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Congressional report on the SOA: https://www.policyarchive.org/download/1033
SOA training manual: https://ia902708.us.archive.org/16/items/USArmySchooloftheAmericasTrainingManuals/US Army School of the Americas Training Manuals_text.pdf
Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUtumGk0E6Q
https://jacobin.com/2019/11/shut-down-school-of-the-americas-whinsec-ice-border-patrol
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But General Vasquez was simply following a well-trodden path for autocrats in Honduras – after all, two of the country’s most hated past dictators, Juan Melgar Castro and Policarpo Paz Garcia, had also attended the school.
More than 60,000 Latin American soldiers have been trained at the School of the Americas – among them, the some of the region’s most notorious human rights abusers, such as Salvadoran death-squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson.
In all, 11 dictators have attended its courses: men such as Argentine junta leader, Leopoldo Galtieri, infamously responsible for the “disappeared” and Guatemala’s Efraín Ríos Montt, whose scorched earth campaign against indigenous villages, was classified as “genocide” by a UN-sponsored commission.
The school was moved to Fort Benning in 1984 and, in 2001, in an attempt to improve its image, its name was changed again to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Cooperation (WHINSEC).
They advocated the use of “fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false, imprisonment, executions and use of truth serum”, according to a Pentagon memorandum (pdf).
A vigil will take place in Colombia, which has sent more officers to US training schools than any other Latin American country and, today, has the worst human rights record in the region.
The original article contains 617 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!