Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation
The protests are timed to coincide with the anniversary of the November 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador. used improper instruction materials in training Latin American officers from 1982 to 1991.The board reviews the institute s curriculum to determine whether it complies with U.S. government policy, and pursued recovery of the manuals from the governments and some individual students. In 2004, Venezuela ceased all training of Venezuelan soldiers at WHINSEC. A bill to abolish the school with 134 co-sponsors was introduced to the House Armed Services Committee in 2005. In June 2007 the McGovern/Lewis Amendment to shut off funding for the Institute failed by 6 votes. Since 1990, Washington, D.C.-based non profit human rights organization School of the Americas Watch has worked to monitor graduates of the institution and to close the former SOA, now WHINSEC through legislative action, grassroots organizing and nonviolent direct action. SOA Watch sponsors an annual (since 1990) public demonstration of protest at Ft.
U.S. The WHINSEC teaches its courses primarily in the Spanish language, especially for Latin American military, police and civilian personnel, as well as the Caribbean personnel in English, but is also open for persons from outside Latin America.
Benning. Beginning in 1963, and evolving as the region changed, SOA taught, at various times, professional military education and training courses to officers and non-commissioned officers in the areas of: The current WHINSEC, now part of the United States Department of Defense, was created as part of the National Defense Authorization Act by Congress in 2001.
His name is on a State Department list of gross human rights abusers. Army School of the Americas in 1963.
Ground Forces was established in Panama During 1949 it was expanded and became the U.S. It relocated to Fort Benning in 1984, following the signing of the Panama Canal Treaty.
More than 61,000 military personnel attended these United States Army schools. According to WHINSEC s web page, «the School of the Americas taught military education courses as they were taught in U. A United Nations panel concluded that 19 of the 27 killers were SOA graduates. A number of graduates of the SOA and WHINSEC have been accused of human rights violations and criminal activity in their home countries.
School of the Americas (SOA). Army Caribbean Training Center.
According to Paul Mulshine, Roberto D Aubuisson s sole link to the SOA is that he had taken a course in Radio Operations long before El Salvador s civil war began. Luis Posada Carriles was educated by the CIA in explosives and sabotage at Fort Benning (the current location of the academy) before the Bay of Pigs invasion. In 1992 the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recommended prosecution of Col. ..
Cid Diaz for murder in association with the 1983 Las Hojas massacre. policy goals toward Latin America and the Caribbean. The School of the Americas and current WHINSEC have been criticized concerning the human rights violations performed by a number of its graduates. According to the Center for International Policy, «The School of the Americas had been questioned for years, as it trained many military personnel before and during the years of the national security doctrine — the dirty war years in the Southern Cone and the civil war years in Central America — in which the armed forces within several Latin American countries ruled or had disproportionate government influence and committed serious human rights violations in those countries.
S. It was expanded and renamed the U.S.
The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC or WHINSEC), formerly the School of the Americas (SOA; Spanish: Escuela de las Américas) is a United States Department of Defense facility at Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia in the United States. Between 1946 and 2001, the SOA trained more than 61,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. In 2005, the demonstration drew 19,000 people.
The manuals were based in part on lesson plans used by the school as far back as 1982 and, in turn, based in part on older material from Project X. After this investigation the Department of Defense discontinued the use of the manuals, directed their recovery to the extent practicable, and destroyed the copies in the field. Others students are the Atlacatl Battalion responsible for the El Mozote massacre. More recently, a SOA/WHINSEC graduate, General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, took active part in the 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis. Critics of SOA Watch argue the connection is often misleading.
Southern command (or a surrogate), and six people chosen by the Secretary of Defense ( including, to the extent practicable, persons from academia and the religious and human rights communities ). Presently about 700 to 1,100 students attend WHINSEC Currently all students are given a minimum of eight hours of instruction in human rights, the rule of law, due process, civilian control of the military, and the role of the military in a democratic society. Courses must focus on leadership development, counter-drug operations, peace support operations, disaster relief, or any other matter the Secretary According to the Center for International Policy, a Board of Visitors is required to review and evaluate curriculum, instruction, physical equipment, fiscal affairs, and academic methods. A federal committee, the board must include the chairmen and ranking minority members of both houses Armed Services Committees (or surrogates), the senior Army officer responsible for training (or a surrogate), one person chosen by the Secretary of State, the head of the U.S.
Armed Forces institutions—the School translated the courses, lessons plans and all, into Spanish. More recently those numbers have increased significantly.
certain passages appeared to condone practices such as execution of guerillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion, and false imprisonment.» On September 20, 1996, the Pentagon released seven training manuals prepared by the U.S. A number of them became notorious for human rights violations, including generals Leopoldo Galtieri, Efraín Ríos Montt and Manuel Noriega, dictators such as Bolivia s Hugo Banzer, some of Augusto Pinochet s officers In 1946, in the early days of the Cold War, the Latin American Training Center – U.S.
Diaz went to the Institute in 2003. . SOA and WHINSEC graduates continue to surface in news reports regarding both current human rights cases and new reports. Defenders argue that today the curriculum includes human rights» On June 28, 1996 a Report issued by the Intelligence Oversight Board stated that «School of the Americas ..
laws and doctrine, and whether it is consistent with U.S. Southern Command advised governments in Latin America that the manuals contained passages that did not represent U.S.
military and used between 1987 and 1991 in Latin America and in intelligence training courses at the U.S.
