The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (American Encounters/Global Interactions)
by Lesley Gill
Book Summary Information
Author: Lesley GillEdition: Paperback
Published: 2004-07
ISBN: 0822333929
Number of pages: 281
Publisher: Duke University Press
Book Reviews of The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (American Encounters/Global Interactions)
Book Review: School of the Americas: Another U.S. Government Conspiracy?
Summary: 3 Stars
America has done it again: bred killers. Lesley Gill, author of School of the Americas, and of Colombia: Unveiling U.S. Policy, has written another book on her disappointment in the U.S. government. This book is yet another revelation of how the U.S. government's foreign policy is creating more damage than is necessary in its position; the U.S. government has a predisposition to place its many hands in situations all over the world in order to `protect' its interests. In Gill's School of the Americas, she explores an area where the U.S. has interfered in the well being of a country or nation. Her book examines the military institution, School of the Americas (SOA, currently known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) that trains Latin American soldiers to learn the American way of `combating' insurgence by using violence.
According to Gill, the school has become an important place for Latin American social climbers. After they graduate, they go back to their countries in order to take control of the military and political situation. There are many, many, many other problems Gill raises concerning the SOA. Nevertheless, what this book lacks is a balanced point of view. Gill, as an anthropologist, looks at interference in a negative way. The issues she brings up in her book are all masks disguising the real issue and point that she has concluded from the very start of her book; The SOA belongs to the bad people.
From the very first pages of the book the SOA is immediately condemned for getting involved in Latin America. Shouldn't the U.S. government let them be? Gill's answer is evidently yes. The U.S. government should not try to get involved in Latin America and should concentrate on its own domestic policy. After all, the United States has a long history of committing to supporting dictators and abusers around the world (does Osama bin Laden ring a bell anyone?), including Latin America. The American values that are taught by the SOA to its students are horrific according to the author. America views itself as superior, due to the notion of "Euro-American" superiority, and the "self-asserted superiority has justified almost any policy that the "civilized" chose to enact on the inhabitants of the Third World, or on the slaves, immigrant laborers, and indigenous people of the Americas" (31) Granted that these values may be mystified in a way, the fact is that these students are here by choice and even though it may be another way for America to assert its Imperialism-that's how the world works. Whatever their reason is to be there, should the school be held accountable for choices a few of the graduates make when they graduate?
Gill states that the "exclusive settings" in the SOA "aggravated the polarization of the world into "our people" and "the enemy," and they intensified forms of racism and class exclusion that were already widespread." (236) Here she is referring to the disconnect between these officers trained in the school and the civilians in their countries (as well as the other officers trained elsewhere). Gill seems to simplify the situation and lay blame on the school-most of these countries she is writing about are countries with military-like rule, ultimately placing the army at just about an equal status to the political leader.
I'm not a supporter of the SOA and I don't believe the American foreign policy is just. But we should be able to lay the blame where it is needed. The author fails to pull herself out from the proximity of the situation to look at it from a wider perspective. Although Gill gives a somewhat sympathetic voice of the students in the SOA through the interviews, she has an incredibly one-sided argument. Her book has a strong emphasis on the students who return to their homeland only to generate more violence rather than prevent further violence from occurring. However, for the most part, all the other graduates are ignored. What are the statistics on the `bad apples' and what percentage do they constitute of all the graduates? On the last page of her book she writes "some movement activists see a positive part for the U.S. military to play in Latin America and object only to what they view as the aberrant behavior of the SOA, particularly the murder of priests and nuns by its graduates." This sentence is pretty much the vast majority of the view from the other side of the road. We do not hear much more than that and we are not given half the amount of evidence given to support her first and foremost conclusion that we encounter from the first couple of pages of the introduction.
I repeat, this is an anthropologist's perspective and if you thought you were going to be reading a more balanced book that will give you insight as to what needs to be done to eliminate violent acts in Latin America but at the same time diminish the involvement of foreign powers in the region, then this isn't the book for you. This doesn't deal with much of the foreign policy and the reasons behind it. It doesn't present solutions, only problems. Is closing down the SOA a solution? Would it eliminate the violence in Latin America? The author does not present to us at what point the U.S. should draw the line on when it should involve itself in Latin America's domestic difficulties. This book simply looks at the SOA, its graduates, American values and the courses taught in the school. So, what about the most important aspect of the reason the SOA was developed, the American government?
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