The School of the Americas – military training and political violence in the Americas (Lesley Gill):

This book examines how the United States constructs a repressive military apparatus, in a region long considered by many to be its “back-yard,” through the lens of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (SOA). The School of the Americas is a U.S. Army centre for Latin American militaries that, since its establishment in the Panama Canal Zone in 1946, has trained over sixty thousand soldiers in combat-related skills and counter-insurgency doctrine. It has been at the centre of an intense public controversy over the last decade, because of the participation of some of its alumni in human rights atrocities. Some of the most notorious graduates include Argentine General Roberto Viola who was convicted of murder, kidnapping, and torture during Argentina’s “dirty war” (1976-2983); former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega; Salvadoran Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, who commanded the brutal Atlacatl Battalion that massacred nearly one thousand civilians in El Mozote; Guatemalan Colonel Julio Alpirez, who tortured and murdered guerrillas and a U.S. citizen while on the CIA’s payroll; and Honduran General Luis Alonso Discua, who commanded an army death squad known as Battalion 3-16.

still digging up the dead! El Mozote. God bless Amerikkka.

The infamous School of the Americas (now known as The Western Hemisphere Institute of Security and Cooperation after a name change in 2001), where impoverished Latin American countries can learn how to terrorise their own civilians for American interests – or rather – selected, corporate & military minority American interests. Coups, massacres, military oppression, disappearances & targeted assassinations, forced expulsions & land siezures, despotic surveillance campaigns, brutal torture & roving death squads are all ingredients of Uncle Sam’s gifts.
Voluntary vassals from the military or business elite can receive cultural conditioning on corporate imperialism & then go incinerate peasant communities, fell forests & fast-track destructive extractive mercantilism & resource raiding off the well-worn canard of “development”, growth opportunity & “fighting Communism”.
Bomb them better & lay those roads.

blood & guts for the banks.

Lesley Gill’s vigorous, bold & incisive research really, really excavates the mass graves & unregulated military-police combing the community under arrant immunity, the filthy politics & business interests, land expropriation & expulsion of indigenous localities & general “war on the poor” that this American radicalisation camp, “torture academy” & “terrorist school” has stoked & provoked.

Psychological colonialism, capitalist scald, low-level Americanisation & blind-faith western-supremacy interlock with an ill-defined, barely perceptible & unexplained mat-antipathy towards anything but neoliberalism & market-mania. Like the social poison of the public school system, the isolated attendees stew in the echo-chamber, wolfing down garbage doctrine & shit-theory from their ivory capsule of drastically distorted idealism & ignorance. “How dare the people resists the markets bondage & the narrow & errant vision we develop in seclusion & mutation!” – role out the right-wing death squads & blame it on the guerrillas/peasants/paupers. full-force for the invisable hand.

the market needs meat & misery to keep the yachts bobbing.

The Reagan administration transformed the county transformed the country (Honduras) into a base of operations for a stand of what it perceived as a rising tide of communism. It authorised the Central Intelligence Agency to organise a paramilitary force of exiled , former Nicaraguan national guardsmen to conduct covert attacks against Nicaragua from bases in Honduras and Costa Rica. The administration also channelled millions of dollars of arms to the Honduran security forces. The military assistance strengthened right-wing elements, who, like their patrons in Washington, favoured a military solution to the Central American conflicts, and who assumed the task of repressing domestic opposition. Even though Honduras did not possess a major guerrilla insurgency, military hard-liners targeted students , unionists, and peasants, as well as anyone who belonged to political parties or groups considered leftists. They forcibly detained, tortured, and disappeared supporters of, or those beloved to support, the Sandinista government or Salvadoran guerrillas.

learn how they loot …. amazing research.

Lesley Gill, 2004, Duke University Press, 244 pages