Academy for Human Abuse

It is important to note that the School of the Americas is pernicious not just for the past deeds ofits graduates: military coups, death squad mobilizations, attempted genocide of indigenous peoples, subversion of civil society’s freedoms, assassinations, kidnapping, extortion, subversion of political opposition, torture, massacres of whole villages. The SOA is also lethal simply because it continues to teach skills that will be used not for security from external enemies but against a nation’s own people, as demonstrated daily in Mexico and Colombia.

The case of Mexico is especially instructive. SOA officials say the Ft. Benning school’s new role is to train a professional officer corps sensitive to democracy and steeped in human rights. This claim becomes laughable when one knows that the school, since the 1994 Zapatista uprising, has increased Mexico’s enrollment from a desultory 15 students per year to an ongoing annual number well into the 300s, an increase of more than 2,000%, rushing the graduates toward duty in the totally abusive “army of occupation” that now crisscrosses Chiapas with community-intrusive military roads; establishes military camps outside villages; beats, terrorizes and dislocates the indigenous population; inhibits free movement with roadblocks; invades villages to savage the citizenry on the sole suspicion that they are sympathetic with those who press for Mexico’s honoring the San Andres peace accords, which it signed in 1995 and then repudiated. This is to aid democracy and be sensitive to human rights?

We have no business training a force that oppresses its own people for any cause. By sustaining the SOA, we not only provide expertise and implicit approval for crimes against humanity, but we also give prestige and new power to the perpetrators. Let us face squarely the present and future reality: These newly honed “professionals,” of whom the Pentagon is so proud, will be in place for enforcing with a steel fist things like the International Monetary Fund’s perverse “structural adjustment” programs, will hover nearby to keep beleaguered sweatshop workers from striking, will spy on political opposition, will harass, intimidate and menace the indigenous populations and do their dirtier work through paramilitaries, which are SOA Salvadoran grad Roberto D’Aubuisson’s death squads ratcheted up a bit and better organized.