The University of Terror Is Back in the News

U.S. activist Theresa Cusimano, a native of Colorado, was arrested a few days ago when she tried to enter the Fort Benning military base in Columbus, a city situated 173 kilometers southeast of Atlanta. A cable from AFP explains that the woman was one of 5,000 protesters that demanded an end to the training of Latin American soldiers in the ex-School of the Americas, now dressed up with the name Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

Cusimano had read the testimony of the Chilean Anatolio Zárate, who was tortured in the Tejas Verdes prison camp by soldiers trained in the United States: “They had us wait underneath the torture room, where we could hear the screams of the tortured, the screams of the women who begged not to be raped. They electrocuted me, I suffered hangings, blows to my feet and hands and being submerged in excrement. … When an electrical current is applied it feels like it is a flame coming from within the head.” [1]

The captors and torturers of Anatolio prided themselves in having learned these techniques at the School of the Americas. From this sadly celebrated school the principal protagonists of the military dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Central America and other nations graduated.

It was U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945) who ordered the opening of the University of Terror in Panama. In 2001, it was renamed its current name. But the cosmetic change of its designation does not free it from its macabre history: the mission of forming guardians of imperialism on the continent. Men trained to torture and exterminate, who counteract the growing influence of leftist political organizations, especially those that are ideologically Marxist.

In the ‘60s, its classrooms were put to the service of military dictatorships. The training courses adapted to the circumstances: counterinsurgency techniques, commando operations, sniper training, psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. In the manuals that have been declassified by the Pentagon there is evidence of different human rights abuses, the use of torture, extortion and summary execution.

Much has been written about this shameful imperial initiative. In an open letter sent July 20, 1993 to the Columbus Ledger Enquirer, Commander Joseph Blair, an old instructor at the institution, declared: “In three years at the school, I never heard of such lofty goals as promoting freedom, democracy or human rights. Latin American military personnel came to Columbus for economic gains.” [2]

But there is a definition by U.S. Democratic Sen. Martin Meehan of Massachusetts that summarizes well the saga of this history: “If the School of [the] Americas held an alumni association meeting, it would bring together some of the most unsavory thugs in the Western Hemisphere.” Without a doubt, Meehan refers to a list that could be endless, but we will try to summarize the careers of the most “brilliant” students of the University of Terror.

Elías Wessin y Wessin (leader of the coup d’état in the Dominican Republic that overthrew the democratic president Juan Bosch in 1963); General Hugo Banzer (responsible for the bloody military government of Bolivia in 1971 and the dictatorship that lasted until 1978); Roberto D’Aubuisson (leader of a death squad in El Salvador, where he founded the ARENA party); General Héctor Gramajo (ex-minister of Guatemala, author of genocidal military policies in the ‘80s); and Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri (leader of the Argentine military junta, responsible for the torture of more than 100,000 people and the death and disappearance of some 30,000).

Add to that Manuel Contreras (head of the National Intelligence Directorate at the service of Augusto Pinochet); Vladimiro Montesinos (ex-CIA collaborator, responsible for Peru’s intelligence service during the controversial government of Alberto Fujimori, accused of political repression, inciting a coup d’état and amassing a great fortune through his close relations with drug trafficking); Santiago Martín Rivas (Peruvian intelligence agent and head of the death squad Colina, which carried out assassinations and acts of dirty war); and Romeo Vásquez Velásquez (head of the Joint General Staff of the Armed Forces of Honduras during the coup d’état against President José Manuel Zelaya Rosales on June 28, 2009).

Along with these jewels, in the classrooms of terror between 1956 and 2003, another 61,000 Latin American soldiers and police officers graduated — the great majority of these students of a criminal army at the service of the United States, the nation that taught them to kill, and its interests. By demanding the end of this sad history, Theresa Cusimano was arrested.

[1] Fragment of the testimony “Yo fui tortuado por Cristian Labbé,” Chile, 2006.

[2] Roy Bourgeois: “Terrorismo made in USA en las Américas. Una enciclopedia básica,” 2006.

[3] In “El Salvador, la Escuela de las Américas y el futuro,” 2007.