Every year Amnesty International adds to its growing list of victims of torture around the world. For the average American, the brutalities that occur in a Colombian prison, for instance, seem to be very distant, both geographically and psychically. That psychic distance comes from a feeling that Americans have no personal responsibility for what happens in foreign countries. But our contribution to Latin America’s current situation is real We need only look at the School of the Americas, a U. S.-funded military training program, to see the effects of American policy in the region.
The school, which the United States has funded since 1946, trains soldiers from Latin America in military discipline and counter-insurgency techniques. It has deservedly earned nicknames like “the School of Assassins” and “the School of Dictators” because many Of its graduates have gone on to become heads of death squads or tyrants who have been guilty Of massacres, torture, unjust imprisonment, disappearances, and murders.
Since the school’s opening in Panama, 56,000 soldiers have been trained in the school. In 1984, the school moved from Panama to Fort Benning, Georgia. In an argument on the floor of the Senate this May, Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia said, “I feel very strongly that Latin America is a much better place with a lot more democracy and a lot more sense of value of human rights because of the School of the Americas.” Democratic Senator seems to have been seduced by the prestige and extra funding coming to his state as a result of the move, for according to Major Joseph A. Blair, a former instructor at the school, in a 1993 interview with Newsweek, “In the three years at the school I never heard of such lofty goals as promoting freedom, democracy and human rights.
In 1993, the school decided to include human rights in the curriculum for the time, but
apparently could not find a single Latin American military leader to teach the course. Instead, they brought in a teacher from Americas Watch, a human rights group that monitors reports of disappearances and torture. Even so, the course only makes up a tiny 12 hours of a year-long training program According to another former instructor, “the students quickly realize that it’s a gringo (American) course, so when they get back to their countries they forget it.”
Among the school’s graduates are 10 Latin-American dictators who have taken power without popular elections. The most notorious of these is Manuel Noriega, the ex-dictator of Panama who is currently serving a 40-year term in prison for drug trafficking. Besides Noriega, the alumni include Salvadoran right wing leader Roberto D’Aubisson, who was linked to the massacre of 500 civilians in 1991, and Hugo Banzer Suarez, the dictator of Bolivia from 1971 to 1978 who was found guilty of torturing priests.