Latin American Training Center-Ground Division In 1946, the
United States Army founded the Latin American Training Center-Ground Division (
Centro de Entrenamiento Latino Americano, Division Terrestre) at
Fort Amador in the
Panama Canal Zone to centralize the "administrative tasks involved in training the increasing number of Latin Americans attending U.S. service schools in the canal zone." The school trained Latin American military personnel to use artillery and advanced weapons purchased from the United States and provided instruction in
nation-building. The army soon renamed the division the Latin American Ground School (
Escuela Latino Americana Terrestre) and divided it into three departments: engineering, communications, and weapons and tactics. The school was affiliated with army training schools in Panama that included the Food Service School (
Fort Clayton), the Motor Mechanics School (
Fort Randolph), and the Medical School (Fort Clayton). During the 1940s and 1950s, the school sought to prove that the quality of training provided matched or exceeded training provided by institutions within the U.S. When a group of Argentine officers attended a three-month course in 1948, the school painstakingly structured the program to convince them that the U.S. was "enterprising, efficient, and powerful." Administrators leveraged preconceived notions around Argentine racial superiority in Latin America to cultivate feelings of equality between the Argentine officers and their U.S. counterparts.
U.S. Army Caribbean School In February 1949, the army consolidated the training schools in the Panama Canal Zone and transferred operations to
Fort Gulick. The army changed the name of the Latin American Ground School to the U.S. Army Caribbean School. Some courses were taught in Spanish to accommodate requests from Latin American countries that the school served. In 1956, English was eliminated as an instructional language and the school adopted Spanish as its official language. Accordingly, the majority of U.S. personnel the school trained between 1956 and 1964 were Puerto Rican. After the 1959
revolution in Cuba, the U.S. Military adopted a national security doctrine under the perceived threat of an "international communist conspiracy." In 1961, President
John F. Kennedy ordered the school to focus on teaching "
anti-communist"
counterinsurgency training to military personnel from Latin America. Broadly, the U.S. offered training to Latin Americans in riot and mob control, special warfare, jungle warfare, intelligence, and counterintelligence, civil affairs, and public information. According to anthropologist
Lesley Gill, the label
"communist" was a “highly elastic category that could accommodate almost any critic of the
status quo." Nicaraguan Dictator
Anastasio Somoza made occasional visits to the school.
Curriculum The Department of Internal Defense dealt with "national internal defense", while the Counterinsurgency Committee provided counterinsurgency training in ten-week and two-week courses. According to the Department of Defense, the school provided intelligence and counter-intelligence training to "foreign military personnel" under the
Mutual Assistance Program. It also trained military police and maintained a close relationship with the Inter-American Police Academy. By its closure in 2000, The USARSA had graduated 60,428 officers, cadets, noncommissioned officers, police and civilian defense officials from 22 Latin American countries and the United States. During the mid-1960s, the school was one of several institutions through which the U.S. Army augmented "training in jungle warfare". The
Department of Defense reported to President
Lyndon B. Johnson that 180 students from the Continental U.S. Base had been trained in 1965, including 60 from the
1st Cavalry Division deployed in the Republic of Vietnam.Heightened tensions in Southeast Asia increased demand for "jungle operations techniques". Further, the school leveraged instructors returning from service in Vietnam to "insure currency of the instruction". The counterinsurgency manuals that the school used for instruction were produced during the Army's Project X, established under the Foreign Intelligence Assistance Program in 1965–66, which relied on knowledge produced during the
Central Intelligence Agency's
Phoenix Program. He considered the training conducted in Panama to be essential because it enhanced American "access to the politically influential leadership" of the
Panamanian National Guard and instilled in its personnel "attitudes favorable to the United States". In the late 1970s,
civil wars and
communist revolutions intensified the
Central American crisis. In 1980, the United States increased economic aid to Honduras, which remained relatively stable compared to other Central American countries. Journalist Ray Bonner reported that much of this aid would go toward training military officers at the School of the Americas and to training programs within the continental United States. Hundreds of Hondurans were trained at the school during the 1980s, when the country became increasingly critical to President Ronald Reagan's efforts to overthrow and defeat the
Nicaraguan Sandinistas and other revolutionary guerrilla movements in the region. The surge in trainees during the 1980s marked the second wave of Hondurans to be trained by the school. The first wave took place between 1950 and 1969, when 1000 Honduran cadets were trained at the school or other facilities within the United States. During the 1980s, Mexico, El Salvador, and Colombia made-up seventy two percent of the school's cadets. On September 21, 1984, the school was expelled from Panama under the terms of the
Panama Canal Treaty. Prior to this expulsion, politicians and journalists in Panama had complained that civilian graduates from the school engaged in repressive and antidemocratic behavior. The army considered relocating the school to
Fort Allen in
Juana Díaz,
Puerto Rico, ultimately choosing Fort Benning (briefly known as
Fort Moore),
Georgia, where it re-opened in December 1984 as part of the
U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. In 1989, the school established a policy on human rights instruction and revised its curriculum to integrate human rights training. According to the school, cadets received between four and forty hours of human rights training depending on their length of attendance. Instructors received sixteen hours of human rights training before they began to teach. As the
Cold War drew to a close around 1991, the
foreign policy of the United States shifted focus from anti-communism to the
war on drugs, with narcoguerillas replacing communists. The focus later shifted again to
terrorism.
Congressional criticism and debate In 1993, a released list of 60,000 graduates confirmed that "dictators, death squad operatives, and assassins" had been educated at the SOA. Again in 1996, the committee urged the Department of Defense to continue efforts to incorporate human rights training into the regular curriculum and to monitor the human rights performance of its graduates. A report regarding the school's selection process and monitoring of human rights practices of its graduates, as well as examples in which graduates made significant contributions to democracy-building and improved human rights practices, was requested by the House Appropriations Committee in 1996. An investigation was undertaken to ensure that the school's contemporary intelligence and counterintelligence materials were in "complete compliance with law, regulations and policy." Rep.
Nancy Pelosi addressed the issue in the congressional record:For years, some of us have had serious questions about the Army's School of the Americas and its connection to some of the worst human rights violators in our hemisphere. Last weekend, information released by the Pentagon confirmed our worst suspicions: U.S. Army intelligence manuals, distributed to thousands of military officers throughout Latin America, promoted the use of executions, torture, blackmail, and other forms of coercion. We now have concrete proof of what we had suspected. For almost 10 years, U.S. taxpayer dollars were used to promote an approach that advocates using, and I quote, "fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions, and the use of truth serum".Congress continued to debate whether or not to close the school throughout 1997. In February, Representative Kennedy introduced another bill, H.R. 611, that sought to close the school. Instead of pressing for the establishment of the U.S. Academy for Democracy and Civil-Military Relations, the bill urged the Department of Defense to create an Inter-American Center for Defense Studies in order to "provide professional training and education relevant to defense management in a democratic constitutional context." Senator
Dick Durbin introduced a similar bill, S.980, into the senate in June. That same month, the Department of Defense submitted the report previously requested to address screening and monitoring of the school's students. The House Appropriations Committee noted that the report was delivered six months beyond its deadline and criticized its content as "woefully inadequate". The report divulged that the screening and selection processes of school candidates differed between countries and that each country was responsible for screening and selecting candidates. According to the report, the names of selected candidates were sent to the "appropriate [U.S.] mission offices and agencies", who were expected to run their own background checks on the candidates. It also suggested that the resources required to monitor all 60,000 graduates were not available.Rep.
Joseph P. Kennedy II entered a counterargument into the congressional record:Mr. Speaker, in the next couple of hours, this House will have the opportunity of closing down the School of the Americas. This is one of the worst vestiges of this country's foreign policies over the course of the last couple of decades. While the cold war has ended, the association of this country in hundreds of villages throughout Latin America, in thousands of families where human rights abuses have taken place time and time and time again, those who perpetrated those human rights abuses have one thing in common. They were graduates of the School of the Americas. This is a school that is funded by U.S. taxpayers. It has trained the Latin American militaries how to come to this country and learn to kill, torture, and maim more efficiently. It is a school that should never have been associated with U.S. taxpayer funds. It is a school whose time has not only come and gone, but whose time should never have been associated with this country. It is time, I believe, for us to close down the School of the Americas. I ask Members on both sides of the aisle, save the taxpayers money. Close the School of the Americas.In July 1999, the House of Representatives voted 230–197 to reduce funding for the school by two million dollars. A House-Senate committee voted 8–7 to overturn the vote in the weeks that followed.
WHINSEC By 2000, the School of the Americas was under increasing criticism in the United States for training students who later participated in undemocratic governments and committed human rights abuses. In 2000, the
US Congress, through the FY01 National Defense Act, withdrew the
Secretary of the Army's authority to operate USARSA. The next year, the institute was renamed to WHINSEC.
U.S. Army Maj. Joseph Blair, a former director of instruction at the school, said in 2002 that "there are no substantive changes besides the name. ...They teach the identical courses that I taught and changed the course names and use the same manuals." However, the first WHINSEC Director, Richard Downie, became the controversial director of the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies (CHDS), the educational institution of both the U.S. Northern and U.S. Southern Commands (SOUTHCOM), at the
National Defense University in
Washington, DC. from March 2004–March, 2013. During Downie's tenure at CHDS, the institution faced controversy over its continued employment of a former military officer from Chile, who was later indicted by a civilian court for his alleged participation in torture and murder and who was defended by Downie. In addition,
The Intercept reported that Honduran plotters in the illegal 2009 military coup received "behind-the-scenes assistance" from CHDS officials working for Downie. The detailed August 2017 article noted that Cresencio Arcos, a former U.S. ambassador to Honduras who was working at the Center at the time the coup occurred, received an angry call from a Congressional staffer who had met with the Honduran colonels who were meeting with Members of Congress in Washington. The colonels purportedly told the staffer they had the center's support. Arcos confronted Downie and Center Deputy Director Ken LaPlante, telling them, "We cannot have this sort of thing happening, where we're supporting coups." LaPlante was a former instructor at the notorious School of the Americas and an ardent defender of that institution while at what is now called the
William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies.
Participation Since its opening in 2001, WHINSEC has trained more than 19,000 students from 36 countries of the
Western Hemisphere. In 2014–2015, the principal "Command & General Staff Officer" course had 65 graduates (60 male and five female) representing 13 nations: Belize, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and the U.S. In 2004, Venezuela ceased all training of its soldiers at WHINSEC after a long period of chilling relations between the United States and Venezuela. On March 28, 2006, the
government of Argentina, headed by President
Néstor Kirchner, decided to stop sending soldiers to train at WHINSEC, and the government of
Uruguay affirmed that it would continue its current policy of not sending soldiers to WHINSEC. In 2007,
Óscar Arias, president of
Costa Rica, decided to stop sending Costa Rican police to the WHINSEC, although he later reneged, saying the training would be beneficial for counter-narcotics operations. Costa Rica has no military but has sent some 2,600 police officers to the school. Bolivian President
Evo Morales formally announced on February 18, 2008, that he would not send Bolivian military or police officers to WHINSEC. In 2012, President
Rafael Correa announced that
Ecuador would withdraw all their troops from the military school at Ft. Benning, citing links to human rights violations. In 2005, a bill to abolish the institute, with 134 cosponsors, was introduced to the
House Armed Services Committee. In June 2007, the McGovern/Lewis Amendment to shut off funding for the Institute failed by six votes. This effort to close the institute was endorsed by the
Council on Hemispheric Affairs, which described the Institute as a "black eye" for America.
Commandants USCARIB School • Col. Cecil Himes (1959–1961). • Col. Edgar W. Schroeder (1961–1963)
(According to another source, Cecil Himes was commandant from 1958 to 1961.) School of the Americas • ? (1964–1972) • Col. John O. Ford (June 1968-January 1971) • Col. Joseph Villa (around 1973) • ? (1973–1984) • Col. Michael J. Sierra (1984–1985) (transfer from
Fort Gulick, Panama to
Fort Benning, GA) • Col. Miguel A. García (1985–1988) • Col. William DePalo (1989–1991) • Col. José Feliciano (1991–1993) • Col. José Álvarez (1993–1995) • Col. Roy R. Trumble (1995–1999) • Col. Glenn R. Weidner (1999–2000)
WHINSEC • Col. Richard D. Downie (2001–2004) • Col. Gilberto R. Pérez (2004–2008) • Col. John D. Suggs jr. (2019-) ==Current organization==