School of the Americas & School of the Americas Watch
US Army opened the School of the Americas In 1946 the as (SOA) for “providing military education and training to military personnel of Central and South American countries and Caribbean countries. Since, its inception, tens of thousands of individuals have passed through the school.
Many of the graduates have been accused or found guilty of human rights abuses and genocide in their home countries. Among them, former general and dictator of Guatemala Efraín Ríos Montt, who was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity in May of 2013 by a Guatemalan court, 30 years after a violent counter-insurgency campaign that resulted in the deaths of 1,771 unarmed men, women and children in the country’s isolated Ixil region of Quiché.
The next example is one that would eventually lead to the formation of the organization, School of the Americas Watch, founded by Father Roy Bourgeois and a group of supporters in 1990. The protest that led to its creation was sparked by the revelation that 19 of 26 Salvadoran soldiers implicated in the shooting deaths of two Jesuit priest, their housekeeper, & her 16-year-old daughter in 1989, during the Salvadoran Civil War, were graduates of the School of the Americas.
Doing what government does best, Congress attempted to rectify the situation by adopting the Leahy Amendments to the Foreign Operations Appropriation Act, which prohibited the Department of Defense (DoD) from providing congressional appropriated funds to any unit of a foreign country’s security forces if there was credible evidence that the unit “has committed gross violations of human rights,” unless the Secretary of State reported to Congress that the foreign government was “taking effective measures to bring the responsible members of the security forces unit to justice.”
(Photo Credit: www.soa.org)
The Leahy Amendments were reenacted in following appropriation bills, until 2008 when they were codified as part of the DoD appropriation rules (10 U.S.C. 2249e) and the Foreign Assistance Act (22 U.S.C. 2151). Though 10 U.S.C. 2249e does not require the Department of Defense to monitor the performance of units or the careers of individuals after they leave the school, 22 U.S.C. 2378d (d)(5) directs the Secretary of State to “establish, and periodically update procedures to…ensure that when an individual is designated to receive United States training, equipment, or other types of assistance, the individuals unit is vetted as well as the individual.”
2378d(d)(7) states that the Secretary must “make publicly available, to the maximum extent practicable, the identity of those units for which no assistance shall be furnished.”
In 2001, the School of the Americas was replaced by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), codified at 10 U.S.C. 2166. The bill establishing WHINSEC also provided for the creation of a 14 member “Board of Visitors”, composed of members of the Senate & House Armed Services Committees, representatives from the State Department, U.S. Southern Command, U.S. Northern Command, the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), and six members designated by the Secretary of Defense.
The “Board of Visitors” is tasked with inquiring into the curriculum, instruction, physical equipment, fiscal affairs, and academic methods of WHINSEC, and reporting to the Secretary of Defense as to whether the curriculum complies with U.S. laws and regulations, is consistent with U.S. policy and goals toward Latin America and the Caribbean, and adheres to U.S. Doctrine.
The School of the America’s watch & it’s supporters continued to protest, but congress expressed that until a student at the school could be tied to human rights violations, they were inclined to support WHINSEC. In response, the SOAW took the names of WHINSEC graduates and instructors previously disclosed by the DoD and matched them with human rights reports prepared by the State Department and other groups. The findings documented five cases where individuals could attend the school despite existing human rights records. The information was presented to the office of U.S. Representative Jim McGovern, soon after which it is claimed the Department of Defense reversed its practice of releasing names of SOA & WHINSEC attendees.
In total, the U.S. Government has released the names of 60,761 students & instructors from 1946- 2004, dozens of which have been linked to human rights abuses, including abductions, murders & torture. There is an ongoing struggle to obtain the names of students, instructors, and guest instructors from years 2005-2010 after the government appealed a decision by a federal judge that compelled it to release the information, & won.
(Article by Derick Battle)