School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas, The

Latin American Politics and Society, Spring 2006 by McSherry, J Patrice

U.S. officers at the SOA depict Latin American military brutality as intrinsic to the Latin American nature, while any U.S. role in the region's dirty wars and human rights violations is never mentioned. Thus, Gill argues, the history of U.S. involvement in Latin American repression is "disappeared." Army commander Colonel Glen Weidner, for example, refers in a speech to "a strain of incomprehensible violence in Guatemalan rural society" (p. 55). (Weidner, the SOA commander, seems to dedicate most of his time to public relations and managing the school's image.) Gill observes that the "millions of dollars of military aid and decades of counterinsurgency training in U.S. schools [are] believed to play no part in the creation of murderous security forces" (p. 32); yet one of her interviewees openly discusses lessons learned at the SOA in the torture and killing of prisoners (p. 99).

A particularly interesting chapter deals with the army's public relations campaign to improve the image of the school. Gill was repeatedly told that torture was not taught at the SOA, and she notes that over the period of her fieldwork there was "a barrage of deafening doublespeak that blurred the lines between truth and fiction and sometimes obscured them completely" (p. 45). Officers insisted that military training in psychological operations and killing techniques was actually an exercise in promoting democracy, engagement, and human rights in Latin America.

Another strength of the book is Gill's analysis of the school's efforts to break down nationalist barriers and weld the Latin American militaries into a transnational anticommunist (and currently, counterterrorist) force under the leadership of the United States. The SOA and other such U.S. schools have been crucial settings for the creation of U.S.-dominated military networks, along with secret programs, such as Operation Condor, the Cold War-era intelligence operations network that "disappeared" and executed hundreds of leftist activists-a conclusion confirmed in this reviewer's own research.

Gill nicely captures important nuances. Some Latin American officers, she notes, accepted without comment views expressed by U.S. officers that were unintentionally arrogant or that betrayed double standards. In one such case, one Latin American officer told her cryptically, several months later, that some of the things he had heard had made him "want to pull out his hair" (p. 130). The Latin Americans generally knew their place, however, as junior partners to their wealthy and powerful sponsors.

Gill devotes one chapter to a case study of the Andean region, addressing the Bolivian military's internal war against indigenous coca growers and the military-paramilitary relationship in Colombia. Although little of the information will be new to Latin Americanists, the chapter provides a good overview to nonspecialists. Another chapter is deVoted to the School of the Americas Watch, its origins, and its activists.

The book has its minor flaws. Some parts are written in a personalized, sometimes anecdotal style. Perhaps the point was to reach a popular audience, but some academic readers may be impatient with some of the more descriptive accounts. On the other hand, the best parts of the book provide relentless arguments, sharp writing, and key evidence to counter the pronouncements of U.S. and Latin American officers as they oversimplify, distort, or rationalize their practices in Latin American countries.