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

This study asks how the School of the Americas (SOA) has worked to further U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere. Called the "school of the assassins" by critics, the SOA was born when the U.S. Army first opened its precursor in the Panama Canal Zone in 1946. In 1963, it adopted the name School of the Americas, and in 1984 it moved to Fort Benning, Georgia. In the 1990s, as investigators released lists of its infamous alumni—Panama's Manuel Noriega, El Salvador's Atlacatl Battalion, and most of Augusto Pinochet's cronies were among them—the "torture manuals" that the SOA had used to teach also saw public light, and public and Congressional pressure mounted. In 2001, the Pentagon renamed the SOA the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation and revamped its curriculum in a public relations clean-up.

Though it changed names, locations, and training emphasis, argues Lesley Gill, the SOA consistently strengthened U.S. "empire" in the Americas. It did so not only by teaching military skills, but also through more ideological teachings. To be sure, students learned the latest in combat, intelligence, and counter-insurgency. But the cultural context mattered almost as much. The SOA showed Latin Americans a new worldview by taking them out of their own militaries and into U.S.-built environments, where the students associated the discipline and technological savvy of the U.S. Army with U.S. superiority and they internalized the U.S. definition of the "good life" by sharing in a comfortable consumer culture. These lessons reinforced an adherence to the Pentagon's security needs and to its definitions of "insurgents." Returning to their home countries, trainees saw their prestige boosted, and used it to enforce race and class hierarchies.

One of the most persistent values of military training has been the sanctity of impunity. While the SOA has admitted that many of its graduates committed atrocities, its structure and ideology has continued to teach students to see themselves as above their compatriots, and, as such, suspicious of transparency and of civilian control. Such conclusions reinforce sociologist Martha Huggins's claims that U.S. training of repressive forces in Latin America did not "professionalize" them as much as it increased their willingness to use force. An anthropologist, Gill arrives at these conclusions mostly through direct observation. She enjoyed unprecedented access to SOA commandants, instructors, and students. She also traveled to Bolivia and Colombia to interview Latin American military men who went through the School and coca growers who suffered its results. She devotes her final chapter to the 1990s grassroots U.S. movement to expose the SOA, a movement with which she identifies. However, although the book provides enough background to satisfy most historians, it is present-minded. Some chapters have almost no references, and it is largely devoid of the archival work that historians might feel such a storied institution deserves.

At times, the ethnography works brilliantly. The author sets aside her own distaste for the SOA in her interviews and shows a genuine curiosity about the workings of the SOA. As a result, her subjects open up about why they came to the SOA, what they liked about it, or how little allegations of murder against them bother them. Tagging along with an SOA field trip to Washington, D.C. yields an especially confrontational meeting with Amnesty International, where the students reveal their disdain for anyone who might jeopardize their impunity.

Unfortunately, the book provides no "smoking guns" on human rights violations. For all her access, Gill did not get a single administrator or graduate to admit that the SOA taught torture. Perhaps that is because it did not do so. Yet Gill is somewhat too eager to assume that it did, and even to insinuate that most human rights violations by Latin Americans are linked to U.S. training. Her sometimes tendentious lecturing is...