Twenty years ago last Monday, Salvadoran soldiers murdered six Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter in the early morning. The military targeted the Jesuits because they called for peace talks between the Salvadoran government and rebels. It was one of many gruesome crimes in a bloody war, whose perpetrators had been supported with U.S. tax dollars.
Some of the soldiers involved in the planning and cover-up of the massacre trained at the School of the Americas, an academy operated by the United States for Latin American military officers in Fort Benning, Georgia. In January, a Spanish court charged eight officers who had trained at the School with involvement in the massacre. The twentieth anniversary of the killings is an opportunity for Americans to consider their partial responsibility, and a chance for Congress to begin an investigation into the tactics taught at the School.
Renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001, presumably to avoid the controversy associated with the actions of former trainees, the School of the Americas has a long history of producing Latin America’s worst dictators and government thugs.
Panama’s Manuel Noriega attended courses there, as did Julio Alpirez, a Guatemalan colonel connected to the murder of an American citizen in that country. Some leaders of the recent coup in Honduras also received training at the School.
School of the Americas defenders can say these graduates are a few bad apples, but the tactics employed in their crimes are taught at the School. According to manuals released in the 1990s, students have received training that advocates beatings and executions, as well as advises military leaders on how to choose targets for assassination.
Governments in Central and South America face challenges ranging from drug cartels to separatist movements, and it’s in the U.S.’s interest to help those governments. The only way to be sure that the School of the Americas is teaching counterinsurgency strategy in line with American values, however, is to suspend the School’s operation and investigate it.
The Latin America Training Review Act, currently in Congress, would do exactly that. Americans concerned about unethical training practices should encourage their congressional representatives to co-sponsor the bill.
The massacre of the Jesuits was just one of the atrocities perpetrated by School of the Americas graduates, but it holds a special resonance here because of Georgetown’s Jesuit identity. It should inspire Americans to take action so no more massacres are carried out by American-trained soldiers in Latin America.
