Product Description

Located at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, the School of the Americas (soa) is a U.S. Army center that has trained more than sixty thousand soldiers and police, mostly from Latin America, in counterinsurgency and combat-related skills since it was founded in 1946. So widely documented is the participation of the School’s graduates in torture, murder, and political repression throughout Latin America that in 2001 the School officially changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Lesley Gill goes behind the façade and presents a comprehensive portrait of the School of the Americas. Talking to a retired Colombian general accused by international human rights organizations of terrible crimes, sitting in on classes, accompanying soa students and their families to an upscale local mall, listening to coca farmers in Colombia and Bolivia, conversing with anti-soa activists in the cramped office of the School of the Americas Watch—Gill exposes the School’s institutionalization of state-sponsored violence, the havoc it has wrought in Latin America, and the strategies used by activists seeking to curtail it.

Based on her unprecedented level of access to the School of the Americas, Gill describes the School’s mission and training methods and reveals how its students, alumni, and officers perceive themselves in relation to the dirty wars that have raged across Latin America. Assessing the School’s role in U.S. empire-building, she shows how Latin America’s brightest and most ambitious military officers are indoctrinated into a stark good-versus-evil worldview, seduced by consumer society and the "American dream," and enlisted as proxies in Washington’s war against drugs and "subversion."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #194196 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

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."
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From The Washington Post
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.

Review
"Lesley Gill has produced an in-depth expose of the militaristic mentality, socio-ethnic tensions, and outrageous atrocities of the empire's Praetorian Guard. Insightful and richly researched, a work of superior quality." - Michael Parenti, author of The Terrorism Trap and The Assassination of Julius Caesar"

Customer Reviews

Gill Illuminates Global Secrets
I can still recall my curiosity as a young girl hearing the cryptically delivered advice from one woman to another: "Honey, what you do in the dark will certainly come out in the light, e---ver--y time." Today, the quotation comes immediately to mind as I think about Lesley Gill's investigative book, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. Perhaps my juxtaposition of Gill's book and the chatter between women appears as an unlikely pairing, but her disclosures of US involvement with Latin Americans, particularly up and coming military officers, certainly reveals North America's clandestine activities illuminated by an astute writer.
Gill, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at American University, prevails as the consummate teacher who seamlessly employs vocabulary for both the novice and the experienced student of international affairs. Her ease of language serves as a major draw in understanding how American leaders exploited the School of the Americas, located first in Panama and later in Columbus, Georgia, to underhandedly endorse corrupt Latino governmental officials. Having also authored Teetering on the Rim: Global Restructuring, Daily Life, and the Armed Retreat of the Bolivian State and Precarious Dependencies: Gender, Class and Domestic Service in Bolivia, Gill is well armed (pardon the pun) in Latin American study and the myriad dimensions of corrupt political rule. Beginning with the school's inception in 1941 and progressing to its name change to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, in 2001, Gill delivers a comprehensive overview for her readers. While her expertise lies mostly with Bolivian culture, Gill adroitly summarizes the SOA's political tentacles in Peru, Argentina, Honduras, Bolivia and Nicaragua. Each re-telling of the personal stories from military officers and the disavowed personalizes her message for both her supporters and distracters.
Gill attacks what's done in presumed darkness. According to Gill, the United States grants tacit approval to innumerable human rights violations by its support of foreign enrollment at the SOA. It is obvious, right from the start, that she's appalled by the contradictory message of a nation founded on the principles of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" endorsing an institution like the SOA. When interviewed by Aaron Mandel for the magazine, American Prospect On-Line, Gill emphatically states "there is no useful purpose for the institution. It's symbolic, really, of the abusive practices from the Cold War right up to the present. It would be better closed and made into a museum to commemorate the lives of the people murdered by SOA graduates."It's almost unbelievable that given the wide ranging influence of the school, virtually no one has heard of it, including many seasoned military personnel bur that fact evolves as a major tenet of Gill's thesis. Gill clearly illuminates the long kept secret and its ancillary political, economic, and even psychological impact on SOA graduates. Students and instructors labor under the SOA motto: "all for one and one for all." Gill, however, discloses, that the motto more aptly describes the impunity (a word she uses a great deal) enjoyed by the cliquish bureaucracy.
Is Gill waging her own war? Yes, seemingly. She zealously delivers evidence to support her views and in an almost recruitment mode, appears to invite readers to align against SOA personnel and students. Readers seeking a balanced perspective might find this distracting and Gill may very well loose possible recruits because of the obviously liberal leanings of the book. Fervency may appear as propaganda and likened to SOA proponents. In fact, some of her fellow armor bearers have created a web-site that not only lists previous graduates, but features a logo of a skull wearing a graduation cap with a lynch man's noose substituted for the traditional tassel. Lest there be any question about its meaning, "Shut down the SOA" is blazoned across the logo of the school which websters renamed the "School of the Assassins." I If one is to believe the numerous atrocities (as I do) then anything less than total conviction by the author would appear shallow and yet, too much emotion lends itself to hell and damnation preaching. Fortunately, for her readers, Gill has not ascended to the pulpit, albeit, a call close at times.
To her credit, Gill moves a step beyond the women in my mother's kitchen who simply recited admonitions. She acts. Gill sends a warning to governmental and military leaders who wield too much power against the powerless that she will be a torch bearer against continued human on human atrocities.

very informative
If you have ever wanted to know more about the School of the Americas, or need information for research (as I did) this book has a lot of great information and history of the topic.

Fantastic Study of the School of the Assassins
This is an extremely well written study of the military training given to soldiers from all over Latin America. It explains how various ideologies have been used over the past sixty years in order to justify military repression of social movements and the quest for democratic institutions. It examine how the original ideology of containing communism morphed into the war on drugs; and finally into the war on terrorism. This should be required reading for any course on foreign relations or international relations.