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School of Americas
A US institution, also referred to as the "School for Dictators",
"School of Assassins", and "Nursery of Death Squads". Countries
with the worst human rights records send the most soldiers to the School.
Its curriculum includes courses in psychological warfare, counter-insurgency,
interrogation techniques, and infantry and commando tactics. Presented with the
most sophisticated and up-to-date techniques by the US Army's best instructors,
these courses teach military officers and soldiers of Third World countries to
subvert the truth, to muzzle union leaders, activist clergy, and journalists,
and to make war on their own people. It prepares them to subdue the voices of
dissent and to make protesters submit. It instructs them in techniques of
marginalizing the poor, the hungry, and the dispossessed.
School of the Americas:
School of Assassins, USA
World War II was the "good war". After that conflict,
most Americans believed that US intentions in the world were noble -- the US was
the punisher of aggression and a warrior for freedom. This image was for
generations of Americans the measure by which they judged their country in world
affairs. The war in Vietnam ended the illusion that America was always on the
"right side". Today, America's image as a defender of democracy and
justice has been further eroded by the School of the Americas (SOA), which
trains Latin American and Caribbean military officers and soldiers to subvert
democracy and kill hope in their own countries.
Founded by the United States in 1946, the SOA was initially located in Panama,
but in 1984 it was kicked out under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty and
moved to the army base at Fort Benning, Georgia. Then-President of Panama Jorge
Illueca called it "the biggest base for de-stabilization in Latin
America," and a major Panamanian newspaper dubbed it " The School of
Today, SOA instructors and students are recruited from the cream of the Latin
American military establishment. The School trains 700-2,000 soldiers a year,
and since its inception in 1946, more than 60,000 military personnel have
graduated from the SOA.
If the SOA concentrated its training on protecting country borders from foreign
aggression or safeguarding citizens from invasion by outside enemies, it would
be considered an exemplary institution, worth the cost of American tax dollars
and US prestige. But, the SOA has very different goals. Its curriculum includes
courses in psychological warfare, counterinsurgency, interrogation techniques,
and infantry and commando tactics. Presented with the most sophisticated and
up-to-date techniques by the US Army's best instructors, these courses teach
military officers and soldiers of Third World countries to subvert the truth, to
muzzle union leaders, activist clergy, and journalists, and to make war on their
own people. It prepares them to subdue the voices of dissent and to make
protesters submit. It instructs them in techniques of marginalizing the poor,
the hungry, and the dispossessed. It tells them how to stamp out freedom and
terrorize their own citizens. It trains them to destroy the hope of democracy.
The School of the Americas (SOA) has been given other names -- "School for
Dictators", "School of Assassins", and "Nursery of Death
Squads". And, countries with the worst human rights records send the most
soldiers to the School.
Countries / Graduates (since 1946)
Argentina / 931
Bolivia / 4,049
Brazil / 355
Chile / 2,405
Colombia / 8,679
Costa Rica / 2,376
Dominican Republic / 2,330
Ecuador / 2,356
El Salvador / 6,776
Guatemala / 1,676
Honduras / 3,691
Nicaragua / 4,693
Panama / 4,235
Paraguay / 1,084
Peru / 3,997
Uruguay / 931
Venezuela / 3,250
When they return to their home countries, graduates of the SOA hold a rather
unique and peculiar view of their countrymen. They look upon priests, social
workers, journalists, and liberal intellectuals, not as assets to their
societies, but as dangerous subversives, working to undermine the system that
keeps these soldiers, army officers, and their sponsors in power.
Graduates of the SOA have been among the most repressive tyrants in Latin
America, and their actions have been some of the most cruel and violent. In El
Salvador, in 1989, a Salvadoran army patrol executed six Jesuit priests as they
lay face-down on the ground at Central America University. According to the
United Nation's Truth Commission Report on El Salvador in 1993, 19 of the 27
officers who took part in the executions were trained at the SOA.
In 1990, in El Salvador, populist Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated.
Three-quarters of the Salvadoran officers implicated in the killing were trained
at the SOA. Roberto D'Aubuison, the late leader of El Salvador's Death Squad,
was implicated in the plot to assassinate Archbishop Romero. He also
participated in numerous murders, including a massacre in the village of El
Mazote, where more than 900 men, women, and children were killed. He graduated
from SOA as well.
The U.N. Truth Commission's statistics reveal the extent of the
School's murderous role in El Salvador .
Romero assassination 3 officers cited --- 2 were SOA graduates
Murder of US nuns 5 officers cited --- 3 were SOA graduates
Union leader murders 3 officers cited --- 3 were SOA graduates
El Junquillo massacre 3 officers cited --- 2 were SOA graduates
El Mazote massacre 12 officers cited --- 10 were SOA graduates
Dutch journalist murders 1 officer cited --- he was an SOA graduate
Las Hojas massacre 6 officers cited --- 3 were SOA graduates
San Sebastian massacre 7 officers cited --- 6 were SOA graduates
Jesuit massacre 26 officers cited --- 19 were SOA graduates
In other Latin American countries, graduates of the SOA have been equally
prominent enemies of human rights. Former dictators Omar Torrijos of Panama,
Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, all overthrew
constitutionally elected governments in their countries. Leopoldo Galtieri, the
former head of the Argentina junta defeated in the Falklands War, was
responsible for thousands of "disappeared" citizens who supported
freedom and democracy in Argentina, and paid the ultimate price with their
lives. He was an SOA graduate.
In Honduras, General Humberto Ragalado Hernandez, was trained at the SOA at the
same time that he was linked to Columbian drug cartels, and the highest ranking
officers in the Honduran Death Squad were trained at SOA as well.
In Peru, the most senior officers convicted of the February 1994 murder of nine
university students and a professor, were graduates of the SOA. In Columbia, a
1992 human rights tribunal cited 246 officers for crimes against the people of
Columbia. 105 of the officers were trained at the SOA. In Panama, ex-dictator
Manuel Noriega, formerly on the CIA payroll, graduated from the SOA. He is now
in a US prison, convicted of trafficking in drugs.
In Guatemala, a country of 10 million, the indigenous Mayan population of 6
million have endured the greatest suffering in Latin America. During more than
30 years of civil war, tens-of-thousands have been slaughtered, with the total
killed estimated to exceed 200,000. Most of the ranking generals involved in the
numerous coups and acts of terror and murder during this period were trained at
In the 1970s and early 1980s, in Guatemala, thousands of political activists and
opponents of government policies were assassinated. General Manuel Antonio
Callejas y Callejas, Chief of Army Intelligence at the time, was cited by the UN
as the individual responsible for most of those murders. He graduated from the
SOA. One of the most vicious tyrants in recent Guatemalan history is Jose Efrain
Rios Montt. General, dictator, and a former president from 1982-83, Rios Montt
was proud of his political philosophy of "beans for the obedient; bullets
for the rest". He was also a graduate of the SOA.
The impact of SOA graduates on Latin American freedom has been devastating.
Armed with sophisticated training, modern weapons, and up-to-date techniques of
control and surveillance, graduates of the SOA have terrorized their own
countrymen for a generation.
In the name of its citizens and using American taxpayer dollars, the United
States, the most-democratic of countries, has for decades been training some of
the most anti-democratic leaders in the world. Administrations that have decried
terrorism abroad, have encouraged terrorists right here at home -- at the SOA.
Our country, for generations, a beacon of liberty and democracy to the world,
should play no part in subverting democracy and killing hope in other countries.
Americans who condemn world terror should condemn just as strongly America's
training of Third World terrorists. It is time for all of us to demand that the
School of the Americas be closed.
What you can do
Call, fax, or write the President, and your Senators and Representative. Ask
them to end funding for the SOA and stop training terrorists and murderers in
Ask them to support House of Representatives Bill -- HR 2652 -- introduced by
Representative Joseph Kennedy (D-MA). This bill would close the School of the
Americas and establish in its place an Academy for Democracy and Civil-Military
Relations, to identify the proper role of the military in a democratic society
and bring about civilian control over military matters in Latin America.
Father Roy Bourgeois founded SOA Watch to inform the American public about
" the School of Assassins" and to close it down. But, he cannot do it
alone. He needs the support of all Americans who abhor the training of
terrorists and murderers in this country. Support SOA Watch and Father Roy
PO Box 3330
Columbus, GA 31903
School of Americas
protest in Kabul: a sign of wider anger in Afghanistan
[6 July 2002]
massacre villagers in central Afghanistan
[3 July 2002]
and threats at Afghanistan's loya jirga
[15 June 2002]
presides over a political and social disaster in Afghanistan
[29 March 2002]
of a protracted colonial war in Afghanistan
[22 March 2002]
Mounting anger over US atrocities in Afghanistan
Deaths of Afghan civilians during NATO bombing - conservatively 3,767
Now, for the first time, a systematic independent study has been carried out
into civilian casualties in Afghanistan by Marc Herold, a US economics professor
at the University of New Hampshire. Based on corroborated reports from aid
agencies, the UN, eyewitnesses, TV stations, newspapers and news agencies around
the world, Herold estimates that at least 3,767 civilians were killed by US
bombs between October 7 and December 10. That is an average of 62 innocent
deaths a day - and an even higher figure than the 3,234 now thought to have been
killed in New York and Washington on September 11.
Afghan war documentary charges US with mass killings of POWs
Showings in Europe spark demands for war crimes probe
A documentary film, Massacre in Mazar, by Irish director Jamie Doran,
was shown to selected audiences in Europe last week, provoking demands for an
international inquiry into US war crimes in Afghanistan.
The film alleges that American troops collaborated in the torture of POWs and
the killing of thousands of captured Taliban soldiers near the town of
Mazar-i-Sharif. It documents events following the November 21, 2001 fall of
Konduz, the Talibanís last stronghold in northern Afghanistan.
Schools of the
"Operation paperclip" was so named when the satanic king makers and
power brokers who presently run our world, and are destroying it,
brought Nazi war criminals to the US at the end of WWII, to continue
their "scientific" projects here. They placed paperclips on the files,
so their clerks could type clean dossiers for President Truman's
From their work came the HIV virus, Aspartame, and the
"Schools of the Americas", etc.
Ferdinand Marcos Filipines
Mohammed Resa Shah - Iran
Israel / Palestine
My Lai massacre - US army's slaughter of
U.S. Devastated El Salvador with Death Squads
Trained by the CIA, paid for by U.S. taxpayers
The Pinochet Principle
* Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, slaughtered hundreds of
thousands with baroque ferocity and summarily expelled tens of thousands of East
Indians, uprooting an entire ethnic community that had deep roots in the
country. He now lives a princely existence in a marble villa in Saudi Arabia,
where the government has furnished him with cars, drivers and other sundries.
* Indonesia's Suharto, who finally left power in 1998 after thirty-two years
of dictatorship, is living in Jakarta in very bad health and is said to be
fearful of traveling to Europe for medical care because he might be subject to
the Pinochet treatment. After he seized power in 1965-66, Suharto oversaw the
massacre of some half a million Indonesians in an anti-Communist witch hunt. In
1975 he ordered the invasion of East Timor, after which about 200,000 people
were murdered by the Indonesian armed forces-equipped and trained by the US
government under both Democratic and Republican administrations-before Indonesia
finally withdrew from the country this past fall.
* Henry Kissinger was never a dictator-of the United States. But given that
he was a chief architect of Richard Nixon's murderous escalation of the war in
Southeast Asia, during which hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodian and
Laotian civilians were killed, and that he helped engineer Salvador AIlende's
overthrow by Pinochet in 1973 and gave US endorsement to Indonesia's invasion of
East Timor in 1975, Kissinger ranks with the dictators and war criminals on this
list. He lives in elegance on Manhattan's East Side, traveling the world lecture
circuit with the gravitas befitting a great diplomat.