School of the Americas

When at Waterloo, I attened a lecture about the School of the Americas. I was shocke dto learn that the US actively trained Latin Americans who later go and torture their own people. Wiki bhai has more information on this School ( no wonder there is a rise of the left in Latin America..well this is one of the reasons away):

The SOA was established in 1946 with the purpose of training Latin American men to promote democracy in their native lands, but, according to SOA Watch, graduates of the school have perpetrated many of the worst human rights violations in recent Latin American history and demand its immediate closure.

In addition to conducting its annual vigils and educating the public about abuses committed by graduates of the academy, the SOA Watch continues to lobby Congress to shut down the school.

In 2004, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez agreed to withdraw all troops from WHINSEC, which has trained over 4,000 Venezuelan soldiers. Several of the officers involved in the failed 2002 coup d'etat were School of the Americas graduates^[1]. In 2006, the governments of Argentina and Uruguay decided to stop sending soldiers to the school, as well [1]. SOA Watch is pressing other South American leaders to follow the examples of these countries...................

Read more about the School of Americas Watch here. and also here:

Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC or WHINSEC), formerly School of the Americas (SOA; Spanish: Escuela de las Américas), is a United States Army facility at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. Its motto is Libertad, Paz y Fraternidad (Liberty, Peace and Brotherhood). ^[1] It has a history of supporting controversial anti-communist regimes and guerrila organisations.

The institute is a training facility operated in the Spanish language, especially for Latin American military personnel. As of 2006 the school now offers its Command And General Staff course to United States military for whom Spanish is their primary language. The course which is formally called ILE is the same which United States military officers attend only in Spanish. Somewhere around 60,000 people attended the now closed School Of The Americas. Presently roughly 1,000 students per year attend WHINSEC which was created as part of the National Defense Authorization Act.

The school has frequently in the past supported regimes in Latin America with a history of employing death squads and otherwise infringing upon human rights, something the school has staunchly denied. In response to this type of past criticism, the school in 2004 created a human rights protection training course, requiring each student to take eight hours. The school has also included in much of its course work training in the principles of democracy. Critics accuse the school of teaching these classes to only a few students and argue that the minimum of eight hours of ethical instruction mandated by recent law is not sufficient.