A plea-deal between British arms dealer BAE and U.S. and U.K. officials may lead to more information regarding Augusto Pinochet embezzling money while president and senator. While Pinochet has been dead for over three years, many of his family members have been tied to the embezzlement, and given their complicity in his regime and his finances, this is good news.
Erwin reminds us that today is the day of the annual protest against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC), formerly known as the School of the Americas. The name-change happened back in 2001, when the Bush administration realized the School's name had been associated with some of the worst crimes against humanity in the 20th century in the Americas. Rather than closing the school down or providing a real analysis of possible changes in U.S. policy in the hemisphere, the government opted to simply change the name to the WHISC.
Among the school's more infamous graduates, there is murderous Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, former friend-to-America Manuel Noriega, and Lieutenant Byron Carvajal, a Colombian facing 60 years in prison for murdering ten counternarcotics police in Colombia, as well as many other distinguished men who were involved in torture and murder throughout Latin America. Obviously, if you've been running a center that trained soldiers who raped, tortured, and murdered civilians everywhere from Chile and Argentina up to El Salvador and Guatemala, you would hope a complete shut-down would happen, rather than a simple name-change, but that would be too humane. As a result, the protests continue on an annual basis.
Father Roy Bourgeois, the founder of the group School of Americas Watch (and major protagonist in Leslie Gill's excellent book that looks at the history, ideology, and results of the SOA) has an article up at HuffPo that outlines the recent activities of graduates from the SOA (including one of the leaders in the Honduran coup this year), as well as outlining a quick history of the SOA and the theme of the protests this year (which focus on the 20th anniversary of the murder by armed forces of 6 Jesuits, their cook, and his daughter in El Salvador).
Without a doubt, the School of the Americas is one of the darkest parts of American foreign policy in the 20th century, and the fact that it continues to exist under a lengthy euphemism does nothing to take away from the ugliness of the facts. It's worth learning a little more about the SOA if you haven't already, and contacting your congressperson to ask them why the U.S. continues to support an institution notorious for its training of torturers, rapists, and murderers.
I'm going to be forward - like nearly every other Latin Americanist, I know virtually nothing about Guyana, French Guyana, or Suriname. Despite being part of the continent, we simply don't include them as part of "Latin America" for whatever reasons (gaining independence relatively late; having colonial reigns that resembled European colonization in Africa more than Latin America, for speaking English and Dutch; etc.). I always wished this weren't true, but I wasn't going to waste my career becoming the first "Surinamist" and then trying to get a job (and learning Dutch on top of Spanish and Portuguese just doesn't seem that thrilling to me).
That said, I was rather surprised to learn that Suriname had a military coup in the 1980s, followed by repression, culminating in the state's murder of 15 opposition members in 1982. My surprise is matched only by my satisfaction of seeing that Dési Bouterse, the former de facto president during the dictatorship, is facing trial in military court for these murders (along with 22 co-defendants). Due to my forestated ignorance on all matters Surinamian (Surinamese?), I couldn't begin to predict how this will turn out. The fact that Bouterse is currently in Parliament makes me inclined to think he may not be punished severely, but that's 100% guessing with no evidence to support that conclusion whatsoever. I don't even know if Bouterse's claim that he was not involved with any step of the killings is false (though given that everybody, from Pinochet to Idi Amin to Saddam Hussein have said the same thing when they knew and often ordered this style of killings makes me think Bouterse is guilty too). But the fact that there is a trial at all definitely seems to be good news for Suriname. It will definitely be worth trying to find out more about it.
