Training Latin American Soldiers, 'School of the Americas' Continues to Stir Debate Jake Hess - Al Jazeera
go to original December 15, 2014

Inside Story Americas - The School of the Americas: Class over? (Al Jazeera)

Welcome to WHINSEC, formerly the School of the Americas (SOA). Between 1946 and 2000, SOA provided military training to more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers.

It drew criticism in the 1990s, when declassified records revealed SOA educated some of the region's most infamous rights abusers, including Honduran death-squad commander Luis Alonso Discua, Panamanian military ruler Manuel Noriega, and 10 soldiers implicated in the massacre of 1,000 unarmed civilians in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote.

A trickle of disclosures built the School of the Americas's notoriety with a 1996 Pentagon investigation revealing its training manuals advocated torture, false imprisonment, and executions.

So gruesome was the picture that the New York Times called for SOA's closure, and a US House of Representatives bill to shut the place down came within 10 votes of acceptance.

By order of the US Congress, the School of the Americas was overhauled and reopened as WHINSEC in 2001. Now it's happy to receive visitors and show it has nothing to hide.

Gone is the alumni "hall of fame", which featured former Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer. Dodgy-sounding courses in counterinsurgency have been scrapped. Torture training is long gone.

Today, on a sprawling campus dotted with sun-bleached buildings, WHINSEC students receive classroom and battlefield education in topics such as medical assistance, joint operations, and civil affairs, each of which features mandatory instruction in human rights.

"Everything's within the context of democratic principles," WHINSEC commander Keith Anthony told Al Jazeera.

Read the whole story at Al Jazeera

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