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The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (American Encounters/Global Interactions)

The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (American Encounters/Global Interactions)

by Lesley Gill (Author)

  • New

    Paperback 2004

    $27.54
Synopsis

Located at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, the School of the Americas (soa) is a U.S. Army center that has trained more than sixty thousand soldiers and police, mostly from Latin America, in counterinsurgency and combat-related skills since it was founded in 1946. So widely documented is the participation of the School's graduates in torture, murder, and political repression throughout Latin America that in 2001 the School officially changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Lesley Gill goes behind the facade and presents a comprehensive portrait of the School of the Americas. Talking to a retired Colombian general accused by international human rights organizations of terrible crimes, sitting in on classes, accompanying soa students and their families to an upscale local mall, listening to coca farmers in Colombia and Bolivia, conversing with anti-soa activists in the cramped office of the School of the Americas Watch-Gill exposes the School's institutionalization of state-sponsored violence, the havoc it has wrought in Latin America, and the strategies used by activists seeking to curtail it.

Based on her unprecedented level of access to the School of the Americas, Gill describes the School's mission and training methods and reveals how its students, alumni, and officers perceive themselves in relation to the dirty wars that have raged across Latin America. Assessing the School's role in U.S. empire-building, she shows how Latin America's brightest and most ambitious military officers are indoctrinated into a stark good-versus-evil worldview, seduced by consumer society and the American dream, and enlisted as proxies in Washington's war against drugs and subversion.

$27.54

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 304
 Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 11 Nov 2004
ISBN 10: 0822333929
ISBN 13: 9780822333920
Book Overview: Transnational ethnography and history of the School of the Americas, analyzing the military, peasant, and activist cultures that are linked by this institution.

Media Reviews
Lesley Gill has produced an in-depth expose of the militaristic mentality, socioethnic tensions, and outrageous atrocities of the empire's Praetorian Guard. Insightful and richly researched, a work of superior quality. -Michael Parenti, author of The Terrorism Trap and The Assassination of Julius Caesar
Lesley Gill's study of the premier military training operation in the Americas is a treasure trove of histories that will provoke a long overdue debate about the values and limits of U.S. engagement in the region. -Robin Kirk, author of More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America's War in Colombia
Lesley Gill's The School of the Americas is an ambitious book that provides the reader with a thorough analysis of the School of the Americas (SOA), and the effects of the SOA's training on the trainees and on two Andean Communities. -- Silvia Borzutzky * Latin American Research Review *
The notion of impunity which Lesley Gill develops with many insights has far-reaching ramifications and consequences. . . . Gill's clarity appeals to our reason, love of truth, and common human decency. . . -- Bill Griffin * The Catholic Worker *
This book is a hugely impressive, detailed, and fascinating cultural history of jazz in Britain and should be recommended not only to cultural historians but also to historians of the Cold War, the British Left, and those interested in race relations and national identity in twentieth-century Britain. -- James J. Nott * American Historical Review *
[B]reathtaking. . . . This book should make one proud to be in the same profession as its author and appalled at the implications of having a U.S. citizenship. -- Gavin Smith * Journal of Latin American Anthropology *
[I]n the wake of recent revelations that suspected terrorists captured by CIA and U.S. special forces in Afghanistan and Iraq have been deliberately hidden from the Red Cross, severely tortured and in some cases abused to death, this book remains immediately relevant. The questions at the heart of the controversy over the school -- is the U.S. military teaching the art of atrocity to Latin American soldiers, and do Americans bear responsibility for the horrors that many of the supposedly 'professionalized' graduates of the school have committed? -- take on new meaning as the United States engages in actions that bear a damning resemblance to the dirty wars fought in years past in Central and South America.
-- Peter Kornbluh * Washington Post Book World *
Gill was able to examine the school's folkways and rhetoric, thanks to glasnost-like levels of administrative cooperation. Lessons in thinking in terms of how to 'kill and maim' opposition and to 'dehumanize' those who persist. Gill then traces the paths of various graduates of the school and links their activities directly to the torture and death of 'Latin American peasants, workers, students [and] human rights activists'--i.e., 'opposition.' * Publishers Weekly *
Author Bio

Lesley Gill is Professor of Anthropology and Department Chair, Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Teetering on the Rim: Global Restructuring, Daily Life, and the Armed Retreat of the Bolivian State; Precarious Dependencies: Gender, Class, and Domestic Service in Bolivia; and Peasants, Entrepreneurs, and Social Change: Frontier Development in Lowland Bolivia.