School of the Americas

Established by the United States in Panama in 1946, the School of the Americas (SOA) moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984 following the 1978 ratification of a treaty effectively establishing Panamanian control over the Canal Zone. The institution was rechristened the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC) in 2001. More than 60,000 military and law enforcement personnel from various Latin American nations have been trained at the SOA/WHISC, including some—such as Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto d'Aubuisson and Colonel Julio Alpirez of Guatemala—considered among the region's worst human rights violators. Critics note that the school's so-called Hall of Fame has featured portraits of, among others, former Bolivian dictator General Hugo Banzer Suarez and General Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas of Guatemala, who oversaw the assassination of thousands of political opponents. Since 1990 there has been an organized movement to shut the SOA/WHISC.

The Department of Defense maintains that the school is intended to “foster mutual respect, confidence, and cooperation” among the participating nations of Latin America and to promote “democratic values, respect for human rights, and knowledge and understanding of U.S. customs and traditions among the students.” Opponents of the school claim that its instruction is antithetical to the U.S.'s professed goal of promoting democratic values in El Salvador, Honduras, Chile, Argentina, and numerous other states that have sent soldiers to Panama or Fort Benning. In 1996 the Department of Defense released documents acknowledging that Army intelligence instructors and manuals used at the school from 1982 to 1991 advocated the use of executions, torture, extortion, and blackmail to counter the opposition of insurgents and dissidents in Latin America.

While few believe that the school continues to officially endorse torture as a counterinsurgency method, activists maintain that the SOA/WHISC's emphasis on combat instruction—to personnel from countries with deplorable human rights records such as Mexico and Colombia—is inimical to the Latin American peoples' struggles for peace and social justice. That the United States continues to train these soldiers, they contend, provides symbolic affirmation of the repression perpetrated by the militaries of these states. Moreover, according to critics, such symbolic support only reinforces what political scientists refer to as national security ideology; that is, the belief by governments that the primary threats to their existence are internal—indeed, that any opposition to official or elite policies is evidence of subversion, “communist” or otherwise—and must be “neutralized” by the forces of the state.