Dubbed ‘The School of Dictators’ by human rights activists, the US Army School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, has produced some of the world’s most notorious torturers, drug traffickers and war criminals. The spectre of their crimes still haunts much of Latin America—from Argentina to El Salvador.

In El Salvador, the human rights abuses were beyond the pale–from the public assassination of bishop Óscar Romero to the raping and killing of four American nuns. 

Some of the school’s well known graduates include Jorge Videla, military dictator of Argentina from 1976 to 1981, who caused the deaths of at least 9,000 people and disappearances of an estimated 30,000 others. Another star pupil of the school was CIA agent, Vladimiro Montesinos, who went on to become Peru’s counterintelligence head. Montesino directed an anti-communist death squad called the Colina Group which committed numerous horrifying massacres of peasant farmers, trade unionists and alleged leftists.

The brutal crimes being committed in our names and with our tax dollars led a man named Father Roy Bourgeois to form The School of the Americas Watch, an organization dedicated to closing down the school.

Join Abby Martin in this edition of The Empire Files as she uncovers how the US funded right wing death squads and intentionally uprooted democracy across Latin America.

The US School That Trains Dictators & Death Squads

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The US began heavily pushing military intervention in Colombia under the Kennedy administration, whose National Security Doctrine aimed to wipe out all populist movements in Latin America through the backing of right wing death squads.

FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), the Marxist-Leninist rebel group, is branded a terrorist group by the US, yet is trying to initiate a peace process. The US prevents this from happening, and continues to use the rebel group as an excuse to increase its military involvement. The so-called Drug War is just another arm of the ongoing violence on the ground.

The role of the US military in Colombia is intense. According to the former US Ambassador to Colombia, the US has more involvement in Colombia than anywhere in the world, including Afghanistan. There is also widespread abuse on behalf of the US military throughout the community. Between 2003-2007, US soldiers and contractors sexually abused at least 54 children and could not be tried or extradited due to immunity clauses between the two countries.

All this aside, Colombia remains the invisible country in the invisible war, shunned by the world. Abby and Robbie Martin are joined by Dan Kovalik, human and labor rights lawyer, on Media Roots Radio to discuss Colombia’s current war and the far-reaching effects of US interventionism over the past half century. 

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