School of the Americas

The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly the School of the Americas (SOA; Spanish: Escuela de las Américas) is a United States Department of Defense facility at Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia in the United States. Between 1946 and 2001, the SOA trained more than 61,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. Some of them became notorious for human rights violations, including generals Leopoldo Galtieri, Rios Montt and Manuel Noriega, dictators such as Bolivia's Hugo Banzer, as well as some of Augusto Pinochet's officers. The terrorist Luis Posada Carriles was educated there in 1961. The School of the Americas has been criticized for the participation in human rights violations by some of its graduates. Critics argue that the education encouraged such practices and that this continues in the WHINSEC. According to the Center for International Policy, "The School of the Americas had been questioned for years, as it trained many military personnel before and during the years of the "national security doctrine" -- the dirty war years in the Southern Cone and the civil war years in Central America -- in which Latin American militaries ruled or had disproportionate government influence and committed serious human rights violations. Training manuals used at the SOA and elsewhere from the early 1980s through 1991 promoted techniques that violated human rights and democratic standards. SOA and WHINSEC graduates continue to surface in news reports regarding both current human rights cases and new reports."

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Western
• Hemisphere
• Institute
• for
• Security
• Cooperation
• WHISC
• WHINSEC
• Fort
• Benning
• School
• of
• the
• Americas
• SOA
• Augusto
• Pinochet
• Luis
• Posada
• Carriles
• Leopoldo
• Galtieri
• Rios
• Montt
• human
• rights
• violations

[zsylvana]

SOA Watch is a nonviolent grassroots movement that works through creative protest and resistance, legislative and media work to stand in solidarity with the people of Latin America, to close the SOA/WHINSEC and to change oppressive U.S. foreign policy that institutions like the SOA represent. We are grateful to our sisters and brothers throughout Latin America and the the Caribbean for their inspiration and the invitation to join them in their struggle for economic and social justice

[zsylvana]

I could not spare you this words,from old American Economist J.K Galbraith,

" Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong."

[YaBaniAdam]

soaw-org.

Watched a few of your videos and would like to say thanks for the educated input.