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Citation: U.S. Catholic Oct 1998, v63, n10, p15(1)
Author: Clarke, Kevin
Title: Let this school out for good.(School of the Americas,
Fort Benning, GA; trains right-wing terrorists for
repressive Latin American regimes)(Margin Notes)(Brief
Article)(Column) by Kevin Clarke
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT 1998 Claretian Publications
BILINGUAL EDUCATION HAS BECOME the center of furious debate around the
country since California recently outlawed the mother tongues of most of the
planet. While impassioned educators swear at each other in a variety of
colorful dialects elsewhere, at least one bilingual education program plods
ahead without arousing much attention. In fact, over the last 50 years nearly
60,000 well-armed noncitizens have stomped in and out of this academy at an
approximate cost to U.S. taxpayers of $4 million a year without launching so
much as one budget hawk or "English-only" proponent into an artery-bursting
fury.
Leave your cattle prod at the door and step into the School of the Americas
(SOA) in Fort Benning, Georgia. If you're not familiar with this particular
center of higher learning, it may be because the SOA prefers to keep a low
profile. Unfortunately, some of its graduates don't share that philosophy.
Armed with an SOA diploma and usually some firepower courtesy of Uncle Sam,
they've returned to their native soil to offer a sotto voce "go ahead" or
directly participate in some of the more egregious human-rights violations on
record. SOA graduates have been so prolific the school is known to Latin
Americans as the "school of coups" and "the school of the assassins."
You may have read about some of the more spectacular final projects of
these students. In El Salvador alone, SOA graduates were involved in the rape
and murder of three American nuns and a lay volunteer and the assassination of
Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980, and the 1989 liquidation of a group of
meddlesome Jesuit priests and their housekeepers.
The American government established the predecessor to the School of the
Americas in 1946 in Panama with the purported aim of building up the
professionalism of Latin American militaries. It remains unclear if the death
squads, disappearances, and the general mayhem and gore associated with SOA
graduates reflect the failure or the success of that mission.
Most of the SOA's graduates come from Colombia, a nation with the dubious
honor of being the Latin American country most cited for human-rights abuses.
The three highest ranking officers convicted in the 1992 murders of nine
Peruvian University students and their professor were SOA graduates. Roberto
d'Aubuisson--an architect of Salvadoran death squads and the man responsible
for Romero's brutal killing--is another graduate, as were Panamanian bad boy
Manuel Noriega and Guatemala's Julio Alpirez, who allegedly ordered the murder
of American Michael Devine in 1990.
In the past, U.S. policymakers were able to persuade themselves that
international communism was a threat that required resistance whatever the
means. The school has provided a training ground for the proxy troops who
would conduct a rear-guard action against the communist menace on behalf of
Uncle Sam. They included Salvadoran and Guatemalan soldiers who defended their
patria in particularly brutal civil wars against a Marxist threat most often
manifested by unarmed Catholic clergy and theologically empowered but
otherwise unarmed campesinos.
These days international communism doesn't maintain the same fearful grip
on the public imagination as it did 30 years ago. Lately congressional
supporters of SOA have concocted a new justification for the school's
continued existence, arguing that it is crucial to maintaining the
professionalism of the actual war on drugs in Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. But
if it is a campaign against drugs that U.S. policymakers truly want to
conduct, wouldn't it be more effective--or at least more seemly--to direct it
at the cocaine-snorting source of the problem here in the U.S. rather than at
peasant farmers in the Peruvian highlands?
OTHER SUPPORTERS SAY THAT THE SOA HAS BEEN a force of stability and
democratization in Latin America. But that argument does not stand up too well
to the evidence of 40 years of coups and chaos throughout the region. And
"Democracy Studies" was only recently tacked onto the SOA catalog after bad
press in the early '90s. The 1996 revelation that CIA torture manuals have
been part of the school's long-standing reading list may indicate what is more
typical of the school's curriculum.
However SOA supporters rationalize its continued existence, its unpleasant
past suggests that the future military campaigns of SOA graduates will most
often be directed against their fellow citizens. But I am not here to argue
that the SOA should be shut down as a shameful relic of Cold War paranoia and
inhumanity. By all means, let's keep a school of the Americas open, but let's
not fill this one with soldier-students and military instructors of death and
mayhem. Let's fill it with battalions of people who can campaign for civil
society in the region's shaky democracies. Latin America doesn't need more
out-of-control militarists whose warped sense of patria persuades them of the
moral rightness of scorched-earth campaigns against unarmed civilians. What it
could use are more doctors, health workers, educators, and development
specialists.
The SOA and 100 or so similar programs may help maintain a buffer zone
between the U.S. and the crying needs of the rest of the world. But at what
cost to the people abandoned to the mercies of the next SOA graduating class?
It is an inhuman and shortsighted policy. The real enemy that we need to
combat in Latin America is not international communism or narcoterrorists: it
is hunger and poverty, indifference and hopelessness. The SOA trains young men
to confront the raging pathologies of their national illnesses, not the
cancers themselves. At a time when the United States has significantly reduced
its overall foreign aid, it is shameful to continue a program that only
contributes to the misery of the common people of Latin America.
(At press time, Congress was preparing to vote on the SOA's future. Visit U.S.
Catholic online--www.uscatholic.org--for an update.)
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