The United States' School of Torture in Latin America
Imagine briefly the string of tweets Donald Trump would send out at the mere suggestion of a Guatemalan military base in the middle of, say, Arkansas. For reference, here is how the President generally approaches the delicate business of international relations with our southern neighbors: “Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador have taken our money for years, and do Nothing. The Dems don’t care, such BAD laws.” Current president aside, an international army base housed within the borders of the United States would be unthinkable under any president, at any point in our history––it would be considered an affront to the safety of our nation. Though the United States would never tolerate the thought of a foreign military base within the borders of the country, this is precisely what our country imposed upon Latin America for years with the School of the Americas.
The School of the Americas was founded as a United States military base in Panama in 1946 in order to supplement traditional military training for the United States Army. Though there is an imperialist tinge to any foreign military presence in a politically insecure nation, the original mission of the School of the Americas was focused inward rather than outwards:
“In 1948, the “Escuela Latino Americana Terrestre” [Latin American School] bore no resemblance to the school that would become a lightning rod for U.S. policy in Latin America. Its mission was simple: to “supplement the training being directed by the military missions of the United States.” In addition to basic courses on infantry and cavalry, it had a strong emphasis on feeding the troops, including a course on the ‘theory and practice of food preparation.’ ”
However, by the 60s the School of the Americas was not just a U.S. military base in foreign territory (which, to reiterate, is totally unprecedented and also just...wild)––it was a hotbed for nascent dictators, teaching young military hopefuls from Latin America to torture and coerce their way to power. Eventually, it became known as la escuela de los golpes, or the school of the coups, for the sheer number of authoritarian dictators it graduated. But what business did the United States have implementing dictatorships anywhere? And why Latin America?
Here’s the simplest way to put it: the United States wanted to protect its dominance in the global sphere, and protecting capitalism was a way to do that. After WWII, the Soviet Union had risen as a competing world power. This was a competition with huge stakes for the United States, who understood capitalism and communism to be fundamentally incompatible economic systems. In the eyes of U.S. leaders at the time, if a single other country turned communist, it would cause the United States’ global influence to fall.
The mere presence of communism in the Soviet Union suggested to the United States that there was a valid threat of communism everywhere. The anxiety crested to such a height that the United States lost sight of the actual source of the “threat”––communism in the Soviet Union––as they perceived it, instead blurring legitimate and fabricated concerns for the security of economic preeminence such that they became “imperceptible.” The United States not only believed in the threat of communism, but they believed it to be coming from Latin America.
This was a huge misconception. It was based largely upon two realities: the election of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and a wave of agrarian reforms throughout the rest of the continent.
FIDEL CASTRO AND A SHORT SUMMARY OF THE ACTUAL COMMUNIST PRESENCE IN LATIN AMERICA.
Fidel Castro’s election represented the dreaded thing that the United States believed was growing in Latin America: a new type of Latin American country, a type more self-assured and without a presumption of subservience to the United States. Worse, Castro was an actual communist who openly critiqued the U.S. government and its foreign policies.
For instance, when the United States placed an embargo on Cuban sugar (Cuba’s primary source of income), Castro turned to the Soviet Union and struck a deal. The Soviet Union agreed to buy all of the sugar the United States had originally bought each year from Cuba. Where the United States had hoped it would scare Cuba into timidity, Cuba instead went unafraid to the United States’ largest enemy (unsurprisingly, U.S. officials did not take kindly to this).
Castro was outspoken in criticizing the United States for its blatant imperialism and attempts to manipulate Latin America into subservience:
“Where are the military bases of the socialist countries? The United States has hundreds of bases, it has squadrons in all the oceans in the world. [...] Everyday the United States is obsessed with finding an island, which may be a small island, or a piece of land, something to maintain its dominating system by force, its system to continue sacking the world. There is a philosophy that says that the world must be sacked, and since this can only be done by force, it explains their philosophy and blind faith weapons.”
Though there were budding socialist movements in the region, including notably what would a decade later become the Allende presidency, Castro represented the sole communist leader in the entirety of Latin America at the time––and the presence of a single communist government in Latin America counted as proof of a mounting communist conspiracy in the region to U.S. leaders.
AGRARIAN REFORMS, A CASE STUDY: GUATEMALA’S JACOBO ÁRBENZ
Meanwhile, many Latin American countries were adopting decidedly not-communist agrarian reforms in response to growing class divides between the majority of the people and the biggest landowners. This is not to say all countries were strict capitalist regimes (though some were); rather, as mentioned earlier, Castro was the single communist, where the rest ran the gamut from socialism to capitalism.
Jacobo Árbenz, ex-military president of Guatemala elected in 1950, represented one of the Latin American leaders who led an agrarian reform and was promptly and brutally punished for it by the United States. Árbenz was a definite capitalist who, by all measures, posed no threat to the sovereignty of the United States. In 1952, he wrote a reform into law that would take uncultivated land from the largest landowners in Guatemala and deed them to smaller, family farmers. The idea was that it would not infringe upon the rights of the big farmers to thrive, while taking the unused land as an opportunity for smaller farmers to survive.
Unfortunately, Guatemala’s largest proprietor at the time was the United Fruit Company, a company from the United States that bought land in Latin America, developed it to grow fruit (primarily bananas), and then sold the fruit to the United States. The United Fruit Company (UFCo) is remembered today for its predatory practices, and has been called a leading example of neo-imperialism.
The UFCo was interested only in profit, often exploiting Latin Americans and knowingly at the expense of the livelihoods of the countries it grew fruit in. As such, it did not take kindly to Árbenz’s reform, though it posed no actual threat to the success of the company as a whole. In response to the Árbenz land reform, the UFCo lobbied the United States government to convince it that Árbenz represented a threat of Soviet-aligned communism in Guatemala.
It worked. The United States officially backed the overthrow of the Árbenz government in favor of a string of brutal dictatorships.
The United States’ desire for complete and uncontested economic control over Latin America was so strong as to even dismantle governments that abided by the economic paradigm the United States had created.
HOW THE UNITED STATES MECHANIZED ITS FEAR OF COMMUNISM.
The success of Castro and popularity of land reforms like Árbenz’s fed into a deep paranoia in the United States, a paranoia which was then mechanized through the School of the Americas. The school’s mission shifted after Castro’s election and the presence of agrarian reforms in the rest of the continent. This shift––from internal edification to teaching torture tactics to Latin American leaders––was a direct response to the U.S.’s mounting anxiety. In fact, the mission of the school was rewritten directly after Castro’s election:
“The 1960-1961 [School of the Américas] catalog was identical to its predecessors, but 1961-1962 marked a significant change. The mission was expanded: “The mission of [the School of the Américas] is to provide military training for officers and enlisted men of the Latin American countries. A wide variety of courses designed to teach principles and techniques used by the United States as a result of experiences in World War II, Korean, and the ever present ‘Cold War’ are presented.” [...] For the first time, the school began to teach techniques intended to eradicate internal enemies.”
The School of the Americas was the official attempt to quell any hint of populism: it taught torture, civilian disappearance, and coersion alongside military tactics, and graduated dictators and terrorists that went on to suppress nearly every Latin American country. Some of the most horrible men in history graduated from the School of the Americas, such as Chile’s Manuel Contreras, the head of Pinochet’s secret police; or El Salvador’s death squad leader, Roberto D'Aubuisson Arrieta. Populism was effectively repressed––and the capitalist regime flourished––at the direct expense of the health, safety, and wellbeing of the entire continent.
The School of the Americas still exists. Today, it lives in Fort Benning, Georgia, and goes by the name Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). The result of the violence that the School of the Americas wrought is now the very thing its successor, WHINSEC, monitors. Much (if not most) of the immmigration from Latin America to the United States can be linked directly to the dictatorships that the SoA instated. Now, WHINSEC’s mission has shifted to monitor narcotrafficking. This means that (among other things), WHINSEC has turned to monitor immigration for illegal narcotics, effectively monitoring the wave of immigration the School of Americas caused. The effects of the School of the Americas, and of WHINSEC, are not felt by abstract concepts like “communism,” and they have rarely fell upon actual communists. As Father Roy Bourgeois, the head of watchdog group School of the Americas Watch, said:
“Who are the insurgents? They are the poor. They are the people in Latin America who call for reform. They are the landless peasants who are hungry. They are the health care workers, human rights advocates, labor organizers. They become the insurgents. They are seen as “the enemy.” They are those who become the targets of those who learn their lessons at the School of the Americas ”
Understanding the history and continued legacy of the SoA is crucial to a transnational feminist perspective. That is, social difference is not stratified the same across cultures and countries, so understanding how all people in the United States, even the most marginalized, benefit from colonialism and imperialism is important to an intersectional mindset.