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| November 17, 2006 Alaskan in Exile by Neil Zawicki When I was nineteen, I learned how to jump out of airplanes with a rifle strapped to my leg. I also learned about the School of the Americas. The Army trains all of the services at their parachute training school at Fort Benning, GA. We got to keep company with Marines and sailors and Air Force people, and then there were these other guys who ran around with a friendly-looking shoulder patch depicting a Spanish Galleon under sail, the official logo of the School of the Americas. “What do you guys do at that school?” we would ask them, we with our bright-eyed, All American Boy voices and hard charging excitement. And they would just smile, or answer us in a language that sounded like Portuguese. “They teach people to blow up villages down there,” said a jump school buddy as we hunched over our lunch in the mess hall. “It’s some creepy shit, man,” offered another. School of the Americas. That name, with its friendly connotation and happy, academic ring, always puts a little spook tingle on my neck. It’s actually a training school at Fort Benning, designed to teach Latin American military members (the ones on our side) to go around pulling high-speed covert warfare to combat any Leftist uprisings … and there have been plenty of those. Whenever the news picks up on a Latin American military operation, like the Grenada invasion or Panama or our occupation of the Dominican Republic or the Contra war in Central America in the 1980s, we can be certain it is only one tiny piece of a larger picture. American Special Forces were in Bolivia during the 1960s, making sure nobody pulled any leftist sneaky pants business. The 60-year-old school, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation, is being revamped by President Bush. Why? Hugo Chavez, for one. He’s the prince of the Leftists in Latin America, and he called Bush the devil. And the Chinese. They’ve been in Latin America lately looking for ways to influence the region. Chavez’ troops trained at the school until 2004. So did Argentina and Uruguay until earlier this year, when they announced they too would no longer train at the school. So, Bush last month quietly suspended training restrictions for Latin American militaries in an attempt to get more apt pupils. Already people are protesting. Massive demonstrations are planned throughout South and Central America and at Fort Benning Nov.17th though 19th. The chief concern is the school training manual, released by the Pentagon in 1996, which advocated torture, extortion and execution … things the United States does not do, right? Right. But we do train other countries to do it for us. The School of the Americas has always had a creepy slant to it. Even as a goofy nineteen year-old, I could sense something sinister. The School of the Americas seems to go beyond typical military training and begins to resemble an Ivy League campus for psychopaths. To learn more about the planned demonstrations, log on to soaw.org. Neil Zawicki, exiled Alaskan, is Editor at Large for Insurgent49, a former reporter for the Alaska Star, and winner of the Alaska Press Club's 'Best Columnist' award. He is now living out the rest of his days in an undisclosed location in Oregon. He can be contacted at hondo23@gmail.com 'Alaskan In Exile' appears on insurgent49.com every Friday. |
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