000. None of the Salvadoran army killers have served a day in jail. MASSACRE 101 One of those imprisoned is Father Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest and founder of SOA Watch (which organized the protest), a nation-wide network of activists determined to close the School. Formed in 1990 in response to the Jesuit murders, SOAW critiques and investigates U.S. foreign policy and military training, and educates the public about the SOA's deadly legacy. The School has trained 60,000 Latin American officers in counter- insurgency techniques during the last 50 years. These include murder, torture, extortion, blackmail, kidnapping and arresting the relatives of those being questioned, according to seven manuals declassified by the Pentagon in 1996. With such instruction, SOA graduates have been responsible for the bloodiest massacres in Latin American history as well as thousands of assassinations and disappearances, and military coups in Panama, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and Argentina. SOA alumni include: --Roberto d'Aubuisson, organizer of El Salvador's death squads, who is held responsible for the assassination of Archbishop Romero in 1980. --Three of the five officers cited for the rape and murder of four U.S. churchwomen in 1980 in San Salvador and ten of the 12 officers cited for the massacre of 900 civilians at El Mozote, El Salvador. In 1993, a U.N. Truth Commission cited 60 Salvadoran officers - 49 of them SOA graduates - for carrying out the worst atrocities during ten years of civil war. --General Hector Gramajo, Guatemalan Defense Minister, who instigated the death of thousands and is held responsible for the rape and torture of Diana Ortiz, a U.S. Ursuline nun. --Guatemalan Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, who was implicated in the murder of U.S. innkeeper Michael Devine and the torture and murder of Efrain Bamaca, a guerrilla leader and husband of U.S. lawyer Jennifer Harbury. --Nineteen of the ranking Honduran officers connected to death squad Battalion 3-16 (a military counter-intelligence unit trained by the CIA),including its founder General Luis Alonso Discua. Battalion 3-16 killed hundreds of civilians. --Former Panamanian dictator and CIA asset General Manuel Noriega,who is now serving 40 years in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking. --Argentinian dictator General Leopoldo Galtieri (1981-1982), who directed the last two years of the six-year "dirty war" when 30,000 people were tortured, murdered and disappeared. --Bolivian dictator General Hugo Banzer Suarez (1971-1978), who brutally suppressed clergy and tin miners and developed the "Banzer Plan" to silence church workers. The plan became a blueprint for repression throughout Latin America. Banzer also sheltered Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. --Over 100 of the 246 Colombian officers cited for war crimes by an international human rights tribunal in 1993. In 1992, Colombian Lt. Col. Victor Bernal Castano was given permission to attend the SOA in order to escape a criminal investigation of his role in the massacre of a peasant family. --Mexican General Juan Lopez Ortiz, who commanded troops responsible for the massacre of suspected Zapatistas in Ocosingo in 1994.The victims' hands were tied behind their backs before they were shot in the head. Consistently, Latin American countries with the worst human rights records have sent the most soldiers to the SOA:Bolivia under Banzer,El Salva dor during the most violent years of repression, and Nicaragua under the Somozas, were all top SOA clients. Continuing this trend, Colombia, which has had the worst human rights record in Latin America during the 1990s,sent the most soldiers to the SOA until 1997 (see list). In that year Mexico surpassed Colombia for the largest number of entrants, as human rights violations linked to official military forces have escalated in Chiapas where the Mexican army is fighting the Zapatista uprising. A MASS MOVEMENT "The SOA is being used to target the poor in Latin America and anyone who fights on their side, while protecting the wealth of the elite," explains Father Bourgeois, a former naval officer and Vietnam veteran. "The U.S.is training military killers to maintain an unjust economic system through atrocities. Our campaign against the SOA is a way of raising awareness about the destructive effects of U.S. foreign policy and a first step towards changing it." Bourgeois' latest jail term is his fourth. He has spent three-and-a-half years in prison for various protests at the SOA. "It's a joy to go to prison in solidarity with the poor," says Father Bourgeois. "Latin Americans have been killed for what I'm doing. We will go on educating people about the viciousness of U.S. policy even from prison. Together, we will shut this school down." There is some basis for Bourgeois' confidence. A mass movement seems to be developing in the U.S. aimed at closing the School. In 1996, 300 people protested at Fort Benning. The number shot to 2,000 in 1997. Many religious denominations across the U.S. are calling for the School's closure. A bill in the House of Representatives to ensure this was defeated by only seven votes (210-217) last fall. The sponsor of the bill was Representative Joseph Kennedy II, who has become a prominent SOA critic and has visited Bourgeois in prison. A similar bill in the Senate is being sponsored by Senator Richard Durbin. Many newspapers including the New York Times, The Washington Post and the Boston Globe have also called for the School's closure. During April, U.S. public television stations aired Father Roy: Inside the School of Assassins, an hour-length documentary about the SOA narrated by Susan Sarandon. This coincided with a massive grassroots rally at the White House and at the steps of the U.S. Capital and vigils at U.S. embassies in Latin America during April 26-28. As one protester put it," Nearly every kind of American wants the SOA closed." NATIONAL SECURITY STATES The School of the Americas was established in Panama in 1946 (it moved to Fort Benning in 1984), with counterinsurgency as the main curriculum. Soldiers were trained in commando tactics, military intelligence,psychological operations and interrogation methods. The instruction emphasized war against internal enemies, not defending borders, and blurred the distinction between armed combatants and civilians. The enemy could be anyone. As the declassified manuals state: "The Counter Intelligence (CI) Agent should consider all organizations as possible guerrilla sympathizers." "Youth, workers, political, business, social and charitable organizations" were suspect, as were religious groups. Militaries had to "infiltrate and suppress even democratic political dissident movements and hunt down opponents in every segment of society." Such training encouraged the emergence of military-dominated "national security states" (NSS) all over Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. Military dictatorships took power through coups, and in the case of Argentina and Chile, carried out SOA instructions by killing 60,000 people. Military dictatorships in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Central America slaughtered at least 270,000 people, while the carnage continues in Colombia and Mexico today. The 1980s variant of counter-insurgency was Low-Intensity Conflict(LIC), which incorporated the lessons of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. According to defense analyst Michael Klare,LIC "is that amount of murder,mutilation,torture,rape and savagery that is sustainable without triggering widespread public disapproval at home." A recent book on the SOA published by the Maryknoll order revealed that once their opponents were eliminated, U.S. and Latin American military leaders "concluded a secret defense plan at a series of meetings in Argentina in 1987 by stating their opposition to a new wave of military coups." They preferred "a permanent state of military control over civilian governments while still preserving formal democracy." This state of affairs characterizes most Latin American countries today, which remain national security states. The NSS's creation was necessitated by the U.S.'s refusal to tolerate any major redistribution of economic resources in Latin America in the post- war era.Faced with deep impulses for social change fed by hunger,poverty and inequality,the U.S relied on military repression to maintain a stable investment climate for multinational corporations. Latin American officers trained at the SOA were instruments of U.S. foreign policy, equipped to preserve this climate and the importance of the School grew as social problems worsened in the continent. TORTURE In addition to massacre (which the SOA curriculum encouraged), the other main component of the NSS was torture; this too was taught at the SOA,which the Pentagon admitted in 1996. "We were trained to torture human beings," one SOA graduate told Father Bourgeois. According to this alumnus, people from the streets of Panama were brought to the School and used as human guinea pigs for torture. He stated: "Some of them were blindfolded and they were stripped and ...tortured. At the same time they had a ... U.S. medical physician ... dressed in green fatigues who would teach the students in the nerve endings in the body, he would show them where to torture, where you wouldn't kill the individual. He would tell them how much the heart can tolerate." Five people in Panama confirmed that they knew about torture training at the SOA when it was located there. Jose Valle, an SOA graduate and member of the Honduran death squad Battalion 3-16, described torturing as "a job, something I did to give food to my kids. I took a course in intelligence at the School of the Americas.The SOA had a lot of videos which showed the type of interrogation and torture they used in Vietnam. Although many people refused to accept it,all this is organized by the U.S. government." MEXICO Mexico now sends the most officers to the SOA. The increase began after the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994. Since then,Mexico has undergone a massive militarization, using millions of dollars in U.S. military aid and training. This has been the Mexican government's response to economic and social problems. The Indians in Chiapas rose up against NAFTA because it allowed foreign multinationals to buy their formerly protected communal lands. The Zapatistas also demanded autonomy, an end to the grinding poverty that leaves 80 percent of Chiapas'children malnourished and the provision of education and health services. The Mexican government answered these demands by blanketing Chiapas with 40,000 troops and sending paramilitary death squads into villages to massacre civilians. These groups are linked to the Mexican army and the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The massacres are aimed at depopulating villages seen as loyal to the Zapatistas and filling them with PRI supporters. On December 22, 1997, Red Mask, a paramilitary group connected to the PRI, killed 45 Tzotzil Indians (20 women, 18 children and seven men)and wounded 25 others in the community of Acteal. Four-year-old Zenaida Perez was left blind from a bullet that destroyed part of her brain. Her mother, father, brother and two sisters were murdered. Two thousand people have been killed in such massacres since May 1995 when death squads first appeared in Chiapas. With names such as "Peace and Justice" and "The Throat-slitters," their members come from the PRI and the police. These paramilitary groups are part of the Mexican army's counter-insurgency strategy in Chiapas. SOA graduate General Jose Ruben Rivas Pena helped design this strategy. According to Proceso, the main leftwing magazine in Mexico,included in his detailed plan are directives to censor media, "secretly organize sectors of the civilian population and conduct psychological operations against civilians." Thirteen SOA graduates who are now top military officials have played a key role in the conflict in the southern Mexican states. They include Colonel Julian Guerrero Barrios, who has been charged with the crime "violence against the people" and for his leadership in the torture and massacre of more than 12 young men in Jalisco. "The message we get from our Latin American sisters and brothers is a simple one," reflects Father Bourgeois. "It's about suffering and death. It's about people who struggle for just wages. It's about people like us who are struggling for schools, adequate housing and medicine for their kids. And it's about a school training soldiers who return to their home countries and who keep the poor impoverished and living on the edge, struggling for survival. As Archbishop Romero said, `We who have a voice will no longer be silent.' We are growing in number and we are not going to stop because the work we are doing connects us to the poor and the oppressed, whose voices have been taken away." SOA Enrollment Nations Graduates since 1946 (partial list) Argentina..... 1,031 Bolivia........4,349 Brazil........ 455 Chile..........2,805 Colombia.......9,679 El Salvador....6,776 Guatemala..... 1,676 Mexico.........766 Nicaragua......4,693 Panama.........4,235 Peru...........3,997 Published in: Briarpatch, May 1998 Americas Update, Summer 1998 Index on Censorship (on website) www.indexoncensorship.org, May 1998

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