The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (review)

Lesley Gill’s School of the Americas (SOA) is a sophisticated work of history, culture, and ethnography. The U.S. Army training center located for most of its existence in Panama from 1946 on was moved to Fort Benning, Georgia in 1984 as Panama prepared to take over sovereignty of the areas occupied by the United States since the early twentieth century. Although the move per se did not fundamentally alter the character and content of the school’s curriculum, the close association of the school with a number of graduates accused of human rights abuses and political repression throughout Latin America inspired a protest movement, a change of name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, and near closure at the hands of the U.S. Congress.

Gill’s book combines the methodologies of historical analysis and ethnography. An anthropologist by training, Gill examines the U.S. role in Latin America through the prism of the SOA and traces the process of “empire building” as told and understood by the groups within her study: the military personnel, both U.S. and Latin American, who have taught or been trained at the SOA. She then moves to developments in Colombia and Bolivia, concentrating on the narratives of repression and resistance by local guerrilla groups and the state-sponsored violence that occurs within the context of illegal cocaine trafficking. Although Gill focuses on this conflict, her references are drawn from a wide array of countries in Central and South America across the decades. She traces the consequences of militarization and the interactions between local military forces, U.S. initiatives, and the SOA, highlighting the impact on local peasant families. Finally, the book returns to the United States to the movement intent on achieving the closure of the SOA. Gill discusses the attempts to make superficial alterations in the curriculum, to change the name of the school, and to improve its public relations to ensure continued legitimacy and viability.

The book appears within the series “American Encounters / Global Interactions,” edited by Gilbert Joseph and Emily Rosenberg, whose concern is to examine the history of the “imposing global presence” of the United States. Gill situates the SOA and its instructors and students within the framework of an encompassing American empire represented by military bases, strategic alliances, and local military forces that have been significantly penetrated and manipulated to serve U.S. interests. Her ethnography of the interaction between agents of “empire” and agents of “resistance” in the United States, the SOA, and Latin America lends the book an immediacy that is so frequently lacking elsewhere. Nevertheless, this methodological approach combined with the book’s passionate advocacy will no doubt cause concern for many a skeptical reader—not only those who would offer a less scathing interpretation of U.S. policy but also those who favor more traditional (and they would say rigorous) historical methods.

Cavils aside, the book provides remarkable insights into how the worldviews of the main characters are shaped by their social and institutional attitudes, cultural proclivities, and classroom instruction. The legitimating narratives that inform and “justify” the acts of repression within the militarized culture are developed through the interviews Gill conducted on both continents. In this regard the book might have benefited from an engagement with the writings of Ignacio Martín-Baró (one of the Jesuits who lost his life in November 1989 at the hands of the U.S.-trained Salvadoran military) on violence and the Manichaean outlook, which would seem to be an appropriate lens for understanding some of the graduates implicated in human rights abuses.

The SOA has struggled to maintain its existence in the face of protest movements, human-rights investigations, and opposition within the U.S. Congress. This has been especially the case in the post–Cold War period, when perceptions of the external and internal threat in Latin America have diminished and truth commissions have been set up...