Editorial
It was a fortuitous if telling convergence of events: the vote by the U.S. House June 24 to require the release of name, rank, country of origin, courses taken and dates of attendance of School of the Americas graduates and the coup five days later in Honduras, led by a general who is a two-time graduate of the school.
It would become especially clear that overthrowing governments was a not-unfamiliar entry on the resumés of quite a few graduates, were the full-disclosure intent of the House to survive the joint House-Senate conference committee in the coming weeks.
The SOA, as it is familiarly known, was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2000 after enough attention had been called to the roster of names and the curriculum of the old school. But the institution, headquartered at Fort Benning, Ga., has had little success obfuscating its past with the gibberish of its new name.
The reality is that the school trained some of the worst actors in the hemisphere during the past half century, military leaders who did the bidding of dictators and oligarchies and who oversaw torture, massacres, genocide of indigenous populations, much of it done under the smokescreen of fighting communism. Those who experienced the brutal repression of U.S.-backed dictators could only have wondered from what ills we were saving them.
After President Manuel Zelaya was escorted from his bedroom in a predawn coup, President Obama is said to have declared: “We do not want to go back to a dark past,” apparently referring to those decades when coups occurred with some regularity and the United States was left propping up some of the most sinister and bloody characters in the hemisphere.
In some respects, however, there is no choice. For the dark past will keep haunting us until we deal truthfully with our own role in Latin America’s recent history and with our silence during decades of unthinkable human rights abuses performed by those who went through SOA classes and learned from SOA manuals.
Shutting down all means of communication and thuggishly closing off sources of news, as is now occurring in Honduras, are the ways of that dark past, a time when the United States was complicit in such tactics. We may try to keep that dark past hidden, but that strategy simply interferes with our efforts to get to a new day. It is difficult for U.S. officials to correctly criticize both Zelaya’s attempts to tamper with the constitution as well as the military’s reaction when in the very recent past our ambassadors looked the other way -- and worse -- at far more egregious violations of law and human rights.
Whatever the immediate outcome in Honduras, groups that have been persistently pressuring for the truth to be told about the School of the Americas have to continue their work a little while longer. The group SOA Watch has instructions on its Web site, soaw.org, about ways to let your views known to senators who will be considering the measure in the next few weeks.
