Hope College: School of the Americas

What is the "School of Assassins?"

The US Army School of the Americas(SOA), now located at Ft. Benning, GA, was established in Panama in 1946-supposedly to promote stability in the region. However, the School's reputation for churning out despots soon earned it the nickname "School of Assassins," and, sadly, history supports this accusation.

Today, the School of the Americas trains 900-2,000 soldiers a year from Latin America and the Caribbean. They are taught combat skills, counter insurgency operations, sniper fire, military intelligence, commando tactics, and psychological operations. Recent revelations show that the SOA used training manuals that advocated torture, assassinations, blackmail, and other undemocratic methods.

Latin American soldiers at the SOA are not taught to defend their border from invasion. They are taught to make war on their own people-specifically and especially religious leaders, labor organizers, educators, student groups, and others working for the rights of the poor.

The SOA in Mexico

The December 22, 1997 massacre of 45 unarmed civilians-including 30 women and 14 children-in the community of Acteal in Chiapas, Mexico was a shocking, but all too familiar story. The civilian-targeted warfare of repression, massacres, intimidation, and assassination that has followed School of the Americas graduates through El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Bolivia, Columbia, and elsewhere, now seems to be showing its ugly face in Mexico. Although there is no information about direct involvement of SOA graduates in the Acteal massacre, Mexican graduates of the School of the Americas have played a key role in the "civilian-targeted warfare" in the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca. At least 18 top military officials involved in the conflict are SOA graduates.
Consistently the countries with the worst human rights records have sent the most students to the SOA during the heyday of the repression. Given that history, it is no coincidence that Mexico is now the largest country client of the SOA. In the first 49 years of the School, Mexico sent very few students-766 total-to be trained at the SOA. The number escalated sharply in 1996 and rose to 333 students in 1997 alone-1/3 of the graduating class. Proponents of the SOA claim that this training is necessary because of Mexico's increased involvement in the "war on drugs". However, that is just a smoke screen. The truth is that in 1997, only 10% of Mexican students took counter-narcotics courses. The rest took the standard counter-insurgency classes.
Not surprisingly, the sudden rise in Mexican graduates corresponds to the growing movement for economic justice in Mexico. The voices of and for the poor-represented by leaders like Bishop Ruiz from the San Cristobal Diocese-threaten the powerful and wealthy. Thus, it is not surprising that SOA graduates have come out against the Church. One SOA graduate, General Jose RubenRivas Pena, wrote an anlysis of the conflict in Chiapas in which he stated: "The Vatican is the indirect cause of the the conflict in Chiapas with its contaminated thread of liberation theology." This rhetoric is frighteninly similar to that used in El Salvador prior to the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero by the SOA graduates in 1980. Those trained at the School of the Americas are part of the "muscle" whose job is to silence the voices who speak out for justice.

Additional Information can be found at:

SOA Watch Homepage
School of the Americas Homepage
School of the Americas CIA Manual

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