Public Employee Press

Training the torturers

The Bush administration has described torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as the work of “a few bad apples.”

In reality, the incidents of torture are consistent with long-standing practices of the U.S. government. For decades, the United States has trained Latin American military personnel in counterinsurgency techniques, including torture, at the School of the Americas.

Union leaders and activists in Latin America have often been targeted for murder or arrest by security forces, including SOA graduates. Many U.S. unions — including the AFL-CIO and DC 37’s parent union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — have called for closing the facility.

“Torture has been part of our foreign policy for years,” said Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of School of the Americas Watch, which also advocates shuttering the torture school.

In 1996, under public pressure, the Pentagon released several SOA training manuals that recommend using torture, false imprisonment, blackmail and even execution to battle insurgents. The manuals were based on U.S. military and CIA manuals written in the 1950s and 1960s.

The School of the Americas was established in 1946 in Panama, and later moved to Fort Benning, Ga. Stung by its notoriety, the school changed its name in 2001 to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

Over six decades, the school has trained 60,000 Latin American military and police personnel. Military repression in Latin America in recent decades has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and unexplained disappearances. SOA manuals recommended targeting for interrogation people who support “union organizing or recruiting,” as well as others who distribute “propaganda in favor of the interests of workers” or “sympathize with demonstrators or strikes.”

Today, SOA graduates stand accused of being responsible for the murder of union activists in Colombia, which is regarded as the world’s most dangerous country for union members.

—GNH