Should School of the Americas' 'Coup Academy' Be Closed?

General Manuel Antonio sits February 28, 1988 in Panama.

Stephen Ferry / Liaison / Getty Images

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Le Monde.

MEXICO CITY — Few of the hemisphere's training centers can boast as many ex-leaders and government strongmen among its graduates. For many schools, this would no doubt be an excellent marketing pitch. Not so for the School of the Americas (SOA). None of its famous alumni reached power by way of the voting booth. Some are even behind bars now, either convicted or facing prosecution in their respective countries for abuse of power.

Created in 1946 by the U.S. government, the SOA was initially set up in Panama. During the Cold War, it was the primary training grounds for military hierarchies across Latin America. Among its more famous students is Manuel Noriega, who established a military dictatorship in Panama and is currently in prison in France, accused of working for the Medellín cocaine-trafficking cartel. Elias Wessin, who participated in the coup that toppled the Dominican Republic's Juan Bosh, also attended the academy, as did Hugo Banzer of Bolivia, who went on to become his country's dictator. Then there was the ex-president of Argentina, Roberto Eduardo Viola, and Vladimiro Montesinos, aid to former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori. Montesinos oversaw Peru's intelligence service. He was later jailed for arms trafficking and corruption. The list goes on. See pictures of Culiacán, the home of Mexico's drug-trafficking industry.

SOA alumni have been actively connected to human rights violations throughout the region, first in their fight against the extreme left, and then in the fight against drug trafficking. In the end, many of them ended up allied with the drug traffickers themselves. In Venezuela, Gen. Efraín Vázquez, an SOA graduate, was involved in the failed coup d'état attempt against Hugo Chavez in 2002.

This record was enough for some U.S. lawmakers to finally take a stand. Last August, 69 members of the House of Representatives (two republicans and 67 democrats) signed a letter to President Barack Obama asking him to close the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (Whinsec), as SOA was re-christened in 2001. Since opening, the school has changed names five times, "but not the curriculum," says Pablo Ruiz, spokesperson for SOA Watch (SOAW), an NGO that has worked to close the institution down.See pictures of Mexico City's police fighting crime.

A free trip to the United States

Lieutenant Zarza (a pseudonym) is one of 1,764 Mexican soldiers who have studied at SOA. Although he spoke openly with AméricaEconomía, he was pushing the bounds of acceptable military behavior, and asked not to be identified to avoid punishment.

Zarza arrived at SOA in the second half of the 1990s, and he admits that when his superior recommended him for the course on intelligence, he knew little to nothing about the school. His education, up to that point, had been in the line of duty, and he was often on the front lines of the battle against drug trafficking.

"For me, it was a scholarship to go to the United States. I wasn't high ranking and I didn't have any specialty in the field, but I had the highest grades in the preparatory courses, so in spite of the complaints of higher ranking officials, I went to Fort Benning," he says.

Some time thereafter, he ran into the institution's history when he saw his name and rank on the Internet, as part of a list of former students that various NGOs make public.

"I can't speak to what happened at the SOA in the past, but when I attended courses, I didn't see anything spectacular," he says. "I would even say that the courses weren't very good, and there wasn't anything new about the military policy. Mexico and the United States have very similar doctrines."

Zarza doubts that it is possible to brainwash someone in the three or six months that students attend courses at the SOA. "We even had a Colombian instructor who advised us to be careful with the gringos, so that we wouldn't have the same problems as in Colombia," he remembers.

He also affirms that he never encountered any teaching about torture techniques, nor suggestions regarding coups d'états. And how can we explain that neither Colombia nor Mexico, two countries who sent a substantial number of students to SOA, have had a coup d'état? See pictures of Colombia's guerrilla army.

Zarza has a hypothesis. "Once, a South American soldier asked us how we resolved the problem with the Indians. We responded 'we are the Indians,'" he says. He thinks that the fact that the military in Chile and Argentina pulls from the upper classes increases the risks of a military coup. In Mexico, in contrast, "whoever enlists in the military does it either out of necessity or calling."

For Argentina, enough is enough

In 2006 SOAW, led by its founder, the Catholic priest Roy Bourgeois, and the organization's Latin America specialist, Lisa Sullivan, managed to get Argentina to stop sending students to SOA, which is currently located at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia.

"The School of the Americas has done a lot of bad things, and it continues to push the idea of a 'war on drugs' and 'war on terrorism,'" said Argentina's then-minister of defense, Nilda Garre, during the official ceremony that made the decision law.

In Argentina today, terrorism and drug trafficking are problems that are tackled by the police, not the military. Later, Bolivia, Uruguay and Venezuela followed Argentina's example and stopped sending students to SOA.

For Kimberly Nolan, a researcher at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching of Mexico (CIDE), it is possible that both the military and SOA's critics are telling the truth. U.S. interests and the role of the military in Latin America have changed since the 1980s. "The United States doesn't think as much about the region. Latin American countries are already democratic and stable," she says.

The focus indeed has shifted from the fight against communism to the fight against organized crime. But if ever the War on Drugs goes the way of the Cold War, the SOA will find itself a military school without an enemy for its blackboards.

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The Alliance School: A Radical Idea for Protecting Bullied Teens

From playground cruelty to the online rumor mill, we're hearing more about bullying than ever, but are we getting better at helping kids and teens cope? TIME looks at the facts behind all those sensational headlines — what we know and don't know about why bullying happens and what we can do to minimize its effects

Jayde LaPorte, right, a transgender ninth-grader, and Robbie Moore attend Milwaukee's Alliance School.

The taunting started four years ago, when Dylan Huegerich was 10. Back then, he didn't know what being gay meant, and even today the soft-spoken teenager isn't sure where he fits on the spectrum of sexual orientation. He knows he's different. He knows that his sense of style — his chin-length hair, his dabbling with makeup — caught the eyes of school bullies in Saukville, Wis. In seventh grade he was pelted with snowballs and shoved into lockers. Everywhere he went on campus, students shouted anti-gay slurs and pointed and stared. "It hurt so bad," he says. "I hated my life. I hated everything."

His mother Amy tried to intervene. She says she was told it was her son's fault for standing out and that he should cut his hair or try to act "more manly," allegations the principal declined to comment on. Dylan's mother considered volunteering in his classroom or the cafeteria, but that wouldn't protect him the rest of the time. Every morning, she says, "I knew I was driving him back to this place where he was hurting. Oh, they beat you up? Here, go there again. My heart broke every time he got out of the car." When the time came to register Dylan for eighth grade, she decided against re-enrollment. "I felt like if I turned in those forms, I was giving him some kind of a sentence," she says.

So instead of sending Dylan back to a school that was a 10-minute drive from his house, his mother opted for the publicly funded Alliance School, an hour and a half away in downtown Milwaukee. The only overtly gay-friendly charter school in the U.S. to accept students as early as the sixth grade, Alliance has several boys who, with their painted nails and longer hairstyles, look like Dylan. But more important, it has many students who say they know how Dylan feels. While only about half of Alliance's 165-member student body identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT), nearly all were bullied or harassed at their previous schools. The hallways are filled with masculine girls, effeminate boys, punks, goths, runts, the overweight and the ultra-nerds. Alliance art teacher Jill Engel affectionately calls the school "the island of misfit toys."

The Alliance School is a radical solution to a much debated problem. Children have long been taunted with homophobic slurs, but a recent string of high-profile suicides has led school and government officials to pay more attention to this subset of bullying victims. Nine out of 10 LGBT students say they have experienced bullying or harassment, according to a nationwide survey of 7,261 middle and high school students conducted in 2009 by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they have felt unsafe in school; 1 in 5 reported having been physically assaulted.

Parents want to protect their kids, but is wrapping them in an Alliance-style cocoon of tolerance the best solution? Some conservatives oppose the idea of a gay-friendly school on moral grounds, others for fiscal reasons: Why should taxpayers help make sexuality a central part of a child's or a school's identity? Developmental experts — and many gay activists — question the wisdom of shielding some students rather than teaching kids coping skills and promoting an atmosphere of respect on all campuses. "Being segregated doesn't help gay kids learn, it doesn't help straight kids learn, it doesn't help bullies learn," says Ritch Savin-Williams, a professor at Cornell University who chairs the human-development department. "All it does is relieve the school and the teachers of responsibility. It's a lose-lose situation all around." And yet to some bullying victims, it's nothing short of a lifeline.

A Place to Walk Tall
It wasn't all that long ago that people didn't contemplate coming out at school until college. In 1974, students at Rutgers University began a tradition called Gay Jeans Day, during which heterosexuals could show their solidarity with gays by wearing jeans to class. This setup meant that homophobes — as well as libertarians and anyone else who didn't like being forced to make a statement — had to choose whether to draw attention to themselves by wearing something else. But as people have started coming out at younger ages, many middle and high schools have become staging grounds for more-involved demonstrations, such as the Day of Silence in April, when participants refuse to speak even in class in order to raise awareness of what many gays say is a forced silence, and National Coming Out Day on Oct. 11. That date was chosen to commemorate a gay-rights march in Washington in 1987, but the timing can be tough, particularly for younger students, forcing a high-pressure will-they-or-won't-they moment on them less than two months into the school year.