Customer Reviews

The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (American Encounters/Global Interactions)

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I can still recall my curiosity as a young girl hearing the cryptically delivered advice from one woman to another: "Honey, what you do in the dark will certainly come out in the light, e---ver--y time." Today, the quotation comes immediately to mind as I think about Lesley Gill's investigative book, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. Perhaps my juxtaposition of Gill's book and the chatter between women appears as an unlikely pairing, but her disclosures of US involvement with Latin Americans, particularly up and coming military officers, certainly reveals North America's clandestine activities illuminated by an astute writer.
Gill, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at American University, prevails as the consummate teacher who seamlessly employs vocabulary for both the novice and the experienced student of international affairs. Her ease of language serves as a major draw in understanding how American leaders exploited the School of the Americas, located first in Panama and later in Columbus, Georgia, to underhandedly endorse corrupt Latino governmental officials. Having also authored Teetering on the Rim: Global Restructuring, Daily Life, and the Armed Retreat of the Bolivian State and Precarious Dependencies: Gender, Class and Domestic Service in Bolivia, Gill is well armed (pardon the pun) in Latin American study and the myriad dimensions of corrupt political rule. Beginning with the school's inception in 1941 and progressing to its name change to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, in 2001, Gill delivers a comprehensive overview for her readers. While her expertise lies mostly with Bolivian culture, Gill adroitly summarizes the SOA's political tentacles in Peru, Argentina, Honduras, Bolivia and Nicaragua. Each re-telling of the personal stories from military officers and the disavowed personalizes her message for both her supporters and distracters.
Gill attacks what's done in presumed darkness. According to Gill, the United States grants tacit approval to innumerable human rights violations by its support of foreign enrollment at the SOA. It is obvious, right from the start, that she's appalled by the contradictory message of a nation founded on the principles of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" endorsing an institution like the SOA. When interviewed by Aaron Mandel for the magazine, American Prospect On-Line, Gill emphatically states "there is no useful purpose for the institution. It's symbolic, really, of the abusive practices from the Cold War right up to the present. It would be better closed and made into a museum to commemorate the lives of the people murdered by SOA graduates."It's almost unbelievable that given the wide ranging influence of the school, virtually no one has heard of it, including many seasoned military personnel bur that fact evolves as a major tenet of Gill's thesis. Gill clearly illuminates the long kept secret and its ancillary political, economic, and even psychological impact on SOA graduates. Students and instructors labor under the SOA motto: "all for one and one for all." Gill, however, discloses, that the motto more aptly describes the impunity (a word she uses a great deal) enjoyed by the cliquish bureaucracy.
Is Gill waging her own war? Yes, seemingly. She zealously delivers evidence to support her views and in an almost recruitment mode, appears to invite readers to align against SOA personnel and students. Readers seeking a balanced perspective might find this distracting and Gill may very well loose possible recruits because of the obviously liberal leanings of the book. Fervency may appear as propaganda and likened to SOA proponents. In fact, some of her fellow armor bearers have created a web-site that not only lists previous graduates, but features a logo of a skull wearing a graduation cap with a lynch man's noose substituted for the traditional tassel. Lest there be any question about its meaning, "Shut down the SOA" is blazoned across the logo of the school which websters renamed the "School of the Assassins." I If one is to believe the numerous atrocities (as I do) then anything less than total conviction by the author would appear shallow and yet, too much emotion lends itself to hell and damnation preaching. Fortunately, for her readers, Gill has not ascended to the pulpit, albeit, a call close at times.
To her credit, Gill moves a step beyond the women in my mother's kitchen who simply recited admonitions. She acts. Gill sends a warning to governmental and military leaders who wield too much power against the powerless that she will be a torch bearer against continued human on human atrocities.

This is an extremely well written study of the military training given to soldiers from all over Latin America. It explains how various ideologies have been used over the past sixty years in order to justify military repression of social movements and the quest for democratic institutions. It examine how the original ideology of containing communism morphed into the war on drugs; and finally into the war on terrorism. This should be required reading for any course on foreign relations or international relations.

If you have ever wanted to know more about the School of the Americas, or need information for research (as I did) this book has a lot of great information and history of the topic.

I ordered a book from this seller a month before Christmas for a present. I never received it. This was especially upsetting because it left me with one present short of what I had planned on giving. I tried to contact them several times, but they never responded.

After reading the introduction to Lesley Gill's The School of the Americas (SOA), I felt stimulated to resolve some of my long-standing issues with the United States involvement in the Cold War - especially regarding the military's ability to withstand the freezing temperatures during this crucial period in world history. Unfortunately, upon conclusion I too was left with a chilly feeling. It may have been the brain freeze from the Popsicle I licked too fast, but more likely from the lack of hard evidence portrayed in the following chapters. I was impressed with the extent of research and fieldwork done to complete Gill's study of the United States military training facility on Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, however, I also was sedated by page after of page of expendable information that only seemed to add to the number of minutes before I could warm up again in a hot bath with the Bush twins.
The tone of this perpetual debate over the United States involvement and manipulation of Latin American countries during and after the Cold War has escalated in recent years in response to the number of military officials, trained in the SOA that have violated international human rights laws such as torture, mass violence, and genocide. This is likely the justification for Gill's book - a firsthand assessment of the School's mission and training methods alluding to some connection between the School and the acts of terror committed in Latin and South America.
The author's first mistake was her decision to bring up the attacks of September 11, 2005 in the opening paragraph, and make a parallel to the atrocities in Latin America. She claims the US has been involved in countless terrorist acts around the world and is capable of covering them up by using non-Americans to do their "dirty work." "The American state rules less through the control of territory than through the penetration and manipulation of subordinate states that retain considerable political independence (pg 3)." At first this seemed to set the stage for a great book. Who doesn't like conspiracy theories? I almost picked up the phone to call Michael Moore, but I decided to read on instead. Gill proposes the idea that the United States government is partially responsible for various atrocities based on their history of providing military training and equipment to insurgents and guerillas for personal benefits. Nevertheless, where should we place the blame? On the assassin who is trained and ordered to carry out these attacks or on the person who actually is funding or teaching or even ordering these attacks to occur? As Bush would say, "we aren't here to play the blame game."
The author's proposal to place blame on the US government can be emotionally inspiring for the reader, but it doesn't actually prove anything unless more evidence is found. 241 pages later, with my bladder on the verge of exploding and my eyes blood shot red, she finally refers back to the attacks on the World Trade Center. She reemphasizes the enormous amount of power the United States holds as a modern day empire, and therefore is capable of spreading world peace as well as mass violence around the world. The obvious assumption is lacking the distinction between the violence that took place and the actual control the school may have had in preventing it. For many years the impunity of the United States government has allowed them to create international laws, impose democracy worldwide, and frankly do anything they want and get away with it. Nevertheless, the School of the Americas has many questions to answer for the violence that plagued South and Central America over the years. However, to what extent are they responsible for the terror? Gill fails to address any specifics from a historical context and this leaves the reader as well as the author with no one to blame. "Isn't it ironic...don't you think?"
Aside from my disappointment in Gill proving a conspiracy against the United States, she takes an unexpected perspective as a cultural anthropologist. Her theme seemed to be less about the political consequences of SOA graduates, and more about US government spreading the American culture and way of life through training facilities such as the SOA. Latin trainees are given the opportunity to learn military tactics from a superior country, but Gill discovered that the networks established and the cultural experience has a much greater effect than the actual military training itself. Imperialism is no longer a product of war fought by soldiers to spread its borders; it's driven psychologically by spreading American culture and ideals as an essential core for socio-economic success. Unfortunately for the trainees, their perception of American culture couldn't be more skewed under the confines of the SOA. They are isolated from any real culture that is distinctive all over the country, and are spoon-fed a constructed environment which seems more like Pleasantville than the reality as we know it.
Lesley Gill has proven she is an excellent ethnographer and researcher in the School of the Americas. Her scholarly approach unfortunately lacks any hard evidence needed to bring justice for so many victims of state-sponsored violence. It ironically leaves the author in a position to have no other option but to sympathize with the school - a surprising stance based on her preemptive liberal agenda that seemed to plague the early chapters. This book highlights the important role the US plays because of the amount of power they hold. It is easy to say that we are a world power but with that power our every move is studied, criticized, mimicked, and vitally consequential. As a world power we should not only be a positive role model to spread peace and bring justice, we should understand that our actions, although seemingly beneficial at the time, may eventually come back to bite us in the ass. In my opinion, rather than spending four years researching a self-conscious facility with only trashcans of shredded paper left to find the dirt, she might as well spend ten minutes in Guantanamo Bay to uncover real human rights violations.

America has done it again: bred killers. Lesley Gill, author of School of the Americas, and of Colombia: Unveiling U.S. Policy, has written another book on her disappointment in the U.S. government. This book is yet another revelation of how the U.S. government's foreign policy is creating more damage than is necessary in its position; the U.S. government has a predisposition to place its many hands in situations all over the world in order to `protect' its interests. In Gill's School of the Americas, she explores an area where the U.S. has interfered in the well being of a country or nation. Her book examines the military institution, School of the Americas (SOA, currently known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) that trains Latin American soldiers to learn the American way of `combating' insurgence by using violence.
According to Gill, the school has become an important place for Latin American social climbers. After they graduate, they go back to their countries in order to take control of the military and political situation. There are many, many, many other problems Gill raises concerning the SOA. Nevertheless, what this book lacks is a balanced point of view. Gill, as an anthropologist, looks at interference in a negative way. The issues she brings up in her book are all masks disguising the real issue and point that she has concluded from the very start of her book; The SOA belongs to the bad people.
From the very first pages of the book the SOA is immediately condemned for getting involved in Latin America. Shouldn't the U.S. government let them be? Gill's answer is evidently yes. The U.S. government should not try to get involved in Latin America and should concentrate on its own domestic policy. After all, the United States has a long history of committing to supporting dictators and abusers around the world (does Osama bin Laden ring a bell anyone?), including Latin America. The American values that are taught by the SOA to its students are horrific according to the author. America views itself as superior, due to the notion of "Euro-American" superiority, and the "self-asserted superiority has justified almost any policy that the "civilized" chose to enact on the inhabitants of the Third World, or on the slaves, immigrant laborers, and indigenous people of the Americas" (31) Granted that these values may be mystified in a way, the fact is that these students are here by choice and even though it may be another way for America to assert its Imperialism-that's how the world works. Whatever their reason is to be there, should the school be held accountable for choices a few of the graduates make when they graduate?
Gill states that the "exclusive settings" in the SOA "aggravated the polarization of the world into "our people" and "the enemy," and they intensified forms of racism and class exclusion that were already widespread." (236) Here she is referring to the disconnect between these officers trained in the school and the civilians in their countries (as well as the other officers trained elsewhere). Gill seems to simplify the situation and lay blame on the school-most of these countries she is writing about are countries with military-like rule, ultimately placing the army at just about an equal status to the political leader.
I'm not a supporter of the SOA and I don't believe the American foreign policy is just. But we should be able to lay the blame where it is needed. The author fails to pull herself out from the proximity of the situation to look at it from a wider perspective. Although Gill gives a somewhat sympathetic voice of the students in the SOA through the interviews, she has an incredibly one-sided argument. Her book has a strong emphasis on the students who return to their homeland only to generate more violence rather than prevent further violence from occurring. However, for the most part, all the other graduates are ignored. What are the statistics on the `bad apples' and what percentage do they constitute of all the graduates? On the last page of her book she writes "some movement activists see a positive part for the U.S. military to play in Latin America and object only to what they view as the aberrant behavior of the SOA, particularly the murder of priests and nuns by its graduates." This sentence is pretty much the vast majority of the view from the other side of the road. We do not hear much more than that and we are not given half the amount of evidence given to support her first and foremost conclusion that we encounter from the first couple of pages of the introduction.
I repeat, this is an anthropologist's perspective and if you thought you were going to be reading a more balanced book that will give you insight as to what needs to be done to eliminate violent acts in Latin America but at the same time diminish the involvement of foreign powers in the region, then this isn't the book for you. This doesn't deal with much of the foreign policy and the reasons behind it. It doesn't present solutions, only problems. Is closing down the SOA a solution? Would it eliminate the violence in Latin America? The author does not present to us at what point the U.S. should draw the line on when it should involve itself in Latin America's domestic difficulties. This book simply looks at the SOA, its graduates, American values and the courses taught in the school. So, what about the most important aspect of the reason the SOA was developed, the American government?