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The SCHOOL of the AMERICAS

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chapter One

The first shafts of morning sunshine fall on the graceful contours of its red-tile roof and bathe the stucco walls in soft pink overtones. It appears that the stately building is blushing. Yet as the formidable Georgia sun continues its ascent, and the building falls under the intensifying rays of a late summer day, the walls turn a harsher, institutional beige. There is no shame here. This is the United States Army's School of the Americas (SOA), a military training center for Latin American men.

The SOA, or the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation as the army now likes to call it, sits deep within Fort Benning, a sprawling army base on the southern edge of Columbus, Georgia. The institution bristles with imperialist symbolism. Emblazoned on the School's crest is the Spanish galleon on which Christopher Columbus conquered the Caribbean, and inscribed around the edge is the SOA motto, "One for all and all for one." This slogan comes from the Monroe Doctrine, James Monroe's message to Congress in 1823 articulating the nascent imperial ambitions of the United States by seeking the exclusion of its European rivalsfrom the Americas. The words continue to describe the imperial unity that the School seeks to build among the contemporary militaries of the Americas.

The SOA is a relatively small part of Fort Benning, which spreads across 184,000 acres of a former cotton plantation that fed Columbus textile mills in the nineteenth century. The base is a place where thousands of people live, work, and train, and it is currently the engine that powers the local economy and sustains many of Columbus's 250,000 residents. Although its rolling, pine-covered hills serve as firing ranges and training grounds for the thousands of infantrymen and women who rotate through the facility every year, Fort Benning has many of the trappings of a small city. It contains living quarters, fast-food restaurants, banks, a library, movie theaters, a post office, a disco, schools, and a golf course. Those who live on the base are never far from work. They use the same facilities, send their young children to the same elementary school, and do at least some of their shopping at the tax-free post exchange, or PX. Active-duty servicemen and women, civilian employees, and retired military personnel in Columbus receive approximately $950 million annually from the military in the form of wages, salaries, and pensions, and local businesspeople get millions more for services provided to the base.

The School of the Americas is located in a quiet area that seems less like a military base than a suburban neighborhood. On its serene lawns, where tall trees provide relief from the summer heat, blasts from the live-fire ranges and the din of training drills do not disrupt the tranquility. "Riverside"-a restored plantation great house that is the official residence of Fort Benning's commanding general-is down the street. Its white pillars and manicured grounds recall the power and pretensions of the Old South's slave-owning aristocracy and symbolize, without a trace of irony, the vaunted position of its current occupant. The upscale homes of army colonels lie within walking distance on leafy residential streets. These two-story dwellings with white stucco walls, red-tile roofs, suburban-style lawns, and abundant shade stand in sharp contrast to the rows of monotonous, sun-baked barracks that house enlisted men on the other side of the base. The SOA's commandant and his family occupy one of them, near the eighteen-hole golf course, where, after many years of military service, they finally enjoy what the commandant refers to as "country club living."

Students, instructors, and administrators begin arriving at the SOA around eight o'clock in the morning. Some don heavily starched combat fatigues, stung their pants legs into imposing black boots. Others wear the Class "A" uniform-known as "greens"-a standard attire prescribed for daily use. All have close-cropped haircuts that disappear under a variety of caps and berets. An occasional civilian administrative assistant or an English-language instructor, who is usually a woman, enters the building with the others. Wearing a printed skirt, a striped jacket, or a brightly colored blouse, these women stand out amid the monotony of earthen tones worn by the men and the handful of military women who train at the institution.

The students have been awake since dawn, when the collective grunts and exertions of hundreds of people initiating physical training-"PT" in army parlance-bring Fort Benning to life. Joggers compete with early morning traffic on the streets, and open fields fill with soldiers going through the paces of morning calisthenics. Fat is anathema to the army. A bulging waistline or a double chin signifies moral lassitude and an unacceptable lack of combat readiness. For SOA students, the battle of the bulge starts every morning at 6:30 a.m., when they congregate on a field for a strenuous one-hour workout. After sweating through the exercise ritual and imposing order on their bodies, they shower, dress in the uniform appropriate for the day's activities, and head to the SOA, where they spend the rest of the day in field-based exercises and classroom lectures.

The SOA moved to Fort Benning from the Panama Canal Zone in 1984. Its trainees come from every Latin American country except Cuba, Haiti, Panama, and, until recently, Nicaragua, but their exact numbers and the countries represented at any particular moment reflect shifting U.S. political concerns in Latin America. Panama, for example, maintained a significant presence until tension between the United States and General Manuel Noriega led to the exclusion of Panamanian trainees in the late 1980s. Nicaragua also figured prominently at the SOA prior to the 1979 Sandinista revolution, which overthrew the Somoza dictatorship, dismantled the national guard, and prompted the United States to exclude the Sandinista-controlled military from the School until 2002. Nowadays, the majority of soldiers come from Mexico and the Andean countries of Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru, where the United States is waging war on the illegal narcotics traffic.

The School offers thirty-five courses on a range of topics to officers of various ranks, as well as a helicopter training program at Fort Rucker, Alabama. With the exception of the forty-eight-week Command and General Staff Officer course, most classes last from one week to four months. They include several geared to the requirements of cadets and noncommissioned officers that cover logistics, leadership, intelligence, and combined arms operations. Others focus on counterdrug and small unit operations, computer literacy and "information operations," formerly known as psychological operations, or simply PSYOP. The School has also developed a series of relatively new offerings, such as de-mining, civil-military relations, resource management, and human rights, in part to rebut the claims of critics who charge that it is a "school of assassins."

A precursor to the School of the Americas-the Latin American Ground School (LAGS)-was established in 1946 in the Panama Canal Zone, where the United States had trained Latin Americans at a variety of military bases since 1939. The Latin American Ground School centralized these activities and, after a subsequent reorganization and name change, became the School of the Americas in 1963. Its departure from Panama in 1984 coincided with the relocation of other U.S. military installations away from the Canal Zone, as the Panamanian government prepared to take control of the canal and the surrounding area.

Fort Benning was not an obvious choice for the School's new home, and substantial debate, intense lobbying, and backroom political wrangling preceded its selection. The army considered reopening the School on bases in Puerto Rico, Miami, or San Antonio because of the presence of large Hispanic communities. It also contemplated handing the institution over to Panama, but, in the end, a successful lobbying campaign by Georgia politicians and local businesspeople captured the School for Fort Benning. Sal Díaz-Versón Jr. and his sister, Elena Amos-anti-Castro Cuban immigrants who made a fortune in the insurance industry-were at the forefront of this campaign, and their efforts merged with the desire of the Columbus Chamber of Commerce and Georgia congressional representatives, especially the powerful Senator Sam Nunn, to bring the SOA to Fort Benning.

Intense anticommunism and sharp business acumen drove the Cuban Americans' bid for the SOA. Like many Cuban immigrants of their generation, brother and sister shared a deep hatred of Cuba and its communist government. This hatred was nurtured by their father, Sal Díaz-Versón Sr., a right-wing journalist who dedicated his career, before and after the Cuban revolution, to denouncing communism. After the triumph of Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries in 1959, the Díaz-Versón family fled Havana for a life of exile in Miami. Sal Jr. was nine years old. He passed his formative years watching his family recover from its losses in Cuba and imbibing the bitterness of other refugees who, at least temporarily, had lost their wealth and the taken-for-granted privileges that accompanied it. Forty-one years later he described himself to me as "one of those hardliners that says Fidel has to go before anything changes." His older sister Elena shared these views. Prior to her death in 2000, she served for several years on the board of directors of the extremist Cuban American National Foundation, and she enjoyed important political ties with a number of conservative, fiercely anticommunist U.S. senators, including Jesse Helms, Orrin Hatch, and Strom Thurmond. The senators had been associates of her late husband, John Amos-the founder and chairman of the Columbus-based American Family Life Assurance Company (AFLAC). Home-grown and Latin American anticommunism, coupled with capitalist self-interest, constituted the glue that bound together the Cuban immigrants and the conservative Southern politicians.

Elena and Sal Jr. believed that supporting the School of the Americas would prevent Cuban-style revolutions from happening elsewhere in Latin America. Mobilizing others to the cause assumed particular urgency for Sal and Elena in the early 1980s, when revolution appeared imminent in much of Central America. The Nicaraguan Sandinistas, who had overthrown the Somoza family dictatorship in 1979, represented an alternative to authoritarian regional regimes backed by the United States. The Sandinistas initiated a widely acclaimed literacy campaign modeled after the Cuban experience, and they decreed a popular agrarian reform that divested the Somozas and a clique of their associates of accumulated wealth in land. As the Sandinistas set out to remake Nicaragua in the 1980s, civil war intensified in Guatemala, where a brutal army counterinsurgency campaign left a trail of death and destruction in its wake. In neighboring El Salvador, guerrillas of the Farbundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) seemed on the verge of wresting power from the military and the infamous "fourteen families" who ruled the country. Sal Jr. explained his sense of impending doom at the time and the importance of the SOA: "There was a cold war taking place in Latin America. The influence of Fidel and the Russians was real ... They were the ones undermining democracy. El Salvador, Nicaragua-those were the key battlegrounds. [The SOA] is much less costly to the United States than having to send in U.S. troops ... We [train] good military folks that can handle the problem internally. You do not need outside forces to come in."

Sal Jr. and Elena were not just driven ideologues. They were also astute businesspeople who understood the importance of promoting capitalism locally. The insurance company AFLAC had grown into an economic powerhouse that figured prominently in the Columbus economy and on the national scene, and Sal Jr., who was the company's president from 1978 to 1992, shared some of the responsibility for its success. He was also a leader in various business associations; for example, he had chaired the Atlanta Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and had served as president of the U.S.-Cuban Business Council, a national lobbying organization based in Washington, D.C. Perhaps most important, however, Sal Jr. and Elena appreciated the enormous economic potential of Fort Benning for Columbus. They believed that even the relatively minor contribution of the SOA and its $3.5 million annual budget would strengthen Fort Benning and bolster the bottom line of local businesses. As Sal Jr. explained: "The growth of Fort Benning helps the community. It has an economic impact-in car sales, in retail, in housing and so forth. So anytime we see the possibility of bringing another division or whatever to Fort Benning, we try to compete for it."

Yet there are reasons to question whether the impact of an enormous military installation on the local community is as beneficial as Díaz-Versón claims. In a study of Fayetteville, North Carolina-the home of Fort Bragg-Catherine Lutz documents a number of problems that plague military company towns. Small businesses, for example, are vulnerable to large fluctuations in the post population, and the army pays no property taxes because federal land is exempt. The absence of tax dollars undermines the quality of public education and forces local people to subsidize the education of military children who attend public schools. Furthermore, U.S. soldiers avoid state income tax because they are allowed to maintain their home-state residency, and the overwhelmingly male nature of the military encourages a lively sex industry (Lutz 2001, 180-93). These criticisms of the army's behavior in Fayetteville apply to its conduct in Columbus as well, but Díaz-Versón did not address them.

In 1983, the year before the School came to Georgia, Díaz-Versón organized and chaired the School of the Americas Support Group in which Elena played an active role, and he estimated that over the years he spent between eighty thousand and one hundred thousand dollars of his own money in SOA-related activities. At its height, the Support Group consisted of approximately forty prominent Columbus citizens who spearheaded the campaign to capture the SOA. Members knew that the army brass was considering other locations with large Hispanic populations, and Columbus, at the time, could not boast of such a constituency. Yet they remained undaunted and tailored a lobbying strategy that emphasized the greater "Americaness" of the Columbus metropolitan area.

They argued that SOA students should not train in areas heavily influenced by Hispanics, because Latin American soldiers would feel too comfortable among their own kind and speak too much Spanish. To understand America, they argued, the trainees needed more access to "middle Americans" and schools where their children could learn English. According to Díaz-Versón, "If you really want them to understand what America is all about and how it really functions and meet the real people, you have to put them somewhere like Fort Benning in Columbus." Armed with this argument, he and others vowed to assist Latin American officials and their families to assimilate into local life. They pledged to invite students to their homes during holidays and to make them aware of special observances, like Thanksgiving, that are not celebrated in Latin America. They offered to connect individuals with health problems to specialists who would waive high consultation fees, and they contacted attorneys to help military visitors deal with traffic violations and other legal problems.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The SCHOOL of the AMERICAS by LESLEY GILL Copyright © 2004 by DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. Excerpted by permission.
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