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</div><div>=</div><div><div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/dianna-ortiz">https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/dianna-ortiz</a></div><div>
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</div><div>Sister Dianna Ortiz—US nun who survived Guatemala torture and became human rights champion—dies at 62</div><div>
</div><div> Common Dreams February 22, 2021</div><div>   </div><div>Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Catholic nun from New Mexico whose 1989 abduction, rape, and torture by U.S.-backed Guatemalan forces led to her becoming an outspoken peace, human rights, and anti-torture activist, died Friday in Washington, D.C. at the age of 62 after battling cancer.Ortiz—who wanted to be a nun since she was a little girl—joined the Ursuline Sisters of Mount Saint Joseph, part of a 400-year-old Roman Catholic order dedicated to the education of girls and the care of the sick and needy, when she was still a teenager. She taught kindergarten for a decade before moving to Guatemala in 1987 at the age of 28.</div><div>
</div><div>Years later Ortiz explained that she wanted "to teach young indigenous children to read and write... and to understand the Bible in their culture."</div><div>
</div><div>It was dangerous work at a dangerous time. Guatemala was ravaged by decades of civil war that followed a 1954 CIA coup deposing Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically-elected progressive president. U.S.-backed right-wing military dictatorships, some of which perpetrated genocidal violence against the country's Mayan population, followed.</div><div>
</div><div>The 36-year civil war left over 200,000 Guatemalans dead, more than 600 villages destroyed, and countless people—mostly Mayan campesinos—displaced.</div><div>
</div><div>"Every family in San Miguel had people who had been tortured, disappeared, or killed," Mary Elizabeth Ballard, an Ursuline sister who had arrived in Guatemala a year before Ortiz, told the literary magazine Agni in a 1998 interview. "No family was untouched."</div><div>
</div><div>By early 1989 Ortiz was receiving threatening letters imploring her to leave Guatemala. She eventually did depart, traveling to the Urusline motherhouse in Kentucky. But only for a short while.</div><div>
</div><div>"She had a great love for the Guatemalans," explained Luisa Bickett, another Ursuline sister who worked in San Miguel.</div><div>
</div><div>"I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.'"</div><div>—Ortiz</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz returned to Guatemala in September 1989. By the following month, she was receiving death threats. For her safety, Ortiz decided to seek refuge at Posada de Belén, a convent and religious retreat 170 miles (270 km) from San Miguel in Antigua.</div><div>
</div><div>On November 2, Ortiz was reading in the convent's garden when her life was forever changed. In an interview with Kerry Kennedy, she recalled that:</div><div>
</div><div>I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.' I turned to see the morning sunlight glinting off a gun held by a man who had threatened me once before on the street. He and his partner forced me onto a bus, then into a police car where they blindfolded me.</div><div>We came to a building and they led me down some stairs. They left me in a dark cell, where I listened to the cries of a man and woman being tortured. When the men returned, they accused me of being a guerrilla and began interrogating me. For every answer I gave them, they burned my back or my chest with cigarettes. Afterwards, they gang-raped me repeatedly.</div><div>Ortiz was then moved to another room with another woman prisoner. Some men returned with a video camera and a machete, which Ortiz thought would be used to torture her. Instead, she says she was forced to kill the other woman.</div><div>
</div><div>"What I remember is blood gushing, spurting like a water fountain... and my cries lost in the cries of the woman," she recalled. Her captors then threatened to release video of her attacking the woman if she refused to cooperate. Then:</div><div>
</div><div>I was lowered into a pit full of bodies—bodies of children, men, and women, some decapitated, all caked with blood. A few were still alive. I could hear them moaning... A stench of decay rose from the pits. Rats swarmed over the bodies... I passed out and when I came to I was lying on the ground beside the pit, rats all over me.</div><div>Ortiz said that a North American man her torturers called "Alejandro" was present during her ordeal. When he realized she was an American, he helped her get dressed and drove her away while apologizing. "He said he was... working to liberate [Guatemala] from communism," Ortiz recalled.</div><div>
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</div><div>Darleen Chmielewski, a Franciscan nun who was one of the first people to see Ortiz after her escape, described her friend as in "a state of shock." The two women went to the home of the the Vatican representative in Guatemala City, who had offered Ortiz refuge.</div><div>
</div><div>"Diana wanted to take a bath," Chmielewski recalled. "I helped her wash and saw all the cigarette burns... she just cried and took baths."</div><div>
</div><div>Two days later, Ortiz was back in the United States. "After escaping from my torturers, I returned home to New Mexico so traumatized that I recognized no one, not even my parents," she told Kennedy. "I had virtually no memory of my life before my abduction; the only piece of my identity that remained was that I was a woman who was raped and forced to torture and murder another human being."</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz also felt forced to do something unimaginable for many nuns. "I got pregnant as a result of the multiple gang rapes," she told Kennedy. "Unable to carry within me... what I could only view as a monster, I turned to someone for assistance and I destroyed that life."</div><div>
</div><div>"I felt I had no choice," explained Ortiz. "If I had had to grow within me what the torturers left me I would have died."</div><div>
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</div><div>Ortiz's torment continued as she sought—and was denied—justice. U.S. embassy officials accused her of staging her abduction in a bid to thwart the George H.W. Bush administration's military aid to Guatemala. Cigarette burns—111 of them, according to a U.S. doctor who examined her—told a different story.</div><div>
</div><div>"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads—my torturers themselves."</div><div>—Ortiz</div><div>
</div><div>In a bizarre twist, Guatemalan officials claimed Ortiz faked her kidnapping to cover up a violent lesbian affair, a rumor subsequently spread by U.S. officials. Previously, the Reagan administration had undertaken a similar effort to discredit another Ursuline nun, Dorothy Kazel of Cleveland, Ohio, who along with three other American churchwomen was kidnapped, raped, and executed in El Salvador by U.S.-backed troops in 1980.</div><div>
</div><div>Even though she was back in the relative safety of the United States, Ortiz received menacing phone calls and anonymous packages, one containing a dead mouse wrapped in a Guatemalan flag. However, undaunted, she made three trips to Guatemala to testify against the government there.</div><div>
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</div><div>Ortiz tasted victory, albeit of a largely symbolic nature, in April 1995, when a federal judge in Boston ordered Gen. Héctor Gramajo, the Guatemalan defense minister who had tried to discredit Ortiz, to pay her and eight other torture victims a combined $47.5 million.</div><div>
</div><div>In 1996 Ortiz held a five-week fasting vigil in front of the White House, where she demanded that the U.S. government declassify all documents about human rights abuses in Guatemala since the 1954 coup. Hillary Clinton, then first lady, invited Ortiz to her office. During their meeting, Clinton did not rule out the possibility that "Alejandro" was a past or current U.S. operative.</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz's relentless pursuit of justice eventually compelled the United States to declassify long-secret documents revealing details of U.S. cooperation with Guatemalan security forces before, during, and after the time of her abduction, including an admission that the U.S. embassy was in contact with members of a death squad.</div><div>
</div><div>The documents also showed that Gen. Gramajo had been trained in counterinsurgency tactics at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), where military and police officials from Latin American allies—many of them dictatorships—were instructed in counterinsurgency and democracy suppression using course manuals that advocated the torture and execution of civilians.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The files also proved that the U.S. was supporting Guatemalan forces guilty of perpetrating genocide. In 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized to the Guatemalan people for the U.S. role in the bloodshed, terror, and repression.</div><div>
</div><div>"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads—my torturers themselves," Ortiz later wrote. "The United States was the Guatemalan army's partner in a covert war against a small opposition force, a war the United Nations would later declare genocidal."</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz's suffering left her with an acute awareness of human rights issues and a desire to work in service of those rights. In 1998 she founded Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), and in 2002 published The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth. In the 2000s Ortiz was a vocal opponent of the George W. Bush's torture program in the so-called War on Terror.</div><div>
</div><div>Last year, she was named deputy director of Pax Christi USA, part of an international Catholic peace movement.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Recently, Ortiz worked for nuclear disarmament and led Pax Christi's work commemorating the 75th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.</div><div>
</div><div>As for her recovery, Ortiz wrote in The Blindfold's Eyes that despite years of therapy at Chicago's Marjorie Kovler Center for torture survivors, "no one ever fully recovers" from torture, "not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz never not stopped searching for the whole truth of what happened to her back in 1989.</div><div>
</div><div>"No one ever fully recovers, not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."</div><div>—Ortiz</div><div>
</div><div>"I demand the right to a future built on truth and justice," she told Kennedy. "My torturers were never brought to justice. It is possible that, individually, they will never be identified or apprehended. But I cannot resign myself to this fact and move on. I have a responsibility to the people of Guatemala and to the people of the world to insist on accountability where it is possible."</div><div>
</div><div>"I know what it is to wait in the dark for torture, and what it is to wait in the dark for the truth," said Ortiz. "I am still waiting."</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Ursuline Sister Larraine Lauter was with Ortiz when she passed away on Friday. Lauter called her friend "unfailingly good."</div><div>
</div><div>"Dianna walked through the very worst of hell and came out with love," she told the Catholic Standard. "It's hard to believe that bad things happen to good nuns, but they do. Her legacy is for us to be nonviolent. Her legacy is a witness to nonviolence and to love in the face of evil and to redemption. That's her legacy, to teach us that that's possible."</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>Why Democrats must make a firm break from the CIA's horrifying ... ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>Sister Dianna Ortiz, OSU: Sept. 2, 1958-Feb. 19, 2021 – Ursuline ... ›</div><div>Human rights advocate Sister Dianna Ortiz dies - Catholic Standard ... ›</div><div>Dianna Ortiz, American Nun Tortured in Guatemala, Dies at 62 - The ... ›</div><div>Dianna Ortiz - Wikipedia ›</div></div><div>=</div></div><div>=<div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/">https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/</a></div><div>
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</div><div><a href="https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-two-the-deadliest-school-in-71599099/">https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-two-the-deadliest-school-in-71599099/</a></div></div><div>
</div><div><div class="css-18vlujm-Header e13uj1sw0" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -webkit-box-align: center; align-items: center; display: flex; flex-wrap: nowrap; -webkit-box-pack: justify; justify-content: space-between; width: 710px;"><div data-test="podcast-episode-name" class="css-1l3vy2z-HeaderText em83jz60" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; display: flex; flex-direction: column; width: calc(((100% - 3rem) - 0rem) - 2rem);"><div class="css-4663v3-Body1 ef0ttv40" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 2.6rem;"><a aria-current="page" class="css-0 active" data-test="nav-link" href="https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-deadliest-school-in-71503766/" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;">Part One: The Deadliest School in HistoryWWPart One: The Deadliest School in History</a></div><div class="css-dvsuxn-Caption ehtcvoe0" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.6rem;">September 15, 2020 • 108 min</div></div></div><div class="css-s0xx49-Content e18dnh530" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; margin-left: 5rem; max-height: 100vh; overflow: hidden; transition: max-height 0.8s ease 0s; width: calc(((100% - 3rem) - 3rem) - 6rem);"><div class="css-m4lnq8-Description e1rvx4i30" itemprop="podcastDescription" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 2rem; margin-top: 1rem;">Robert is joined by Joelle Monique to discuss the School of the Americas.FOOTNOTES:<li style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/el-salvador-mozote-trial-trump/2020/03/13/09d89632-64a5-11ea-8a8e-5c5336b32760_story.html">https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/el-salvador-mozote-trial-trump/2020/03/13/09d89632-64a5-11ea-8a8e-5c5336b32760_story.html</a></li><li style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;"><a target="blank" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/world/americas/el-salvador-el-mazote-massacre.html" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-decoration-line: none;">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/world/americas/el-salvador-el-mazote-massacre.html</a></li><li style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;"><a target="blank" href="https://theintercept.com/2020/01/28/el-mozote-massacre-reagan-war-on-press/" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-decoration-line: none;">https://theintercept.com/2020/01/28/el-mozote-massacre-reagan-war-on-press/</a></li><li style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;"><a target="blank" href="https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncw/f/hassettm2007-1.pdf%C2%A0" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-decoration-line: none;">https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncw/f/hassettm2007-1.pdf </a></li><li style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;"><a target="blank" href="https://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-guatemala-war-aftermath-20180903-story.html%C2%A0" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-decoration-line: none;">https://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-guatemala-war-aftermath-20180903-story.html </a></li><li style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;"><a target="blank" href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/nov/18/us-military-usa" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-decoration-line: none;">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/nov/18/us-military-usa</a></li><li style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;"><a target="blank" href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/920310%20Imporper%20Material%20in%20Spanish-Language%20Intelligence%20Training%20Manuals.pdf" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-decoration-line: none;">https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/920310%20Imporper%20Material%20in%20Spanish-Language%20Intelligence%20Training%20Manuals.pdf</a></li><li style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;"><a target="blank" href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-37114191" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-decoration-line: none;">https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-37114191</a></li><li style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;"><a target="blank" href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/sep/03/operation-condor-the-illegal-state-network-that-terrorised-south-america" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-decoration-line: none;">https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/sep/03/operation-condor-the-illegal-state-network-that-terrorised-south-america</a></li></div><div class="css-1cfzogj-Actions e1l3qzpl0" style="box-sizing: inherit; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; 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</div><div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/11/el-salvador-murders-jesuits-uca-school-of-the-americas">https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/11/el-salvador-murders-jesuits-uca-school-of-the-americas</a></div><div>h goodfriend</div><div>
</div><div><section class="po-cnintro po-wpintro" id="ch-0" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">IN November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter were murdered in their residence on the campus of the Jesuit Central American University (UCA) in San Salvador, El Salvador. Thirty years later, the massacre remains emblematic of the indiscriminate savagery exercised by the servants of the Salvadoran ruling class, the impunity they enjoy, and the devastating legacies of US intervention in the region.The Jesuit murders drew international outcry, but the victims were only eight of some seventy-five thousand killed and ten thousand more disappeared during the twelve-year civil war (1980–1992). Formally, the conflict pitted the US-backed military dictatorship against the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) leftist guerillas. But the Salvadoran state tortured and slaughtered civilians with abandon. At the war’s close, a 1993 United Nations Truth Commission <a href="https://www.usip.org/publications/1992/07/truth-commission-el-salvador" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">report</a> attributed only 5 percent of the bloodshed to the insurgents. The regime and its paramilitaries bore responsibility for the vast majority of the conflict’s deaths, disappearances, and displacements.The Salvadoran security forces didn’t carry out these horrors alone. They were armed, trained, funded, and advised by the United States. The attack at the UCA was carried out by members of the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite counterinsurgency force trained at the infamous School of the Americas (SOA) in Fort Benning, Georgia. Several members of the military high command who gave the orders and participated in the cover-up were also <a href="https://www.soaw.org/notorious-soa-graduates/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">graduates</a> of that illustrious institution. The best way we can honor the victims of the Jesuit massacre and US-backed atrocities worldwide today is to stop them from recurring by severing the global tentacles of US empire.</section><section class="po-cnsection po-wpsection" id="ch-1" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-repeat: no-repeat; margin-top: 4em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h1 class="po-cnsubhead po-wpsubhead" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-repeat: no-repeat; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.4em;">The War</h1>El Salvador’s civil war was the result of decades, indeed centuries, of dispossession and exploitation of the country’s impoverished majorities at the hands of a handful of landed oligarchic families. The military regime quashed a 1932 indigenous and Communist uprising with genocidal violence, and peaceful movements for democratic reforms and redistribution were met with brazen electoral fraud and escalating force throughout the 1960s and ’70s. Salvadoran students, unionists, and peasants increasingly turned to arms, eventually formalizing the FMLN in 1980.Following in the footsteps of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, the guerillas would have soon overwhelmed the antidemocratic regime were it not for US intervention. Reagan and his neocons, determined to prevent another revolutionary victory in the region, propped up the embattled dictatorship to the tune of up to $1 million per day. All the weight of the US empire could not defeat the rebels, who fought the regime to a draw in 1992.The prevailing wisdom of Latin American insurgent strategy held that El Salvador’s small, densely populated terrain could not sustain guerilla warfare, but the FMLN proved otherwise. The insurgency’s remarkable success among rural peasants was made possible in part by the gains of radical, new forms of Catholicism in the countryside, with clandestine organizing made possible often by close coordination with local clergy.</section><section class="po-cnsection po-wpsection" id="ch-2" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-repeat: no-repeat; margin-top: 4em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h1 class="po-cnsubhead po-wpsubhead" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-repeat: no-repeat; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.4em;">The Martyrs</h1>The UCA’s Jesuits were among some two dozen priests assassinated throughout El Salvador’s civil war by Salvadoran security forces or their associated death squads. Prominent victims included Father Rutilio Grande, murdered with two parishioners in Aguilares in 1977; <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2017/03/oscar-romero-assassination-matt-eisenbrandt-assassination-of-saint" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">Saint Óscar Romero</a>, archbishop of San Salvador, gunned down while delivering mass in 1980; as well as Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donovan, and Maura Clarke, <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2017/05/el-salvador-civil-war-reagan-cold-war-death-squads-sandinistas" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">four US churchwomen</a> raped and murdered later that same year.Many of these martyrs were practitioners of the Catholic doctrine of liberation theology, which emerged following the 1959 Second Vatican Council and 1968 Medellín Conference of Latin American Bishops. Inspired by the emancipatory struggles of the time, liberation theology advocated a “preferential option for the poor” and critiqued the “structural sins” of capitalism and colonization.<aside class="sr-atslot sr-atslot--left prt-x" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-repeat: no-repeat; margin: 0px 2em 2em -23vw; max-width: 300px; clear: left; float: left;">For Latin America’s bloodthirsty cold warriors, liberation theology was a synonym for communism. In El Salvador, “Haga patria, mate un cura” (“Be a patriot, kill a priest”) was a popular right-wing slogan. As the UCA emerged as a center of emancipatory thought and dissent to the dictatorship, it became a target for harassment by the military and the ultra-conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party that took power in the spring of 1989.Certainly, in deeply religious countries like El Salvador and Nicaragua, many <a href="https://larrlasa.org/articles/10.25222/larr.782/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">revolutionaries were formed</a> by their experiences in Christian base communities, and some clergy did take up arms. But like Archbishop Romero, the UCA’s Jesuits were leading voices against violence. The priests were men of extraordinary dignity and courage, renowned intellectuals and public figures, respected in their fields and beloved in the communities they served.<a href="http://www.uca.edu.sv/ignacio-ellacuria/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">Ignacio Ellacuría</a>, born in Basque Country, was a philosopher and theologian. Dean of the UCA at the time of his assassination, he was an outspoken critic of the military regime and its US backers, and a constant advocate for peace and for the poor. <a href="http://www.uca.edu.sv/ignacio-martin-baro/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">Ignacio Martín-Baró</a> was a Spanish theologian and social psychologist. Head of the UCA’s psychology department and founding director of the UCA’s public opinion polling institute IUDOP, Martín-Baró was known for his Freirean emphasis on consciousness-raising and pioneered the field of “liberation psychology.”<a href="http://www.uca.edu.sv/segundo-montes/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">Segundo Montes</a>, also Spanish, led the UCA’s sociology department and directed the university’s Human Rights Institute (IDHUCA); he was also known for his work with refugee communities displaced by the war. <a href="http://www.uca.edu.sv/amando-lopez/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">Amando López</a>, Spanish, had served as dean of the UCA in Managua, Nicaragua following the Sandinista revolution from 1979–1983. He was a professor of philosophy and theology at the time of his murder. <a href="http://www.uca.edu.sv/juan-ramon-moreno/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">Juan Ramón Moreno</a>, Spanish, had years of experience throughout the region. He was serving as assistant director of the UCA’s Monseñor Romero Center.<a href="http://www.uca.edu.sv/joaquin-lopez-y-lopez/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">Joaquín López y López</a> was a Salvadoran who taught at the Externado San José, the prestigious San Salvador Jesuit high school, and founded the Fé y Alegría community arts and education extension program. <a href="http://www.uca.edu.sv/elba-ramos/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">Elba Ramos</a>, also Salvadoran, worked as a cook and housekeeper for the Jesuits since 1985. She lived on campus with her husband, who was employed as a gardener. Their daughter <a href="http://www.uca.edu.sv/celina-ramos/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">Celina Mariceth Ramos</a>, fifteen, was a high school student.</aside></section><section class="po-cnsection po-wpsection" id="ch-3" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-repeat: no-repeat; margin-top: 4em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h1 class="po-cnsubhead po-wpsubhead" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-repeat: no-repeat; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.4em;">The Murders</h1>The events took place during the FMLN’s November 1989 “final offensive,” which brought the war from remote mountain regions to the doorsteps of the wealthiest neighborhoods in San Salvador. But it was in the working-class communities surrounding the capital where the guerillas formed their bastions, and where the Salvadoran Air Force conducted a massive bombing campaign to drive them out. The dramatic show of force failed to overthrow the regime, but it confirmed the FMLN’s formidable military capabilities and resolve, setting the stage for the UN-brokered negotiations that would eventually end the conflict.In the first days of the insurrection, the army took over radio transmissions nationwide, broadcasting state propaganda. In an unusual move, the military opened the phone lines to callers. Denunciations and death threats poured in against union leaders, NGO representatives, and clergy, with messages like, “Ellacuría is a guerrillero. They should cut his head off!” The vice president himself accused the priest of “poisoning the minds” of Salvadoran youth.When the offensive began, the Atlacatl Battalion was in the midst of a training by US Special Forces at their western headquarters. One commando unit was dispatched to the military command center in San Salvador, located within blocks of the UCA. They arrived on November 13, and were immediately ordered to search the Jesuit residence on the university campus. The soldiers turned up nothing. They would return two days later with a far more sinister task.On the evening of November 15, as the FMLN’s assault continued full force, the entirety of El Salvador’s military leadership gathered at the command center, accompanied by US advisers. President Alfredo Cristiani was also on hand, signing off on the areal bombings. The UN Truth Commission would subsequently conclude that General René Emilio Ponce, chief of staff of the Salvadoran Armed Forces, gave the order to assassinate Ellacuría that night — and to leave no witnesses.In the early hours of November 16, dozens of soldiers with the Atlacatl Battalion entered the campus. They faked an attack, damaging parked cars and detonating a grenade. As some monitored the perimeter, others surrounded the Jesuit residence. After the soldiers began to force their way in, the priests opened the doors.The soldiers lead the five Spaniards into the garden in their pajamas. They were ordered to lie down on the lawn. Elba and her daughter were held at gunpoint inside. The commanding officer gave the order, and all seven were executed in a hail of gunfire. Joaquín López y López, hidden indoors, was discovered, then shot.Before withdrawing, the soldiers ransacked the nearby Monseñor Romero Center, scrawling “FMLN” on the walls and outside the campus gates. In the following weeks, the Salvadoran government would claim that the guerillas had committed the murders. In a statement, the Cristiani administration <a href="https://apnews.com/d6cfc3b8221f50f92ccca88a9648ee2f" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">declared</a> that the crime was “intended to destabilize the democratic process and increase even more the climate of anguish created by the FMLN.” It wasn’t until January 1990 that, in the face of overwhelming evidence and international outcry, the Salvadoran state was forced to admit the military’s responsibility.</section><section class="po-cnsection po-wpsection" id="ch-4" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-repeat: no-repeat; margin-top: 4em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h1 class="po-cnsubhead po-wpsubhead" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-repeat: no-repeat; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.4em;">Thirty Years of Impunity</h1>Justice for the material and intellectual authors of the massacre has been consistently distorted, deferred, and denied. From the legislature, the courts, and the military, the loyal servants of the right-wing extremists that continue to dominate the country’s capitalist class have sought every possible means to avoid a reckoning with this and other emblematic wartime atrocities. They have been aided by the US military and intelligence establishment, which <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/21/world/how-us-actions-helped-hide-salvador-human-rights-abuses.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">colluded</a> with the Salvadoran high command to shield top officials from investigation.The massacre sparked an international firestorm. Cristiani, who found himself under immense pressure from US allies to restore faith in his faltering administration in order to justify ongoing military aid, eventually convened a military commission to investigate. The commission promptly named nine men, all but one of whom were lower-ranking soldiers who directly participated in the murders. None belonged to the high command. Facing threats and obstruction from within the Cristiani administration and the Armed Forces, members of the state prosecution team resigned in protest.<aside class="sr-atslot sr-atslot--left prt-x" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-repeat: no-repeat; margin: 0px 2em 2em -23vw; max-width: 300px; clear: left; float: left;">The trial was a sham, conducted by a militarized regime at war with its own people. Despite multiple confessions, only two men were ultimately convicted on homicide charges: Colonel Guillermo Alfredo Benavides, the director of the Military Academy who communicated the orders to assassinate Ellacuría to the Atlacatl Battalion, and Lieutenant Yusshy Mendoza, who helped lead the unit that perpetrated the massacre. A 1992 <a href="https://www.icj.org/a-breach-of-impunity-the-trial-for-the-murder-of-jesuits-in-el-salvador-report-of-the-observer-for-latin-america-of-the-international-commission-of-jurists-una-brecha-a-la-impunidad-aunque-no-un-triun/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">report</a> from the International Commission of Jurists concluded that “justice was not achieved in this trial; indeed, justice probably could not have been achieved” in such conditions.Both were sentenced to the maximum of thirty years. But in a matter of weeks, the legislature, dominated by Cristiani’s quasi-fascist ARENA party, forced through an amnesty law shielding perpetrators from prosecution for crimes committed during the war. The 1993 legislation amounted to a mass self-exoneration by the Right, disproportionately threatened by potential suits, and it would remain on the books until the Supreme Court’s reversal in 2016. The men served only a few months in prison before the amnesty law triggered their release.For years, the UCA pursued the “intellectual authors” of the crime — those who planned and ordered the massacre — in Salvadoran courts, seeking not their imprisonment, but a process of truth, justice, and forgiveness. Nevertheless, the attorney general’s office refused to investigate, invoking the amnesty law. A 1999 <a href="https://www.cidh.oas.org/annualrep/99eng/Merits/ElSalvador10.488.htm" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">report</a> by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States found that El Salvador had violated the human rights to life, due process, and knowledge of the truth. The following year, a court ruled that the massacre was not covered by the amnesty law but rejected the UCA’s suit against the military high command, claiming that the statute of limitations had expired.Finally, international solidarity reactivated the case. In 2008, the US-based <a href="https://cja.org/what-we-do/litigation/the-jesuits-massacre-case/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">Center</a><a href="https://cja.org/what-we-do/litigation/the-jesuits-massacre-case/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;"> for</a><a href="https://cja.org/what-we-do/litigation/the-jesuits-massacre-case/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;"> Justice and Accountability</a> (CJA) and the Spanish Human Rights Association filed suit in Spain under the country’s doctrine of universal jurisdiction against Cristiani and nineteen former military members for their role in the massacre. These included former defense minister general Rafael Humberto Larios; former Air Force chief general Juan Rafael Bustillo, also implicated in the infamous <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2016/12/el-mozote-el-salvador-war-reagan-atlacatl-massacre" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">1981 El Mozote massacre</a> and known for running a joint US <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/luis-posasa-carriles-cold-war-anticommunism" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">supply operation</a> for the Nicaraguan Contras out of a Salvadoran air base; former vice minister of defense general Juan Orlando Zepeda; former Armed Forces chief of staff general René Emilio Ponce; Colonel Benavides; and the improbably named Colonel Inocente Montano, former vice minister of public security.In 2011, at the request of the Spanish court, INTERPOL issued arrest warrants for eighteen Salvadoran former military officials implicated in the massacre. Nine of the perpetrators, including the former defense minister and vice minister, the former Air Force commander, and the lieutenant who led the massacre took refuge in a Salvadoran military barrack. The Salvadoran Supreme Court, however, rejected the warrants. Only Montano was arrested, in the United States, where he had been living for some ten years.In 2015, El Salvador’s Supreme Court reversed its decision, allowing the arrests to go forward. In February 2016, the same day that US courts authorized Montano’s extradition to Spain, Salvadoran police detained four of the defendants, all lower-ranking soldiers, with the exception of Benavides. The court, however, again denied extradition. On the grounds that they had been acquitted in 1991, three of the defendants were released. Only Benavides was imprisoned. No longer protected by the amnesty law, he was ordered to complete his original thirty-year sentence.Three decades later, the walls are closing in on those who conspired to kill Ellacuría and his cohort. Montano was extradited from the United States to Spain in 2017, where he faces <a href="https://elpais.com/internacional/2019/05/09/actualidad/1557420850_050890.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">up to 150 years</a> in prison. Two of the lower-ranking officers, Lt Mendoza and Lt Colonel Camilo Hernández, opted to collaborate with the Spanish prosecution. The rest, fugitives from international law, remain protected by the Salvadoran Supreme Court from extradition. But their long-standing immunity in the Salvadoran judicial system may at last be wearing thin: in 2018, the UCA’s case against the military high command was finally reopened by a Salvadoran court.The halting, circuitous march toward justice for the Jesuits advances as the <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/11/salvadoran-soldiers-confirm-el-mozote-massacre-victim-accounts-191101205304895.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">trial</a> for earlier victims of the Atlacatl battalion moves forward in El Salvador. In 2016, a Salvadoran court ordered the reopening of the case against seventeen high-ranking former military officials for the 1981 massacre at El Mozote, which left nearly one thousand civilians dead, half of them children. Exhumations at the site of the massacre are ongoing. A generation of cold warriors who seemed to have escaped justice now finds itself in the crosshairs.</aside></section><section class="po-cnsection po-wpsection" id="ch-5" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-repeat: no-repeat; margin-top: 4em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h1 class="po-cnsubhead po-wpsubhead" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-repeat: no-repeat; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.4em;">How Many Thousands?</h1>In El Salvador, the United States joined forces with some of the most brutal reactionaries in the region to repress popular movements for equality, justice, and self-determination. US financing, weapons, strategy, and political support sustained the scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign for years. US intervention helped ensure that it was Cristiani’s ARENA party that dominated the postwar transition, implementing sweeping neoliberal structural adjustment and free trade policies that favored US capital at the expense of millions of Salvadoran workers who, displaced and dispossessed in peacetime, were forced to migrate north.But just as US imperialism made these horrors possible, international solidarity has been key in the struggles for justice. US advocates have secured broad caches of declassified army and intelligence documents from the war period. The Spanish suit was aided by a trove of materials obtained by the <a href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB492/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">National Security Archive</a> confirming key details of the case as well as the US role in obstructing the search for the truth. The University of Washington’s <a href="https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2019/07/23/advances-and-setbacks-in-litigation-for-salvadoran-war-records/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">Center for Human Rights</a> was the victim of a <a href="https://www.seattlepi.com/local/crime/article/Break-in-reported-at-UW-center-fighting-CIA-on-El-6582473.php" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">break-in</a> and theft of a computer and hard drive after it filed suit against the CIA for records pertaining to the war and the role of high-ranking Salvadoran officials in the Mozote massacre.<aside class="sr-atslot sr-atslot--left prt-x" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-repeat: no-repeat; margin: 0px 2em 2em -23vw; max-width: 300px; clear: left; float: left;">The veteran US solidarity organization <a href="http://www.soaw.org/fort-benning-november/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">School of the Americas Watch</a> was formed in response to the Jesuit massacre and hosts an annual vigil at the gates of Fort Benning to denounce the US role in crimes across the hemisphere. The group estimates that over eighty-three thousand Latin American state security forces have been trained at the site, which now bears the deceptively benign title of Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). These graduates have carried out coups, massacres, assassinations, torture, disappearances, economic destabilization, and mass displacement. Recently, ICE <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/ice-fails-redact-document-reveals-location-urban-warfare-training-facility-1458732" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">revealed</a> that agents will train in domestic “urban warfare” at Fort Benning, bringing SOA’s counterinsurgency project full circle.In a 1983 text called “<a href="http://www.uca.edu.sv/centro-documentacion-virtual/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/C13-c02-.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">The Truth About American Intervention in El Salvador</a>,” Ellacuría wrote: “History shows that Yankee intervention, far from favoring the peoples of Latin America, far from promoting their democratic self-determination, has put them in the position that so many find themselves in today, by favoring genocidal antidemocratic regimes (Somoza, Argentine and Uruguayan military officials, Stroessner, Pinochet, among others) and by allying with oligarchic sectors that have maintained the underdevelopment and exploitation of the vast Latin American majorities.”Facing the Reagan administration’s determination to escalate the war, Ellacuría wondered, “How many thousands will have to flee their homelands or simply be displaced from their homes and workplaces, which American weapons have now turned into places of death and destruction?”The priest’s words remind us that the UCA martyrs take their place among millions of victims of the US-backed wars on communism, on drugs, and on terror worldwide. Even as the struggle for truth and reparations in El Salvador moves forward, the US imperial machine continues to churn out death, displacement, and authoritarianism. The top military officials involved in the unfolding <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/11/bolivia-evo-morales-coup-media" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">coup</a> against leftist indigenous President Evo Morales in Bolivia are <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/13/bolivian-coup-plotters-school-of-the-americas-fbi-police-programs/" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">graduates</a> of the SOA and Washington <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/10/badges-without-borders-stuart-schrader-imperialism-policing-cold-war" style="box-sizing: border-box; background: transparent; cursor: pointer; transition: all 0.2s ease 0s;">police training</a> programs.Many of the Jesuits abandoned the safety of their homeland to serve in solidarity with the exploited and oppressed in Central America. They offered their lives in pursuit of peace and a more equitable world, free from the dictates of oligarchs, generals, and imperial overseers. As long as the monstrous military-industrial complex — its surveillance networks, military bases, international training programs, and weapons markets — casts its shadow across the globe, true justice for the casualties of US foreign policy in El Salvador and beyond will remain incomplete.</aside></section></div><div>
</div><div></div><div><a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/el-calabozo-massacre-remains-returned-38-years-200124210105414.html">https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/el-calabozo-massacre-remains-returned-38-years-200124210105414.html</a></div><div>
</div><div>San Vicente, El Salvador - Six white caskets sat in a row before an altar set up on the patio of a house in the Salvadoran community of Amatitan Abajo.</div>They held the remains of six people who were killed alongside 200 others by Salvadoran soldiers in what has been labelled the August 1982 El Calabozo massacre."We have a lot of emotions today," said Margarita Realegeno Bonilla, who waited nearly 38 years to finally lay to rest her six family members, including her parents and siblings, the youngest who was eight.<h4 style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.1; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 8px; word-break: break-word; background-color: rgb(252, 252, 252);">More:</h4><ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 20px; list-style: outside square; line-height: 1.7; background-color: rgb(252, 252, 252); padding-left: 19px !important;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 20px;"><h4 style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.1; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 8px; word-break: break-word;"><a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/11/salvadoran-soldiers-confirm-el-mozote-massacre-victim-accounts-191101205304895.html?utm_source=website&utm_medium=article_page&utm_campaign=read_more_links" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; outline: 0px; cursor: pointer;">Ex-Salvadoran soldiers confirm El Mozote massacre victim accounts</a></h4></li></ul><ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 20px; list-style: outside square; line-height: 1.7; background-color: rgb(252, 252, 252); padding-left: 19px !important;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 20px;"><h4 style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.1; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 8px; word-break: break-word;"><a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/el-salvador-judge-expands-1981-el-mozote-massacre-case-190718195829116.html?utm_source=website&utm_medium=article_page&utm_campaign=read_more_links" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; outline: 0px; cursor: pointer;">El Salvador judge expands 1981 El Mozote massacre case</a></h4></li></ul><ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 20px; list-style: outside square; line-height: 1.7; background-color: rgb(252, 252, 252); padding-left: 19px !important;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.6; margin-bottom: 20px;"><h4 style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.1; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 8px; word-break: break-word;"><a href="hhttps://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/2012228123122975116.html?utm_source=website&utm_medium=article_page&utm_campaign=read_more_links" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; outline: 0px; cursor: pointer;">El Salvador's brutal civil war: What we still don't know</a></h4></li></ul>Realegeno Bonilla joined a small congregation of mainly elderly men and women who gathered to hold a burial."Now that God gives us the opportunity, we feel better knowing that they are going to be buried safely," Realegeno Bonilla told Al Jazeera.Friday's ceremony was one small step forward in a decades-long crusade for justice and reparations for victims of the El Calabozo massacre, which included women, children and the elderly. ...<div>
<div>A University of Wisconsin graduate thesis demonstrates that the defenders of SOA are wrong. Studying data on individual SOA graduates over a 40-year time span, Kate McCoy found that "students who took multiple courses at the School were more almost four times more likely to violate [human rights] than their counterparts who took only one course. ... [G]reater exposure to the School of the Americas training makes trainees more likely to engage in human rights violations ..." [Emphasis in original text].</div><div>
<div><table width="85%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" align="center" dwcopytype="CopyTableCell"><tbody><tr align="left"><td><div align="left">Published on Tuesday, November 18, 2003 by <a href="http://www.americas.org/" target="new">Americas.org</a></div></td></tr><tr align="left"><td><div align="left">School of Assassins</div></td></tr><tr align="left"><td><div align="left">by Mary Turck</div></td></tr><tr><td height="10"> </td></tr><tr align="left" valign="top"><td>What do Col. Byron Lima Estrada of Guatemala, Lt. Josê Espinoza Guerra and General Juan Orlando Zepeda, both of El Salvador, and General Juan López Ortiz of Mexico have in common?They are all murderers. They were all trained at the School of the Americas. Because of them, and because of thousands of others like them, many people call U.S. Army's School of the Americas the "School of Assassins."And what do Panama's Manuel Noriega, Argentina's Leopoldo Galtiere, Peru's Juan Velasco Alvarado, Ecuador's Guillermo Rodriguez, and Bolivia's Hugo Banzer have in common? They have all been dictators in their countries, and they were all trained at the School of the Americas. Because of them, and others, many people call the U.S. Army's School of the Americas the "School of Coups."The School of the Americas (SOA) is a military training school for Latin American soldiers. SOA is an official program of the U.S. government, funded by the government and run by the U.S. Armed Forces since 1946. SOA graduates have long been implicated in terrorism, human rights violations, coercion, and atrocities committed against civilian populations across Latin America.Until now, evidence against the SOA has been mostly anecdotal. Sure, its supporters say, SOA graduates brutally murdered six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador in 1989 and took part in the massacre of 900 people in El Mozote, El Salvador. Yes, they acknowledge, SOA alum Byron Lima Estrada was convicted this year of murdering Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998. And it's true that another SOA graduate commanded the unit that carried out the 1994 Ocosingo massacre in Mexico. When pressed, they will even admit that, during the 1980s, SOA manuals recommended blackmail, torture and execution of political dissidents. But these were aberrations, SOA supporters insist. Most SOA grads do not torture. And SOA doesn't even exist any longer. Now it's called WHISC and everything is better.A University of Wisconsin graduate thesis demonstrates that the defenders of SOA are wrong. Studying data on individual SOA graduates over a 40-year time span, Kate McCoy found that "students who took multiple courses at the School were more almost four times more likely to violate [human rights] than their counterparts who took only one course. ... [G]reater exposure to the School of the Americas training makes trainees more likely to engage in human rights violations ..." [Emphasis in original text].In its 57 years, the School of the Americas has trained more than 61,000 Latin American officers in combat techniques, command tactics, military intelligence, and techniques of torture. These graduates have left a trail of blood and suffering in their own countries. Today, SOA/WHISC trains about a thousand soldiers each year.McCoy's study also addresses SOA supporters' claims that the school changed during the 1980s, and now gives better training in human rights. Her statistics show that "contrary to the Army's claims that the School of the Americas has corrected past faults and that professional standards have been raised over time to promote the highest respect for human rights, there is no statistical evidence that students who attended the School in the 1990s were less likely to engage in human rights violations than those who graduated in the 1960s."On January 21, 2001, SOA's name was changed to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC). But only the name was changed-its mission and its shame continue. No one really believes that makes a difference.McCoy's study did not include data from the WHISC years of 2001 and later-the Bush administration insists that this data will not be released because of "national security" concerns. That means future researchers will not be able to reveal such embarrassing statistics about SOA/WHISC. McCoy observes regretfully that the Bush administration's move means "studies such as this one could not be updated, and it may become increasingly difficult for researchers to apply their tools to vital social and political questions."Every November, opponents of the School of the Americas gather for a massive demonstration outside the gates of this school for terrorism. They carry crosses and banners with names of people murdered by SOA graduates. They sing and pray and chant. Some cross the line painted on a street outside the gates of Fort Benning, committing civil disobedience.Dozens of the demonstrators-like a 68-year-old Sister Caryl Hartges from Wisconsin-end up serving time in federal prisons. She crossed the line last year, on her fifth trip to the demonstrations at Fort Benning. Sister Caryl served her time. And she's coming back to SOA this November 22. She explains that, "It has do with the call of the Gospel, which is a call for justice, which sometimes takes precedence over the law of the land."Mary Turck (<a href="mailto:mturck@americas.org">mturck@americas.org</a>) is the editor of Connection to the Americas, a publication of the Resource Center of the Americas.</td></tr></tbody></table></div><div></div><div><a href="http://soaw.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=762">http://soaw.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=762</a></div><div>
</div><div><table class="contentpaneopen" style="border: none; border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; width: 691px; line-height: 16.5px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><tbody><tr><td class="contentheading" width="100%" style="line-height: 26.7409992218018px; padding-bottom: 10px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); text-transform: capitalize;"><a href="http://soaw.org/take-action/legislative/articles/762" class="contentpagetitle" style="text-decoration: none !important;">New Research Findings Further Incriminate The Notorious SOA/WHINSEC</a></td><td align="right" width="100%" class="buttonheading" style="text-align: center; padding: 0px 0px 0px 8px !important; background: url(http://soaw.org/templates/ja_mageia/images/cyan/dot.gif) 50% 100% repeat-x;">
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<table class="contentpaneopen" style="border: none; border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; width: 691px; line-height: 16.5px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><tbody><tr><td valign="top">Introduction –<o:p xmlns:o="o" />Since 1990, Latin American human right and justice advocates have worked to make known the human rights violations committed by graduates of the US Army School of the Americas. These include the high profile killings of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador, the 4 U.S. Churchwomen in El Salvador, the 6 Jesuit priests and their coworkers in El Salvador, the El Mozote Massacre in which 801 people were killed in one day, the assassination of Bishop Gerardi in Guatemala following the release of his truth commission report linking the Guatemalan Army with the vast majority of human rights abuses.<o:p xmlns:o="o"> <o:p xmlns:o="o" /></o:p>In response to the mounting campaign to bring the truth about foreign military training to Congress and to the public, and in connection with the revelation of the so-called “torture training manuals<a href="http://soaw.org/index.php#ftn1" name="ftnref1" title="">[1]</a>” that were used at the SOA, in 1999 the US House of Representatives voted 230-to-197 to close the SOA. In response, the Department of Defense (DoD) mounted its own campaign and convinced Congress that the school, which it previously stated needed no reform, could be reformed by teaching human rights and democracy. On January 17, 2001, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (known by the acronyms WHISC and WHINSEC) was opened in the same facility with virtually the same curriculum as the SOA.<o:p xmlns:o="o" />Continuing in our efforts to close the SOA/WHINSEC, today we bring important new data. They provide more detail about the superficialities of reforms at the school, the implausibility of real reform in the future, and the continuing pattern of support for human rights abusers in Latin America. We bring these finding along with a Dear Colleague letter by Rep. McGovern, inviting Members of Congress to join him in co-sponsoring H.R. 1258, “"The Latin America Military Training Review Act of 2005," which calls for the suspension of the SOA/WHINSEC and the investigation of training needs in Latin America.<o:p xmlns:o="o" />Point 1 - "None of the fundamental issues raised around the need to close the SOA have been addressed in the renamed WHISC - not its training methods, nor its lack of oversight, nor the school's record of graduating human rights abusers."<o:p xmlns:o="o" />Words from a 1995 Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) study undermine the claim that the Army planned to close the SOA and create a completely new institution --the WHINSEC-- with a new mission. The main objective was to have the public forget about negative publicity surrounding recent horrifying public revelations.After the infamous "torture manuals" used by the SOA became public knowledge in 1996, Congress ordered the General Accounting Office (GAO) to look into the SOA and a DoD initiative to strengthen institutions involved in defense and security activities in Latin American countries.  That GAO study referenced the earlier TRADOC study and developed recommendations concerning the future of the School of the Americas<a href="http://soaw.org/index.php#ftn2" name="ftnref2" title="">[2]</a>.<o:p xmlns:o="o" />TRADOC acknowledged “concerns about the School in the post-Cold War period have surfaced, driven in part by adverse publicity over human rights violations associated with past students of the School.”  The study determined “that negative publicity about the School would probably continue and that a new name for the School may be an appropriate way to break with the past.” It also suggested that the Departments of Army and State study the desirability of establishing a Western Hemisphere Center for research, study, and instruction.<o:p xmlns:o="o" />The GAO report was done as a result of grassroots pressure on the U.S. Congress and on the Army to be accountable for the SOA, but the Army's response was to view these serious concerns as a “public relations” matter and to paper over the problem. The fundamental issues of human rights abuses have never been addressed.  The Army has been able to keep the SOA open under a new name, never being accountable for the first 50 years when over 60,000 soldiers were trained at the School and an unknown number of human rights violations were perpetrated by these graduates when they returned to their nations. For this reason it is important to request the establishment of a new, joint congressional task force to conduct an assessment of the kind of education and training that is appropriate for the DoD to provide to military personnel of Latin American nations (as called for in HR 1258), and to investigate the accountability of the SOA in past human rights offenses (as called for by Amnesty International<a href="http://soaw.org/index.php#ftn3" name="ftnref3" title="">[3]</a>.)<o:p xmlns:o="o" />Point 2 - "The failure of the U.S. Army to deal seriously with the record of the SOA, the most intensely scrutinized aspect of US military training in Latin America, raises questions about the quality and emphasis in the vast array of other training programs."<o:p xmlns:o="o" />In a recent master’s thesis conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison<a href="http://soaw.org/index.php#ftn4" name="ftnref4" title="">[4]</a>, Katherine McCoy studied the question:  “Does U.S. Military training help improve human rights in other countries by providing a powerful alternative example of how to be both effective and professional, or erode human rights by providing the legitimacy and resources to perpetuate abuses?” <a href="http://soaw.org/index.php#ftn5" name="ftnref5" title="">[5]</a> The statistical analysis was based on a sample of nearly 12,000 SOA graduates from six countries (Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru and Panama) during the period from 1960-2000.  Using data on the human rights records of these graduates, the study tracked them over the 40-year period to determine what effect SOA training had on graduates? human rights records.<o:p xmlns:o="o" />The Army, the DoD and other supporters of the SOA, and now the WHINSEC, have argued that this school and training of this kind are essential for the professionalization and democratization of Latin American militaries.  Further, they have argued that any evidence of human rights violations committed by graduates, as argued by those in opposition to the SOA/WHINSEC, do not constitute a pattern, but simply “a few bad apples.”  Recognizing that those “bad apples” exist, those in support of the training of Latin American militaries have argued the following:<o:p xmlns:o="o" />?        “The way to do away with human rights violations is to expose foreign militaries to the modern, professional training embodied by the U.S. military.” (McCoy)<o:p xmlns:o="o" />?        “The more professional training a soldier has, the less likely he is to violate human rights.  Similarly, the more professional training a soldier has, the greater his respect for democracy and the rule of law.” (McCoy)<o:p xmlns:o="o" />“Applied to the case of the SOA, then, these arguments predict that exposure to professional training through the SOA would reduce a soldier’s chance of committing a human rights violation or engaging in other illegal behavior, and that soldiers with the greatest exposure to this type of training should have the lowest chances of committing such crimes.” (McCoy)<o:p xmlns:o="o" />?            The result of Katherine McCoy’s study found the opposite.  First, McCoy found that graduates who took more courses were more often the perpetrators of human rights violations: (see graph)<o:p xmlns:o="o" /> <o:p xmlns:o="o" /><img width="397" height="263" src="http://www.soaw.org/img/original/percent.jpg" v:shapes="x0000_i1025" xmlns:v="v" /> <o:p xmlns:o="o" />?        Second, McCoy statistically analyzed the data to see if this could be explained by other factors—type of SOA training, civil wars or dictatorships in the soldiers’ home nations, the cold war period and decade attending, and the soldiers’ rank.  Even after controlling for these variables through regression analysis, soldiers who took two or more courses were almost four times more likely to have committed human rights violations than soldiers who took one course. These results are highly significant “Hence when reviewing differences in rates of human rights abuses among graduates of the School of the Americas, we find that the worst offenders are students who took more than one class at the SOA…this suggests that more courses in fact result in much higher rates of abuse.” (McCoy)<o:p xmlns:o="o" />?        “Another key finding of this study is that, contrary to the Army’s claim that the School of the Americas has corrected past faults and that professional standards have been raised over time to promote the highest respect for human rights, there is no statistical evidence that students who attended the SOA in the 1990s were less likely to engage in human rights violations than those who graduated in the 1960s…the absence of any indicator that SOA graduates improved over time with respect to human rights raises the possibility that recent reforms have not managed to curb existing patterns of human rights violations. ” (McCoy)<o:p xmlns:o="o" />These results raise serious questions about the nature and effectiveness of the training done at the SOA.  Because the training provided has never been analyzed or scrutinized, and because past reforms did not result in statistical changes in human rights violations, we cannot assume that the current “reforms” have done any better.  The U.S. Army, the DoD, and the U.S. Congress have failed to deal with the record of the SOA.  Therefore, no “reforms” will result in significant or substantive change in the training or democratization of Latin America or Latin American militaries.<o:p xmlns:o="o" /> <o:p xmlns:o="o" />Point 3 - "Human rights abuses and the problems with civil-military relations are not, unfortunately, a thing of the past in Latin America."<o:p xmlns:o="o" />WHINSEC claims that their applicants must undergo a stringent 5-step vetting process. "Specifically, Chiefs of Missions should ensure that all nominees for training or travel grants, military or civilian, in country or in the U.S., are scrutinized for records of human rights abuses, corruption, or criminal activities that would render them ineligible or inappropriate for U.S. training programs."<o:p xmlns:o="o" /><a name="abusers" style="text-decoration: underline;" /><a name="abusers">In practice, however, the screening process for applicants to WHINSEC is seriously flawed. There are a number of students with well-documented prior histories of human rights abuses in their home countries subsequently studying at the WHINSEC, including the following:<o:p xmlns:o="o" /></a><a name="abusers">?        From El Salvador: In 1983, Colonel Francisco del Cid Diaz (then a 2nd Lieutenant) commanded a unit that forcibly removed 16 residents from the Los Hojas cooperative of the Asociaci?n Nacional de Ind?genas, bound and beat them, shot all 16 at point-blank range and threw their bodies in the Cuyuapa River. This is a very well known, very high profile and notorious massacre, and cited in the annual State Department Human Rights Country Reports throughout the 1980s.  The case was also investigated by, and included in the final report of, the El Salvador Truth Commission established under the Salvadoran Peace Accords.<o:p xmlns:o="o" /></a><a name="abusers">       The El Salvador Supreme Court granted amnesty to all defendants, but in 1992 the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights stated that there was substantial evidence that Col. del Cid Diaz and the other ranking officer present gave the orders to execute, and recommended that the Salvadoran government bring them to justice. Instead of facing justice, we find that Col. del Cid Diaz was at the WHINSEC in 2003, and was also enrolled in SOA in 1988 and 1991.<o:p xmlns:o="o" /></a><a name="abusers">?        From Bolivia: In 1997 Captain Filmann Urzagaste Rodriguez was one of those responsible for the kidnapping and torture of Waldo Albarracin, then the director of the Popular Assembly for Human Rights in Bolivia and now the Human Rights Defender (Ombudsman). In 1999 the Bolivian Chamber of Deputies Commission in charge of investigating the case passed it, together with all the evidence, to the ordinary courts for investigation and prosecution. The case was also the subject of a well-known petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (that has not yet been acted upon). In 2002, Urzagaste Rodriguez, now a Major, took a 49-week officer training course at the WHINSEC.<o:p xmlns:o="o" /></a><a name="abusers">?        From Colombia: Three Colombian police officers under investigation for personal use of counter-narcotics funds took courses at the WHINSEC at nearly the same time as the investigation. In June 2002 the Colombian Attorney General's office, at the request of the U.S. Government, opened a "disciplinary" investigation into alleged activities of corruption by members of the Colombian National Police, including Captain Dario Sierro Chapeta, Lt. Col. Francisco Patino Fonseca, and Captain Luis Benavides Guancha. The first two attended the WHINSEC in 2002, and Benavides Guancha was there for 18 weeks in 2003. (It is yet to be determined if the charges against the 3 were brought before, during, or after acceptance at the WHINSEC.)<o:p xmlns:o="o" /></a><a name="abusers">Human rights abuses and problems with civil-military relations are not a thing of the past in Latin America, and many are well documented. The fact that students with known human rights violations and problems of corruption are attending an institution that boasts about the "meticulous screening process" that all students pass to ensure they are "law-abiding citizens"</a><a href="http://soaw.org/index.php#ftn1" name="ftnref1" title="">[6]</a>, undermines the claim that the WHINSEC "teaches" respect for human rights, or that it is serious about claiming to train "only personnel of unquestionable character." To the contrary, these cases can be interpreted as the WHINSEC’s --or more seriously the U.S. military-- rewarding of human rights violators with the honor of studying in the United States.<o:p xmlns:o="o" />Last Updated 5/06/04 by SOA Watch, www.soaw.org<o:p xmlns:o="o" /><div><dd> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" style="border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); height: 1px;" /><div id="ftn1"><a href="http://soaw.org/index.php#ftnref1" name="ftn1" title="">[1]</a> Lisa Haugaard, Latin America Working Group, “Declassified Army and CIA Manuals Used in Latin America:<o:p xmlns:o="o" />An Analysis of Their Content,” 1997, <a href="http://www.lawg.org/misc/publications-manuals.htm">www.lawg.org/misc/publications-manuals.htm</a><o:p xmlns:o="o" /></div><div id="ftn2"><a href="http://soaw.org/index.php#ftnref2" name="ftn2" title="">[2]</a>United States, General Accounting Office, School of the Americas: U.S. Military Training for Latin American Countries, document no. NSIAD-96-178 (Washington: GAO, August 22, 1996) <a href="http://www.fas.org/asmp/resources/govern/gao96178.pdf">http://www.fas.org/asmp/resources/govern/gao96178.pdf</a><o:p xmlns:o="o" /> <o:p xmlns:o="o" /></div><div id="ftn3"><a href="http://soaw.org/index.php#ftnref3" name="ftn3" title="">[3]</a> Amnesty International, Unmet Power, Unmatched Principles:  The Human Rights Dimensions of US Training of Foreign Military and Police Forces, 2002. <o:p xmlns:o="o" /></div><div id="ftn4"><a href="http://soaw.org/index.php#ftnref4" name="ftn4" title="">[4]</a> The program is consistently ranked as one of the top Sociology program in the country, largely because of its rigor in statistics. (McCoy)<o:p xmlns:o="o" /></div><div id="ftn5"><a href="http://soaw.org/index.php#ftnref5" name="ftn5" title="">[5]</a> McCoy, Katherine, Trained to Torture:  A Statistical Analysis of Human Rights Violations Committee by Graduates of the U.S. Army School of the Americas, 1960 – 2000, submitted to the University of Wisconsin - Madison in partial fulfillment of the Master of Science Degree, 2003<o:p xmlns:o="o" />[6] Statements in preceding quotation marks made by Army Legislative Liaison LTC Jack Einwechter at a WHINSEC briefing to House Members and staff on March 17, 2004.</div></dd></div></td></tr></tbody></table></div><div>
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</div><div><div class="articletext" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-align: justify; overflow: visible; margin-top: 50px; line-height: 22.8571434020996px;">Social Justice Author: Williams, Ginger; Disney, Jennifer Date published: July 1, 2015 Language: English PMID: 19223 ISSN: 10431578 CODEN: SOJUEX Journal code: ISOJ</div><div class="articletext" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-align: justify; overflow: visible; margin-top: 50px; line-height: 22.8571434020996px;"> THE UNITED STATES HAS LONG FLEXED ITS MUSCLES IN LATIN AMERICAN AFFAIRS and exerted its power over the Western Hemisphere. The end of the Cold War failed to ease tensions in US-Latin American relations. The expansion of state-sanctioned terrorism in the Americas until the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in 1998 rested on the privileges of impunity for Latin American security forces and their brethren in the United States. Impunity reinforced US hegemony by enabling Latin American militaries (and those who trained them) to get away with torture, murder, and the disappearance of thousands of people during the many dirty wars that ensued during the last half of the twentieth century. According to Leslie Gill (2004,237), "the impunity-backed state terror that fractured countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, and Argentina while they were ruled by harsh regimes set the stage for the consolidation of neoliberal economic models under civilian governments." John Bellamy Foster (2007,2-3) further articulates the connection between militarism and neoliberalism in Latin America, and identifies the role the United States played in the process: "It was in the US-sponsored dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay) that neoliberalism, i.e., the promotion of a new naked capitalism in response to world economic slowdown-requiring the elimination of all state protections for the population and all limits on the movement of capital-was first imposed." The return to "democracy" in the 1980s and 1990s did not alleviate the fears, as repressive entities largely remained intact (in Chile, for example). The arrest of Augusto Pinochet tilted the balance as former repressive leaders started to face the courts after 1998, and the poor began to blame the new "democratic" leaders for selling the state to transnational capital. The trial and conviction of José Efrain Rios Montt in Guatemala in 2013 demonstrates that 15 years later, it is possible to convict a former head of state of crimes against humanity.1Since 1998, 17 left-leaning presidents have been elected in Latin America.2 In different ways, they helped to orchestrate a movement against the Washington Consensus and loosen the grip of the United States on the region.3 When some of these new presidents entered office, they challenged the power relations in the hemisphere, promising to overhaul the government and the economy and to reassert the place of government above that of transnational corporations. In response, in 2002, President George W. Bush announced that "the future of this hemisphere depends on the strength of three commitments-democracy, security, and free-market development." Democracy proved to be a problem for the Bush administration with the elections of Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, who challenged the power of the Washington Consensus in the region. Populist-style democracy was something that policymakers in Washington thought had died with Juan Perón and Getulio Vargas in the 1950s; moreover, these populist-style democratic leaders have fervently worked to reassert the power of the state over transnational capital, which US policymakers have interpreted as a threat to stability in the region. Because of the perceived instability in Latin America, the United States has reasserted one of its strongest Cold War policies-US military presence and training in the hemisphere-to deal with the perceived rising threats.How do we explain US militarism in the region in the wake of the overwhelming rejection of the Washington Consensus since 1998? How do US policymakers justify policies at home that Latin American nations and inter-American organizations deem obsolete? Why is the United States intent on executing a War on Drugs in Latin America that has not curtailed the entry of drugs into the United States, but has cost the United States over seven billion dollars in military aid to Colombia alone since 1996?4 The answers to these questions are revealed by examining the nature of the relationship between militarism and neoliberalism in Latin America.Militarism and Neoliberalism in Latin AmericaThe current integration of the world economy into a neocolonial system of capitalist production, consumption, and reproduction requires access to and control of resources including labor so that transnational corporations can maximize profits. Corporations need the assurance of political stability and protection of their investments. As part of the nation-state apparatus, the military is on hand whenever necessary to intimidate and repress popular resistance to exploitative working conditions, to structural adjustment programs, or the privatization of resources in aid of profit accumulation. (Kirk and Okazawa-Rey 2000,3)At the end of the Cold War, US policy in Latin America turned to "shaping the strategic environment to prevent conflict and promote stability" (McSherry 2000, 34). But by the end of the twentieth century, U S leadership became synonymous with global market capitalism, and the US government forced Latin American nations to jump on board the neoliberal economic train or face reprisals. In their special issue of Social Justice on "Neoliberalism, Militarism, and Armed Conflict," Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey (2000, 1) assert that neoliberalism and militarism are inextricably linked. "In critiquing and challenging neoliberal economic integration," they argue, "it is essential to take account of militarism as an intrinsic element. Conversely, in analyzing militarism, war, and armed conflict, it is also necessary to consider global economic forces and institutions."Although much recent scholarship on Latin America focuses on the widespread political shift to the Left, our article examines military and political movements that subvert democracy in the region.5 We explore the rise of militarism in Latin America in response to the backlash against the imposition of neoliberal economic policies. One of the strongest elements of US Cold War policy in Latin America, US military presence and training, grew stronger in the new millennium. US expenditures on the military and military training in Latin America now exceed Cold War levels. The wars on drugs and terrorism have been used to justify increased militarization in the region, when the primary motive has been to repress resistance to neoliberalism. This study concentrates on Colombia, Mexico, and Honduras. Militarism and neoliberalism in Latin America have three operational dimensions: ( 1 ) neoliberal globalization has led to increasing poverty and inequality in the region; (2) neoliberalism requires increased military expenditures to repress resistance and/ or impose neoliberal structural adjustment policies that perpetuate the interests of dominant-class elites in particular and capital accumulation in general; (3) US military training of Latin American armed forces increases military and paramilitary violence, reinforces US hegemony, buttresses the imposition of neoliberal policies, and subverts democracy in the region.This article describes the impact of neoliberal globalization in Latin America. After discussing the nature of US militarism after the Cold War, we detail the connection between a consistent, increasing presence of the US military and the imposition of neoliberalism in the region. Then we explain how the United States has resurrected old forms of neocolonial strategies (such as gunboat diplomacy and the training and financing of military coups) and subverted democracy through military and paramilitary violence. By exploiting existing domestic conflicts in Columbia, Mexico, and Honduras, the United States has justified increased military involvement in these countries to counter growing regional resistance to the Washington Consensus. Mexico has witnessed ongoing militarization since the Zapatista rebellion in 1994. Honduras experienced a military coup that overthrew a left-leaning, democratically elected president. Columbia is in its 50th year of civil war. Thus, these three countries provide the best case studies for examining militarism and neoliberalism in the region.Neoliberal Globalization in Latin America: Human (Under-)Development, Poverty, and InequalityThe fact that the term "globalization" did not become part of our lexicon until the late eighties/early nineties, was not because it wasn't already pervasive-international trade, production, and finance had already been growing much faster than domestic economies by the mid-sixties-but because its later combination with neoliberalism accelerated those international trends and the process seemed to take on a life of its own. (Panitch and Gindin 2003,19)Neoliberal globalization has dominated the Latin American region throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. Richard Peet (2003, 3-4) distinguishes between the humanitarian potential within globalization and the reality of existing neoliberal globalization, which is based on neoliberal ideas, policies, and institutions. Laura MacDonald and Anne Ruckert (2009, 3) define neoliberalism as a set of economic policies associated with the Washington Consensus and its corresponding "ten neoliberal commandments." Senior Institute for International Economics (HE) official John Williamson enumerated those reforms for Latin America at the conclusion of a 1989 HE conference attended by participants from international financial institutions, US government agencies, and the Federal Reserve Board. The prescriptions include fiscal discipline, public expenditures in fields with high economic returns, tax reform, financial liberalization, unified and competitive exchange rates, trade liberalization, removal of barriers to foreign direct investment, privatization,deregulation, and secure property rights (Hristov 2005,91; Macdonald and Ruckert 2009,3). Panitch and Gindin (2003,24) define neoliberalism as "state-led economic restructuring oriented to removing, through the expansion and deepening of markets, democratically imposed barriers to accumulation (earlier concessions on the part of capital that once reflected capitalism's munificence now resurfaced as problems that demanded reversal)." For MacDonald and Ruckert (2009, 4), neoliberalism represents "a new form of social rule under which elite class power and the profitability of capital have been successfully restored."Neoliberalism has had a devastating effect on inequality, poverty, and unemployment in Latin America. In 1996, "the superiors of all 18 Latin American provinces of the Society of Jesus issued an urgent letter on neoliberalism... addressed to all those in the Americas participating in the Jesuit enterprise and 'those who make common cause with our people, especially the poorest'" (Gent 2008a).6 The Jesuit leaders noted that, at the time, "180 million people (43.5 percent) in Latin America (and the Caribbean) lived in poverty, and 80 million (19 percent) lived in extreme poverty" (Latin American Provincials of the Society of Jesus 1997,48). The "lost decade" of economic growth of the 1980s saw the number of Latin Americans living in poverty increase from 41 percent in 1980 to 48 percent in 1990 (Foster 2007, 3). Between 1990 and 2000, joblessness rose 10 percent in Latin America (ibid.). In the 1980s and 1990s, there was high and persistent income inequality:The most striking fact is the resilience of high inequality, through many different policy regimes over the past few decades. The 1970s saw some tendency for mild reductions in inequality, and the 1980s a more marked tendency for increased inequality in the context of macroeconomic, difficulties. The 1990s has seen a more mixed picture: more countries experienced increases than declines in inequality, but there is no overall pattern. (Walton 2004,171)The "Economic Snapshot of Latin America" in the Latinobarómetro 2010 Report estimates that "in 2009, the region's poverty rate rose to 33.1 percent, up from 33 percent in 2008, and, in the case of extreme poverty, to 13.7 percent, up from 12.9 percent." However, the report also notes that in 2002, 44 percent of people in Latin America were living in poverty, with 19.4 percent experiencing extreme poverty. According to the IMF, by 2010 poverty in Latin America had declined to 31.4 percent, its lowest level in 20 years (Barcena 2012, 1). IMF figures also reveal that the rate of extreme poverty fell to 12.3 percent between 1990 and 2010 (ibid.). Despite these achievements, 177 million people remain in poverty, including 70 million in extreme poverty (ibid.). The IMF attributes the drop in poverty to strong economic growth, higher wage earnings, a decline in fertility rates, and better social programs (ibid.). Yet it does not acknowledge that many of these changes came about during the tenure of democratically elected leaders on the Left, who revitalized the state's role in alleviating poverty and unemployment and implementing social programs for the poor. "There can be no doubt," states the Latinobarómetro 2010 Report, that the most important problem in Latin America is inequality, which, "measured as the Gini coefficient, is greater than in any other region of the world."US Militarism in Latin America since the End of the Cold WarOne of the strongest elements of US Cold War policy in Latin America was retained and grew stronger in the new millennium: US military presence and training in the region. After the Cold War ended, US military expenditures in Latin America increased. After declining in 2001, US military aid, training, and arms sales to the region increased each year from the beginning of the war on terror through 2010 (Emerson 2010, 41).7 US military and police aid to Latin America increased steadily, reaching a height of $1.6 billion in 2010.8Beginning in 2005, five Latin American countries were among the top 20 global recipients of US military assistance (Emerson 2010,41). In 2010, Colombia and Haiti were among the top 10 global recipients of US economic and military assistance (USAID, US Overseas Loans and Grants, Greenbook, 2012).According to Tovrov (2012), "the United States allocates more than $50 billion a year to send abroad in the form of military and economic aid. Among the top 10 nations, military assistance is generally the largest percentage of the total amount sent." In 2012, the top 10 recipients of US aid were Afghanistan, Israel, Pakistan, Egypt, Haiti, Iraq, Jordan, Mexico, Kenya, and Nigeria (ibid.).There are other measures of US militarism in Latin America in the post-Cold War period and after the initiation of the War on Terror. Between 2001 and 2005, 85,820 Latin American soldiers were trained in the United States. In contrast, 61,000 soldiers were trained at the infamous School of the Americas/Westem Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (SOA/WHINSEC) between 1946 and 2000 (Emerson 2010,41). Moreover, the Fourth Fleet, which was established in 1943 and disbanded in 1950, was reactivated on July 1,2008, by the US Department of Defense to "operate in the Caribbean, and Central and South America" (Cruz 2008). US Navy spokespersons insist that the fleet's reactivation was "administrative in nature only" (Espinoza 2008), but Admiral Gary Roughead stated that it "will send a strong signal to all Navies operating in the region" (Ross 2008). Government officials in Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia consider the "US decision to reactivate the Fourth Fleet a matter of concern" (Espinoza 2008). According to John Ross, an American journalist and author who lived and worked in Mexico for decades, "the resurrection and imminent dispatch of the United States Fourth Fleet to patrol the coasts of Latin America invokes the bad old days of Monroe Doctrine impositions and gunboat diplomacy for many citizens of those southern latitudes" (ibid.).In the early twenty-first century, electoral victories of the Left have multiplied and emergent social movements increasingly challenge neoliberalism in Latin America. For the first time in US-Latin American relations since World War II, more US troops and military facilities were located in the region than aid agencies (Chomsky 2006,4). Military tensions are higher now than during the Cold War. Its grip on the region weakening, the US government also lacks the credibility to reassert it.Emerson (2010, 38) argues that the War on Terror replaced the Cold War as "the guiding paradigm for US policy toward Latin America during the George W. Bush administration." For Emerson (ibid., 43), continuity exists in foreign policy logic between the post-September 11 Pentagon strategy of "effective sovereignty" (in which US national security is threatened by "ungovemed spaces" within Latin American countries) and the Cold War conception of "internal enemies." "In contrast to assumptions that the disconnect was a product of US neglect," Emerson notes, "a growing militarization of US policy became evident, a policy that viewed the Western Hemisphere as complementary to the 'War on Terror.'" Jasmin Hristov (2005,106) argues along similar lines that after September 11, the National Security Doctrine focused on the use of low-intensity warfare "under the cover of the War on Drugs or War on Terror" aimed at the "internal enemy." She contends that the internal enemy includes social movements and organizations, as well as "entire sectors of society that have been excluded and marginalized by the current economic model, who are potential sources of challenge with their demands for social justice" (ibid.).Over the last decade, the Pentagon and US Southern Command (Southcom) have become more responsible than the State Department for policy in Latin America. This undoubtedly explains the shift to a security focus (Emerson 2010,41). Southcom 's Command Strategy 2018 announced its intention "to expand its scope by acting as the regional coordinating body for both military and non-military operations" (ibid.). Using data from Just the Facts (at justf.org), Emerson correlates this policymaking shift toward the Pentagon with increased military spending in the region (ibid.). Southcom's change in terminology from "narcotraffickers" to "narcoterrorists" enabled a "doubling of military training in Colombia, with funds originally designed for countemarcotics programs diverted to support counterinsurgency missions" (ibid., 43). According to Delacour, Plan Colombia "exemplifies this exercise of hegemony and the masking of counterinsurgency measures as a countemarcotics policy" (in Kirk and Okazawa-Rey 2000,6).Continuously resorting to military solutions to address social and political problems has exacerbated conflict and sidetracked development in the region. Increased military presence and assistance, as well as counterinsurgency training, in Colombia, Mexico, and Honduras in the name of the wars on drugs and terror reinforce US hegemony, buttress the imposition of neoliberal policies, and subvert democracy in the region.Militarism and Neoliberalism in ColombiaIn Colombia, increases in military training and aid have been justified via the War on Drugs. The country is the prototypical case in Latin America of rising US military expenditures in efforts to repress resistance, from Afro-Colombians to unionized workers to the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). US military training of Colombian armed forces has increased military and paramilitary violence, reinforced US hegemony, and subverted democracy.Colombia's 50-year conflict is extremely complicated, with the situation defying comprehension. Four armed groups, some of which cooperate, are fed by the drug trade. They operate in a nation deeply divided by geography, economic status, ethnicity, and ideology. Unfortunately, the United States-now a key actor in the conflict-is pursuing a dangerously simplistic strategy, one that is doomed to failure. Instead of recognizing the complexity of Colombia's crisis and addressing its many root causes, Washington's approach is dominated by the priorities of the wars on drugs and terror. The Andres Pastrana administration conceived Plan Colombia in 1999. In 2000, the Clinton administration agreed to fund the program, which sought to eradicate drug output and to strengthen democracy in Colombia, at a cost of $1.3 billion (Delacour 2000,63).The United States has poured over seven billion dollars into Colombian military and police aid grants since 1996 (justf.org). Since the late 1980s, the United States has aided the Colombian government in combating the drug trade. Then, Washington's mandate was to avoid involvement in Colombia's long-standing civil war. As counterdrug operations became increasingly dangerous, and guerilla attacks on Colombian security forces grew more successful in the mid-1990s, US efforts to engage Colombian security forces in counterdrug policies conflicted with congressional efforts to condition such assistance on human rights criteria. In August 2000, however, "Clinton waived five of the six human rights conditions, making a mockery of the administration's pronounced concerns for human rights" (Delacour 2000,63).As of 2006, approximately 82 percent of US aid to Colombia went to its military police, largely to aid drug interdiction, arrest drug traffickers, and ensure the safety of the massive herbicide fumigation operation in coca- and poppy-producing areas (Witness for Peace 2006). In 2002, before the war in Iraq erupted, Colombia was the third-largest recipient of US security assistance, behind Israel and Egypt (Isaacson 2003a, 16). Between 1997 and 2002, US aid to Colombia's military increased six times, equaling $1.5 million per day in 2002 (ibid.). In mid-2002, the Bush administration asked Congress for more worldwide anti-terror funding, which became law on August 2, 2002. The bill provided for an expanded campaign against narcotics trafficking and against the FARC, the National Liberation Army, and the paramilitaries, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). This broadened mission laid the foundation for a dramatically increased US military commitment. With the attention of the US public focused on Iraq and the Middle East, the Bush administration helped Colombia's military protect a vulnerable Colombian oil pipeline. In 2002, US troops were sent to Colombia to protect the Cano Limon pipeline, where Occidental Petroleum and Colombia's Ecopetrol produced $5 billion a year in oil (Tate 2004,73).9 With 170 attacks on the pipeline in 2001, the Colombian government petitioned the US government for military aid specifically to protect the pipeline (Leech 2002,3). In 2003, the Bush administration projected $104 million in expenditures to help Colombia's army protect the Cano Limon-Covenas pipeline, of which US oil company Occidental Petroleum owns 44 percent (Isaacson 2003b). In Colombia, the military has historically protected the few at the expense of the majority.The appeal of military aid has grown in the wake of recent international crises. US supporters of military aid to Colombia believe a stronger security force is the best way to protect territory and people. As is the case with other Latin American nations, however, the historical role of Colombia's military has not involved protecting people. While the US and Colombian governments were busy fighting the FARC and other "insurgents" and waging the War on Drugs, Colombia's local governments and its civil society (churches and business associations; labor, human rights, and peace activists; student, campesino, and women's groups; and AfroColombian and indigenous organizations) were busy working peacefully for change. Many in these groups were identified as "insurgents," especially union activists, and were killed or displaced. Over the last 20 years, 4,000 trade unionists have been murdered in Colombia (American Center for International Labor Solidarity 2006, 2). Each year, more union activists are killed in Colombia than in the rest of the world combined (ibid.). On June 30, 2005, "the Colombian Commission of Jurists reported that paramilitaries had killed at least 2,548 civilians since the 2002 cease-fire declaration" (ibid., 7). In an interview cited in the labor center's report, Carlos Castaño, former head of the AUC paramilitary umbrella group, said: "We kill trade unionists because they interfere with people working" (ibid., 12). Of the trade unionists victimized, teachers have been especially targeted (Otis 2012, 5).Removal of Afro-Colombians from their oil-rich lands is another use of militarism to reinforce neoliberalism. In 1996, paramilitaries forced Marino Córdoba, an AfroColombian from the Riosucio municipality of Colombia and former director of the Association of Displaced Afro-Colombians, out of his home for working for the legal recognition of land for Afro-Colombians (Córdoba 2003). Now in the United States, he continues to raise awareness of the plight of displaced Colombians. According to the Human Rights and Displacement Consultancy, over 2.7 million Colombians have been displaced, and Córdoba estimates that Afro-Colombians account for 90 percent of that figure (ibid.).Hristov's Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Columbia cites hundreds of examples of what she calls SC A-sponsored terrorism10 against peasants, indigenous groups, and human rights workers of all kinds:The SC A, which can also be described as the machinery of terror, runs through a system of mutually reinforcing mechanisms that can be grouped into three broad categories: legal, military, and ideological.... Here, the penetration of civil society by the SCA, especially during the last fifteen years, has not been sporadic but rather organized, systematic, and intense. (Hristov 2009a, 26-27; 25)Perhaps the most damning evidence of the relationship between the state and the paramilitaries in Colombia comes from Captain Gilberto Cárdenas, former director of the Judicial Police Investigative and Intelligence Unit (Sección de Investigaciones Judiciales e Inteligencia de la Policía), in a statement made to authorities of the Colombian state and the United Nations:The paramilitaries were created by the Colombian government itself to do the dirty work, in other words, in order to kill all individuals who, according to the state and police, are guerrillas. But in order to do that, they [the government] had to create illegal groups so that no one would suspect the government of Colombia and its military forces.... Members of the army and the police even patrol side by side with the paramilitaries. (Quoted in Hristov 2009a, 58)Colombia's civil war continues. A tenuous peace process began in 2002, when newly elected President Álvaro Uribe approved a law enabling official negotiations with any illegal armed group. By July 2004, the government and the largest paramilitary organization in Colombia, the AUC, reached an agreement known as the Acuerdo de Santa Fe de Ralito, which provided for the demobilization of about 50 paramilitary blocs spread over 28 of Colombia's 32 departments (Hristov 2009b, 12). According to Uribe, "this was the beginning of a process toward peace and the restoration of human rights" (ibid.). The Colombian people had good reason to wish for the dismantling of the paramilitaries. Paramilitaries have committed about 80 percent of all human rights violations against the civilian population of Colombia, which has the regions' worst human rights record, and one of the world's largest populations of internal refugees (Amnesty International 2010a). By 2004, the paramilitaries had gained the upper hand in the fight against the guerrillas, and Uribe gave the "green light to Plan Patriota, the second phase of Plan Colombia" (Brito 2009,36).Colombia's relationship with SOA/WHINSEC further confirms that US military training increases violence and human rights violations and subverts democracy in the region. Over 10,000 Colombian soldiers have trained at the school, with Latin American military officers supposedly learning how to operate professionally within a democratic society. However, Colombia's human rights atrocities have continued to rise as more Colombian soldiers are trained at the US military school. In 2004, over one-third of the soldiers who attended WHINSEC were from Colombia, while Colombia's human rights abuses continued to escalate (WHINSEC 2004a). For the past decade, Colombia has had the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. Nonetheless, the day after President Uribe was reelected in June 2006, the US State Department certified that Colombia was meeting human rights conditions for US military assistance (McFarland Sánchez-Moreno 2006).When General Bantz Craddock, the head of US SOUTHCOM, addressed graduates of the SOA/WHINSEC's Command and General Staff Course in the summer of 2004, he warned soldiers that "today's complex challenges include transnational terrorism, narcoterror, and radical movements" (Board of Visitors Meeting, WHINSEC 2004a). Most Latin American security experts say that, aside from Colombia, the terrorist threat is overstated and terrorists who threaten US citizens on US soil are "scarcer still" (Isaacson 2005). In March 2006, CIA Director Porter Goss testified before the House Armed Services Committee that the United States should pay greater attention to threats "in our own backyard" (ibid.). He noted that "presidential elections will be held in eight South and Central American countries in 2006" and warned that "destabilization or a backslide away from democratic principles would not be helpful to our interests and would probably be threatening to our security in the long run" (Priest and Pincus 2005). Thus, Colombia, an exceptional stronghold of right-wing conservatism in the region, is the country in which the United States remains the most deeply entrenched militarily.More bothersome to the United States than Colombia's human rights record is the decade-long challenge to the Washington Consensus posed by Latin America's anti-neoliberal forces. The Colombian government intensified the conflict in March 2008 when its military crossed the southern border into Ecuador and bombed a FARC encampment, killing 25 (Walcott 2008,11). This violation of territorial boundaries set off a diplomatic standoff with Ecuador that continued until November 2010. Despite the easing of tensions and averting of war, this event highlights the growing polarization in South America. The United States heightened its military presence in Colombia, and on October30,2009, US and Colombian officials signed an agreement that gave US armed forces access to seven Colombian military bases for the next decade (Grandin 2010, 1). Within the hemisphere, this deal was hotly debated, since the repercussions transcended the dynamics of US-Colombian relations. In July 2009, the US Air Force made its last flight from its base in Manta, Ecuador. Growing Ecuadoran dissatisfaction with the base and it effects upon the country prompted its closure. In 2006, President Rafael Correa's campaign promised to close the base when its lease expired in 2009. The leasing of seven new bases in Colombia offset the base closure in Ecuador, and the US foothold in South America became firmer. According to Grandin, "the Obama decision to go forward with the bases accelerates a dangerous trend in US hemispheric policy" (ibid.).A decrease in US military aid to Colombia between 2009 and 2013 had been projected, but the Obama administration continued to justify aid by claiming that enhanced hemispheric security was needed. In 2009, Presidents Obama and Uribe signed the US-Colombia Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA), giving the United States access to the seven bases noted above. On April 15,2012, Presidents Obama and Santos signed the US-Colombia Action Plan on Regional Security as a "response to increasing insecurity generated by transnational organized crime" (US State Department 2012). If there is greater insecurity in Colombia, does this indicate that Plan Colombia has failed, or is the plan being extended via further militarization of the region? Plan Colombia's original conception was as a military strategy to combat the FARC and eradicate coca production intended for the US market. The plan did diminish FARC forces. Yet coca production is still going strong in Colombia, and even greater quantities are being produced in other Andean countries, such as Bolivia and Peru (Crandall 2008).11Although Plan Colombia failed to eliminate the drug trade or the FARC, US policymakers adopted it as a model for policy in Afghanistan and Iraq (Hylton 2010). In a 2009 op-ed piece that connects the two counterinsurgencies, Rozoff (2012) argues: "CBS News quoted an unnamed Pentagon official stating, 'The more Afghanistan can look like Colombia, the better.'The equation is now being reversed." As Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Martin Dempsey reported, "we're getting ready to send some brigade commanders who have been in Iraq and Afghanistan down here to partner with their Joint Task Force commanders in a leader developmental function. The challenges they face are not unlike the challenges we've faced in Iraq and Afghanistan" (ibid.). In April 2012, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta visited Colombia as part of a three-nation tour to coordinate the American role in the "final solution to cut the FARC in half by 2014" (ibid.). Colombia thus remains the focus of US hemispheric military aid in the region, and the model for counterinsurgency doctrine throughout the world (Hylton 2010).Militarism and Neoliberalism in MexicoWhile the Obama administration intends to reinforce diplomatic relations in response to the open militarization carried out by the George W. Bush government (2001 -2009), this diplomatic agenda is still linked to security and military power. In this sense, despite the change in discourse, the practice remains the same.... As the Colombian case has shown and as is becoming evident in the Mexican one, this leads to authoritarian systems with increasing military and paramilitary power, human rights violations, and increased US interference under the guise of help, cooperation, or the defense of its interests and investments in the region. (Delgado-Ramos and Romano 2011)Perhaps no state in Latin America reflects the relationship between neoliberalism and militarism better than Mexico. Neoliberalism there has created growing poverty and resistance, and the state has increasingly resorted to militarism in response. Mexico is now one of the top 10 global recipients of US aid. US military training of the Mexican armed forces intensified with the Zapatista rebellion in 1994. It coincides with increasing military and paramilitary violence and human rights abuses, buttressing the imposition of neoliberal policies and subverting democracy in Mexico.Since the early 1980s, a "neoliberal revolution" has been underway in Mexico, with well-documented effects: "severe cuts in social spending, the gutting of protective legislation, heightened foreign investment and privatization, growing income inequality, and the expansion of crime and violence. Neoliberalism is an attempt to realign and strengthen capitalist imperialism using the tools of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund" (Ochoa 2001,148). On January 1,1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, a group of armed guerrillas calling themselves the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) rose up and occupied government buildings in the town of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in the state of Chiapas. The Zapatistas called upon Mexican workers, the poor, and the labor movement to rise up against neoliberal economies and the violence of poverty, providing a blueprint for a broader Latin American movement, while sending a foreboding message to the power structures in Mexico City and Washington, DC: "This is our response to the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, because this represents a death sentence for all of the indigenous ethnicities in Mexico" (Bums and Charlip 2007,292).In the Center for Economic and Policy Research's assessment of NAFTA after 20 years, Mexico is 18th in a list of 20 Latin American countries when ranked by real growth of GDP per capita, the most basic economic measure of living standards (Weisbrot et al. 2014). Mexican national statistics show that its poverty rate of 52.3 percent in 2012 is almost identical to the 1994 rate (ibid.). As such, 14.3 million more Mexicans were living below the poverty line in 2012 than in 1994 (ibid.). N AFTA's impact on agricultural employment was severe, causing increased poverty and eliminating many small farmers. This was due especially to policies such as the dumping of US com at 30 percent below the cost of production: "From 1991-2007, there were 4.9 million Mexican family farmers displaced, while seasonal labor in agro-export industries increased by about 3 million. This meant a net loss of 1.9 million jobs" (ibid.).Although the Zapatistas never threatened to take state power, the Mexican government immediately sent troops and heavily militarized the state of Chiapas. On behalf of Mexico's indigenous and non-indigenous poor, the Zapatistas demanded land, work, housing, nutrition, health, education, liberty, democracy, peace, justice, and dignity. Instead of upholding the February 16,1996, San Andrés Accords between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government, the state responded with military and paramilitary violence. Violence in Chiapas peaked in 1997 as the paramilitaries (with close ties to the Mexican army) committed horrific atrocities, the most famous being the massacre of Actael, in which a pacifist community of 45, mostly women and children, was brutally executed while praying in their local church.12 Since 1994, the state of Chiapas has withstood low-intensity warfare in a global counterinsurgency strategy supported by the United States.The state of Oaxaca has figured prominently in Mexico's neoliberal resistance and militarized repression. On May 1, 2006, members of Local 22 of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE) delivered a list of economic demands to the state government. It included the creation of education infrastructure, new teaching positions, more teaching materials, support for scholarships and school breakfasts, and improved salaries for teachers (González and Baeza 2007, 30). After no response was forthcoming, hundreds of teachers initiated an encampment in Oaxaca, blocked access to Oaxaca's airport, held mega-marches of about 80,000 people, and created the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, APPO), a coalition of "365 social, political, human rights, non-governmental, environmental, gender, student and union organizations, the indigenous communities, and thousands of independent Oaxacans" (ibid.). APPO's Constituent Assembly, including over 1,000 delegates, adopted the goals of anticapitalism, anti-imperialism, direct democracy, independence from the state, and gender and ethnic equality (ibid., 33).Between May 2006 and April 2007, thousands of teachers, workers, and citizens of Oaxaca "rebelled against the corrupt and oppressive government of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz despite assassinations, disappearances, beastly abuse, and imprisonment.... In retaliation for the events of 2006, federal police repressed hundreds of protestors and arrested dozens of people. They broke into homes without warrants, and raped women" (ibid., 26). On October 27, 2006, teacher Emilio Alonso Fabián and US journalist William Bradley Roland (Brad Will) were assassinated; APPO reported 16 wounded, one disappeared, and three kidnapped teachers (ibid., 32). On October 28, the secretary of government conceded all 17 points on the list of the teachers' demands, and the day after, the federal and state governments initiated even more repression, resulting in three dead, eight wounded, and 50 detained (ibid.). Upon visiting Oaxaca, an International Civil Commission of Observation of Human Rights concluded that "the events that occurred in Oaxaca form part of a juridical, police, and military strategy, acting on a psychosocial and community level, whose goal is to control and intimidate the population in areas where community-based or non-partisan social movements are unfolding" (ibid., 34).In late November 2006, the administration of President Vicente Fox "sent hundreds of military-trained Federal Preventative Police [Policía Federal Preventiva, PFP] to lay siege on the city" (Magaña 2010, 83). Fox augmented the repressive forces of Ulises Ruiz Ortiz with the power of the national government, unleashing an overwhelming display of state power and repression on Oaxaca's resistance movements:The brute force used by the PFP was too much for the nonviolent APPO to overcome, no matter how flexible and adaptable. In one week at least 192 people were taken prisoner by the PFP, many of them shipped to a maximum-security prison in the Northern state of Nayarit.... One of the women I interviewed told me about a friend who was among those arrested and shipped to Nayarit. While in police custody, she was tortured and humiliated. She received electric shocks to the nipples and vagina, was photographed naked by police, and was hung from a helicopter where she was told to scream like she did in the marches. (Ibid.)Between June 14 and December 10, 2006, the violence in Oaxaca resulted in "26 murders, 450 arrests, countless injuries, and almost 30 people 'disappeared.' According to the International Civil Commission for Human Rights Observation's most recent report, the number of politically motivated murders in Oaxaca between the summer of 2006 and April 2008 was 62" (ibid.).13US military expenditures for the War on Drugs contribute to the violence in Mexico. With the crackdown on drug cartels in Colombia, "the United States has supported Mexico's crackdown on drug cartels with both money and personnel," including $1.6 billion between 2007 and 2010 (Tovrov 2012). In 2008, the Bush administration began to implement a multiyear, $ 1.4 billion foreign aid plan known as the Mérida Initiative, "with the stated purpose of enhancing Mexico's ability to reduce crime, with overwhelming emphasis on the drug trade. This aid package complements other forms of US security aid to its southern neighbor, including millions of dollars in annual military aid from the Department of Defense" (Brewer 2009,9). Most Mérida Initiative funds support military aid:The detailed spending plan prepared by the US State Department in September 2008 outlines the proposed uses of Mérida funding, including the purchase of airplanes and helicopters for the Mexican military for surveillance, countemarcotics, and counterterrorism operations; the purchase of scanners and armored vehicles; the establishment of law enforcement databases; training for specialized police units combating organized crime; and anticorruption activities in the federal police. (Ibid.)In 2008, Mexico received nearly $13 million in aid from the Department of Defense (ibid., 13). Critics of the initiative and human rights activists call attention to abuses committed by military forces in Mexico. They particularly fault the deployment of "forces trained for war to perform the work of civilian police" (ibid., 10). Delgado-Ramos and Romano (2011,99) also connect human rights abuses, US military aid, and the drug war in Mexico: "According to Mexico's National Human Rights Commission, complaints against soldiers have increased 500 percent; in 2009 alone, some 1,800 complaints were registered, most of them from the states in which most of the antidrug army contingents are stationed (Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Sinaloa, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Michoacán)."14 Militarization of the Mexican state has increased military and paramilitary violence and human rights abuses against indigenous communities, women, teachers, students, laborrights activists, and other marginalized communities in the name of the War on Drugs and neoliberalism, subverting democracy in Mexico.Military Coup in HondurasHonduras represents one of the most egregious examples of militarism in Latin America. Since the end of the Cold War, it is the only Latin American country in which a military coup successfully deposed a democratically elected leader. The 2009 coup demonstrates the extent to which Latin American elites, with the backing of US military training and aid, will use force to support neoliberalism and subvert democracy. Adult Hondurans remember the brutality of the Honduran government during the 1980s, when the military assassinated and tortured suspected opponents. Honduras's infamous paramilitary Battalion 316 was found responsible for the kidnapping, torture, disappearance, and murder of hundreds of people (Center for Justice and Accountability 2009).On June 28, 2009, democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a coup and whisked away to Costa Rica by the golpista government of Roberto Micheletti, which maintained power through force and unleashed a wave of human rights violations in Honduras for more than 125 days without agreeing to negotiate or cede power to the elected president. One week after the coup, the military fired 160 rounds of live ammunition into a nonviolent crowd, killing a teenager (Goodman 2011). By mid-August, the coup regime had carried out nine politically motivated murders, countless military attacks on peaceful protesters, and ordered the arrest of over 1,300 people (Beachy 2009). Direct links exist between the 2009 military coup and the military government of the 1980s. The golpista government's special security advisor was Billy Joya, a former member of Battalion 316, who was trained in counterinsurgency techniques at the School of the Americas. General Luis Javier Prince Suazo, the head of the Honduran Air Force and SO A graduate, arranged to have Zelaya flown into exile in Costa Rica (Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice 2009). Similar to the 1980s, the military detained hundreds, and protesters and teachers, peasant farmers, students, and journalists disappeared. The elite Honduran police force, COBRA, harassed Hondurans in urban and rural areas. To shut down the press and restrict freedom of expression, major television and radio stations were militarized as part of the coup (Amnesty International 2010b, 4).On June 28, the Obama administration decried the coup and called for the restoration of democracy in Honduras, but US policymakers responded sluggishly and ambivalently throughout the summer and fall of 2009, reflecting ingrained patterns of US-Honduran relations, especially longstanding ties with the military. US policymakers had begun to distrust President Manuel Zelaya, who inched toward the Left after his election in 2005. Before the coup, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a neoliberal US government aid agency, pumped nearly $17 million in foreign aid to Honduras between April 1 and July 31, 2009 (Conroy 2010). Created by Congress in 2004 with strong bipartisan support, the MCC was to "provide some of the world's poorest countries with large-scale grants to fund country-led solutions for reducing poverty through sustainable economic growth."15 The MCC claims to be committed to helping poor countries reduce poverty, but it only helps "those countries committed to good governance, economic freedom, and investments in their citizens," that is, those with a strict neoliberal free-trade development model. Zelaya had "fallen out of favor with the Honduran business class" in part because he joined the Chavez-led Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), a move ratified by the Honduran Congress in October 2008 (ibid.). The 2009 Honduran coup demonstrates that Latin American leaders who reject the Washington Consensus and neoliberalism and lack the support of their militaries and economic elites can face reprisals in the form of militarism, often backed by the United States:Just a month before his overthrow, Zelay a-in response to an investigation that charged Goldcorp, another Vancouver-based company, with contaminating Honduras 's Siria Valley-introduced a law that would have required community approval before new mining concessions were granted; it also banned open-pit mines and the use of cyanide and mercury. That legislation died with his ouster. Zelaya also tried to break the dependent relationship whereby the region exports oil to US refineries only to buy back gasoline and diesel at monopolistic prices ; he joined Petrocaribe-the alliance that provides cheap Venezuelan oil to member countries-and signed a competitive contract with Conoco Phillips. This move earned him the ire of Exxon and Chevron, which dominate Central America's fuel market. (Grandin 2010)In Europe, Latin America, and the United States, human rights organizations called for the United States to cut diplomatic relations and economic aid to Honduras to comply with international laws governing military coups (Section 7008 of the US Foreign Operations Law) (Dangle 2009a). After the June 28 announcement that a coup had occurred, however, the US government "withheld determination" until mid-August. It refused to demand Zelaya's return, because, according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, "we're working with others on behalf of our ultimate objectives" (Dangle 2009b). US policymakers were ambivalent about returning Zelaya to power. The US ambassador to Honduras, Ambassador Hugo Llorens, previously served as President George W. Bush's National Security Advisor on issues pertaining to Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. His resume includes the 2002 Venezuelan coup attempt against Hugo Chávez. As human rights atrocities mounted, international pressure against the Honduran coup gained legitimacy. By August, US officials again admitted that a coup had taken place, but it was too late to save Manuel Zelaya's presidency.The November 2009 election "was marked by violence and fraud, was boycotted by the EU, the UN, the Carter Center, the OAS, and half of the Honduran voters" (Fasquelle 2011,20). Porfirio Lobo won the election, which has been described as the "progeny of the military coup that deposed President Zelaya on June 28, 2009" (Frank 2012, 11). After the election, heads of state throughout the region refused to recognize Lobo's presidency; the United States "hailed him for restoring democracy and restoring reconciliation" (ibid.). President Obama even invited him to the White House. Upon his inauguration in January 2010, President Lobo declared the crisis over and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed those remarks as ex-President Manuel Zelaya was "allowed" to leave the Brazilian embassy. Since Lobo's inauguration,repression in Honduras has increased. Honduras has the highest homicide rate in the hemisphere, and protesters and human rights advocates have experienced illegal detentions, executions by death squads, intimidation, and torture. In Honduras, a man, woman, or child is killed every 74 minutes (ibid., 14).Despite the repression, activists in Honduras and throughout the hemisphere have protested the "illegitimate" government of the Lobo administration. On May 28, 2011, through a deal brokered by Colombian President Manuel Santos and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Manuel Zelaya was allowed to return to Honduras almost two years after he was deposed. This marked the largest demonstration in Honduran history, with an estimated 11 percent of the Honduran population attending (Frank 2011). Upon Zelaya's return, the United States called for the reinstatement of Honduras to the OAS, which took place in June 2011. Only Ecuador dissented due to persistent human rights violations. Some voices in the United States have spoken out against the undemocratic and violent government in Honduras. Ninety-four members of the House of Representatives signed a letter dated March 9,2012, which called for the suspension of police and military aid to Honduras. On March 5, 2012, seven senators signed a letter expressing concerns over the "increasing human rights violations in Honduras" (Frank 2012, 14). Although the US State Department admits that human rights violations exist in Honduras, the US government sees working with the Honduran military as a solution. On March 6,2012, Vice President Biden flew to Honduras and promised to increase military and police funds to $107 million under the Central American Regional Security Initiative. President Obama's proposed budget for 2013 more than doubled police and military funds for Honduras (ibid.). Given the increases in US military funding and the extensive political and social violence, Honduras has become the Colombia of 10 years ago.Honduras remains strategically important for the US military in the region, serving as the regional hub for US military operations in Central America. Human rights organizations in Honduras such as COFEDAH (Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras-Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras) agree that the drug war is "a pretext for a greater military occupation" (ibid., 17). Human rights workers in Honduras and defenders of human rights in the United Nations and throughout the world have called on Honduras to guarantee basic human rights. This is difficult since the United States props up the government, the police, and the military, which are heavily involved in human rights violations, the drug trade, and criminal activity. Delgado-Ramos and Romano (2011, 101) summarize the role of US hegemony in the context of the Honduran coup:The US Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies... organized a workshop to advise Honduran police and army forces, as well as Congress members and government officials, on the planning of national security strategies.... The seriousness of US interference in internal affairs through this type of "advising" is compounded by the fact that the Honduran government receiving these internal security "suggestions" is the product of a technical coup d'état against a constitutional president.US military training of the Honduran armed forces has unequivocally increased military violence, reinforced neoliberalism, and subverted democracy in the region.SOA/WHINSEC: Architect of Violence and RepressionThe US Army School of the Americas (SOA/WHINSEC) is the model for US military training and counterinsurgency in Latin America. SOA/WHINSEC was established in 1946 in Panama as a Cold War mechanism for keeping order and stability in the region and serving as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. In 1984, in compliance with the Panama Canal Treaty, the school was moved to Ft. Benning, Georgia. For over 60 years, the school, under several names, has taught courses to Latin American military officers on counterinsurgency methods, counter-narcotics, command and general staff, human rights training, and democratic consolidation (WHINSEC 2004b).The US military and policymakers view the school as a way to secure democracy in Latin America and to help professionalize their militaries. Yet it gained notoriety in the hemisphere as a "School of Assassins" and boasts among its graduates men who have committed some of the most horrific atrocities in Latin America.16 In December 2000, the SO A Watch movement, which sought to close the school while investigating past and current atrocities and their links to its graduates, won enough support from Congress and the American public to motivate the US Army to close the Army School of the Americas. Only three weeks later, in January 2001, the army reopened the school in the same building, with the same instructors, under a new name-The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. As the SOA Watch movement would attest, "New Name, Same Shame."Katherine McCoy's (2005) article on the school 's torture and human rights record directly challenged the US government's argument that US military training leads to the professionalization of Latin American militaries and the democratization of Latin America. She analyzed the course records of nearly 12,000 SOA graduates from six countries (Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, and Panama), between 1960 and 2000, and tracked their human rights records during the 40-year period to determine the impact of SOA training. The more courses an SOA graduate took, McCoy concluded, the more likely the graduate was to commit human rights abuses. Moreover, if the graduate took two or more courses, they were more than three times as likely to commit human rights abuses than soldiers who took one course (ibid., 57). Students who took three courses had a higher rate of abuse and committed abuses sooner after graduation (ibid.). McCoy concluded that "repeated SOA training was associated with increased human rights violations in times of war and peace, under democratic presidents and dictatorial regimes, and both during and after the cold war" (ibid., 61).The recent coups in Haiti in 1991 and 2004, the Venezuelan coup attempt of 2002, and the Honduran coup of 2009, which was led by an SOA graduate, exemplify the continuation of violence in the region. A legacy of the Cold War, SOAAVHINSEC remains the bulwark of US military training, and thus violence, in the hemisphere. Though not the only US military training school for the region, it is the premiere one and a shining example. Newly elected Latin American leaders are beginning to withdraw troops from the school because of its reputation. Leaders in the United States must likewise cease this perpetuation of violence (funded by US taxpayers) in Latin America.Conclusion: Moving beyond MilitarismColombia and Honduras are the most violent and heavily militarized nations in Latin America. Mexico is not far behind. Military solutions have not worked in these countries, and innocent civilians continue to die. Poverty and inequality caused by neoliberalism lead the marginalized communities most affected by neoliberal policies to resist. US military expenditures in Latin America and ongoing military training of its armed forces by entities such as SOAAVHINSEC repress that resistance, increase military and paramilitary violence, reinforce US hegemony, and subvert democracy in the region. In this context, are peace and change possible?Guatemala is the first Latin American country to place a former president on trial for genocide. President Jose Efraín Rios Montt, a former SOA graduate, whose 14-month rule between 1982 and 1983 resulted in the killing or disappearance of 70,000 people and the displacement of hundreds of thousands, was charged in 2011 with genocide and crimes against humanity and placed under house arrest while awaiting trial (Wirtz 2012). On May 10, 2013, in Guatemala City, a threejudge trial court convicted Rios Montt of crimes against humanity and genocide of more than 1,700 indigenous Ixil Mayans (Castillo 2013). After a six-week trial and testimony of over 90 witnesses, dozens of forensic and other experts, and the presentation of documentary and other evidence, Rios Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison. Prosecutors presenteda month of chilling testimony from survivors of Army massacres carried out 30 years ago during one of the bloodiest periods of Guatemala's long civil war. Experts in the trial described how the Army had marched into remote hamlets in the Maya Ixil region in search of leftist guerrillas during General Rios Montt's 17-month rule in 1982 and 1983. Soldiers killed all those who could not flee, burning down houses, killing livestock and destroying crops. (Malkin 2013)The trial court issued a 718-page judgment laying the foundation for the 80-year sentence (Open Society Foundations 2013). Three days later, the Constitutional Court overturned the conviction due to a "procedural irregularity," and now lawyers on both sides believe that the case must be retried in front of new judges (Malkin 2013). Nevertheless, the Open Society Justice Initiative states the importance of this case in addressing military violence in Latin America: "The trial marks the first time a former head of state has been tried for genocide in a domestic court. It is an important milestone in holding political and military leaders accountable for international crimes" (ibid.). The arrest of Augusto Pinochet in 1998 and the conviction of Efraín Rios Montt in 2013 prove that world leaders must concern themselves with what happens when they leave office, as well as how they treat their citizens while in office.The United States needs a new foreign policy in Latin America based on democracy, development, and the preservation of human rights, not one that defends neoliberal economic policies with arms. Latin American nations will demand no less. Perhaps Rigoberta Menchú, the Guatemalan activist and politician, put it best in 2001 in a letter she penned to President George W. Bush, when she responded to his statement that "all nations in all regions of the world must now make a decision: You are with us or you are with the terrorists" (Menchú 2001). She retorted: "Before you give the cry for war, I would like to invite you to think about a different type of world leadership, one which must convince rather than conquer, in which the human species can show that in the last 1,000 years we have overcome the idea of an eye for an eye."NOTES1. We discuss Rios Montt's complicated trial in greater detail at the end of the article.2. 1998: Hugo Chávez, Venezuela; 1999: Ricardo Lagos, Chile; 2002: Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil; 2003: Néstor Kirchner, Argentina; 2004: Tabaré Ramón Vázquez, Uraguay; 2005: Evo Morales, Bolivia; 2006: Michelle Bachelet,Chile; 2006: Manuel Zelaya, Honduras; 2006: Rafael Correa, Ecuador; 2006: Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua; 2007: Cristina Fernández Kirchner, Argentina; 2008: Fernando Lugo, Paraguay; 2009: José Mujica, Uruguay; 2009: Mauricio Funes, El Salvador; 2010: Dilma Rousseff, Brazil; 2011: Ollanta Humala, Peru; and 2013: Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela.3. For many authors, the Washington Consensus is the conflation of US foreign policy and economic interests through the domination of neoliberal structural adjustment policies via the IMF, World Bank, and WTO. Many scholars have also written about the New American Imperialism, American Empire, and the unilateralism that accompanied the US policy agenda during the Reagan-Bush years. George W. Bush's administration took this to new heights and the Obama administration largely left it unchallenged.4. Data from Just the Facts. See http://justf.org/All_Grants_Country?yearl=l996&year2=20l 3 &funding=All+Programs&subregion=Entire+Region&x=68&y=6.5. See, for example, our recent article, "Latin American Social Movements and a New Left Consensus: State and Civil Society Challenges to Neoliberal Globalization" (2014) in New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture 36(1): 1-31.6. See Latin American Provincials of the Society of Jesus (1997.43) and Gent (2008b).7. See also Berrigan and Wingo (2005) and Just the Facts for data collected throughout this period.8. The Congressional Research Service Report on U.S. Foreign Assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean: Recent Trends and FY2013 Appropriation covers the Obama administration's foreign aid budget request for fiscal year 2013, citing "the recent downward trend in assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean," beginning in 2010. However, in taking non-fuel Pentagon contracts into account, John Lindsay-Poland argues that "US military spending in the region is still considerably higher than during the George W. Bush administration, when the equivalent Pentagon spending in Latin America averaged $301 million a year" (at http://forusa.org/blogs/john-lindsay-poland/pentagon-continuescontracting-us-companies-latin-america/11782).9. See also Joseph L. Galloway, "U.S. Forces Expanding Role in Colombia Beyond Drug Mission, Troops Now Working to Protect Oil Pipeline," Charlotte Observer, January 21, 2003.10. SCA stands for state's coercive apparatus; see Hristov (2009, 26-27; 25).11. Aerial spraying has reduced coca production in Colombia somewhat, but not the amount of cocaine entering the United States. Supplies from nearby countries compensate for Colombia's decline.12. During a July 2005 Witness for Peace delegation to study neoliberalism in Chiapas, the authors heard directly from members of Las Abejas ("The Bees"), who gave direct and moving accounts of the massacre that occurred while they were attending church.13. See also Comisión Civil Internaciónal de Observación por los Derechos Humanos (CCIODH), Informe Sobre los Hechos de Oaxaca (2008, Barcelona: Graficas Lunas), 209; and Lynn Stephen, '"We are brown, we are short, we are fat.... We are the face of Oaxaca': Women Leaders in the Oaxaca Rebellion," Socialism and Democracy 21(2): 97-112.14. Mexico's case is not exceptional in the region: "According to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, in 2001 three out of four Latin American countries receiving US military and intelligence assistance had serious human rights violations" (Delgado-Ramos and Romano 2011, 99).15. The US Secretary of State chairs the MCC board of directors and the US Treasury Secretary is the vice chair. Information on the MCC is found at www.mcc.gov.16. Argentina: General Roberto Viola, General Jorge Rafael Videla Redondo, Emilio Massera; Chile: Colonel Pablo Belmar, Miguel Krassnoff; Bolivia: General Hugo Banzer; El Salvador: Captain Roberto D'Aubisson, Colonel Franscisco del Cid Diaz; Colombia: General Luis Alfonso Zapata Uribe, General Rafael Samudio Molina; Guatemala: General Efraín Ríos Montt; and Panama: General Manuel Noriega.References:American Center for International Labor Solidarity2006 "Justice for All: The Struggle for Worker Rights in Colombia." At www.usleap. org/files/ColombiaFinal_0.pdf.Amnesty International2010a "Annual Report on Colombia." At www.amnesty.org/en/region/colombia/ report-2010.2010b "Honduras: Submission to the UN Universal Periodic Review, Ninth Session of the UPR Working Group of the Human Rights Council." November-December.Barcena, Alicia2012 "Picture This: Growing Out of Poverty." Finance and Development 49(1): 44-45. At www.impforg/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2012/03/picture.htm.Beachy, Ben2009 "Tomorrow: Global Day of Action for Honduras." Witness for Peace, August 10. At www.witnessforpeace.org.Berrigan, Frida and Jonathan Wingo2005 "The Bush Effect: U.S. Military Involvement in Latin America Rises, Development and Humanitarian Aid Fall." World Policy Institute, November 5. At www.commondreams.org/views05/1105-21.htm.Board of Visitors Meeting, WHINSEC2004 Ft. Benning, Georgia, July 16.Brewer, Stephanie Erin2009 "Rethinking the Mérida Initiative: Why the US Must Change Course in Its Approach to Mexico's Drug War." Human Rights Brief 16(3): 9-14.Britto, Lina2009 "Colombia and Ecuador: A Clash of Two Plans." NACIA Report on the Americas 42(4): 35-39.Burns, E. Bradford and Julie A. Charlip2007 Latin America: An Interpretive History. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.Bush, George W.2002 "Remarks of U.S. President George W. Bush to the World Affairs Council National Conference, at the Organization of American States," January 16. At www.oas.org/en/media_center/speech.asp?sCodigo=02-0026.Castillo, Mariano2013 "Guatemala's Ríos Montt Guilty of Genocide." CNN, May 13. At www.cnn. com/2013/05/10/world/americas/guatemala-genocide-trial.Center for Justice and Accountability2009 "Honduras: Battalion 316, Torture and Forced Disappearance." At www.cja.org/ article.php?list=type&type=254.Chomsky, Noam2006 Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. New York: Henry Holt and Company.Conroy, Bill2009 "Millennium Challenge Corp. Poured Millions into Honduras in Months Leading up to Putsch." The Narcosphere, August 9. At http://narcosphere, narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2009/08/millennium-challenge-co.Córdoba, Marino2003 Association of Displaced Afro-Colombians (AFRODES), interview with Ginger Williams, Washington, DC, October 3.MCorporation Latinobarómetro2010 Latinobarómetro 2010 Report, Chile, December. At www.latinobarometro.org/ latino/LATContenidos.jsp.Crandall, Russell2008 Driven by Drugs: US. Policy Toward Colombia, 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner.Cruz, J.A.2008 "Fourth Fleet Threatens Peace, Democracy in Latin America." People's World, June 7. At www.peoplesworld.org/fourth-fleet-threatens-peace-democracy-in-latin-americal.Dangle, Benjamin2009a "The Road to Zelaya's Return: Money, Guns, and Social Movements in Honduras," September 21. At http: //bendlanglnet/? cat=36.2009b "Showdown in Honduras: The Rise and Uncertain Future of the Coup," June 29. At www.TowardFreedom.com.Delacour, Justin2000 "Plan Colombia: Rhetoric, Reality, and the Press." Social Justice 27(4): 63-75.Delgado-Ramos, Gian Carlo and Silvina Maria Romano2011 "Political-Economic Factors in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Colombia Plan, the Merida Initiative, and the Obama Administration." Translated by Mariana Ortega Brena. Latin American Perspectives 38(4): 93-108.Emerson, R. Guy2010 "Radical Neglect? The 'War on Terror' and Latin America." Latin American Politics and Society 52(1): 33-62.Espinoza, Marla Daniela2008 "U.S Decision to Reactivate the Fourth Fleet a Matter of Concern." El Universal, Caracas, Venezuela, June 3. At www.worldpress.org/Americas/3164. cfm.Fasquelle, Rodolfo Pastor2011 "The 2009 Coup and the Struggle for Democracy in Honduras." NACLA: Report on the Americas 44( 1): 16-21.Foster, John Bellamy2007 "The Latin American Revolt: An Introduction." Monthly Review 59(3): 1-7.Frank, Dana2011 "Honduras: Zelaya Returns but Justice Is Still Not Done." The Nation, June 3. At www.TheNation.com.2012 "Honduras: Which Side Are We On?" The Nation, June 11. At www.TheNation. com.Gent, Michael G.2008a "Undoing the Damage: The Growing Backlash to Neoliberalism in Latin America." Delaware Review of Latin American Studies 9(2). At www.udel.edu/ LAS/Vol9-2Gent.html.2008b "Neoliberalism in Latin America: Ten Years after the Jesuit Provincials Sounded the Alarm." At www.sjweb.info/documents/sjs/docs/Gent_PJ98.pdf.Gill, Leslie2004 The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Gonzalez, Gloria Martinez and Alejandro Valle Baeza2007 "Oaxaca: Rebellion against Marginalization, Extreme Poverty and Abuse of Power." Monthly Review 59(3): 26-37.Goodman, Amy2011 "Demanding an End to Violence and Repression in Honduras." Rabble.ca, June 1. At http: //rabble.ca/columnists/2011/06/demanding-end-violence-and-repression-honduras.Grandin, Greg2010 "Muscling Latin America," January. At www.catalunyaoberta.cat/hemeroreca/ statics/fles/TheNation1.pdf.Hristov, Jasmin2005 "Freedom and Democracy or Hunger and Terror: Neoliberalism and Militarization in Latin America." Social Justice 32(2): 89-114.2009a Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia. Athens: Ohio University Research in International Studies, Ohio University Press.2009b. "Legalizing the Illegal: Paramilitarism in Colombia's 'Post-Paramilitary' Era." NACLA Report on the Americas 42(4).Hylton, Forrest2010 "Plan Colombia: The Measure of Success." At http: Hdemocracyinamericas.org/ pdfs/Hylton.pdf.Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice2009 "The Coup in Honduras." At www.icpj.net/latin-america.Isaacson, Adam2003a "Washington's New War in Columbia." NACLA Report on the Americas 36(5): 13-18.2003b Senior Colombian Advisor, Center for International Policy, interview with Ginger Williams, Washington, DC, January 20.2005 "Closing the Seams: U.S. Security Policy in the Americas." NACLA Report on the Americas 38(6): 13-17.Kirk, Gwyn and Margo Okazawa-Rey2000 "Neoliberalism. Militarism, and Armed Conflict: An Introduction." Social Justice 27(4): 1-17.Latin American Provincials of the Society of Jesus1997 "Letter and Study Document on Neo-liberalism in Latin America." Promotio Iustitiae 67: 41-60. At www.sjweb.info/documents/sjs/pj/docs_pdf/PJ67.ENG.pdfLeech, Garry2002 "Washington's New Rules of Engagement." Colombia Journal, November 18. At http: llcolombiajournal.org/washingtons-new-rules -of-engagement.htm.Macdonald, Laura and Arne Ruckert2009 "Post-Neoliberalism in the Americas: An Introduction." In Post-Neoliberalism in the Americas, edited by Laura Macdonald and Arne Ruckert, 1-18. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Magaña, Maurice Rafael2010 "Analyzing the Meshwork as an Emerging Social Movement Formation: An Ethnographic Account of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO)." Journal of Contemporary Anthropology 1(1): 72-87.Malkin, Elizabeth2013 "Genocide Trial of Guatemalan Ex-Dictator May Have to Restart." New York Times, May 21. At www.nytimes.com/20I3/05/22/world/americas/trial-of-exdictator-of-guatemala-may-have-to-restart.html?ref=efrainriosmontt.McCoy, Katherine E.2005 "Trained to Torture? The Human Rights Effects of Military Training at the School of the Americas." Latin American Perspectives 32(6): 47-64.McFarland Sdnchez-Moreno, Maria2006 "Colombia: Rosy Picture Belies Stark Problems." Human Rights Watch. June 14. At www.hrw.org/news/2006/06l13/colombia-rosy-picture-belies-stark-problems.McSherry, Patrice2000 "Preserving Hegemony: National Security Doctrine in the Post-Cold War Era." NACLA Report on the Americas 34(3): 26-55.Menchú, Rigoberta2001 Open letter from Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu to President George W. Bush, September 23. At http: Hglohalresearch.calarticleslMENI09A.html.Ochoa, Enrique C.2001 "Neoliberalism, Disorder, and Militarization in Mexico." Latin American Perspectives 28(4): 148-59.Open Society Foundations2013 "The Trial of Efraín Ríos Montt and Mauricio Rodriguez." Open Society Justice Initiative. At www.riosmontt-trial.org/20l3/05/statement-legal-stalemate-over-guatemalas-rios-montt-genocide-trial-threatens-victims-rights/.Otis, John2012 "Targeting Teachers: The 'Dirty War' against Colombia's Unions," February 9. At www.globalpost.com/dispatchlnewslregionslamericaslcolombiall20207l colombia-unions-teachers-viotence.Panitch, Leo and Sam Gindin2003 "American Imperialism and Eurocapitalism: The Making of Neoliberal Globalization." Studies in Political Economy 71-72: 7-38.Peet. Richard2003 Unholy Trinity. The IMF, World Bank, and WTO. London: Zed Books.Priest, Dana and Walter Pincus2005 "CIA, White House Defend Transfers of Terror Suspects." Washington Post, March 18.Ross, John2008 "Fourth Fleet Steams South Return of the Gunboat ." Counterpunch Webzine, July 29. At www.counterpunch.org/2008/07/29/return-of-the-gunboat/.Rozoff. Rick2012 "U.S.'s Post-Afghanistan Counterinsurgency War: Colombia." April 23. At www. opednews.com/articles/U-S-sPost-Afghanistan-Co-by-Rick-Rozoff-120423-8.Tate, Winifred2004 "No Room for Peace: United States' Role in the Colombian Peace Process." Accord 14: 70-73. At www.c-r.org/accord-article/no-room-peace-united-states%E2%80%99-policy-colombia.Tovrov, Daniel2012 "Top Ten Recipients of U.S. Aid." International Business Times, February 6. At www.ibtimes.com/articles/293844/20l20206/aid-humanitarian-top-ten.htm.USAID2012 U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants, Obligations and Loan Authorizations. The Greenbook, Companion to the Annual Report to Congress. At http: Hgbk.eads. usaidallnet.gov/data/fast-facts.html.ttUS Department of State2012 "Joint Press Release on the United States-Colombia Action Plan on Regional Security Cooperation." Office of the Spokesperson, April 15. At www.state. gov/rl/pa/prslps/2012104/187928.htm.Walcott, Judith2008 "The Ecuador-Colombia Border: Historical Links, Current Events, and Future Possibilities." A Writenet Report Commissioned by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Emergency, and Technical Support Service, ii-26.Walton, Michael2004 "Neoliberalism in Latin America: Good, Bad, or Incomplete?" Latin American Research Review 39(3): 165-83.Weisbrot, Mark, Stephan Lefebvre, and Joseph Sammut2014 "Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Assessment after Twenty Years." Center for Economic and Policy Research. At www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/ nafta-20-years.WHINSEC2004a Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation Public Affairs Office Publication, Ft. Benning, Georgia.2004b Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation Course Syllabi, received from Major Tony Raimondo, J.D.Wirtz Nicolas2012 "Rios Montt and the Genocide Trial in Guatemala." Americas Quarterly, June 7. At http://americasquarterly.org/rios-montl-and-the-genocide-trial-in-guatemala%20.Witness For Peace2006 Newsletter 23(1), Spring.Author affiliation:Ginger Williams & Jennifer DisneyAuthor affiliation: GINGER WILLIAMS is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Peace, Justice, and Conflict Resolution Studies Program, which she founded in 2006, at Winthrop University. Specializing in the history of US-Latin American relations, her current work focuses on twentieth-century social movements in the United States and Latin America. She is a past president of the Peace History Society. JENNIFER LEIGH DISNEY is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Winthrop University. Her areas of teaching, research, and scholarship are in the fields of comparative politics and political theory, focusing on development, underdevelopment, and social movements in Africa and Latin America. Temple University Press published her 2008 book. Women's Activism and Feminist Agency in Mozambique and Nicaragua.</div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 22.8571434020996px; clear: both;"> Read more: <a href="http://www.readperiodicals.com/201507/3659706701.html#ixzz3fnt1odmZ" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none;">http://www.readperiodicals.com/201507/3659706701.html#ixzz3fnt1odmZ</a></div><div>
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soawatch cf  court rules names must be public, outlawed by bush2

kpfa 10 am 4/28/13 husb 1 yr in Lompoc 9no time off) jliteky AT judy liteky 100K fine for fed tresspass?

<a href="http://www.soaw.org/">http://www.soaw.org/</a>

<h1>Most Notorious SOA Graduates<a name="most" /></h1><a name="most">

</a><a name="most">This list is a summary of the most notorious SOA grads, sorted by

country of origin, which is current as of 04/10/2012, and will be

updated continuously.</a>

<a name="most">For a more complete list of the graduates sorted by country, click </a><a href="http://www.soaw.org/about-the-soawhinsec/soawhinsec-grads/notorious-grads#bottom">here</a>.

<h2><a name="Argentina">ARGENTINA</a></h2>

Name: Naval Officer Emilio Massera (Deceased), Commander-in-chief of the Navy, 1973 - 1978 , Military Junta Leader 1976 – 1978
Country: Argentina
Dates/courses: Attended the School of the Americas in Panama*
Info: In May 1976, Massera, then head of the Navy, undertook a military coup against Perón, together with General Jorge Videla (<a href="http://www.soaw.org/about-the-soawhinsec/soawhinsec-grads/notorious-grads#videla">see below</a>),

and the army commander, and Brigadier Ramón Agostin, the commander of

the air force. Sought out by the US government for his opposition to

communisum, he attended the SOA, then located in Panama, and installed

an interrogation and torture centre in the Naval School of Mechanics,

ESMA. Here, around 30,000 “enemies of the state” where held as

prisoners, and tortured, killed, and routinely taken on “death flights”

where they would be dropped from airplanes into the river plate. The

newborn babies from women who gave birth while in captivity where sold

and/or given away to military families and members of the police force.
Assisting

the US with the development of Plan Cóndor, too coordinate the

terrorism efforts of South American military dictatorships at the time,

he also supported the US backed military dictatorships in Central

America. In August 1978, he was ultimately forced to retire. In 1999 an

international arrest warrant for him was issued but Argentina refused to

extradite him to Spain.

*(This SOA graduate is not in our

database, but was determined to have attended the SOA through other

sources: The Independent, Nov. 10th, 2010)

Name: <a name="videla">General Jorge Rafael Videla Redondo - Army commander, Military Junta Leader 1976 – 1981
Country: Argentina
Dates/courses: Trained at the School of the Americas facility in Panamá. *
Info:

Videla took power together with the “Junta of 3” (with the leaders of

the three branches of the armed forces) in 1976 in a coup d’etat that

overthrew María Estela de Perón, former wife of  Perón. He continued in

power until 1981. Like Massera, he participated in the “disappearances”

of 30,000 persons, and coordinated acts of repression in neighboring

Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay operating to implement the U.S. designed

“Plan Condor.”  (Punto Final, Jan. 2011)
In 1985 he was discharged

from the army, and received a life sentence for crimes against humanity

(though he was later pardoned by Menem in 1990, and remained in liberty

until 1998.) Videla, is as of 2008 now being held in military custody.

(The Cutting Edge, Nov. 2008)
*(This SOA graduate is not in our

database, but was determined to have attended the SOA through other

sources: The Independent, Nov. 10th, 2010)

Name: General Roberto Viola
Country: Argentina
Dates/courses: 1971, Tactical Officer, Arg. Cadet Course.
Info:

Military dictator, 1981: Achieved power via scheduled change of

military rulers. (WP, 5/19/94) In December 1985, Viola was convicted of

murder, kidnapping and torture during the "dirty war."(The New York

Times, 10/8/89)

Name: Luis Arce Gomez
Country: Argentina
Dates/courses: Communications course, Tactical officer and radio repair courses, 1958
Info:

With Garcia Meza Tejada, Arce Gomez plotted and executed a bloody coup,

which occurred on July 17, 1980. (Garcia Meza became "president" and

Arce Gomez Minister of the Interior.) Prior to the coup, Arce Gomez was

in charge of assembling a paramilitary force to overthrow the

government. (One of his recruits was Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal

known as the Butcher of Lyon) (Americas Watch Report, Bolivia: The

Trial of Responsibilities: The Garcia Meza Tejada Trial, 1993) Drug

trafficking (convicted), 1989: Arce Gomez, who was declared a fugitive

from justice in 1986, was captured by Bolivian police in 1989. With the

approval of the Bolivian government, he was handed over to the United

States and is currently serving a 30-year sentence in Miami for

drug-trafficking. (Americas Watch Report, Bolivia: The Trial of

Responsibilities: The Garcia Meza Tejada Trial, 1993)

Name: General Leopoldo Galtieri, military dictator, 1981-1982
Country: Argentina
Dates/courses: Engineer course, 1949
Info: One

of many violent dictators of Argentina, who achieved power by means of a

violent coup. Galtieri was convicted and sentenced to 12 years in

prison for leading Argentina into the disastrous war with Britain for

control of the Falkland Islands, using the war as a way to manipulate

public support for the military. He was pardoned, along with 280 other

human rights abusers by President Carlos Menem in October 1989. (The New

York Times, 10/12/89)

</a><h2><a name="videla" /><a name="bolivia">BOLIVIA</a></h2>

Name: Sub. Tte. Luis Arce Gomez
Country: Bolivia
Dates/courses: 1958, Communications Officer; 1958, Tactical Officer, Radio Repair
Info: Armed

insurrection (convicted), 1980: With Garcia Meza Tejada, Arce Gomez

plotted and executed a bloody coup, which occurred on July 17, 1980.

(Garcia Meza became "president" and Arce Gomez minister of the

Interior.) Prior to the coup, Arce Gomez was in charge of assembling a
paramilitary

force to overthrow the government. (One of his recruits was Klaus

Barbie.) (Americas Watch Report, Bolivia: The Trial of Responsibilities:

The Garcia Meza Tejada Trial, 1993)             Drug trafficking

(convicted), 1989: Arce Gomez, who was declared a fugitive from justice

in 1986, was captured by Bolivian police in 1989. With the approval of

the Bolivian government, he was handed over to the United States and is

currently serving a 30-year sentence in Miami for drug-trafficking.

(Americas Watch Report, Bolivia: The Trial of Responsibilities: The

Garcia Meza Tejada Trial, 1993)

Name: General Hugo Banzer Suarez
Country: Bolivia
Dates/courses: Attended the SOA in 1956
Info:

Military general and dictator of Bolivia after seizing power in a

violent coup in 1971.  He closed universities and banned all political

activity, participated in Operation Condor, and his rule was repressive

with numerous labor leaders and members of the opposition exiled, jailed

and killed. Several thousand Bolivians sought asylum in foreign

countries, 3,000 political opponents were arrested, 200 were killed, and

many more were tortured. In the basement of the Ministry of the

Interior or "the horror chambers" around 2,000 political prisoners were

held and tortured with many others disappeared.  For all this, Banzer

was included in a photo gallery called the “Wall of Fame” at the SOA.

Name: Captain Filmann Urzagaste Rodriguez
Country: Bolivia
Dates/courses: Attended the SOA/WHINSEC in 2002 for a 49-week course
Info:

Was one of those responsible in 1997 for the kidnapping and torture of

Waldo Albarracin, then the director of the Popular Assembly for Human

Rights in Bolivia and now the Human Rights Defender (Ombudsman). In

2006, SOA/ WHINSEC officials and the supporters tried to discredit this

research linking the “new school WHINSEC” with admitting known human

rights abusers by claiming Waldo had recanted his story and did not

accuse Captain Rodriguez of the crime.  A letter from Waldo was

submitted to the Congressional Record by Congressman Jim McGovern on the

House floor to corroborate the research and expose the attempts to

silence Waldo’s story.

<h2><a name="chile">CHILE</a></h2>

Augusto Pinochet is not a graduate of the School of the Americas; yet

his influence is held in high esteem. in 1991, visitors could view a

note from Pinochet, and a ceremonial sword donated by him, on display in

the office of the Commandant (Charles Call, MH, 8/9/93)

Graduates

of the School of the Americas have comprised 1 out of every 7 members

of the command staff of DINA, the notorious Chilean intelligence agency

responsible for many of the worst human rights atrocities during the

Pinochet years. See here for a <a href="http://www.soaw.org/about-the-soawhinsec/soawhinsec-grads/notorious-grads/234-notorious-graduates-from-chile#DINA">complete list</a>.

Name: Colonel Pablo Belmar
Country: Chile
Dates/courses: Guest Instructor in 1987, and took Basic Arms Orientation course in 1968
Info:

Directly implicated in the 1976 torture and murder of United Nations

official Carmelo Soria, whose neck was broken after he was arrested and

tortured by Chilean DINA (Dirección de lnteligencia Nacional) personnel,

Pinochet's personal secret police force that operated from 1974-1977.

Soria's car and body were dumped in a Santiago canal in order to make

his death appear accidental. (Americas Watch Report, Unfinished

Business: Human Rights in Chile at the Start of the Frei Presidency,

1994) According to former SOA instructor Maj. Joseph Blair, as a guest

instructor in 1987, Belmar was responsible for teaching the human rights

component to the students.

Name: First Lieutenant Miguel Krassnoff
Country: Chile
Dates/courses: 1974, Urban Counterinsurgency Course Cited in Spanish Human Rights Case, 1998: Info: One

of 30 officials cited in the case of Augusto Pinochet for crimes of

genocide, terrorism, torture, and illegal arrest. A former member of the

DINA, Krassnoff was known by political prisoners held and tortured at

Villa Grimaldi, Tress Alamos and Cuatro Alamos. Implicated in the death

by torture of former Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria in 1976. Took part

in the assault on the residence of former president Salvador Allende who

was deposed by the Army in Sept. 1973. (Derechos Chile)

Name: Armando Fernandez Larios
Country: Chile
Dates/courses: Combat Arms Orientation, 1970
Info:

Fernandez Larios was second in command to General Sergio Arellano

Stark, whose tour of northern cities in 1973 resulted in dozens of

summary executions. (Americas Watch Report, Chile in Transition, 1989)

He was one of two DINA agents charged with assassinating General Carlos

Prats Gonzalez, who was defense minister under the regime Augusto

Pinochet overthrew. Prats and his wife were killed by a car bomb in

Buenos Aires, Argentina. (Americas Watch Report, Unfinished Business:

Human Rights in Chile at the Start of the Frei Presidency, 1994) He was

also indicted in 1979 by U.S. grand jury for involvement in the Letelier

assassination in Washington, D.C. (Americas Watch Report, Chile in

Transition, 1989)

<h2><a name="Colombia">COLOMBIA</a></h2>

Name: Colonel Alvaro Quijano
Country: Colombia
Dates/courses: Instructor of Peacekeeping Operations and Democratic Sustainment courses at the school from 2003 to 2004
Info:

Col. Alvaro Quijano led a special counterinsurgency unit in western

Colombia — a drug cartel stronghold — and he and other soldiers who

attended the SOA were arrested in 2007.  They were arrested for

allegedly providing security for the Norte del Valle cartel's leader and

most-wanted drug lord, Diego Montoya, is on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted

list.

Name: General Luis Bernardo Urbina Sanchez
Country: Colombia
Dates/courses: Command and General Staff Course, 1985
Info: Paramilitary

death squad activity, 1988-89 -- Fellow SOA graduate Meneses Baez

confessed to Urbina Sanchez' involvement in paramilitary death squads,

which he referred to as "self-defense' groups; Disappearance,

assassination, 1989 -- Implicated in the assassination of Amparo

Tordecilla.  Assassination, 1987 -- Implicated in the assassination of

Union Patriotica member Alvaro Garces Parra. Disappearance, torture,

assassination, 1987 -- Ordered the detention, torture and assassination

of Mario Alexander Granados Plazas. Disappearance, 1986 -- Intellectual

author of the detention/disappearance of William Camacho Barajas and

Orlando Garcia Gonzalez. Torture, disappearance, 1977 -- Implicated in

the torture of Omaira Montoya Henao and Mauricio Trujillo, and the

subsequent disappearance of Omaira Montoya. (TERRORISMO DE ESTADO EN

COLOMBIA, 1992)

Name: General Luis Alfonso Zapata Uribe
Country: Colombia
Dates/courses: Counter-insurgency, Small-Unit Infantry Tactics C-7, 1976
Info:

San Jose Killings: Has commanded the 17th Brigade of the Colombian Army

since May 2005., whom were involved in the November 17th, 2005, killing

of Arlen Salas David, a leader of the Peace Community of San Jose de

Apartado, Antioquia.

The soldiers accused, along with members of

the self-defense forces [paramilitaries], of the slaughter are Colonel

Orlando Espinosa Beltrán, Major José Fernando Castaño López, Luitenant

Alejandro Jaramillo Giraldo, Captian Sabarain Cruz Reina, Sargent Ángel

María Padilla Petro, Sargent Jorge Humberto Milanés Vega, Sargent Henry

Agudelo Guasmayan Ortega, Sargent Édgar Garciá Estupiñón, Sargent Darío

Brango Agamez, and Captain Ricardo Bastidas Candia. Criminal proceedings

against the soldiers were brought on February 26, 2009 for murder of

protected persons, acts of extreme cruelty, and conspiracy as part of

their participation in the February 21, 2005 massacre in which eight

people, including four children, were murdered..(El Tiempo, Jan. 2010)

Name: General Harold Bedoya Pizarro
Country: Colombia
Dates/courses: 1978-79, SOA Guest Instructor;1965, Military Intelligence Course
Info:

Paramilitary death squad activity, 1965 - present: "Throughout Bedoya's

entire career, he has been Implicated with the sponsorship and

organization of a network of paramilitary organizations. Bedoya, who has

never undergone any investigation for his involvement in the massacres

of non-combatants or other dirty-war crimes, is an articulate proponent

of the continued "legal" involvement of local populations in

counterinsurgency operations." (Ana Carrigan, NACLA Report on the

Americas, March/April 1995)

Paramilitary death squad activity ("AAA"), 1978: Believed to be the
founder

and chief of the paramilitary death squad known as "AAA" (American

Anti-communist Alliance). (TERRORISMO DE ESTADO EN COLOMBIA,
1992)

Other

prominent members of the AAA Paramilitary group graduated from the SOA

include: Tte. Cnel. Mario Montoya Uribe (1993, SOA Guest Instructor;

1983, Tactical Officer, Cadet Arms) Maj Jorge Flores Suarez (1972,

Military Intelligence Officer Course)

Name: Major Alejandro de Jesus Alvarez Henao
Country: Colombia
Dates/courses: 1984, Joint Operations
Info: Paramilitary death squad activity (MAS), 1982: Principal member of
"Muerte a Secuestradores" (MAS), a paramilitary death squad responsible
for numerous assassinations and disappearances. (TERRORISMO DE ESTADO EN
COLOMBIA, 1992)

Other

prominent members of MAS Paramilitary group graduated from the SOA

include: LTC Virgilio Anzola Montero (1967, Cadet Orientation Course),

GEN Carlos Julio Gil Colorado (1969, 0-6), GEN Farouk Yanine Diaz (1990,

Guest speaker; 1991, Guest speaker; 1969, Maintenance Orientation

Course)

Name: First Lieutenant Luis Enrique Andrade Ortiz
Country: Colombia
Dates/courses: 1983, Cadet Arms Orientation Course
Info:

Massacre of a judicial commission, 1989: Believed to be the

intellectual author of the paramilitary massacre of 12 officials,

including 2 judges, who were investigating military/paramilitary

cooperation.
Assassination, 1988: Ordered the assassination of farmer

Jorge Ramirez, carried out by a military/paramilitary patrol under his

command.
Assassination, 1988: Ordered the assassination of Jose

Sanchez, also carried out by military/paramilitary soldiers under his

command. Then he had the corpse put on display for the benefit of the

public.
Ramirez family massacre, 1986: Andrade Ortiz was one of

officers in charge of military/paramilitary soldiers who broke into the

home of the Ramirez family, killed two members outright; and captured 4

others whose bodies were found later with signs of torture. (TERRORISMO

DE ESTADO EN
COLOMBIA, 1992)

Name: General Hernan Jose Guzman Rodriguez
Country: Colombia
Dates/courses: 1993, SOA "Hall of Fame"; 1969, Maintenance Orientation
Info:

Former Commander, Colombian Army, dismissed: With five other top

military officers, Guzman Rodriguez was dismissed on November 22, 1994

by President Ernesto Samper. Samper overhauled the military leadership

in the hopes of decreasing corruption and drug trafficking in the armed
forces, and Improving the human rights record of the military. (Reuters, 11/22/94)
Paramilitary activity (MAS), 1987-90: Guzman Rodriguez protected and
aided paramilitary death squad MAS between 1987 and 1990, when it was
responsible for the deaths of at least 149 people. (TERRORISMO DE ESTADO
EN COLOMBIA, 1992)
Illegal

detention, torture, extrajudicial execution, 1986: Guzman Rodriguez

commanded the soldiers who detained, tortured, gang raped and executed

Yolanda Acevedo Carvajal - then concocted the story that she committed

suicide by shooting herself in the nape of her neck. (TERRORISMO DE

ESTADO EN COLOMBIA, 1992)

Name: Colonel Roberto Hernandez Hernandez
Country: Colombia
Dates/courses: 1970, Automotive Maintenance Officer;
1976, Tactical Officer, Small Unit Infantry Tactics
Info: Paramilitary activity, 1980-90: Consistently implicated in paramilitary
activities in association with members of the extreme right.
Torture, 1990: Supervised the illegal detention and torture of 42
people, most of whom were union members and human rights workers.
Trujillo massacre, 1990: Implicated in the gruesome killings in
Trujillo, in which many victims were dismembered with chain saws.
(TERRORISMO DE ESTADO EN COLOMBIA, 1992)

Name: Major Carlos Enrique Martinez Orozco
Country: Colombia
Dates/courses: 1975, Guerrilla Warfare Operations
Info:

Massacre, 1988: Implicated in the massacre of 18 miners in Antioquia,

whose body parts washed in pieces down the river Nare. Mart?nez Orozco

was subsequently promoted.
Paramilitary activity, 1990: Protected a

chief paramilitarist responsible for high-profile assassinations; and in

June 1992 was charged in a military court for his connection to

paramilitaries.
(Amnesty International Report: Colombia: Political Violence: Myth and Reality; TERRORISMO DE ESTADO EN COLOMBIA, 1992)

Name: General Gustavo Pardo Ariza
Country: Colombia
Dates/courses: 1971, Irregular Warfare Operations
Info:

Escape of Pablo Escobar, 1992: Pardo was one of three Army officers

(two of them SOA graduates) forced into retirement upon the "escape" of

Pablo Escobar from prison. Pardo was head of the Fourth Brigade in

Medellin; soldiers under his command were supposed to be guarding the

prison from which Escobar literally walked away. (Americas Watch Report:

State of War Politcal Violence and Counterinsurgency in Colombia, 1993)

Name: General Rafael Samudio Molina
Country: Colombia
Dates/courses: 1988, SOA "Hall of Fame"; 1970, SOA Guest Instructor
Info:

Massacre at the Palace of Justice, November 7, 1985: Oversaw the Army

massacre at the Palace of Justice following an attempt by the M-19 to

take it over. The Army under his command set the building ablaze,

resulting in the needless and horrifying deaths of many of the hostages.

Other hostages were killed in Army crossfire, or, as some suspect,

direct assassination. Even the hostages who lived through the horrifying

ordeal were not safe; some were killed before exiting the palace and

others were arrested and disappeared immediately upon leaving the

building. Taped conversations between Samudio Molina and his commanders

in the building establish that at no time did Samudio Molina act as an

agent of the civilian government, but rather used the situation to prove

the brutality of the Colombian military and to eliminate individuals,

including Supreme Court justices, who were not staunch enough allies of

the Colombian Army. (POJ) Samudio Molina has also been implicated in

paramilitary activities since 1978. (TERRORISMO DE ESTADO EN COLOMBIA,

1992)

Name: General Farouk Yanine Diaz
Country: Colombia
Dates/courses: 1990, Guest speaker; 1991, Guest speaker; 1969,
Maintenance Orientation Course
Info: Urabá massacre, 1988: Implicated in the massacre of 20 banana workers in Antioqua in March 1988.
Assassination, 1987: Implicated in the assassination of the mayor of Sabana de Torres, Alvaro Garces Parra.
Paramilitary

activities (MAS), 1984-85: Implicated in paramilitary activities

associated with the death squad MAS. (TERRORISMO DE ESTADO EN COLOMBIA,

1992)
Massacre of 19 businessmen, 1987: After an investigation that

linked Yanine to this 1987 massacre, the public prosecutor’s office

issued an arrest warrant for Yanine, who was at that time giving classes

at the Inter-American Defense College in Washington. Upon return to

Colombia, Yanine was detained, but, in a decision criticized by the U.S.

State Department, among others, his case was quickly passed to a

military court where he was absolved. (Colombia: Derechos humanos y

derechos
humanitarios, Comision Colombiana de Juristas, 1997)

According to the 1998 State Department Report on Human Rights in

Colombia, “Despite the government’s attempts to bring him to justice in

the civilian court system, the military prevailed, continuing the

tradition of impunity for all but the lowest-ranking members of the

security forces.” According to former SOA instructor Maj. Joseph Blair,

Yanine visited the SOA as a guest speaker from 1986 to 1989 on an annual

basis and was a close personal friend of US Army Col. Miguel Garcia,

who was the commandant of the SOA at the time.

Name: Cadete Ritoalejo del Rio Rojas
Country: Colombia
Dates/courses: 1967, Cadet Orientation Course
Info:

Paramilitary activity, 1985: Implicated in paramilitary activities,

including the theft of an Army weapons shipment. (TERRORISMO DE ESTADO

EN COLOMBIA, 1992) In 1999, President Pastrana sent Del Rio into

retirement without explanation, at a time when he was under

investigation by the federal Prosecutor’s Office for alleged human

rights abuses and could face criminal charges. (Miami Herald 4/10/99)

<h2><a name="Costa Rica">Costa Rica</a></h2>

Name: Minor Masis
Country: Costa Rica
Dates/courses: 1991,Curso Basico para Oficiales de Infanteria (0-20)
Info: Rape and Murder, 1992: This leader of Costa Rica’s former “Comando
Cobra” anti-drug squad is serving a 42-year jail term for rape and
murder committed during a 1992 drug raid in the South Atlantic Talamanca
Mountains. (The Tico Times, 1998)

<h2><a name="Ecuador">ECUADOR</a></h2>

Name: General Guillermo Rodriguez
Country: Ecuador
Dates/courses:

Three-time graduate of the SOA, taking courses on topics like Irregular

Warfare (1967 Maintenance Management, 1961 C &R & Bn Staff, 26

Aug. 1966 Irregular Warfare Orientation.)
Info: Military

dictator of Ecuador from February 6, 1972 to January 11, 1976 who took

power by leading a coup to exile the previous president.  Initiated an

extensive seven year period of military rule over Ecuador.

<h2><a name="el salvador">El Salvador</a></h2>

Name: Colonel Francisco del Cid Diaz
Country: El Salvador
Dates/courses:

2003, Cadet Troop Leader Training; 1991, Combat Arms Officer Adv.

Course; 1988, Infantry Officer Basic Course .               

Info: In 1983, Colonel Diaz (then a 2nd Lieutenant)

commanded a unit that forcibly removed 16 residents from the Los Hojas

cooperative, bound and beat them, shot all 16 at point-blank range and

threw their bodies in the Cuyuapa River. This very well known, very high

profile and notorious massacre was cited in the annual State Department

Human Rights Country Reports throughout the 1980s, and investigated by,

and included in the final report of, the El Salvador Truth Commission.

The OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights stated that there was

substantial evidence that Col. del Cid Diaz gave orders to execute, and

recommended that the Salvadoran government bring them to justice.

Instead of facing justice, Col. del Cid Diaz was at the SOA/ WHINSEC in

2003.

Name: Captain Roberto D'Aubuisson
Country: El Salvador
Dates/courses: 1972, Communications Officer Course (Chief Off Communication 0 – 20)
Info:

Romero assassination, 1980: Planned and ordered the assassination of

Archbishop Oscar Romero, beloved champion of the poor in El Salvador.

Death Squad Organizer, 1978-1992: Organized El Salvador's death squad

network. (United Nations Truth Commission Report on El Salvador, 1993)

Name: General Jose Guillermo Garcia
Country: El Salvador
Dates/courses: 1962 - CIO, Counterinsurgency Course
Info:

El Mozote massacre, 1981: Then-defense minister Garcia, and the Armed

Forces High Command, refused to investigate reports that hundreds of

unarmed civilians were brutally murdered by the U.S.-trained Atlacatl

battalion in the Morazon province in December of 1981. The reports

turned out to be true.
Murder of U.S. Churchwomen, 1980: Garcia also

failed to launch a serious investigation of the murder of 4 U.S. church

women by members of the Salvadoran National Guard in December 1980.

(United Nations Truth Commission Report on El Salvador, 1993) Later

granted residency in the U.S.

These events occurred in the

course of an anti-guerrilla action known as "Operación Rescate" in

which, in addition to the Atlacatl Battalion, units from the Third

Infantry Brigade and the San Francisco Gotera Commando Training Centre

took part. In the course of "Operación Rescate", massacres of civilians

also occurred in the following places: 11 December, more than 20 people

in La Joya canton; 12 December, some 30 people in the village of La

Ranchería; the same day, by units of the Atlacatl Battalion, the

inhabitants of the village of Los Toriles; and 13 December, the

inhabitants of the village of Jocote Amarillo and Cerro Pando canton.

More than 500 identified victims perished at El Mozote and in the other

villages. Many other victims have not been identified. (“From Madness to

Hope: the 12-year war in El Salvador” Truth Commission Report for El

Salvador, 1993)

Name: Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa Barrios (deceased)
Country: El Salvador
Dates/courses: 1966, Parachute Rigger Course
Info:

El Mozote massacre, 1981: Commander of the brutal Atlacatl battalion,

which massacred hundreds of unarmed men, women and children in and

around El Mozote in December 1991. (United Nations Truth Commission

Report on El Salvador, 1993)

Other officers in command of the Atlacatl Battalionl include SOA graduates:

Commanding Officer: Major (now Colonel) Natividad de Jesús Cáceres

Cabrera (1970, General Supply Officer Course); Chief of Operations:

(deceased) Major José Armando Azmitia Melara (1967, Cadet Orientation

Course); Company Commanders: (now Colonel) Juan Ernesto Méndez Rodríguez

(1970, Cadet Course); (deceased) Roberto Alfonso Mendoza Portillo

(1980, Supply/Human Rights Course); (now Lieutenant Colonel) José

Antonio Rodríguez Molina (1972, Combat Arms/Support Services), (now

Lieutenant Colonel) Captain Walter Oswaldo Salazar (1974 Basis in

Engineering for Officers) and (currently a fugitive from justice) José

Alfredo Jiménez (1971, Cadet Course). (“From Madness to Hope: the

12-year war in El Salvador” Truth Commission Report for El Salvador,

1993)

Name: General Rafael Humberto Larios
Country: El Salvador
Dates/courses: Command and General Staff course at the SOA in 1977.
Info: Jesuits

massacre (1989): Held the rank of General and was Minister of Defense

at the time. Was present at meetings where the orders were given and

discussed.

Name: General Juan Rafael Bustillo
Country: El Salvador
Dates/courses: CIO Orientation course at the SOA in August of 1965
Info:

Jesuits massacre (1989): Held the rank of general and was commander of

the Salvadoran Air Force at the time of the massacre. Participated in

the meetings where orders were given for the massacre.

Name: General Juan Orlando Zeped
Country: El Salvador
Dates/courses: 1975, Urban Counterinsurgency Ops.; 1969, Unnamed Course
Info:

Jesuit massacre, 1989: Planned the assassination of 6 Jesuit priests

and covered-up the massacre, which also took the lives of the priests'

housekeeper and her teen-age daughter. (United Nations Truth Commission

Report on El Salvador, 1993)
Other war crimes, 1980's: The

Non-Governmental Human Rights Commission in El Salvador also cites

Zepeda for involvement in 210 summary executions, 64 tortures, and 110

illegal detentions. (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El

Salvador)
Member of the “La Tandona” and held the rank of colonel and

served as the Vice Minister of Defense at the time of the massacre.

Prior to the massacre he publicly accused the UCA of being the center of

operations for the FMLN and was present for the meetings where orders

were given for the massacre. He was later promoted to the rank of

general.

Name: Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano
Country: El Salvador
Dates/courses: 1970, Engineer Officer Course
Info: Jesuit

massacre, 1989: Was in on the planning of the massacre, and cooperated

in the cover-up. (United Nations Truth Commission Report on El Salvador,

1993)
Held the rank of colonel and was a Vice Minister in the

Salvadoran government at the time of the massacre. Prior to the massacre

he publicly accused the Jesuits of being aligned with subversive

movements and was present for the meetings where orders were given for

the massacre.
Other SOA graduates who were compicit to the 1989 Jesuit massacre are:
• 

Colonel Francisco Elena Fuentes – held the rank of colonel and was the

commander of the First Infantry Brigade in San Salvador at the time of

the massacre. He was present for the meetings where orders were given

for the massacre, and one day after the killings, troops from his First

Infantry Brigade attempted to intimidate members of San Salvador’s

Archdiocese by transmitting messages over loudspeakers saying, “We are

still killing communists, Ellacuría and Martín-Baró have fallen,

surrender, this is the First Brigade.” Fuentes took the Irregular

warfare course at the SOA in 1969, a second course in 1973, and was

invited to the SOA to be an instructor in 1985.
•  Lieutenant Colonel

Carlos Camilo Hernández Barahona – held the rank of major and was the

interim Assistant Dean at the Military College in El Salvador at the

time of the massacre and later promoted to lieutenant colonel. On the

night of November 15, 1989, he was present when Benavides informed the

officers at the Military College of the order he had been given to

murder Ellacuría and remained silent when asked by Benavides if anyone

objected to the order. Later, Benavides ordered Hernández Barahona to

organize and plan the operation.

Hernández Barahona organized and

attended the meeting where the orders were given for the massacre. He

also handed over an AK-47 rifle that had been captured from the FMLN and

told them to use it in the massacre. The use of the FMLN AK-47 would

serve to point blame away from the Armed Forces and toward the FMLN.

Additionally, Hernández Barahona ordered them to leave behind at the

murder site propaganda mentioning the FMLN.

Hernández Barahona

was also involved in the cover up, by taking part in the burning of a

small suitcase containing photographs, documents and money which the

soldiers had stolen from the Jesuits. In conjunction with Benavides he

ordered that all Military College arrival and departure logs for that

year and the previous year be burned. This was done to prevent

investigators from learning who had attended the meetings held at the

Military College at the time the murders of the Jesuits were being

planned and ordered. He attended the SOA twice in both 1972 and 1975.
• 

Second Lieutenant Gonzalo Guevara Cerritos – held the rank of Second

Lieutenant and was assigned to the Atlacatl Battalion at the time of the

massacre. He was not the commander of the unit, but was an officer with

command authority over the troops that carried out the massacre. He was

sentenced to three years for instigation and conspiracy to commit acts

of terrorism for his role in the Jesuits massacre and was later released

and continued active service in the armed forces. Cerritos came to the

U.S. in 2005 and was employed in Los Angeles. He was deported back to El

Salvador in April 2007. He attended the SOA in 1988.
•  Sergeant

Antonio Ramiro Avalos Vargas – was a sergeant in the Salvadoran Army and

was assigned to the Atlacatl Battalion at the time of the massacre. In

the 1991-1992 trial he admitted to killing Fathers López and Moreno. He

was not convicted. He attended the SOA in 1988.

Biographies courtesy of the Center for Justice and Accountability's website. You can access the full biographies here.

<h2><a name="guatemala">Guatemala</a></h2>

Name: General Efrain Rios Montt
Country: Guatemala
Dates/courses: Attended the SOA in 1950
Info:

Former dictator of Guatemala who seized power in a coup in 1982.  Two

Truth Commissions documented widespread human rights abuses by his

regime including rape, torture, executions and acts of genocide against

the populace, including indigenous population through a scorched earth

campaign.  Conservative estimates cite 200,000 Guatemalans being

killed.  His regime was supported by U.S. aid and President Ronald

Reagan declared during a meeting with Ríos Montt on December 4, 1982:

"President Ríos Montt is a man of great personal integrity and

commitment. ... I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all

Guatemalans and to promote social justice.”

Name: Colonel Byron Disrael Lima Estrada
Country: Guatemala
Dates/courses: Attended the SOA in the 1960’s*
Info: Arrested in January 2000 for involvement in the death of Guatemalan
Bishop

Juan Jose Gerardi in 1998 as part of continuing concerns about SOA

graduates undermining peace and justice throughout Latin America. 

Bishop Gerardi was murdered in April 1998 just two days after he

released a report accusing the Guatemalan military for most of the human

rights abuses committed during the country’s civil conflict.

*(Does not appear in the SOA Grads Database, but appears in other sources)

Name: Pedro Pimentel Ríos
Country: Guatemala
Dates/courses:
Info:

Following on the heels of an earlier conviction in the case of the 1982

Dos Erres massacre, SOA-trained Pedro Pimentel Ríos was sentenced to

6,060 years for his role in the killings of 201 people. After his

participation in the massacre, Ríos left to become an instructor at the

School of the Americas.*

*(Does not appear in the SOA Grads Database, but appears in other sources)

Name: Otto Perez Molina
Country: Guatemala
Dates/courses: 
Info:

1985, Command and General Staff College (Commandant's List)

Assassination, 1994: Chief of the G-2 (military intelligence) and on the

payroll of the CIA, Perez Molina was in charge in 1994, when the

General Staff was implicated in the assassination of Judge Edgar Ramiro

Elias Ogaldez. (Allan Nairn, The Nation, 4/17/95)

<h2><a name="Haiti">Haiti</a></h2>

Name: Colonel Gambetta Hyppolite
Country: Haiti
Dates/courses: 1959, Policia Militar para Alistados
Info: Ordered

his soldiers to fire against the Provincial Electoral Bureau, 1987:

During the 1987 elections, Col. Gambetta Hippolite ordered his soldiers

to fire on the Provincial Electoral Bureau in Gonaives as part of a

larger army campaign to "stop the democratic elections". (Americas Watch

Report: Human Rights in Haiti, 1987)

Name: Colonel Franck Romain
Country: Haiti
Dates/courses: 1956, MP Officer
Info:

St. Jean Bosco Massacre: On Sept. 11, 1988, armed men broke into the

St. Jean Bosco church while Fr. Jean Bertrand Aristide was saying mass

and killed 12 parishioners and wounded at least 77. The doused the

church in gasoline and set it on fire. Witnesses identified at least two

of the gang members as deputies of Col. Romain, who was then Mayor of

Port-au- Prince. Col. Romain later publicly justified the massacre as

legitimate. (Americas Watch Report: Human Rights in Haiti, 1987)

<h2><a name="Honduras">Honduras</a></h2>

Name: General Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez
Country: Honduras
Dates/courses: Took a combat arms course at SOA in 1976 and another course on small military units in 1984
Info:

Four out of the six Honduran soldiers who were accused by Honduran

officials as responsible for flying President Zelaya out of the country

during the June 2009 coup were SOA trained, including General Velasquez,

head of the of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Honduran military, who

was aided by another SOA graduate, Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, the

head of the Honduran Air Force (who took a 1996 course on joint

operations).

Name: Policarpo Paz García, head of the 1980-1982 dictatorial regime
Country: Honduras
Dates/courses: Communications course, 1956 and General officer course, 1959
Info:

“Paz Garcia, whom the U.S. Army installed into SOA’s ‘Hall of Fame’ ten

years later. Paz Garcia’s tenure was also marked by brutal military

repression and the formation of Battalion 3-16, a military death squad

that worked closely with the CIA in targeting suspected leftists in the

’80s. Paz Garcia’s military commander was another SOA grad, Gen. Gustavo

Alvarez Martinez, who ran 3-16 and ordered the execution of Fr. James

Carney, a U.S. missionary to Honduras.”  (National Catholic Reporter,

June 2009)

<h2><a name="mexico">Mexico</a></h2>

Mexican graduates of the School of the Americas have played a key role

in the “low-intensity conflict” in the States of Chiapas, Guerrero, and

Oaxaca.  (Nuevo Amanecer Press and Covert Action Quarterly).

At least 13 top military officials involved in the conflict are SOA grads, including:

Col.

Harold B. Rambling Torres (1972 – irrefular Warfare Ops. O-6), Brig.

Gen. Carmelo Teheran Montero (1972, Military Intelligence 0-11) Col.

Jose Luis Ruvalcaba  (1975 Jungle Operations OE -8), Brig. Gen. Carlos

Demetrio Gaytan Ochoa (1981, Administracion/Recursos 0-17), Col. German

Antonio Bautista (1994, Curso de Comando y Estado mayor para Oficiales

0-3), Capitan 1 Gaston Menchaca Arias (1971, Operaciones de Guerra

Irregular 0-6),  Mayor Miguel Leyva Garcia (1971), Mayor Enrique Alonso

Garrido (Nov. 1981, Administracion/Recursos 0-17), TCNEL Manuel Garcia

Ruiz (1980, Operaciones Conjuntas – America Latina 0-16), TCNEL Adrian

Maldonado Ramirez (1978, Operaciones Conjuntas 0 – 16, 1979, Operaciones

Conjuntas – America Latina 0 – 16), Coronel Edmundo Elpidio Leyva

Galindo  (1978, Operaciones Conjuntas 0 -16, 1979, Operaciones Conjuntas

– America Latina 0 -16), Renato Garcia Gonzalez, TCNEL Jose Ruben Rivas

Pena (see below)

More documentation here: http://www.soaw.org/old/article.php?id=242

Zetas:

An October 22, 2003 article in The Brownsville Herald (TX) reported

that the notorious Gulf Drug Cartel has hired 31 ex-Mexican soldiers to

be part of its hired assassin force, The Zetas. According to the Mexican

secretary of defense, at least 1/3 of these deserters were trained at

the SOA as part of the elite Special Air Mobile Force Group. Their

highly specialized and dangerous weapons, training, and intelligence

capabilities are now being used to increase the availability of the

drugs and terrorize the region. The Mexican attorney general’s office

implicates them in dozens of shootouts, kidnappings and executions of

police officers.

Name: Mayor Miguel Leyva Garcia
Country: Mexico
Dates/courses: 15 Mar. – 17 Dec. 1971
Info:

Leyva Garcia was complicit (together with Gastón Menchaca Arias, having

attended an Irregular Warfare Operations Course at the SOA) in the

actions against the EZLN revolt in Chiapas in January, 1994. Leyva

Garcia also became “famous” in human rights violation reports in the

state of Guerrero as a military commander in the action against the

Ejercito Popular Revolucionario.

Name: (retired) Lieutenant Coronel Julian Leyzaola Pérez
Country: Mexico
Dates/courses: 1997, Administration of resources
Info: The

current Ciudad Juarez chief of police, is a graduate of the SOA, and

has been accused by the UNHCR of arbitrary detention, excessive violence

and torture.

Name: Jose Ruben Rivas Pena
Country: Mexico
Dates/courses: 1980, Comando y Estado Mayor
Info:

Called for the formation of paramilitary groups: Rivas Pena wrote the

army’s “Campaign Plan Chiapas 94” which calls for the “training and

support for self-defense forces or other paramilitary organizations.”

(NACLA Report on the Americas). Rivas Pena is also credited with saying:

“The Vatican is the indirect cause of the conflict in Chiapas, which is

directly sponsored by a contaminated current of Liberation Theology.”

(Nuevo Amanecer Press)

Name: General Juan Lopez Ortiz
Country: Mexico
Dates/courses: 1959, Infantry Arms; 1959, Infantry Tactics
Info: Ocosingo Massacre, 1994: Troops under his command massacred five persons
in the Ocosingo market; the prisoners’ hands were tied behind their
backs before the soldiers shot them in the back of the head (Covert
Action Quarterly)

<h2><a name="panama">Panama</a></h2>

Name: General Manuel Noriega
Country: Panama
Dates/courses:

Five time SOA graduate, including courses in Jungle Operations and

Counter-Intelligence in 1965 and 1967 (1965 – Jungle Operations, 1967

Infantry Officer 0 -7, 1967 Jungle Operations OE – 8, 1967, Counter

Intelligence Officer Course MI-Phase II, 1967 Combat Intell Off O-11A) 
Info:

Military dictator of Panama from 1983 to 1989.  He was on the CIA

payroll while heavily involved in the drug trade.  He was tried in court

for 8 separate counts of drug trafficking, racketeering and money

laundering in the early 1990’s, convicted of murder charges, an

extradited to France in April 2010 and is now serving another prison

sentence. The 1988 Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and

International Operations concluded that "The saga of Panama's General

Manuel Antonio Noriega represents one of the most serious foreign policy

failures for the United States.”

<h2><a name="paraguay">Paraguay</a></h2>

Name: General Roberto Knofelmacher
Country: Paraguay
Dates/courses: Attended the SOA in 1954
Info:

General Knofelmacher was accused of being the “autor moral” of

assassinations in Paraguay.  On July 12, 1996, peasant leaders Arsenio

Vazquezy and Mariano Diaz were murdered by employees of a firm owned by

Gen. Knofelmacher. The murders were followed by the destruction of the

homes and the forcible removal of peasant families from a piece of land

claimed by Knofelmacher. The peasants have brought suit against

Knofelmacher as responsible for the assassinations. (Informe de Derechos

Humanos en Paraguay)

Name: Alejandro Fretes Davalos
Country: Paraguay
Dates/courses: Attended the SOA in 1956
Info:

Fretes Davalos was a member of military intelligence and participated

in Operation Condor, which coordinated the efforts of Southern Cone

military regimes to arrest, imprison, torture, and “repatriate” the

opponents of the different regimes. (Es Mi Informe, 1994)

Name: Telmo Hurtado
Country: Peru
Dates/courses: Attended Arms Orientation courses from 1981-1982 during the height of military repression
Info:

Accused of perpetrating the August 14, 1985 massacre of 69 children,

women and men in the village of Accomarca while they commanded four

military brigades that carried out the executions.  Hurtado separated

the children and women of the village from the men so that his unit

could rape them, then ordered them into buildings which he set on fire,

burning them alive. (Some info cited here:

http://www.cja.org/article.php?list=type&type=80) Hurtado was

sentenced to 6 years in prison for "abuse of authority." A U.S. State

Department report released in February 1994 said that Hurtado was freed

and returned to active duty, a testament to the impunity enjoyed by most

of the Peruvian military. Americas Watch reports he has since been

promoted to captain. (Americas Watch Report: Untold Terror: Violence

Against Women in Peru’s Armed Conflict, 1992; Latinamerica Press,

1/24/94).  He was arrested by ICE in the United States in 2006 after

fleeing Peru.

Name: Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos Torres
Country: Peru
Dates/courses: Attended the Cadet course at the SOA in 1965
Info:

Former Chief of Intelligence who allegedly ran the “Colina death

squads” linked to the La Cantuta murders and disappearances.  (Americas

Watch Report: Anatomy of a Cover-up: The Disappearances at La Canuta,

1993) Four officers tortured after plotting a coup against Fujimori in

November 1992 state that Montesinos took an active part in torturing

them. (Americas Watch Report: Human Rights in Peru: One Year After

Fujimori’s Coup, 1993)  He was sentenced 15 years in prison for numerous

corruption convictions, and then sentenced to six more years in prison

for using government money to fund former President Fujimori’s 2000

campaign.

<h2><a name="uruguay">Uruguay</a></h2>

Name: Captain Luis Alfredo Maurente
Country: Uruguay
Dates/courses: Attended the SOA in 1969 and 1976, with curriculum that included Military Intelligence courses
Info:

Uruguay’s Justice Department sought extradition for Maurente for his

involvement in the clandestine Automotores Orletti detention center,

which operated in Buenos Aires, Argetina during the 1970’s. Maurente was

part of the Defense Intelligence Services and, together with three

other ex-military officers, faces charges for the disappearances of

close to 100 Uruguayan and Argentinean citizens, kidnapping and illicit

association. 
More information cited here: http://www.soaw.org/old/article.php?id=1408

<h2><a name="venezuela">Venezuela</a></h2>

Name: Army Commander in Chief Efrain Vasquez and General Ramirez Poveda
Country: Venezuela
Dates/courses: Attended the SOA in 1988; 1972
Info: Both

Vasquez and Poveda helped to lead a failed coup in Venezuela in April

of 2002, despite supposedly receiving training at the SOA that

encourages respect for democracy and civilian governments.  Otto Reich,

then Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, shared

his support for the coup and a new government, and in the same year was

appointed as a WHINSEC Board of Visitor member to “oversee” democracy

and human rights curriculum, as well as operations at the school.  Reich

met with these SOA graduates prior to the coup and advised business

leader Pedro Carmona, who subsequently seized the presidency.

Name: General Ramon Davila Guillen
Country: Venezuela
Dates/courses: Attended the SOA in 1967 for Irregular Warfare training
Info:

General Guillen was indicted in November 1996 in connection with a

shipment of one ton of cocaine into Miami in 1990, which he says was

authorized by the CIA in an effort to catch drug dealers. In 1993, the

CIA called the shipment "a regrettable incident" and dismissed the CIA

agent involved. (CAP, 9/21/97)


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