The recent coup that removed Manuel Zelaya as president of Honduras has brought the School of the Americas, now known as WHINSEC (Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), back into the news. The coup, which brought protest from farmers, unions and socially progressive movements in Honduras, had WHINSEC graduates among its leaders.
Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern of Worcester is continuing his years-long battle to shut down the school, a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense, which since its founding in 1946 has trained Latin American soldiers and police in torture, assassination and other terrorist techniques.
McGovern has led an effort to attach an amendment forcing public disclosure of the names, countries of origin, ranks and dates of attendance of the school's graduates and instructors to the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act. That information is important because hundreds of notorious Latin American human rights violators have been graduates of the school. In addition, McGovern has once again filed a bill (HR 2567) that would stop its operations and review the activities of its graduates. The bill has over 50 cosponsors.
In 1989, 26 soldiers, including 19 SOA alumni, murdered six priests at a Catholic university in San Salvador; in the 1990s a furor erupted when it became known that for 10 years the school had used manuals advocating kidnapping, extortion, false imprisonment, torture and execution and naming religious workers and advocates for the poor as targets for these "neutralization" techniques. The Pentagon later called the use of the manuals a "mistake."
SOA graduates have also been implicated in drug trafficking. One was a Venezuelan, General Ramon Davila Guillen, who was charged with trafficking in 1996; it was already known that he had shipped a ton of cocaine into Miami in the early '90s with CIA authorization. In 2000 the Defense Department, chagrined by the accumulation of blots on the school's copybook, changed its name from School of the Americas to WHINSEC.
Latin American governments have become increasingly reluctant to send their soldiers and police to the school. Since 2004, leaders of Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay and Costa Rica have announced that they would cut ties with it, though Costa Rica modified its decision and continued to send police.
