School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas

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School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas

Latin American Politics and Society, Spring 2006 by McSherry, J Patrice


Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Photographs, bibliography, index, 304 pp.

As its role became better known in the 1980s, the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) became a symbol of U.S. foreign policy perversities in Latin America. By then, many graduates of the school were already infamous in their own countries for their leadership of, or involvement in, savage counterinsurgency campaigns and human rights atrocities. The SOA was known in the region as the School of Assassins or the School of Coups. The names of SOA graduates are familiar to Latin Americanists: dictator Hugo Banzer of Bolivia, who took power in a bloody coup; Leopoldo Galtieri, Argentine general and member of the "dirty war" junta in the 1980s; Roberto d'Aubuisson, leader of Salvadoran death squads; General Efrain Rios Montt, overseer of massacres of indigenous peasants as dictator in Guatemala; Chilean Miguel Krassnoff, DINA officer and torturer; the list goes on. The U.N. Truth Commission on El Salvador found that 60 Salvadoran officers were responsible for the worst atrocities of that country's dirty war; more than two-thirds were SOA graduates (Franciscans International et al. 2000, 4). More than 60,000 Latin American officers have trained at the SOA.

The SOA's reputation was further stained after the 1996 declassification of several of its training manuals, under pressure from a Baltimore Sun lawsuit. The manuals provided documented evidence that SOA instructors had taught and advocated methods of torture, extortion, kidnapping, and execution in the counterinsurgency wars. The Pentagon claimed that the manuals contained only isolated "objectionable" passages, and continued a long pattern of denial by arguing that the manuals had not been properly cleared and did not represent U.S. government policy. Given the historical record, those denials were not credible.

Beyond their more heinous passages, moreover, the manuals were suffused with suspicion of public gatherings and general political activity in developing societies; they imparted lessons in population control, mass registrations of communities, censorship, infiltration, surveillance, and other repressive methods. One declassified 1983 CIA manual used to train Central American armies, "Human Resource Exploitation Manual," was drawn directly from a 1963 CIA manual, demonstrating that the "objectionable passages" were not "mistakes" but longstanding and integral components of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy and tactics. The SOA and CIA manuals provide stunning proof of U.S. sponsorship of, and training in, repressive methods of social control in Latin America.

In recent years, the SOA has embarked on a public relations campaign to improve its image, even changing its name in 2001 to the Western Hemisphere Institute for security Cooperation (WHINSEC). Lesley Gill took advantage of this opening to conduct an in-depth study of the school and its role, aided by the relatively open access allowed her by the school's commander. The result is a fascinating book and an unflinching look at U.S. complicity in human rights crimes in Latin America.

A notable contribution of Gill's study is its theoretical framework, which places the school squarely in an analysis of U.S. hegemony and what Gill calls the U.S. imperial project. Gill argues that through the SOA and other training schools, institutions, and programs, Washington transformed the Latin American security forces into "extensions of its own power in Latin America and internationalized state-sponsored violence in the Americas" (p. 7). The SOA shaped Latin American militaries into proxy forces under U.S. control, Gill posits, thereby extending U.S. control of political developments throughout the region.

Gill thus argues that the SOA is one of the instruments through which Washington imposes its political will and pursues its economic interests in other countries. Seeking political, military, and cultural domination, she writes, the U.S. government also has established a constellation of military bases worldwide, an enormous defense budget, a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons, and a system of ongoing alliances with repressive regimes. U.S. imperialism, Gill contends, means more than military interventions and intrusive economic policies: it is a "way of life," a means of exercising power through indigenous military, paramilitary, and security forces as they "enforce the systems of order required by dominant groups to manage different kinds of people" (p. 4).

The book's chapters take the reader along as Gill becomes familiar with life in the SOA: its curriculum, its officers, its trainees, and how the asymmetrical power relations reflecting the U.S.-Latin American reality manifest themselves at various levels. She analyzes the ideology taught at the SOA (for example, chap. 6), the upward mobility at home that a stint at the school provides trainees (chap. 4), and the impact of subtle ideological assumptions of racial and gender superiority. Other unspoken messages of cultural and racial supremacy are conveyed in the SOA's attempts to promote "the American way of life" (pp. 30-31, chap. 3). The phenomenon of transnational male bonding also occurs at the school.

U.S. officers at the SOA depict Latin American military brutality as intrinsic to the Latin American nature, while any U.S. role in the region's dirty wars and human rights violations is never mentioned. Thus, Gill argues, the history of U.S. involvement in Latin American repression is "disappeared." Army commander Colonel Glen Weidner, for example, refers in a speech to "a strain of incomprehensible violence in Guatemalan rural society" (p. 55). (Weidner, the SOA commander, seems to dedicate most of his time to public relations and managing the school's image.) Gill observes that the "millions of dollars of military aid and decades of counterinsurgency training in U.S. schools [are] believed to play no part in the creation of murderous security forces" (p. 32); yet one of her interviewees openly discusses lessons learned at the SOA in the torture and killing of prisoners (p. 99).

A particularly interesting chapter deals with the army's public relations campaign to improve the image of the school. Gill was repeatedly told that torture was not taught at the SOA, and she notes that over the period of her fieldwork there was "a barrage of deafening doublespeak that blurred the lines between truth and fiction and sometimes obscured them completely" (p. 45). Officers insisted that military training in psychological operations and killing techniques was actually an exercise in promoting democracy, engagement, and human rights in Latin America.

Another strength of the book is Gill's analysis of the school's efforts to break down nationalist barriers and weld the Latin American militaries into a transnational anticommunist (and currently, counterterrorist) force under the leadership of the United States. The SOA and other such U.S. schools have been crucial settings for the creation of U.S.-dominated military networks, along with secret programs, such as Operation Condor, the Cold War-era intelligence operations network that "disappeared" and executed hundreds of leftist activists-a conclusion confirmed in this reviewer's own research.

Gill nicely captures important nuances. Some Latin American officers, she notes, accepted without comment views expressed by U.S. officers that were unintentionally arrogant or that betrayed double standards. In one such case, one Latin American officer told her cryptically, several months later, that some of the things he had heard had made him "want to pull out his hair" (p. 130). The Latin Americans generally knew their place, however, as junior partners to their wealthy and powerful sponsors.

Gill devotes one chapter to a case study of the Andean region, addressing the Bolivian military's internal war against indigenous coca growers and the military-paramilitary relationship in Colombia. Although little of the information will be new to Latin Americanists, the chapter provides a good overview to nonspecialists. Another chapter is deVoted to the School of the Americas Watch, its origins, and its activists.

The book has its minor flaws. Some parts are written in a personalized, sometimes anecdotal style. Perhaps the point was to reach a popular audience, but some academic readers may be impatient with some of the more descriptive accounts. On the other hand, the best parts of the book provide relentless arguments, sharp writing, and key evidence to counter the pronouncements of U.S. and Latin American officers as they oversimplify, distort, or rationalize their practices in Latin American countries.

I would have liked the book to go deeper into some areas. The SOA's use of the "torture manuals" that became public in the mid-1990s is one example. Gill briefly discusses them (for example, pp. 49, 212), but the information does not go beyond previous reporting. Similarly, including more about the historical role of the SOA in Latin America, especially its role in the counterinsurgency wars and in covert operations during the Cold War, would have given the reader a fuller picture.

Overall, the book is a useful study of the SOA and a good introduction for students. Gill is persuasive in terms of her analytical framework, and she provides an intimate account of the people who staff the SOA and the people who train there. She effectively undercuts the "bad apples" rationale through her presentation of the School of the Americas as a cog in the U.S. machinery of empire.

REFERENCE

Franciscans International, Pax Christi International, International Catholic Peace Movement, and Maryknoll. 2000. Question of the Violation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in Any Part of the World. Written statement to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 56th session. Geneva, March 20-April 28. (Accessed April 22, 2005)
J. Patrice McSherry
Long Island University
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McSherry, J Patrice "School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas, The". Latin American Politics and Society. Spring 2006. FindArticles.com. 03 May. 2008. School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas, The | Latin American Politics and Society | Find Articles at BNET.com

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