[April 17th marks the 50th anniversary of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy U.S. invasions and interventions of Latin American nations, leading up to a weekend Guest Post on the Dominican Republic from a colleague, friend, and DR scholar!]
On three telling
stages in the history of a longstanding, controversial
US government institution.
1)
The Latin American Ground School: In 1946
the U.S. government formed the Latin American Training Center-Ground
Division (soon shortened to the Latin American Ground School) at Fort Amador in the Panama Canal
Zone. The institution’s official purpose was to provide a location for “administrative tasks involved in
training the increasing number of Latin Americans attending U.S. service
schools in the Canal Zone,” and that certainly was a central function of
the training center for its first couple decades (and remains one today, on
which more below). But the 1946 origin point was far from coincidental, as from
the beginning the center represented an overt attempt to use U.S. military and
governmental power to push Latin America and the Western Hemisphere away from
potential Soviet/communist influences. That would all become far more overt
still after the 1959 Cuban revolution, as illustrated by President
Kennedy’s 1961 order that the center teach tactics “to thwart armed
communist insurgencies.”
2)
The School of the Americas: Just two years
after Kennedy’s order, the center’s name was formally changed to the “U.S. Army
School of the Americas,” and the official language of instruction was changed
to Spanish. Those steps would seem to reflect an increasing emphasis on Latin
American communities and audiences, and yet over the next few years, tens of
thousands of U.S. soldiers and military personnel would train at the school. They
did so as part of the Jungle Operations
Committee and Course, a program which utilized the school’s setting to
train soldiers and personnel destined for the unfolding war in Vietnam. At the
same time, elements of the Vietnam conflict influenced the trainings offered at
the school, including (according to both
historians and former instructors like Major Joseph Blair), illegal
subjects such as torture and assassination. The school’s relationship with
dictators and death squads had long been a fraught one, but it was during this
1960s moment that such emphases (for US soldiers as well as Latin American
students) seem to have been formalized and amplified.
3)
The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation (WHINSEC): Due in no small part to the long-developing controversies
over such programs and practices, and in particular to 1990s Congressional debates
over whether to defund and close the school entirely, in 2001 the school’s name
was once again changed, this time to WHINSEC. The question of whether anything
else has changed is an open one: Blair
has argued that “there are no substantive changes besides the name”; while researcher Ruth Blakeley
has concluded that after the change “a much more rigorous human rights training
program was in place than in any other US military institution.” That debate is
of course a crucial one, but in any case it is telling that this institution
has continued to exist into the age of the “war on terror,” and that is has
clearly exerted a significant ongoing influence over the hemisphere (more than
19,000 Latin American students have trained at WHINSEC since the name change).
Next
InvasionStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other US-Latin America histories you’d highlight?
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