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73 As a form of development and security assistance to Latin America, the United States trained more than sixty-one thousand soldiers and police at the School of the Americas (Gill, 2004). It was a military training base funded by the US government but located in Panama. Many of the graduates went to work for dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. Officially established as a strategic initiative to quell leftist uprisings in the hemisphere, the program’s curriculum also trained students in advanced interrogation and torture techniques. It was a curriculum for governments who wanted to see unions broken, activists intimidated, writers silenced, and artists disappeared. When El Salvador and Honduras went to war with each other in 1970, both dictators had graduated from the School of the Americas. Other star graduates from the School of the Americas included Leopoldo Galtieri, who was a chief architect of Argentina’s Dirty War, which saw thousands of leftist activists, union leaders, and students disappeared. Many were tossed out of planes or helicopters into the ocean. Roberto Viola was another graduate who became president of Argentina during the Dirty War; he was later convicted to seventeen years in prison for human rights violations. Guatemala’s former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, “The Death Angel,” was also an alumnus of the School of the Americas. He ruled Guatemala with an iron fist beginning in 1982 and famously said that a true Christian carries the bible in one hand and the machine gun in the other (Roeser, 2007). Guatemala’s civil war led to the deaths of 200,000 Guatemalans, the majority of whom were Indian. Ríos Montt’s military regime committed atrocious crimes against humanity, including massacres, rape as a THE NEW DOCTOR BLOOMS: THE ETHICS OF MEDICAL EDUCATION CHAPTER 4 WHERE NO DOCTOR HAS GONE BEFORE 74 weapon, torture, and genocide against Guatemala’s Indians. Two truth commissions have illuminated the crimes of Guatemala’s civil war, and from these commissions , the rule of Ríos Montt stands out as the most alarming and gruesome of the entire thirty-six-year war (Lovell, 2000). Blakeley (2006) points out that accusations of human rights violations have been made against less than 1.5 percent of the graduates of the School of the Americas. The human rights violations that occurred against the indigenous and poor of the Americas is known to be widespread, but not all of the criminals have been brought to justice and many likely never will. But Blakeley argues that looking at the impact of the School of the Americas on a case-by-case basis is not necessarily the best approach to critiquing this program. Rather, it should be viewed as a project of regimented protocols for torture, the forceful extraction of information, and as a product of broader tolerance for human rights violations. The tens of thousands of graduates from the School of the Americas were not monsters as Galeano (1992) argues, but merely technocrats. Since the closing of the School of the Americas, there has been a broader consciousness to move towards capacity building that invests resources into policies that work to heal bones rather than in institutions that aim only to break them. Fortunately, in what can be taken as the complete antithesis to the school of the Americas, Cuba is doing exactly that: training health-care workers to go where few have had the chance to go in the past. Why Human Resources for Health Matters Building capacity for human resources for health is Cuba’s national strength. They have done it well in the twentieth century, and for the twenty-first century, the country is working to train more health-care workers for the global South than the world has ever seen. At the rate that Cuba is going, in the next decade the country will outstrip the School of the Americas for the number of graduates that have gone into the field. While the US government’s human resource outreach programs came through the military, Cuba’s approach comes through medicine. And as this chapter will show, investing in people through humanitarianism , rather than militarism, can make a world of difference. Despite the numerous global efforts to scale up the global health workforce, there continues to be too many patients without doctors and too many doctors without patients. Indeed, many countries have tried for decades to increase the supply of their health-care workers. Often, economic demand for health workers in...

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