The US military may have changed the name of the School of the Americas (SOA) to the 'Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation' (WHINSEC) and added a few token human rights courses to the curriculum, but shedding the dark and bloody past of the institution responsible for training some of Latin America's most notorious human rights violators, murderers and dictators won't be as simple as a semantic differential. An investigation of the school's history has never been officially undertaken, despite the approximated deaths of hundreds of thousands of people at the hands of its graduates. Now, however, a bill has entered the congressional arena that hopes to shut down the institution dubbed the 'School of Assassins' - this time for good.
Senator James McGovern (D-MA) is the author of the H.R 1217 bill, which calls on a suspension of authority "for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (the successor institution to the United States Army School of the Americas) in the Department of Defence, and for other purposes." To date, Rep. McGovern has 133 co-sponsors for the bill.
Since its inception in 1946, SOA/WHINSEC has trained more than 60,000 Latin American military personnel. "Among the SOA's...alumni are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador and Hugo Banzar Suarez of Bolivia," states SOA Watch, an organisation founded by Maryknoll Priest, Fr. Roy Bourgeois. "SOA graduates were responsible for the Uraba massacre in Colombia, the El Mozote massacre of 900 civilians in El Salvador, the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the massacre of 14-year-old Celina Ramos, her mother Elba Ramos and six Jesuit priests in El Salvador and hundreds of other human rights abuses."
It is more than apt that a member of the Maryknoll order should be heading the careful observation of SOA/WHINSEC. On December 2, 1980, Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and Cleveland Lay Mission Team Member Jean Donovan, were raped and executed by members of the armed forces of El Salvador. Of the five officers later found directly responsible for the crime, 3 were graduates of SOA. Ironically, in 1984, the same year the national guardsmen were found guilty, the US Kissinger Commission called on more military aid for El Salvador.
El Salvador's civil war, which raged between 1980 and 1992, left approximately 70,000 people dead. One of the worst known atrocities was the El Mozote massacre. The lone survivor of the small El Salvadoran village, Rufina Amaya, gave this testimony:
"The soldiers from the Atlacatl Battalion came at seven in the morning. They said they had orders to kill everyone. Nobody was to remain alive. They locked the women in the houses and the men in the church. There were 1,100 of us in all. The children were with the women. They kept us locked up all morning. At ten o'clock the soldiers began to kill the men who were in the church. First they machine-gunned them and then they slit their throats.
"By two o'clock the soldiers had finished killing the men and they came for the women. They left the children locked up. They separated me from my eight-month old daughter and my oldest son. They took us away to kill us. As we came to the place where they were going to kill us, I was able to slip away and hide under a small bush, covering myself with the branches. I watched the soldiers line up twenty women and machine-gun them. Then they brought another group. Another rain of bullets. Then another group. And another.
"They killed four of my children: my nine-year-old, my six-year-old, my three-year-old, and my eight-month-old daughter. My husband was killed, too. I spent seven days and nights alone in the hills with nothing to eat or drink. I couldn't find anyone else; the soldiers had killed everyone. God allowed me to live so that I can testify how the Army killed the men and women and burned their bodies. I didn't see them kill the children, but I heard the children's screams."
At least 9 of those implicated in the massacre were graduates of SOA/WHINSEC, and, according to SOA Watch, over two-thirds of the officers responsible for the worst atrocities of the war, whose names were cited in the 1993 United Nations Truth Commission Report on El Salvador, were trained at the School of the Americas.
Originally based in Panama, SOA/WHINSEC was forced to relocate to Fort Benning, Georgia, under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty in 1984. There is some speculation that the recent increase in human rights topics within the school are acting as deflectors, prising attention away from other training schools operated by the US military. Indeed, if the training does return to the Latin American region, it will be more difficult for human rights groups to monitor its activities. But Latin American governments themselves may be the answer to this problem - at least partly. Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay have all declared they will cease sending any military personnel to the school. However, countries such as Columbia, who send the largest amount of military personnel for 'training' are still yet to make such a move.
The tragedy of the war in El Salvador is still being felt by its people today, and the large increase in gang violence and poverty have done little to improve the lives of the majority of Salvadorans. Perhaps some of the US$6 billion that went into military aid during the Reagan years could have been much better spent - and El Salvador is just one of the countries that suffered under the hands of those trained to kill and torture at SOA/WHINSEC.
Whatever the name, it appears the game is the same.
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