The School Of The Americas

Founded in 1946 and located at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, the School of the Americas (SOA) is a US Army center that has trained more than 60,000 soldiers and police, mostly from Latin America, in counterinsurgency and combat-related skills. So widely documented is the participation of the School’s graduates in torture, murder, and political repression throughout Latin America that in 2001 the School officially changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Gill goes behind the facade and presents a comprehensive portrait of the School of the Americas. Talking to a retired Colombian general accused by international human rights organizations of terrible crimes, sitting in on classes, accompanying SOA students and their families to an upscale local mall, listening to coca farmers in Colombia and Bolivia, conversing with anti-SOA activists in the cramped office of the School of the Americas Watch, Gill exposes the School’s institutionalization of State-sponsored violence, the havoc it has wrought in Latin America, and the strategies used by activists seeking to curtail it.