Uncle Sam's School of the Assassins Loses Two More Clients

SOA Watch reports that two more countries, Argentina and Uruguay, have added their names to the growing list of nations who no longer want to associate themselves with the world's foremost terrorist training camp, Uncle Sam's School of the America's/WHISC.

In today's Guardian, Duncan Cambell reports, "two Latin American countries are to stop sending troops for training to a controversial military academy in the US... training Latin American soldiers in illegal interrogation techniques. The defence ministers of Argentina and Uruguay have decided to stop sending soldiers to train at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation."

Many well-known terrorists have received training at the camp, located in Fort Benning, GA. Among them are former Venezuelan Army Commander in Chief Efrain Vasquez and General Ramirez Poveda who helped lead the Uncle Sam's failed April 2002 coup which aimed to kill Comrade Hugo Chavez and bring about regime change in oil-rich Venezuela.

In Cambell's Guardian piece, he adds more names to the sordid list.

Graduates included the late Salvadoran rightwing militia leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, known as "Blowtorch Bob" for his interrogation methods; Efraín Ríos Montt, later accused of genocide in Guatemala; Leopoldo Galtieri, the late Argentinian junta leader jailed for human rights abuses, and Manuel Noriega, the former Panamanian leader now serving 40 years for drugs offences in the US.

Many others throughout South America - in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Peru have received training from Uncle Sam in order to better and more efficiently torture and brutalize domestic opposition.

The fact that participation Uncle Sam's torture camps has lost so much appeal throughout South America offers additional evidence to the growing sea-change in the region, led by Venezuela and Cuba, away from the Operation Condor-style domestic repression and towards solidarity with one-another against the brutal and oppressive forces of imperialism.