An integral part of America’s brutal colonisation of undeveloped nations is the little-known US Army “School of the Americas” located in Fort Benning, Georgia, which trains Latin American military officers and soldiers to subvert their governments and kill hope in their own countries.
This so-called university, also known as the “School of Dictators”, has produced thousands of dishonorable graduates linked to terror, torture, massacres and military death squads. The US initially placed the school in Panama, but in 1984 it was moved to the US Army base at Fort Benning, Georgia. It is generally considered as America’s main base for its continuing de-stabilization of Latin America, though the US Congress was quick to note that “Human rights training is part of the program of the School of the Americas.” (1) (2)
In September 1996, under intense public pressure, the Pentagon was forced to release the school’s training manuals which were discovered to advocate torture, extortion, blackmail, assassination, and the targeting and repression of civilian populations. According to a Washington Post story at the time:
“Used in courses at the US Army’s School of the Americas, the manual says that to recruit and control informants, counterintelligence agents could use fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum”.
In the 1990s, there were extensive investigations exposing the school’s practices and its connections to brutal dictators, but efforts to shut down the school have failed and it is rarely mentioned in the US today.
[Next week, Close the School of Americas, November 15-17 at Fort Benning, Georgia]
Around 2,000 students are recruited each year from the military in Latin American countries, and more than 60,000 have graduated since the school opened. The curriculum includes courses in psychological warfare, counterinsurgency, “enhanced interrogation” techniques, torture, civilian repression and assassination. Presented with the most sophisticated and up-to-date techniques by the US Army’s best instructors, these courses teach military officers and soldiers of Third World countries to subvert the truth, to silence union leaders and journalists, to terrorise the clergy, and to make war on their own people. (3)
