The U.S. School for Dictators, Torturers and Assassins; A Thread

(1/29) In 1946, the United States founded a school located in Panama to train Latin American military forces known as the Latin American Training Center–Ground Division. In 1963, the school’s name was changed, becoming the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA).

(2/29) However, after falling out with the U.S.-backed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, the school was moved to Fort Benning, Georgia. At its core, the Army SOA’s curriculum is about counterinsurgency.

(3/29) Its creation was inspired by the National Security Doctrine, which sought to fight “communism” by trusting local security forces to maintain “order” throughout Latin America. The Army SOA has trained over 80,000 members of military and police forces from 22 Latin […]

(4/29) […] American countries since its inception. By providing training, arms, funding, and resources to Latin American dictatorships, the United States maintained “stability” for U.S. investment without getting involved directly.

(5/29) The school is infamous because countless SOA graduates have been implicated in some of the worst atrocities in recent memory, including the assassination of Catholic bishops, labor leaders, women and children, priests, nuns, and the massacres of entire communities.

(6/29) After years of denial, the Pentagon admitted in 1996 that seven U.S. Army intelligence training manuals advocated torture, extortion, assassinations, blackmail, and the targeting of civilian populations.

(7/29) As many as a thousand manuals were used to train students from the militaries of Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela.

(8/29) Training manuals provided by the U.S. military identified “potential insurgents” as “religious workers, labor organizers, student groups, and others in sympathy with the cause of the poor.”

(9/29) The consensus is that SOA graduates have played essential roles in almost every single coup and every significant human rights violation in Latin America in the past fifty years.

(10/29) Since the founding of the Army SOA, around 700 Argentinian students have graduated. Notable Argentinian graduates include Naval Officer Emilio Massera, who was responsible for creating a torture center that tortured and killed 30,000 “enemies of the state” […]

(11/29) […] during the period known as the “dirty war,” which was an extended period of violence and state terror that initiated with a military junta.

(12/29) Colonel Mario Davico was another Argentinian graduate who trained at the SOA in 1949 Davico served as an advisor to the Honduran armed forces in the 1980s, where he taught the “Argentinian Method” of extreme repression.

(13/29) This included: arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial executions, and various methods of disposing of victims' bodies.

(14/29) Bolivia has sent more than 3,800 students to train at the SOA over the past several decades. The most infamous Bolivian SOA graduate was the brutal U.S.-backed Bolivian dictator Hugo Bánzer Suárez.

(15/29) Captain Tito Montaño Belzú graduated from the SOA in 1970 and was eventually convicted of murder and genocide in connection with the 1980 coup.

(16/29) Around 330 Brazilians have graduated from the SOA, many of which have been convicted of torture methods such as “electric shock, suffocation, and injection of Pentothal.”

(17/29) In Chile, it is estimated that more than 3,300 military and paramilitary troops and leaders are SOA graduates.

(18/29) Additionally, it was found that one of every seven of the commanding staff of the DINA—the joint intelligence service of the Chilean armed forces, which reported directly and exclusively to General Pinochet—was an SOA graduate.

(19/29) Among the leaders of the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, most were SOA graduates.

(20/29) The SOA graduates who served as DINA officers are responsible for countless atrocities, such as the establishment of the Villa Grimaldi concentration camp, as well as regularly carrying out summary executions, assassinations, torture, murder, and kidnappings.

(21/29) It is estimated that more than 3,300 Ecuadorians have graduated from the SOA, including former military dictator General Guillermo Rodríguez.

(22/29) El Salvador has sent more than 6,600 students to train at the SOA, with graduates being found guilty of murdering Archbishop Óscar Romero, as well as carrying out countless massacres, r*pes, and murders.

(23/29) Most infamous among El Salvador SOA graduates is Colonel José Mario Godínez Castillo, who is accused of 1,051 summary executions, 318 tortures, 610 illegal detentions, and kidnapping for profit.

(24/29) More than 1,500 Guatemalans have graduated from the SOA, which killed as many as 200,000 people during the thirty-six-year war according to the Human Rights Watch.

(25/29) Infamous Guatemalan graduates include former dictator General Romeo Lucas García, who was responsible for 5,000 political murders and as many as 25,000 civilian deaths.

(26/29) These are just a few examples of the Army SOA’s star pupils, and we will likely never know how many innocent people had their lives stolen from them by U.S. trained death squads.

(27/29) It is now undeniable that the worst human rights abuses committed by SOA graduates were not examples of outliers, but rather these methods were explicitly taught to them during their time at the Army SOA.

(28/29) Responding to mounting protests spearheaded by SOA Watch, Congress renamed the School of the Americas the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2000, rather than closing the academy.

(29/29) Thus, the School of the Americas with a new name reopened in the exact same place, and it continues to train the exact same Latin American soldiers.