The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (review)
This study asks how the School of the Americas (SOA) has worked to further U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere. Called the "school of the assassins" by critics, the SOA was born when the U.S. Army first opened its precursor in the Panama Canal Zone in 1946. In 1963, it adopted the name School of the Americas, and in 1984 it moved to Fort Benning, Georgia. In the 1990s, as investigators released lists of its infamous alumni—Panama's Manuel Noriega, El Salvador's Atlacatl Battalion, and most of Augusto Pinochet's cronies were among them—the /"torture manuals" that the SOA had used to teach also saw public light, and public and Congressional pressure mounted. In 2001, the Pentagon renamed the SOA the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation and revamped its curriculum in a public relations clean-up.