The article published by COHA on April 22, 2011, “School of the Americas: The Spirited Campaign Against the SOA-WHINSEC Continues with Critics and Advocates to Be Heard,” has generated a number of passionate responses in the past few days. Since we at COHA have always encouraged voices of all points of view to be heard on issues of concern to our readership, we have decided to publish several of the email responses that we...
Introduction: A Disgraced Institution? The School of the Americas is an institution rarely spoken of in a positive light. This less-than-reputable academy was created at the beginning of the Cold War epoch as a U.S. military training facility for Latin America’s armed and police forces. The School of the Americas (SOA) would grow to become a magnet for negative criticism of United States policy and its reliance on local military regimes to keep leftist...
After years of lobbying by human rights activists, Congress has approved the release of information on the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas, the military training facility infamous for producing some of Latin America’s most notorious human rights violators. The final amendment incorporated into the National Defense Authorization Act for 2010 requires the Pentagon to release the names and enrollment information of students and instructors at...
Court Statement by Louis Wolf Testimony before Judge E. Mallon Faircloth, Federal Court, Columbus, Georgia, January 26, 2009, by Louis Wolf Since 1946, the School of Americas (SOA), then based at the American base, Fort Gulick in Panama, trained ten different Latin American military officers who would become the most renowned dictators in the hemisphere, and hundreds of senior and mid-level officers who distinguished themselves as gross human rights abusers, serial torturers, drug traffickers,...
