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Table of Contents
I. INTRODUCTION...........................................................................1
II. A SCHOOL FOR COUNTERINSURGENCY..............................2
A. Counterinsurgency Develops as a Policy............................3
B. The Curriculum....................................................................4
C. Sister Dianna Ortiz...............................................................5
D. Alumni of the School...........................................................6
III. THE "FRENCH SCHOOL" OF TORTURE................................9
IV. COUNTERINSURGENCY TODAY.........................................11
V. CONCLUSION............................................................................13
"The U.S. Army School of the Americas ... is a school that has run more dictators than any other school in the history of the world.
I. INTRODUCTION
A few years ago, during a visit to Buenos Aires, I visited the Plaza de Mayo. Old women carrying large photographs of their dead children marched around the square as they have done every Thursday since April 1977. One woman told me how her eighteenyear-old daughter, clad in a nightgown, was abducted in the middle of the night. She had criticized government policies at the university. Her body was found near a creek. Other women related stories of how their children were "disappeared" and tortured. These mothers continue to demand that the military tell them what happened to their loved ones. During the time they were kidnapped, the United States supported the Argentine dictatorship in its "dirty war."2 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Leopoldo Galtieri led the military junta in Argentina, when some 30,000 people were disappeared and killed.3 Galtieri was a graduate of the School of the Americas ("SOA" or "School").4
II. A SCHOOL FOR COUNTERINSURGENCY
The School was established in 1946 in the Panama Canal Zone; it was called the Latin American Training Center-Ground Division.5 In 1963, it became the U.S. Army School of the Americas.6 It suspended operations in September 1984, pursuant to the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty.7 The School of the Americas reopened three months later at Fort Benning, Georgia, where a U.S. military base is located.8 Due to negative publicity about the School, SOA was cosmetically renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation ("WHINSEC") in 2001.9
Since it opened, more than 59,000 military, police, and civilians from twenty-three Latin American and Caribbean countries have been trained at the School.10 Many went on to disappear, torture, and murder their people." In fact, according to a 1995 Los Angeles Times editorial, "it is hard to think of a coup or human-rights outrage that has occurred in [Latin America] in the past 40...