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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Fetal Heartbeats: How the 'Heartbeat Bill' Will Reshape America's Abortion Fight

Case Study Anti-abortion groups begin a brazen campaign to make women listen to a heartbeat before they end a pregnancy

Cohen is the author of Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America.

Abortion opponents have a new weapon of choice: the “heartbeat bill.” A coalition of anti-abortion groups told the Associated Press last week last week that it was pushing to enact laws in all 50 states that would make women listen to a fetus’s heart beat before they could abort. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) has introduced a similar federal bill, The Heartbeat Informed Consent Act, in Congress.

When the Supreme Court decided Roe, critics of abortion vowed to get it overturned. They have not succeeded in that. But they have managed to pass a wide array of laws — some upheld by the courts, others struck down — making access to abortion more difficult. The Supreme Court has ruled that states can impose some restrictions, such as 24-hour waiting periods and parental consent requirements, but has struck down others, such as laws forcing women to notify their spouses. The heartbeat laws are the latest effort in a decades-long campaign that — as conservatives gain strength at the state level—appears to be gaining ground.

(MORE: The Grass-Roots Abortion War)

Recently, abortion opponents have been pushing some tough new restrictions — and prompting lawsuits over whether they go too far. Five states — Indiana, Kansas, Alabama, Idaho, and Oklahoma — have adopted laws that ban almost all abortions after the five-month mark. Meanwhile, Ohio is considering enacting the most extreme anti-abortion law in the nation. Its House of Representatives has voted for a bill that would ban all abortions once a heartbeat can be detected, which can occur as early as six weeks. That is a frontal assault on Roe, which recognized a right to abortion until “viability,” the point — around the 22nd week — when a fetus can survive outside the womb.

The new heartbeat bills don’t go quite as far — they would simply require abortion providers to make the fetus’s heartbeat audible to a woman seeking an abortion. Supporters argue that making the woman listen to the heartbeat — or look at an ultrasound image of the fetus, as Bachmann’s bill also requires — is important for true “informed consent.” They also believe that women who are provided with this kind of information are less likely to end their pregnancies. According to Bachmann, a poll by Focus on the Family, a group opposed to abortion, found that when women who were undecided about whether to end a pregnancy were shown an ultrasound of the fetus, 78% did not have the abortion.

Abortion rights advocates, however, insist that the heartbeat bills are an attempt to interfere with women’s right to make private medical decisions. They argue that the state has no business trying to lobby patients about medical procedures, or to turn doctors into government mouthpieces. At the moment, popular opinion is sharply divided on whether the state should require women to confront evidence of a fetus’s development. A Gallup poll in July found that 50% of those surveyed supported laws requiring women to be shown ultrasound images of their fetuses, while 46% were opposed.

But critics of these bills scored an important win in August, when a federal judge struck down parts of a new Texas law requiring women seeking an abortion in most cases to view a sonogram and listen to the fetal heart beat. Judge Sam Sparks ruled that the Texas law — which Gov. Rick Perry helped to push through the legislature — violated the First Amendment. “The act compels physicians to advance an ideological agenda with which they may not agree,” he said. The issue could end up in the Supreme Court.

(MORE: Rick Perry’s Mission)

While challenges to heartbeat laws make their way through the courts, anti-abortion forces are working on new — and in some cases more radical — measures. Next month, Mississippi will vote on whether to add a “personhood amendment” to its state constitution that would declare that personhood begins at conception. If it passes — and a court does not block it — the amendment could ban all abortions in the state and even some kinds of contraception, such as IUDs.

The Mississippi amendment may sound outrageous — and critics are pointing out how sweeping its implications could be. (One Mississippi law professor has suggested that if life begins at conception, state residents might be eligible to vote at the age of 17 and 3 months) It is unlikely that the Supreme Court would allow Mississippi to ban all abortions, but one thing seems inevitable: more fights over how far the states can go to rein in the constitutional right to abortion.

The Locavore's Illusions: Backyard Farming Won't Solve America's Food Ills

Don't Make Fighting Hunger Trendy | TIME Ideas | TIME.com /* */ Home TIME Magazine Photos Videos Specials Topics Subscribe Mobile AppsNewslettersRSS @TIME NewsFeed U.S. Politics World Business Money Tech Health Science Entertainment Opinion SEARCH TIME.COM Full Archive Covers Videos HomeContributorsLetters SocietyThe Locavore’s IllusionsAs charming as it sounds, growing kale in your backyard won't solve the nation's food illsBy Judith Warner | @judithswarner | October 14, 2011 | View CommentsTweetSteven Errico / Getty Images

Warner's latest book is We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.

A writer-mother of three in Brooklyn with a “tenuous and unpredictable income” tells of keeping her family afloat by growing her own fruits and veggies. Meanwhile, a Sesame Street effort on hunger in America plays up DIY solutions like food drives, new-and-improved parenting techniques, better grocery choices and community gardening.

(MORE: Top 10 Topical Sesame Street Characters)

All this proved a bit too much for Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, who was moved to make an impassioned plea this week for a cultural reality check, warning about the possibility of the incursion of “a right-wing political agenda” into seemingly apolitical discussions of how best to fight the effects of a devastating economy on the nation’s most vulnerable.

Berg’s critique, which he focused, online, on Sesame Street, then widened, with me, on the phone this week, might, on the surface seem surprising: a kale and burdock root-munching Brooklyn mom would appear, at first glance, to have little in common with a Tea Party stalwart, and Sesame Street is hardly a hotbed of political reaction.

Yet in these, and in much of the well-meaning progressive response to the twin problems of hunger and obesity in our country, there is, indeed, a common thread: a deep-rooted, unthinking do-it-yourself individualism. It’s so ingrained as to be virtually unconscious. And at a time when nearly 49 million Americans are living in “food-insecure households” — i.e. homes where family members sometimes go hungry — it’s a tendency that, if unchecked, can do a great deal of harm.

(MORE: The World’s Growing Food-Price Crisis)

Berg, a former USDA Coordinator of Community Food Security, has spent the past two decades fighting hunger. In recent years, he has focused his efforts on working to enhance the poorest New Yorkers’ access to food. He’s a great fan of farmer’s markets (particularly when they make it possible for shoppers to pay for their purchases with food stamps), supports community gardens, and runs a number of CSAs — community supported agriculture programs — which specifically aim to bring fresh, local produce to low-income communities. But, he says, these small, local, well-meaning, if trendy efforts, however important and beneficial, can’t come close to accomplishing the large-scale good of a government program like the unsexy, old standby, food stamps (now called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP benefits.)

“In both media and society there is trendiness and there’s what’s hot,” he complains. “Now it’s all about rebellion against The Man — corporate agribusiness.” (Which, some progressives say, profits directly the more that food stamp-style benefits expand.) “But we couldn’t solve this if people took to growing their own food. Even if we had community gardens on every corner, it would be dwarfed by food stamps.” The progressive impulse, he says, now centers around “the feeling that you’re somehow an outsider — so spending $60 for a free-range, grass-fed beef is being virtuous. But we need large scale guaranteed programs that impact tens of millions of people at once.”

Berg’s critique is echoed by a number of other experts who spend their lives trying to bring better food to America’s neediest tables. And it should serve as a sobering self-check for those of us easily enchanted with the vision of a foodie utopia where a rainbow coalition of backyard farmers will solve the nation’s food ills by growing charmingly mottled heirloom tomatoes.

Sometimes thinking small and local — without an eye to the systemic and political — paves the way toward rollbacks of progressive policies that really work. Sometimes “The Man” can do a great deal of good, for example,when funding programs that add incentive dollars to SNAP benefits at farmers markets. Fact is: as a society, we’ve been assiduously cultivating our own gardens for the past thirty years. And what our politics have brought us is a bumper crop of poorly nourished people.

Warner, a former contributing columnist for the New York Times, is the author, most recently, of We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of MedicationRead other related stories about this:Hunger Affects Costs All in U.S. $542 EachUPIMeet Lily, a Muppet Facing Growing Concern: National HungerCNNRelated Topics: locavores, New York City Coalition Against Hunger, nutrition, sesame street, Life & Style, Society
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