Between 1946-2000, SOA provided training to more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers [Jake Hess/Al Jazeera]
by
Jake Hess
Fort Benning, United States - Echoes of machine-gun fire rumble through the forest as the rising sun burns off the last patches of morning fog. Beneath a tin roof, a gaggle of soldiers from Colombia, Paraguay, Chile, and Mexico clutch their rifles and pose for a photo.
A cheer erupts from the group when a mock artillery shell explodes in the distance.
Down a winding dirt path, a Colombian officer douses his underling in fake blood. Today's the last day of an eight-week army medical course here at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), and it's time for the Latin American soldiers to show their American teachers what they've learned.
Their mission: evacuate the "casualty" before he's killed by guerrillas.
The bloody guy moans for dramatic effect as he sprawls out behind a patch of trees. With the smell of gunpowder filling the air, a squad of soldiers trudges down the hill to begin the rescue. Soon they blanket the forest with green smoke to provide cover from incoming guerrilla fire.
The soldiers pull out a plastic stretcher and pick up their comrade. When the teacher, surnamed Arroyo, realises the casualty is on backwards, she grows restless.
"Let's go! Today!" she commands. Before long, the stretcher is properly loaded, and the soldiers disappear through a column of smoke with their classmate in tow.
No more 'torture manuals'
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.
......
US military training severely impacted all of Salvadoran society. Rape of women and girls [by the Salvadoran military] was the daily bread in the scorched earth operations.
- Claudia Interiano, human rights lawyer
It's easy to doubt the sincerity of the security concerns. The public can read the names of dozens of recent graduates on memorial plaques adorning the walls of WHINSEC's Roy Benavidez Hall. The school's Facebook page also features photos of students.
That's one reason a federal court rejected WHINSEC's argument and ordered it to release the students' names. One year later, it hasn't done so.
Anthony, who became WHINSEC commander in April, said it was the Pentagon's decision to withhold the names, adding he'd be happy to disclose them if given the authority.
"I think it's important that we be transparent, and if we're told to release the names, we're definitely going to execute that and have no issues with that at all," Anthony said.
The Pentagon, which has appealed the court's ruling, did not respond to Al Jazeera's repeated requests for comment.
WHINSEC's critics don't buy the transparency talk. Congressmen last year introduced a bill to halt the school's operations pending an investigation of its past. Sixty-nine legislators wrote to President Barack Obama in 2011 to denounce its "problematic history and lack of transparency". Civil society groups say shutting down the school could save taxpayers $18m annually.
