School of the Americas
Official seal
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| Motto | Libertad, Paz y Fraternidad (Freedom, Peace, and Fraternity) |
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| Established | 1946 (as Escuela de las Americas), as WHINSEC 2000/2001 |
| Commandant | Colonel Glenn R. Huber Jr. |
| Budget | $14M as of FY2010[update] |
| Members | 215 |
| Owner | United States Department of Defense |
| Location | Fort Benning, Georgia, United States |
| Coordinates | 32°21′54.1″N 84°57′21.25″W / 32.365028°N 84.9559028°W |
| Address | 7161 Richardson Circle |
| Website | Official website |
The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), is a United States Department of Defense Institute located at Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia, that provides military training to government personnel in US-allied Latin American nations.
The school was founded in 1946 and from 1961 was assigned the specific goal of teaching "anti-communist counterinsurgency training," a role which it would fulfill for the rest of the Cold War. In this period, it educated several Latin American dictators, generations of their military and, during the 1980s, included the uses of torture in its curriculum. In 2000/2001, the institute was renamed to WHINSEC.
In July, 2016, just days before the Democratic Party convention, a Platform Committee meeting in Orlando, Florida, issued a call for the closing of the Institute as one of its planks into the Democratic Party's policy platform. The amendment, which was agreed to by representatives of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, said: "Our support of democracies and civilian governments in the Western Hemisphere includes our belief that their military and police forces should never be involved in the political process, and therefore we will reinstate the 2000 Congressional mandate to close the School of the Americas now known as WHINSEC."
The US Army School of the Americas (SOA) was founded in 1946 and originally located at Fort Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone. From 1961 (during the Kennedy administration), the School was assigned the specific Cold War goal of teaching "anti-communist" counterinsurgency training to military personnel of Latin American countries. At the time and in those places, "communists" was, in the words of anthropologist Lesley Gill, "... an enormously elastic category that could accommodate almost any critic of the status quo."
During this period, Colombia supplied the largest number of students from any client country. As the Cold War drew to a close around 1990, United States foreign policy shifted focus from "anti-communism" to the War on Drugs, with narcoguerillas replacing "communists". This term was later replaced by "the more ominous sounding 'terrorist'".
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Wikipedia