2 November 1999

This month, the Turtle salutes the School of the Americas Watch!

The Turtle is not usually in the business of advocating school closures, particularly not on the grounds of efficiency. This is the kind of argument we associate with those against whom the People's Didactic Machine Tool is locked in ceaseless ideological combat. And yet this month, the Turtle is proud to salute the surprisingly-named Father Roy Bourgeois, who, together with his colleagues at the School of the Americas Watch (http://www.soaw.org), is fighting hard to have the School of the Americas closed down.

The SOA is, in its own terms, an eminently successful institution. It counts among its graduates ten Heads of State, and over fifty Cabinet Ministers, together with many more high-ranking government functionaries throughout Latin America. Established in Panama in 1946 and now based in Fort Benning, Georgia it has been funded by the United States government as a way of promoting cooperation between the US and its Latin American satellites for over half a century. So what's the fuss?

Although the US government frequently trumpets the dizzy political heights that SOA graduates have scaled, it is a little cagey about just how these men have attained them. It turns out that School of the Americas graduates aren't like those from other schools. Alumni include Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez from Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. Besides their alma mater, one feature all these men have in common is that they became Heads of State not through any kind of democratic process, but through military coups. Given the sort of school the SOA is, however, this isn't terribly surprising.

The SOA is a US army institution, set up to stamp out communism in Latin America by disseminating training in advanced combat, equipment procurement, and ideological techniques. Over fifty-six thousand have been served in its fifty-three year history.

There is, however, an increasing amount of opposition to the school. It has been pointed out that in all the recent UN reports on large-scale human rights violations committed in Latin America, it seems that an SOA graduate has been implicated. To put this another way, there hasn't been a serious incident of killing or torture in Latin America in which an SOA graduate hasn't been involved. This is chillingly impressive.

The US government has, perhaps understandably, reacted angrily to suggestions that the SOA is implicated in the perpertration of such abuses,and likes two arguments which can be put forward in defending the School. On the one hand, that the SOA does teach respect for human rights. On the other, that it cannot fairly be held responsible for a few bad eggs, of which there are bound to be a smattering in any graduating class. But both of these arguments are patent bollocks.

First, the only human rights which are mandatorily taught at the SOA involve a four-hour seminar on the Geneva Convention. Soldiers are taught that if they are captured, they have the right only to state their name rank and serial number. Another course on 'democracy promotion' has had a total enrollment of 24 since it was introduced in the mid-1990s.

Second, the argument that it's not the army's fault if its Latin American intake is congenitally predisposed to human rights violations is rendered a little suspect by the recent revelation that torture is actually a core course at the SOA. Recently declassified training manuals from SOA (http://www.soaw.org/manuals.phpl) describe a variety of techniques for interrogation, involving different kinds of torture. Psychological torture is used first. One of the suggestions is to make the interrogated person -- or 'employee' in the jargon of the manuals -- believe that his wife and children are being beaten and raped in the room next door. If this doesn't work, different forms of physical torture are suggested, with an emphasis on non-scarring pain-producing techniques. In anonymous interviews, graduates of the School who attended when it was based in Panama have claimed that US army doctors worked with graduates on the torture of live human subjects. The doctors would offer opinions on when a subject could no longer be tortured (because they would die), and also provided elementary courses on neural physiology, to show which parts of the body could best be manipulated in order to cause pain.

A few bad eggs indeed.

Clearly, this needs to stop. And, given that the original rationale for the SOA has disappeared, it is interesting to ask why the SOA not only persists, but has recently spent thirty million dollars upgrading its housing facilities. The Cold War is over, and the threat of Communism in Latin America has somewhat abated. Why these new injections of cash? As it happens, the SOA is now a principle laundering post for drug money. A former SOA instructor recounts how every week he used to escort SOA soldiers to the local banking facility, where they used routinely to pull (on average) thirty thousand dollars in cash from their fatigues.

The SOA makes life extremely hard for anyone trying to promote peace and democracy in Latin America. (An extremely conservative estimate puts the number killed by SOA graduates at around fifty thousand, or nearly one for each graduate.) And, while appeals to the suffering of people overseas are not arguments which have generally gone down well in Congress, there are at least two other reasons to close down the SOA, both of which draw on the idea of opportunity cost. The School's operating costs are around twenty million dollars every year. Closing down the SOA would be akin to giving twenty million dollars to the war on drugs, without actually having to spend anything at all. Second, it is a cheap way to make good on commitments to the promotion of human rights in Latin America, again without having to spend a dime.

Among those pushing strongest for the closure of the SOA is Father Roy Bourgeois. A purple-heart-winning Vietnam veteran, Bourgeois now heads the School of the Americas Watch, an heroic organisation based in Fort Benning (just outside the SOA itself) which is pushing the US government to end its support for the SOA, and which engages in non-violent, high-profile activities in pursuit of this end. In his most recent action, he broke into the base with two other activists disguised as military personnel, climbed a tree by the SOA's barracks, and played a recording of a speech by El Salvadorean Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated by SOA alumni.

Finally, however, victories are on the horizon. Recently, the House of Representatives voted to withhold two million dollars of Federal funding for the SOA's International Military Education and Training (IMET) funds. It is the first step in what will --with luck -- be the end of a obscene and unconscionable institution. And it is a victory that would have been unthinkable without the Stakhanovite efforts of Father Roy and his organisation.

And so, for his work in making the US public angry about the School of the Americas, for his courage in the face of persistent intimidation by the US government and military, for his heroic leadership, and for a strength of conviction that has carried him through over three years in prison, the Turtle is proud to salute Father Roy Bourgeois, and the School of the Americas Watch!