Part Two: The Deadliest School in History

you are a podcast producer. Uh and uh you are also the Are you the president? I'm not of of myself. Yes, okay, you're there, but not of the United States? No, not, thank god? No, okay, okay, I would. This is good to know because I was going to actually be very angry at you about the wildfire response, but apparently you had nothing to do with that. Um, so I guess, I'll,

I guess, I guess we're cool. Um. Sorry, I forgot who the president was briefly, and since you were on my computer culture critic, that's a kind of president in a way, aren't we all the president of critiquing culture? Yes, wasn't that what Gamergate was about basically was it I don't know about a lot of things. So which happened? Yeah, okay, uh so Joel, how are you? We're doing this normally we do both parts of a two part episode in the same day. We took a little breather, took a

little breather, and then the entire country caught on fire. Yes, so I don't know, how are you? How are you

holding up? I'm not yet on fire and counting my blessings and oh god, I'm actually really glad we took I'm trying to encourage more people to like allow themselves space to breathe in a very serious way, Like I feel like before this we had all of this culture surrounding like self care and also but like, guys, seriously, there was ever a time to like take a nap every once in a while and to like say no,

you can't do that. Thing, which is something I'm really trying to work on now is absolutely it's so chaotic. This is easily the most chaos most of us have ever experienced in our lives. Ever. Um, you can you can rest at times now? All the time you have we have, say vigilant there's a lot to take care of, but my God, please like just allow yourself in space. So with that, I am not crying today yet, so I feel good to keep going, keep learning, hopefully make

some pause to change in the near future. Well that's a good way to look at things. Um, let's let's pivot directly from that to talking about unbelievable war crimes committed on behalf of us interests in parts of the world that are very close to our country and and we're crying again. Yeah, let's let's do it behind the bastards does best and let everybody know that the world's more funcked up than they thought it was. It is

kind of comforting, you know. I think a lot of people who I think there are a lot of people who have lived pretty comfortable existences because we've we've we've all sort of come up and our had our childhoods in this period of relative calm that's unusual in human

history and also was very geographically isolated. The calm was localized, right, Um, And hearing stories like this makes you understand that like this chaos and like uncertainty and fear that we're feeling this like this, like gnawing terror that like death squads might start coming in the night, that like the state might send security forces out to murder you. This like thing that's new to most Americans. Uh is what we've been doing to a bunch of people for decades. And uh,

let's let's yeah, let's so that's important to understand. So yes, yes, there's a reason we have been deserved and disrupted. And I feel like, at the very least, hopefully now we can have better empathy and you're like thoughtful action. Yeah, and we can understand the patterns that we're about to see replicated in our own country and attempt to disrupt them. Perhaps.

So in December of nineteen eight one, dozens of El Salvador and graduates of the School of the America's converged on El Mazotte, a tiny village in the northern hills of the Morazon Province. Now Morizon was a stronghold of for the Feri Bundo Martine National Liberation Front or f l m N, a leftist militant group resisting El Salvador's far right government, which was of course enthusiastically backed by

the Reagan administration. Now, the US had been admitting increasing numbers of El Salvadoran soldiers into the School of the Americas for years as this conflict heat it up, so like leftist militants start gaining you know, power and sort of the hill areas and like fighting the government, and we start just just taking more and more of these guys into the s o A, which is generally the strategy.

You see the government sees our government sees left wing activism sort of picking up in a country, and they start propagandizing and brainwashing more of that nation's soldiers in the School of the Americas. So once Reagan took office, he started sending in Special Forces advisers to help out in that neighborly way that only special Forces can. Elmazote was one of several small villages suspective hosting rebel fighters,

acting as their u S trainers had taught them. The soldiers of Al Salvador's Elite Ulcado Battalion started their operations by pounding the outlying portions of several towns flat with a multi hour artillery barrage. Then grant, yeah, it's just what you do. Then ground troops moved in on December tenth, securing Almazote and ordering all residents out into the town square.

By the way, as a pro tip, since this might be useful for everybody, if you find yourself in the middle of like a genocide or a government crackdown that involves death squads, and somebody tells you to gather in the town square, don't gather in the town square. It never ends. Well, that's like the top place for massacring people is the town square. Avoid the town square if

things go real bad in your country. So anyway, the US trained soldiers of that Lakato battalion separated the men in Almazote from the women, which is, you know, another bad sign. They also separated out all of the children and forced them into a small building next to the village church. The soldiers spent the rest of the day executing every single person in Almazote. They killed the children last, perhaps because they needed to psych themselves up for such

a gruesome task. Rather than look at what they were doing and look into the eyes of these little kids, the soldiers just fired into the building where the town's children were held. Then they set it on fire before they left. Years later, that building was excavated, revealing the remains of at least a hundred and forty three victims inside. The average age was six. After wiping Christ, Jesus Christ,

what the how? Wow? Yeah, children, it's amazing. And this is specifically the battalion of the El Salvadoran Army that was that is trained and armed by the United States. Um like these guys were all trained by active due to US soldiers in how to do this like they were not. This isn't just some foreign country where people did a horrible thing because of some dictator. These are the guys we trained, using that training to, among other things, shoot a hundred and forty three children to death in

a building outside of a Catholic church. So after wiping almostote off the map, the men of the Applicatto Battalion and their US advisors headed to the nearby town of Laoya to repeat the process. We know what happened thanks to the stories of a handful of lucky survivors. One of them, Rosario Lopez, was just fast enough to get

out of town with her husband and three children. Ario hit up on a hill while twenty four of her family members were massacred, including her parents, two sisters, seventeen nieces and nephews. So yeah, her husband Jose later recalled to a journalist. I heard the commotion the prayers from where I was hiding up in the mountain. It was shooting at a bunch of kids, and some of them

cried and others had stopped. Now, Jose Rosario and their children had on that mountain for five days until Jose finally felt brave enough to descend and check for survivors. The first body he found was one of his wife's sisters. She had clearly been raped before being executed. Further in, he saw the bodies of the town's children stacked in a pile, their faces too damaged by fire and decay for him to recognize. He and a few other days

survivors did what they could to bury their bones. Altogether, the brave men of the at Licatto Battalion killed at least nine hundred and seventy eight people in just a couple of days. Nearly half of their victims were under the age of twelve. Years later, one survivor would report hearing an officer threatened to murder one soldier who expressed

an unwillingness to shoot children. Now, as far as we know, I don't believe any US troops were present during the Elmazote massacre, but the killing was done by soldiers who had again been trained by US Special Forces uh and it was under the command of officers who'd all graduated from the School of the America's Those little boys and girls were also gunned down by US made M sixteen assault rifles, which had been given to El Salvador as part of the one million dollars a day in military

aid that the Reagan administration sent into the country. When Ronald Reagan took office, Latin America was in the grip of yet another wave of revolutions. The Sandinistas had overthrown the dictator of Nicaragua in nineteen seventy nine, and by the time Ronnie was sworn in on a bible made of jelly beans, left wing guerrilla movements in Guatemala and El Salvador looked like they might be on the verge

of victory. Two. And I'm gonna quote here from an article in the Intercept in retrospect, it's clear that these were inevitable revolutions. The title of one history of the period, tiny cruel white oligarchs had ruled over indigenous peasants across the region for hundreds of years, and sooner or later the dam was going to break. But to the Reaganites, this was all the work of the international communist conspiracy headquartered in Moscow and had to be crushed by any

means necessary. Now, the article I just quoted from the intercept was written by John Schwarz, a journalist I quite respect he wrote that article this very year in partial response to some new developments in the decades old quest to hold some of the perpetrators of elma Zotte accountable for their crimes. But John's greater purpose was to highlight how similar many of the tactics the Reagan administration used to cover up its complicity and foreign massacres are two

tactics being used right now by the Trump administration. And considering the number of armed Trump supporters talking about mass murdering their political foes, like within five minutes of my house, uh, you can see why it's relevant. Uh So this is really important to talk about for more reasons than just understanding a historic crime. This has bearing on what's going to happen to a lot of people listening to this

podcast in the future. If things go as bad as they could go, so Elmazotte was never supposed to become public knowledge the Reagan administration when this happened. The An administration was in the process of trying to sell Congress on a partnership with the Salvadoran government, and one requirement that Congress had put forward was that the President would have to certify by January twenty nine, nine two, that El Salvador was quote making a concerted and significant effort

to comply with internationally recognized human rights. Now, if he couldn't, all u s A del Salvador a million dollars a day and guns and other baby killing tools would be cut off. So there were high stakes here. Now. The Reagan administration was very unhappy when they started hearing the first reports from Almazote, not because of the thousand people who had been killed, but because this was bad for them politically. It was going to be providing yeah feed

for the Democrats. So the first move that they took was to write off the rumors of the massacre as a trick by left wing guerrillas. But then on January nine two, two days before congress is deadline, the New York Times in the Washington Post both published front page stories about the massacre. Writing in the intercept, John de

tales what happened next. Thomas Enders, a career diplomat who at the time was Assistant Secretary of State for inter American Affairs, later said that Elmazotte, if true, might have destroyed the entire effort in El Salvador. What to do? The answer had been articulated by Richard Nixon years earlier, as was born out by Nixon's direct experience during Watergate,

few things are more dangerous to conservative priorities than good journalism. Therefore, as a top Nixon aid later recalled, Nixon believed that it was necessary to fight the press through the nutcutters, as the president called them, forcing our own news make a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition. That's what Nixon said, Fight the president through the nutcutters, forcing our own news, make a brutal attack on the opposition. So the pushback

began with congressional testimony by Enders. There's no reason to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians, he told a

House subcommittee. What about the number of victims? Bonner's article had mentioned a list of seven hundred and thirty three compiled by villagers as well as Italian of nine twenty six from a human rights organization, Elliot Abrams, whod just taken off as a six assistant set Terry of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, and formed the Senate that the numbers, first of all, were not credible. Our information was that there were only three people in the canton.

This was clear conscious deceit on part of Abram's. Both the Times and Post articles had written that the massacre had taken place in several locations. Then came the assault from the administration's outside allies. On February tenth, The Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy editorial titled the Media's War. Americans were badly confused about the situation in El Salvador thanks to the US press. Almazote was not a massacre, the journal wrote, but a quote unquote massacre. What what

unquote massacre? Yeah? Yeah. On the one hand, the number of dead had been obviously exaggerated, and on the other maybe the killing had been carried out by rebels dressed in government uniforms. Bonner was credulous, a reporter out on a limb and like reporters in Vietnam a sucker for communist sources. One of the editorials authors appeared on PBS to proclaim that obviously Ray Bonner has a political orientation, so there's a lot that's that that's going on here. Um,

but it's all very familiar. So first of all, what you see is Abram's getting up there and throwing out a bunch of lies at once. Uh. Number one, like throwing out a sound by like Elzote is not a massacre. It's a quote unquote massacre. Uh. The number of dead have been exaggerated. Oh and maybe they were also killed by rebels dressed as soldiers. There's no evidence for any of this. He's just throwing out a bunch of claims that then have to be dealt with and like responded

to by the Times and by the Washington Post. And it helps to drum up this idea that there's debate over whether or not anybody was killed, and that allows Americans to kind of shut their ears to it. And it works. This is the same thing the Trump administration does now. It always works. It works extremely well. Um.

And of course he starts to attack. This is one of the reasons why I'm less concerned these days about pretending to not have a bias as a reporter, because Bonner here is doing as much as he possibly can. He's he's a very good traditional reporter doing very good tradition reporting, and he gets called a communist basically, because that's what they do. It doesn't matter what you say, it doesn't matter how biased you are or aren't, They're going to call you a communist if you're reporting on

things that are bad to them. So yeah, Accuracy in Media, which was a conservative media criticism organization, went further, declaring Bonner was raging a propaganda war favoring the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador Um. So yeah, it worked. Bonner was pulled out of Central America by the Times and sent back to New York for more training in journalism. Yeah. Yeah, the Times did what they do. It's the It's the

New York Times, right. They're always going to they're always going to publish that first good story, and they're always going to back away and run a bunch of op eds with wing nuts claiming that that story was bullshit because they're scared of being seen as taking a stance on anything. That's how it's gonna be. Yeah, that's how it That's how it was in the thirties too. Yeah, you know, that's just the way it goes at all

papers being reliant on advertising dollars. It's really I mean, we've already seen it destroy like most like solid sources of internet journalism, and the papers have been fighting it for so long. Like at the local level particularly, we've

seen a lot of like good local journalism. But this idea that companies that are like oh god, to keep selling and being willing to print just the most ridiculous ship or good ship and then like retracting it and disrespecting their reporters who they must have a relationship with, they must know like this person's ability and their skills. Like it's such a pr move and so not about like the core ethics of journalism. It's astounding. It's astounding

that it's allowed to permeate like this. It's not great, not very good. So yeah, the disinformation campaign worked, at least in the immediate term. Uh yeah. Bonder gets pulled out, sent back to New York for training, and other reporters learned from his example. It was dangerous to report on any story that might be seen as sympathetic to left wing militants in Latin America. Meanwhile, the right wing militants

who controlled El Salvador continued to receive US aid. Their soldiers continued to attend the School of the America's in order to learn how to be the best desk ones they could be. By the time the violence was all over, they'd killed more than seventy five thousands El Salvadorans, the per capita equivalent of five million Americans, So this is a huge chunk of the country. The government was responsible

for eighty five percent of these deaths. Now, the good news is that at present a number of culprits have finally been stripped of their immunity. There was a law for a while that basically was trying to make peace between the two sides and said that like, nobody gets punished for their war crimes. But that got partly at least reversed. And so some of these guys are in the process and these these these court cases are going on right now, right and there's even there's been requests made.

The Obama administration released some evidence uh and declassified some files to allow the court case is to proceed. They made request of the Trump administration that obviously haven't been um listened to, in part because uh, the U S mility. Like while some of the El Salvadoran military leaders who helped make Elmazote happen have been punished, the Americans who were responsible never did. In fact, Elliot Abrams went on to become part of George W. Bush's National Security Council.

In today he's Trump's Special Representative for Venezuela. Um So, speaking of nightmarish, unforgivable crimes against humanity committed at the behest of Republicans, you want to talk about Guatemala. WHOA, let's get into it. Yeah, I'm a big Guatemala fan. It's great country. It's a beautiful country. Yeah. Yeah, it's been horrible to it. We've been real bad to it, real bad to it. Um it's one of the most

beautiful places I've ever been in my life. Um I I ran across a T shirt over there that was like, I think the thing written on it was something like Guatemala is like how nature exaggerates or how nature puts in an exclamation point. And if you go to places like La La Lan, you really feel that because it's this like lan is one of the deepest lakes in Central America. Um, and it's just surrounded by a ring of volcanoes. Like look a look at pictures of this place.

It's absolutely astonishing. Um. And when I was there at least um, Like, one of the things people would tell us is that, like the military is not allowed in here anymore, Like we don't let them in because of some of the things we're about to talk about. Um, wait, can you how do you keep the military out? Uh?

You know, I think it's I think it was just sort of a matter of like after a lot of the massacres, they kind of pulled out of certain areas where they've been killing the Maya, and they were like, there's kind of like I don't know, I got we got stopped on the road a couple of times by just sort of groups of men with m sixteens and not wearing uniforms really but operating what we're clearly checkpoint. I don't like, it was very unclear to me. I'm

not like guatemal In politics is extremely complicated. But yeah, yeah, so Robert, you want to know what isn't extremely complicated? The products and services that support this podcast. Word alright, we're back, so back in nineteen fifty four, Like, Guatemala is great, hard not to love it. Um. The problem is that in nineteen fifty four, the United Fruit Company was also in love with Guatemala UM, particularly they're they're

wonderful bananas. Now. Unfortunately, the democratically elected leader of Guatemala in nineteen fifty four was a dude named Jacobo Arbez who didn't like that a foreign country owned a large

chunk of the Guatemalan economy. Because these fruit companies owned huge amounts of Guatemalan land that had been sold to them basically by corrupt like ali arcs in Guatemala who had stolen it from indigenous people um, and then sold it to US corporations for a fraction of what it was actually worked, which allowed these corporations to basically enslave Guatemalan workers. And it was horrible. It sounds like the typical chain of command. Yes, indigenous people to oligarch to

United States. Yeah, and so our Beds comes to power and he's like, I'm going to nationalize all this ship, right, Like I'm gonna make all this ship. Everybody's like, I'm going to take this land that was sold illegally to these U S corporations, and I'm going to redistribute it to the peasants um and we're going to like try to undo the damage that the start of globalization has

done to Guatemala. Beautiful dream, A beautiful dream. You may recognize this is not all that different from what was happening over in Chile with Saladora end A at a pretty similar time. Um. So yeah, our bez comes to power, he promises to do this, and United Fruit, who owns this land, goes to the CIA and it's like, guys, you gotta do something about this. He's gonna take away our banana land. And so the CIA is like, don't worry, bro,

we got you. And then they pick up their US trained Guatemalan soldiers who would all like all these guys who've gone to the s o A and who were already inculcated, and like, yeah, I wanna I want to personally get wealthy, um by being a corrupt oligarch. And if all I have to do is murdersome indigenous people and Marxists and whatnot, that sounds great to me. I hate those people anyway, because that's partly what I've been

trained to do in the School of the America. So they overthrow your Cobo r best Um and this winds up sparking a civil war in Guatemala. And that happens in a lot of countries too, But in Guatemala, that fucking war just does not end. It goes on for thirty six goddamn years. Yeah, it is, it is. They

are just it is horrible in Guatemala. You can't exaggerate how much this completely fux society in that country, because it's just it's a generation and a half of of more or less constant sometimes low level sometimes you know. But but like war Um in the military junta that came to power didn't just hate Marxists, they hated again the local indigenous people who were descendants of the Maya

um and the like. The these kind of local Maya groups were seen as being allies of the Marxist guerrillas in the hill Uh, and eventually the Guatemalan state, which was overwhelmingly run by military officers trained by the US, decided the only way to fight this insurgency was to destroy the indigenous villages that gave it shelter. Over thirty six long years of war, US trained forces killed as many as two hundred thousand people, many of whom were Maya.

And I'm gonna quote here from the Los Angeles Times reporting on sort of how this all shook out. A report by a United Nations backed truth commission after the thirty six years Civil war formally ended in nineteen nine six, found that security forces had inflicted multiple acts of savagery

and genocide against Maya communities. The campaign included bombing villages and attacking fleeing residents, impaling victims, burning people alive, severing limbs, throwing children the pits filled with bodies and killing them, disemboweling civilians, and slashing open the wounds of pregnant women.

Which let's think right now to the story that just broke today of the United States government giving forced hist ectomes to women who are in to migrant women who are in our custody at camps on the border, just the fancier version of what they were doing. Uh. The goal is the same to stop certain groups of people

from having children. So the massacres, the scorch deirth operations, forced disappearances, and executions of Mayan authorities, leaders and spiritual guides were not only an attempt to destroy the social base of the guerrillas, but above all, to destroy the cultural values that ensured cohesion and collective action in Mayan communities. The Commission for Historical Clarification said the Guatemalan government was responsible for more than ninety percent of deaths, disappearances, and

other human rights violations during the war. The Commission said, the state deliberately exaggerated a limited insurgent threat to justify large scale repression. The Commission found and again, what that what that quote from the Commission for Historical Clarification is saying, is that the Guatemalan government with the US, is backing committed genocide. That's what genocide is, an attempt to destroy

a culture. So in the nineteen seventies, which is kind of in the middle of this whole war, President Jimmy Carter attempted to put a halt to the violence, and he did this by banning all military aid to Guatemala in order to force the government to take action on its horrible human rights record. Now, this was in general another period, Like I said, we're left wing insurgencies were starting to gain ground in Latin America, and Carter's decision

infuriated the American right wing. In nineteen eighty two, a three man military and took headed by evangelical preacher and School of America's graduate, General Efrain Rios Mont, took power in Guatemala. Now, Rio's Mont had been one of the School of America's first students, graduating back in nineteen fifty one when the school was just three years old, and when he finally took power, the Reagan administration was happy to know they had a steadfast ally they could trust

to think the right way about things. And Rio's Mont is a very interesting guy because again he's in the military in nineteen seventies six. He comes under the influence of a bunch of America and evangelical preachers and he converts and becomes and like takes a break from being in the military to be like a radio preacher and stuff. Like he's like Jerry Folwell, but he's also a general um and he is a hard core like religious conservative,

very much in mind with the American right wing. So Rio's Mont under his like, you know, again, the war had been going on for a while, but under Rio s Mont it, it escalates to a new stage of horror. And in objective terms, um yeah. Before we get onto objective terms, I want to read a couple of different quotes from survivors of the horror that Rios Mont put out. And this is from an article in h in a c l a Um called Rios Mont the evangelist so uh.

An unnamed survivor from Aguacotton, Huetenango, the military came to burn whole families out, to burn their houses, and not just their houses, but the people themselves. They burned men, women and children who died in flames, incinerated. It caused us terror, It caused this a lot of fear. Another unnamed survivor from Robin al Baja Vera pause. The military officials raped the women who were twelve and thirteen years old. The girls couldn't do anything because there were so many

soldiers lining up to take their turn. First they raped them and then they killed them. Another unnamed survivor from the same town. The children were kicked to death. The children shouted and shouted and then they were silent. So that's Rio's Mont, whoa uh trying sorry, trying to um kicking a person to death is such a laborious task, like it can't be done quickly, and as we you know, you spoke earlier about like soldiers not being allowed really

to back out otherwise potentially suffering the same fate. That's so much psychological damage done, not just to the victims, but also to the people actively participating in these murder Yeah, yeah, yeah,

what a human toll. I mean, it's one of those things you actually you read about things like the Nazi genocides and not just not like the constant like the one of the things people don't understand about the Holocaust is that the concentration camps were not plan a. The concentration camps were in part a result of the fact that the German high command learned during the course of

executing genocides that their soldiers couldn't survive massacurring civilians. There was a particular massacre called body Yard where they shot like thirty thousand people to death in a single day, and it just destroyed a lot of these soldiers. Which is not to like not saying like these Nazis need sympathy, but like human beings can't do that, most of them, and so people men were shooting themselves and drinking themselves

to death. And one of the reasons why the camps got built is because there was this understanding by the high command that like, oh shit, we can't like we're we're going to be suffering like casualties we can't afford in order to carry out these genocides. We need to find a way to do them while exposing the minimum number of soldiers to the savagery that's necessary in them. UM. Anyway, speaking line distinction is just that's why you do it.

And it's also why you really need to have a religious justification for what you're doing, because it makes it easier to convince people that they're doing the right thing by killing these godless communists. Speaking of that, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in nineteen eighty by flipping the evangelical vote away from the Democrats who had helped elect Carter a little bit earlier. UM and two of his big backers.

Of Reagan's big backers where of course, Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson, we talked about this in our Fallwell episode. Carl Rio's mont was friends with Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson. They were great buddies. He considered them spiritual advisors, and

Reagan developed a friendship with Rio's Mont. In nineteen eighty two, while all of this kicking children to death thing stuff was going on, Reagan traveled to Guatemala and basically said that all of the stories of genocide there were lies and that Rio's Mont was totally dedicated the democracy in Guatemala. He said, frankly, I'm inclined to believe that Rio's Mont has been getting a bum wrap. Yeah, easy to do. I guess when your agenda is being achieved. Yeah, overlook

kicking babies to death. Yeah, well, it's just some babies. Reagan also said that Rio's Mont had great personal integrity. Um. Yeah, and he blamed the media. Uh. In nineteen eighty three, he lifted the arms embargo on Guatemala, flooding the country with helicopter parts that the government needed to continue its genocide. During his first year in power, Rios Monts soldiers massacred more than ten thousand civilians. Four villages were wiped off

the face of the earth. Uh. Yeah. Years later, a Reconciliation Commission report would find that U s A during this period had a quote significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation. Now, typing that out excise as a major part of the story. Because the crimes committed by the Guatemalan government weren't just enabled by US weaponry and carried out by soldiers trained by the Army. Acts of torture and even genocide were regularly carried out

with the help of active duty American soldiers. And this brings me to the story of Sister Diana Ortiz. She was a us Ursulin nun in n She traveled to Guatemala to teach little kids how to read. Unfortunately, the Guatemalan government was somewhat distrustful of the Catholic Church for reasons will discuss a little later. The church is part of its mission to help the poor, often wound up sending its people into the same impoverished communities that were

such hotbeds from Marxist guerrillas. So the government caught sister Ortiz as she was traveling to an isolated rural community to deliver necessary aid. She was kidnapped, repeatedly raped, and burned with cigarettes while she was tortured for information. Now, thousands of other Guatemalan women found themselves in similar situations, and we didn't hear from most of them because most of them died or were too terrified of the consequences

of talking to ever come out. But sister Ortiz managed to survive an escape, and she was eventually able to report on the details of her ordeal, particularly the fact that her torture sessions had been directed by an amor arikan man. He gave the orders while a knife was forced into her hand and she was made to stab another woman's body. Um. Yeah. Years later, she would write. So often it is assumed that torture is conducted for the purpose of gaining information. It is much more often

intended to threaten populations into silence and submission. What I was to endure was a message, a warning to others not to oppose, to remain silent, and to yield to power without question. And Guatemala, the Catholic Church sought to walk in company with the suffering poor. I was to be a message board upon which those in power would write a warning to the Church to cease its opposition or be prepared to face the full force of the state. Something for everybody to keep in mind as the coming

months come. That's what torture is. That's what police violence is. It's what happens in the streets of Portland when a police officer punches a seventeen year old in the face before macing them at point blank range. It's the same, I Dia. You forced them into silence by causing them pain and terror. Cool stuff, good, good things. Deep. Yeah.

So while we're talking about the Catholic Church and the School of America's graduates, we should return to El Salvador and the story of a brave Catholic priest named Oscar Romero. Oscar was a leftist part of a wing of the established Catholic Church that was particularly prominent in Latin America.

The pope at the time, John Paul the Second, and most of the leadership in Rome were much more conservative, and Romero preached something that's called liberation theology, which is a controversial shouldn't be controversial, but it is with especially within the Catholic Church. It was a controversial interpretation of the Gospel that stressed justice for the poor and freedom for the oppressed. So the leadership actually, like in Rome, a lot of the leadership of the Catholic Church considered

Romero to basically be a terrorist. But this is you know, it's one of those things when we talk about the Catholic Church in Guatemala, and there's some other places in Latin America where they fulfill a similar role. This is kind of why our current pope is the dude that he is. He comes from this sort of tradition. There's a lot of very leftist Catholic priests and nuns and stuff within Latin America um and it's it's it's very tight into all of this and it's yeah, and he's

also a Jesuit and that is not too like. It's one of those things we should like. The Catholic Church horrible organization, and I think is broadly the or leadership is broadly on the wrong side of this at the time. But you also have to acknowledge that, like a lot of the great heroes in this period were Catholic clergy um who were put their bodies on the line because they knew that if they were killed, people would pay attention. It's wait, so they thought that he was a terrorist

because he wanted justice for the poor. Yeah, he wanted actual justice for the poor and not just alms for the poor, like liberation. Theologians were more on the side of like, well, the poor need to take back their fucking land that's been stolen from them. Um like breaking. Okay, listen, the only way that's gonna happen if they started breaking some commandments, y'all. And I know for a fact you don't like that. You get really testy when people get

out here and start killing. So, I mean, you know, the one time Jesus was physically aggressive in the entire Bible is when he needed to funk up some rich bankers. So I think I think people like Oscar Omero might say that Jesus is lesson for us is to funk up some rich bankers. Jesus, where is this Jesus and my Catholic Sunday schools? Not that we we I don't

want to. You have to when you talk about like the church and this, you have to number one, give proper credit to heroes like Oscar Omero without pretending that like the broad swath of the Catholic Church supported what he was doing. But what he was doing was very heroic. So he goes into these places and he's he's preaching actively against these death squads that are uh killing the

ship out of people. So he's he starts to he's speaking up like at the time in nineteen seventy nine, Um, the government of El Salvador is like kind of broadly

left wing. But there's this because of how the most recent election with like nineteen seventy nine, this government comes to power and the right wing gets furious, um, and it sort of coalesces behind This graduate of the School of the America is named Roberto Dubuson, and Dobbuson starts organizing death squads with the funding of a bunch of rich like landowners and and like corporate magnates, um, and they start murdering left wing activists and basically anybody who

speaks up on the left is a way to kind of pave the road for the return to power of the right in Al Salvador. So, in the wake of a bunch of executions, Oscar Romero, this Catholic priest takes to the radio and delivers a speech where he begs Al Salvadoran soldiers to refuse orders to kill. He tells them, in the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven. More loudly each day. I implore you, I beg you, I order you, in

the name of God, stop the repression. So the very next day, while he gave another speech, gunman under the command of Roberto Darbison entered his church and shot him dead. And the whole assassination was caught on tape. And I'm gonna play an exerpt from that now because I really do think that Americans ought to hear it because we paid for it, right, all the guns, the guns these guys had, We gave them, the training that that Davison had, we provided, so people should hear what it sounded like

when it was used. The the sound that the people make in the wake of that, the screaming from inside the church is um, like that's that's the sound of imperialism, and it's distilled and who its purest form, like that's the sound of the American empire. Uh, and and what it does to the human soul, Like that's screaming, the distortion and like the fear and the and the and the pain. Um. It's important to listen to that. I

think i've as I can listen. I don't know if you've ever listened to the slate tape narratives, you know what those are. So in the nineteen thirties, late twenties, as we're able to start recording like audio, a group of folks decided that they need to record all of the last like living slaves in America, Yes, to hear the story. Yeah yeah, And like ever since, like I

listened to most of them. There aren't that many because the quality of audio equipment and recording at the time wasn't great, So we lost a couple of the tapes,

and they preserved and digitize what they can. But like ever since, like really taking and listen to those and understanding not just the connection to the past but to the present, and like in the way words are formed and the way certain sounds had our ears, Like I believe firmly in the preservation of atrocity in the hopes that people actually listen to it and take that in and you can't hear anguished screams like that, understand the

similarities between what happened there and what's currently happening in our own backyards and not immediately feel called to action. Yeah yeah, yep, yeah. So uh Dobison, who again is the guy who's organizing these death squads, the ones that kill um Romero. Uh and several supporters were caught on a farm shortly thereafter with the cash of guns and other equipment that tied them to the killing, but authorities received so many death threats from Dobbison's far right supporters

that he was released very quickly. His political allies took power soon after. Dobison became a celebrated figure among the global right wing and even in the United States. In nineteen eighty four, several US Republican political advocacy organizations invited Dobison to Washington, d c. To attend a dinner held in his honor. He was praised for his continuing efforts for freedom in the face of communist aggression, which is an inspiration to freedom loving people everywhere. No one has

ever been brought to justice for Romero's murder. This is largely due to the fact that Dobison died early. I mean, that's one of the reasons. Um he didn't. He didn't live very long. He got like cancer or some ship. The Catholic Church did, however, canonize Oscar Omero in two thousand eighteen, turning him into a proper saint, So you know, that's good. He'd been. He had been um treated as a saint and considered a saint by people in El

Salvador for decades by this point. By the way, like he was, he was immediately canonized by the people who lived there um, But it took the church some time to catch up. So Sister Ortiz, who did survive her ordeal um, is not a saint yet, but more progress has been made in bringing her assailants to justice. The man who orchestrated Guatemala torture program in the late nineteen eighties was Defense Minister General Hector Granmaho. He was trained,

of course, at the School of the Americas. I feel like I'm becoming a bit of a broken record, but all of these guys went there. Um. In nineteen eighty one, a U. S Court found Grandmaho responsible for the rape and torture of Sister Diana and ordered him to pay forty seven point five million dollars in damages. Now that's interesting, and it may seem wild that, like you could, a government employee and a government salary might have forty seven

eight million dollars to hand over. This was not so unusual for ambitious graduates of the School of the Americas. That was part of the point of going to the School of the Americas. And I'm gonna quote now from Leslie Gill's book. In Guatemala, for example, the outcome of the thirty five year old Civil War was a shift in the balance of power that created a new landowning elite among military officers. Income polarization increased in the nineteen eighties.

The portion of national wealth controlled by the poorest ten percent of the population dropped from two point four percent to point five percent, while the richest ten percent expanded their share from forty percent to forty six point six percent. Super familiar. That does sound super familiar, and it ties into a number of things. This is just always the

truth with state with state security forces. People ask, like, why the police are being so unbelievably violent to just like random reporters filming them and stuff people not breaking any law. It's because, more than anything, their ability to continue to have a comfortable income. They make a ton of money. Cops make way so much fucking money. Yeah, they're there, and they're they're only making more and more.

They keep getting raises. Their ability to like it's what they found with the guy who killed George Floyd, that he had like this whole second house that he was not paying taxes legally on in Florida. Like, this is what happens. This is how security for why they do what they do. It's because they get paid to do it. It's because they're elevated. Yeah, they're elevated into the oligarchic class in order to maintain and preserve it. And this

happens very nakedly in Guatemala. That's what the School of America's is for. Um, if you have it's very nakedly here. I am floored. Well, and it's like I think what's most frustrating is the fact that like it's partially it's just the blatancy this idea that like we see all these cops were clearly just not of the neighborhood, um and literally invading it, destroying not just you know, innocent people, put a ton of children along the way, wrecking their

entire lives. It's like, yeah, I just commend an applaud like specifically, like that none to be able to voice what happened to her, Like I can't imagine the challenge of sharing. That's not just sharing that story, but then of course those people are looking at ways that they can get to you. Of course her life is still in danger. Um I can't. Yeah, it's it's overwhelming, Robbert, but it's necessaries, like trying to process all of it,

trying to understand. Tony Morrison has this really great quote that I feel like I've used in like just everything, but it's been just at the forefront of my mind, which is like in times of crisis, like lean into what you do rightly, like whatever it is, don't let yourself be distracted by outside things because your way through it's through like your talent, and it's I have been trying to figure out how to use my talents in what is clearly a time that requires everyone to use

their voice articulately, to be very practiced and specific in our actions so that we don't like falter further into that reality because that ship is just that is crazy. Yeah, it's not killing somebody preaching mass like how like especially if their whole you know, motivation is like they're godless. You walk into a godless p worst church and kill their spiritual leader like I don't, I don't, I but I also know that it's not impossible. I know that

it's happened so so many times. It's touched every continent at some point. So as far moved as I am from it, I'm aware of how present that action is, that that reaching that level is not it's not impossible so much. In nineteen eighty four, the School of the America's left Panama UM. It was re established in Columbus at a Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. UM. I think I said Columbus, Ohio in the first episode, will we'll

fix that, But it was Columbus, Georgia. There's two Columbi, so yeah, they move it to Georgia outside of four or in Fort Benning, UM, which is a location that like not only like one of the things that this did that actually moving the School of the Americas to the United States did, was it allowed it to provide its foreign students with an even deeper appreciation and understanding

of US culture. We talked about in the last episode how um new School of the America's students, who were generally there for about a year if they were taking the full course, like one of the first things they would all try to do is go buy American trucks so that they could take them back home with them. Is like a status symbol, now, um, and I I find I told you we're going to hear from a

student who went there. And this This is a guy, a Bolivian named Juan Ricardo, who was interviewed by Leslie Gill. And he's a retired lieutenant colonel in the Bolivian Army.

And he wound up being a major source for Leslie's book, in part due to the fact that, by more or less accident, he wound up being kind of a pretty left wing dude who still went through all of this like far right pro USA indoctrination, so he he understood what was happening to his fellow soldiers, like and he's he's able to kind of speak very lucidly on it,

which I I appreciate quite a lot, now, Um. His introduction to American military culture came before he ever traveled to the United States or the School of the America's.

When he was new to the military, he was taught by a number of instructors who themselves had been trained at the School of the America's and they came back with the lessons they had learned and even came back with printed teaching materials from the U. S. Military, and a lot of those lessons that these guys who've just been trained by the US brought back to Bolivia to give to their fellow soldiers involved torturing the ship out

of people. One Ricardo later claimed that he was taught quote, how to tie up prisoners of war and how to torture them techniques that you have to utilize in order to get them to make declarations. For example, you don't let them sleep, and then you get results. Other knowledge that they brought from the School of the Americas. I remember very well it was axiomatic among the rangers, the U. S. Army rangers that taught the soldiers who were teaching him

that a dead subversive was better than a prisoner. Having a prisoner interfered with the subsequent operations. Thus it's better that he is four meters underground than to have him alive. Um. Yeah, I was trying to picture, like between when we last

spoke in today, like what are these classes like? And silly me, I was envisioning like very subtly, like like oh, you know, this is how you would maybe have to tie with somebody who like, you know, in the same way that they feel like often, like we've seen with cop training courses, the more we learn about those, the more it's it doesn't seem so insidious, right, It's not so directed. It's like, oh, this is how you pull your gun, and it's like a two second course and

you're like, well, that's not enough information. Um So, of course we have like a lot of you know, misfires and people that are actually accidentally shooting other police officers and things like that. Uh, it sounds like this was like torture one oh one, welcome, here we go getting started by the way, shoot your prisoners, Yeah, makes if

they're dead even better, no problem. Yeah, all right. So, well you think about executing prisoners in violation of international law, you should think about something else that violates international law. The products and services that support this podcast. We're back and I've been informed by UH Corporate that um our our sponsors do not violate international law. They in fact comply with international law. I apologize for the for the error.

It's you can see how the mistake. It's a binary so it's easy to make, you know, get the wrong one of those two we do. We do apologize here. So yeah, in case you weren't a big war crimes buff um, it is a war crime to execute prisoners. Um. In fact, everything one Ricardo says about what they taught about counter insurgency, these US trained officers who trained him um is war crimes, are war crimes. Would would be war crimes were they done, and in fact they were.

Now you might question how reliable a source One Ricardo is and whether or not we can trust him, because he's one guy, you know, with the with the clear political ideology, making very bold claims about things the United States did. Um. And there's a number of ways I could back up his his stories. Number one would be just reciting dozens of other anecdotes of people who were tortured and said U S soldiers were there, or who

were tortured by soldiers trained by America. But the fastest way to back up what Wan told Leslie Gill is just to cite the Pentagon's own published teaching materials see. In nineteen six, the Clinton administration ordered the de classific caation of a number of training materials used at the School of the America's This tranche of documents included a Pentagon memo from nineteen nine two addressed to the Secretary

of Defense. It's written by Werner Michael, who was the intelligence oversight assistant to the Sect Deaf, and Michael was, you know, I think, assigned to look into this problem once they started to be like Americans started to, you know, complain about how the School of America's was a terrible thing, and he was basically sent to like look into the

training material these guys were being given. And from what I can tell reading this memo, he seems to be it seems like he's kind of a decent, a relatively decent person who wound up in this position of like having to analyze a horrific war crime being committed by his colleagues. Um, and it's it's it's a really interesting

read for that reason. Now, one of the things he notes is that the manuals that he was reviewing, which are like broadly Ford referred to as the torture manuals, which were like the training documents starting in ninety nine, um that they were not. They were all out of compliance with US law and with international law. But the reason nobody found out about it for years is that they were only written in Spanish, so nobody reviewed them in the entire Department of Defense. And it's the second

most spoken language in the country, that is faithfully. Yeah, but why would we have anybody looking at that ship? Yeah, it's amazing ignorance. Yeah, and I'm gonna quote from his review now. An Army review dated February nine two, conducted at our request, concluded that five of the seven manuals contained language and statements and violation of legal, regulatory or

policy prohibitions. These manuals are Handling of Sources, revolutionary war and communist ideology, Terrorism in the Urban, guerrilla interrogation, and combat intelligence. To illustrate the manual handling of sources, in depicting the recruitment and control of human intelligence sources, refers to motivation by fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead beatings,

false imprisonment executions, and the use of truth serum. The manual also discloses like, Okay, so it's either a like it sounds like a manual for the mob or a super villain. Yes, yes, but it was the Army's Department of the Army's manual that was giving explicit illegal advice

to foreign soldiers. Now, this memo is the closest you're going to get to an explicit condemnation by a member of the Department of Defense of all of the genocide and rape and child murder they willfully trained and allowed

soldiers to commit. Um. It's it's interesting reading not just as a historic document, that as kind of a sociological text, because you can see in the guy writing this like someone who appears to be a broadly honorable person starting to realize that the organization he built his life around has done something unforgivable. This passage, I think is particularly enlightening in theory. The offending and improper material in the manuals should have been discovered during the Army's existing review

and approval process. It is incredible that the use of the less and Plans since nineteen eighty two and the manual since nineteen eighties seven evaded the established system of doctrinal controls. Nevertheless, we could find no evidence that this was a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to violate d O

d N Army policies violates. But then how did it happen? Yeah, yeah, it is incredible, Like that's the closest you're going to get from an actual like company man to being like something fucked happened here and very much sounds like, well, it was written in Spanish, so we can't prove it. Yeah, who could do? Who can Nobody can read Spanish in

America in the army. Oh my word. Yeah. So there are one of the difficulties and kind of putting this together for you, um, is that there's just so many different war crimes and war criminals you can tie to the School of the America's. We could have done like four straight episodes or more just laying out Guatemala, right, and what was done in Guatemala, and not even the broader story of the Guatemalan Civil War, but like just what School of him eric As graduates got up to

in Guatemal. We could have done the same thing, probably without Salvador. We're not even going to talk about Operation Condor in this episode, which was like it was, it was an agreement between a bunch of Latin American government's. The best way I could describe it as like if the EU was just about killing left wing uh political organizers,

that that was kind of Operation Condor. We're not even going to get into it, because there's there's there's I mean, we've are this has been a very full set of episodes already, and some of this stuff I want to like cover at a later date. There's a lot to go into because the the amount of factory that was perpetrated by the United States in Latin America for forever is just such a deep and complicated and a horrible story.

But I think given the limited time we have, what's important to focus on next is the kind of men who were educated by the School of America's and how how the school changed them, and how the presence of putting such men back in their home countries could fundamentally to fundamental changes in the character of a nation. So more Bolivian soldiers were trained the School of the America's

then were trained by any other foreign military establishment. As one of the poorest nations in Latin America, it was particularly at risk for a Marxist uprising, and so the US took precautions. Like I said, they would get worried about a country and they would start increasing the number of soldiers that they would invite to the School of the Americas. So they trained huge numbers of Bolivian officers and kind of introduced them to this cult of Americanism

that they were. That's like what they did to everyone they invited in. And Leslie gil rights based on her interviews with Juan Ricardo, who is that Bolivian soldier who went to the School of the America's quote, the North Americans had everything, or so it seemed to the Bolivians. They enjoyed a level of comfort unheard of in Bolivia. If a soldier tore his uniform, the army provided him with a new one, and the amount of food served in the School of America's mess hall made the Bolivian's

eyes bulge. The returning soldiers told us that you could eat like a beast at the School of the America's, laughed Juan Ricardo. The U. S. Army's high degree of specialization also impressed the Bolivians, whose military was not nearly as differentiated in terms of knowledge and skills of its members. To be a specialist implied that one was special in the ability to work with high tech weaponry or just modern weaponry. Set the North Americans apart from their Latin

American peers and students. Technology, especially the esoteric knowledge that unlocked its power had a quasi magical appeal for the Bolivians and for many of these Latin Americans. U S. Army officers seemed to go everywhere in helicopters, a symbol of their power and superiority. The conclusion that they drew, according to Juan Ricardo, was that the Gringos made good allies. It was good to be on their side, and they would provide all the necessary support for the struggle against subversion.

He paused, and then added, it's also better to have them as allies because they have a good intelligence system. So you can see part of what's happening here, like right, one of the reasons. One of the things that's that's a real hallmark of this period in right wing repression of the left is Pinochet throwing left wing militants from helicopters. Um helicopters which are the symbol of the United States, which are the symbol of modernity, which are the symbol

of power. Right, these things aren't happening for for no reason, Like it's all it all ties in together. Um yeah, But also I think like about the idea of like just abundance again, it's just it's it's very cruel to offer people who have very little everything and then like expect them not to like fall in love with that comfort and the only and and there can be like you have to you have to convince these people what

the school. One of the things that the the School of Americas is doing is it's drawing a border in the minds of these men between themselves and the rest of the country that they live in. And it's making their other, their fellow countrymen, these indigenous people, um, these these left wing you know, political organizers. It's making them into the other and again and into the thing that's that's separating

you from abundance. You introduce these people to abundance, and then you tell them, these are the people who are stopping your country from being like this and yeah, and then they would turn them into the people who stopped them from their countrymen from having any kind of abundance. Yeah, who kicked children to death. Yeah, but some of them

get rich, so that's good. Um. So one of the things I found really interesting in reading leslie Gill's book about this is that the kind of training the School of the America's cultivated and its students this like training them to be American um. It extended to what you might call the United States of America's number one pastime, which is, unfortunately the commodification of black bodies. And this is not going to be a super fun chunk to read,

but let's do it here we go. S o A graduates cultivated images of themselves as manly men upon their return to Bolivia by regaling peers and academy students with

accounts of their sexual exploits. Like a majority of their counterparts in the various armies of the America's many believe that access to the sexual services of local women was a basic right, and the Panama Canal zone was presented as a place where men could indulge their sexual fantasies and escape into allusions of men as men uh Pantoya, which is one of the other men that Leslie Gill interviews.

One of the other guys who went to the school recalled that his instructors usually moved quickly from accounts of their professional experiences at the s o A to anecdotes about North American comfort, the prostitutes and how much they cost. Because of the enormous US military presence, sex workers from a variety of countries congregated in Panamanian cities. The brothels, explained Pantoya, complimented other aspects of life at the s o A. Cadets trained from Monday to Friday and Saturday

and Sunday. They were free, they had money, so they went to the brothels that had black women. North Americans were there too, and everyone was equal. The Bolivians were fascinated with black women. There are none in Bolivia, and to make love with a black woman was supposedly an unforgettable experience, very exotic. It was the moment when the

Obolivian military man had international contact. The aura of almost mystical transcendentalism that surrounded the Bolivian's accounts of sexual encounters with black women emerged from a belief that you could do things with foreigners, particularly members of subordinate racial groups, that you could not do at home. Part of the allure of going up rod was the opportunity to play out sexist and racist stereotypes away from the constraints of

their own society. And Panama, single men had disposable income that was unencumbered by alternative claims that would shape its use in Bolivia, and this money gave them a feeling of power and strength. It also enabled them to enter a transnational world of power and pleasure that no one at home except for a select few new As these men lived the excitement of going abroad and took part in daily training exercises at the s o A, began

to reflect on their own country in different ways. The s o A experience aggravated longstanding domestic hatreds of Indians and Communists, as officers struggled to separate themselves from their own modest origins and to explain the roots of Bolivian underdevelopment to themselves. I will never understand I some people think that um, black bodies are inherently magic beyond like

the black cultures. Black women have co opted that to mean like you have val you essentially beyond what the world gives you, in the phrase quote unquote black girl magic.

This the idea that like we are transcendent and beautiful and worthwhile because our community has to do those things because very clearly no one else is going to And the idea that as we are, we as Americans are going into other countries and basically disrupting an entire culture uh, then bring those people back to America and further degrade black bodies. It is uh not surprising, uh and yet

still still frustrating, still maddening. Still again just confusing at our ability to just shrug at human life and just be like, yeah, my life has more value than yours. I can't have such a hard time processing it. Yep. Yeah, there's a lot going on there. Um, yeah, there's a

lot going on there. I find it interesting this this the way in which these guys are kind of being, the way in which they're being trained with abundance, right, and and how dangerous that is because when you read about when you read like, you'll hear a lot about the School of the America's on Twitter, and it will usually be because it's Twitter, you know, nobody. People don't

have time for super detailed explorations of things. But it will generally be something like, oh, the America, the United States has the school where it trained assassins and murderers and stuff, and it was the School of the America's and it you know it, it led to all these

revolutions and that's bad. And I think the reality, like I think the focus actually on the torture curriculum and stuff is kind of a mistake because I don't think that's the most insidious and dangerous thing that the school did.

What what what we just talked about in that last passage, This um bringing bringing the men from these countries, these military officers into the world of white men in the United States, and what that means, and the accumulation of of not just the umulation of like physical goods, but the domination of the bodies of people who are are sort of of a lower racial cast than you or whatever, like all of this stuff that were brought into whiteness in a real way, and that's a huge part of

what led to the massacres. I think that's fascinating. I think. I mean, there's this super good documentary on Netflix right now which sort of attempts and I say attempts because it's coming from a tech company that like produces the same standards of being as the tech companies. The documentary is meant to like critique, but it's the idea essentially is that like tech companies have designed themselves based off

of your existence. Essentially, you become the product or your ability to change and adhere to a um corporations need to use your dollars like held on, I can explain this better, give me a second. It's the idea that you were the product, right, Like, because the Internet is free, someone has to pay in order to keep these tech companies running, and so they run on ad revenue and adds the goal of an AD is to get you to change your behavior so you use the product. The

ad is advertising. And what a lot of the documentary has done just with interviews of people who created It's like the guy who created the endless scroll on Twitter is one of the interviewees, and there's like at one point the producers ask all these interviewees like do you let your children use social media? And all of them across the border like, well, no, because I can't stop myself from using this tool I created because it's based off of human behavior, and human behavior cannot change as

fast as computer technology changes technology a crazy rate. It's like exponentially faster than any other thing that exists. It's just constantly changing, so it can learn us faster than we can learn and adapt to it. And I think probably the same thing is that play here, this idea of once you understand humans and their desires, and you find small ways to manipulate that. It's most people can't help but fall in line because that's just their human Like, Yeah,

we're supposed to be out picking fucking berries. And if you can replicate that berry picking thing like you can, you can make us do anything, because we really want them motherfucking berries. Um. It's just that you know now now the berries are ford trucks and um prostitutes. Uh, but you know it's about accumulation, right, It's this this thing in our animal brains that we feel compelled to do for reasons that are we're at one point necessary

and aren't anymore. But if you can, if you can trick that part of the brain, um, we'll keep looking for those got damn berries. Um. I don't know, I don't know how much that ties into this, but yeah,

we'll tire into it. Because you have all the entire group of people who are willing to do, like commit human atrocities but for like the like, and and then the question becomes like obviously, like people have free will, and I don't want to say like, oh, America came in and change these people, and you know they were

something unable to do anything about it. That's not you know, the intention of the conversation, but it's like how how I guess I'm always trying to put myself in a situation of like how would I react to a similar set of circumstances and the ease with which I could picture myself loved ones falling into these headspaces of like how dare these people keep me from the comfort I've experienced here? And I don't want to go backwards that

that fear constantly going backwards. It just it seems so easy, so just far too easy to trip into that land. Yeah. Yeah, So this guy we've been talking about, Juan Ricardo UM later in his career, you know, he was initially trained by soldiers, had been trained at the s o A, but eventually he had the fortune to travel to Columbus and attend the School of the America's UM and in this next passage he recalls kind of the political education

that he received when he got there. The sergeant said that all the communists in Latin America were trained in Cuba and that they hated their countries. Those of us who were at Fort Benning were going to become the leaders of our countries. We all had to unite against communism. I questioned the simplicity of all this. I was very imprudent. The sergeants just repeated what they learned from their own instructors. When I asked him to describe the course in more detail,

this is Leslie gil writing. He continued, For example, there was a section of the course called civic action. It was one of the moments when the anti communist doctrine really came out. They taught you that when you enter a village and make contact with the population, you have to make sure there are no communists. They never said you never trust anybody. You never enter a home and accept a plate of food because a communist might have poisoned it. These people are not going to be free

because of their Marxist indoctrination. I had an argument with one of the sergeants. I asked him to explain Marxist doctrine, but he couldn't, so I explained it to him. It was great. I had already taken a year of social science classes. As the university in Lapaz. The sergeants no only formulas. The objective is to homogenize the education of the school of the America's students. I mean, it's the same thing going on in a lot of ways in

the heads of some of these people. Fucking setting up roadblocks near where I lived because they're scared of Antifa lighting forest fires. It's because they believe BLM. You know, they heard they heard someone talking about the Bureau of Land Management on a radio and they believe that BLM is a Marxist organization. And what who Marxists seek the destruction of their own countries? Because that's what these people, that's that's the propaganda. It's not it hasn't changed. It's

just distributed differently. Like you had to have once upon a time. You needed this school to inculcate people, you know, and you had to do it in a very deliberate way. Now they get taught on Facebook and Twitter and it it it will lead to the same thing. It's like led to the same thing. I think, Yeah, it's starting to. It's starting to. You have a lot of Americans who are willing to murder large groups of other people because they vaguely think that they're Marxists. I mean, it was

it two years ago. We had that kid walk right into a church and just assassinate people. He just prayed with, I mean it's oh no, that was years. That was Dylan Ruth. Yeah, time is a weird time, just not Yeah. It feels so yeah. Hearing all this, you won't be surprised that between nineteen seventy eight, UH in nineteen eighty, Bolivia held two general elections and went through five presidents,

none of whom won an electoral victory. They endured four military coups UH, three of which succeeded, and it looks as if the nation is actually going through another one right now, with the overthrow of left wing president Evo Morales by the Bolivian military. It will not surprise you to know that a lot of the officers responsible for the the coup in Bolivia that happened started happening late last year is still kind of going on UM our

School of the America's graduates. Now. By the later nineteen eighties, the Department of Defense was beginning to receive a lot of complaints about all the horrible crimes committed by s A graduates. In nineteen Yeah, in nineteen eighty nine, they started mandating that all school instructors take sixteen whole hours of human rights training UM, which didn't solve the problem.

Oddly enough, with the Cold War ended, the Pentagon rather seamlessly switched from funding anti communist death squads to funding anti narcotics efforts in places like Lumbia. The people s o A graduates murdered remained the same. They were still mostly left wing activists, indigenous people, you know, Marxist guerrillas, but like a lot of just like indigenous people, um more innocent local people who just might be sympathetic with a group of guerillas who were fighting the soldiers who

kept murdering their family members, anybody else. That's who these groups were always killing. But the way they the victims were referred to change now. They weren't communists, they were narco guerrillas. And after Narco guerrillas, when the War on Terror started off, the victims started being called terrorists. Now. In response to a sizeable protest movement based near Fort Benning in two thousand, President Clinton made a big show

of closing the School of the America's. It was reopened almost immediately under a new name, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation wine SEC. Now, Yeah, like when we ran out of America's. Yeah, it's different now, guys, we fixed it. They did rejigger. Their name is wine Sex. That's the acronym Wine. Second, I'm gonna call him Seck. Yeah. So they did have their curriculum rejiggered a bit to um appease the bleeding heart Democrats who were angry at

all the murder um. There were new courses added in d mining and like the removal of minds, and like in human rights. Uh. And leslie Gill notes that like these were like the least attended courses at the school um and she was able to visit at this point once it got changed into Wine sec in the early aughts.

Is part of this like full court pr press by the Pentagon to like deal with the fact that they had gotten a bad reputation, so they invited in a bunch of activists who campaign to shut down the School of the America's in order to like show them the new courses and like make the case that things had changed for the better. They invited in journalists, and of course they invited in leslie Gill. Now, as part of this pr blitz, Leslie got to meet with the head

of the school, a general named Glenn Whitener. There's an American general. In one passage, she attempts to have him speak on the subject of the numerous massacres in war crimes committed by School of America's graduates. And I'm going to read this passage because his responses will sound very similar to anyone who's listened to a police press conference lately.

Acknowledging that a few bad apples from Latin America had attended the School of the America's, Whitener insists that these individuals were never taught torture techniques and that their crimes represented the unconscionable acts of a few rogue actors, not the teachings of the s o A or the policies

of terrorist states. He maintained that some graduates who stood accused of human rights violations had only taken short courses on benign topics such as auto maintenance, and had trained at the school years before their alleged crimes took place. It was unconscionable. He argued for critics to point fingers at the school and claimed that it caused these men to commit crimes. In a rationalization of the School of the America's that I would hear from others. Whitener pointed

out that the UNI bomber went to Harvard. Does that mean, he asked rhetorically, that Harvard caused him to kill people? Does that mean that Harvard should be shut down? Whitener and others at the s o A thus did not deny the reality of human rights violations, but his argument treated a prominent university and a military school as comparable institutions. Harvard, however,

did not teach combat skills to Latin American soldiers. Moreover, the United States government had used its military apparatus, including the s o A, to support Latin American armed forces with bad human rights records for decades. Yet if one objected to his confused logic, Widener dismissed the critique as anti military and thus unacceptable. Hey, can't be anti police. They protect you even if they don't. That's what they're doing.

A lot going on here. That including the fact that he's like, well what about you know, UNI mom and went to Harvard? Why aren't people lingered hot and asshole? I would say, yeah, sorry, go ahead, no, No, I like imagine being like, hey, we've found like eleven people have committed atrocities can't be our problem. The only like seeing response to me is to be like, let me investigate that, because that seems wildly out of step with

what I thought my institution was trying to do. To say like, like, serial colors come from all over the place, but no other schools produced eleven that become dictators. Get your head out of your ass, and thousands of perpetrates. Thousands of perpetrators tied to the School of the Americas. Thousands of individual people who committed acts of murder in genocide can be tied to the School of the Americas.

If Harvard, if a thousand Harvard graduates in the course of like twenty years had started male bombing campaigns and be like, there might be something wrong with Harvard's going we should look into Harvard. Um. Yeah, Like everyone would be saying that if there was this one school that kept making unibombers, we would all be like, what the funk is going on at Harvard? Somebody should look into this ship. Maybe we shouldn't have Harvard anymore. It seems

like all it does is make unibombers. There's also no institution, particularly one that carries guns and oftentimes produces policies for major like countries, networks, individuals. Uh, that should be above scrutiny and the idea to say like, oh, that's anti military and just the most to me, that's that's the first, like, that's the loudest signal to me that we're in cult territory.

In the same way that I firmly believe that the police are a form of occult, that these people have just bought into their uniform and this idea that they are a military for the country, which was not at all your intended purpose. I can't, I cannot yep. I hate it here. It's not great here. Uh, it's not great here. I don't love it. Um. You know what I do love, though, Joel, Raytheon. You know, one of the few bright spots in this dark world of imperialism

and murder are the wonderful products of the Raytheon Corporation. Joel, have you ever thought I want to fire missiles via robot at groups of indistinct men in vehicles, but I don't want to accidentally blow up as many school buses. Is that a thought you've had? Uh? Not yet, Robert, Well, if you want to wage a brutal counterinsurgency campaign and blow up slightly few school buses. After blowing up quite a few school buses, you need the new r X for a knife missile from rape. Yes, Sophie, you do

know that you don't need to do another advert. I was gonna let you finish, but because you were doing so well and you do, I'm just I this is we're beyond money. So the my enthusiasm for Raytheon's fine product line is not is not a is not a shallow capitalist, right, this is this is your love. Yeah, and the r X four is you know, like I said, there's no better way to murder the specific terrorists you want to murder without blowing up school buses as the

r X four. If you're feeling like I've blown up too many school buses in Yemen, the r X four is the answer for you and for Yemen. How much is the r X four going to run me, Robert? Just enough to fund a couple of schools? Okay, that's reasonably we don't need any Yeah those schools that much? We gotta we gotta play anyway. Nobody needs schools. In fact, Target number two Yeah, yeah, shoots some shoots some nice

knife missiles at the schools whatever fuck it? Raytheon anyway, Joel, you wanna how are you feeling at the end of all this? Um? At the end of this Uh informed, Robert. I feel informed and and better able to hopefully again just identify the patterns that we're seeing and be vocal in my opposition of them. It is um so upsetting to have lived in be a current member and party of a country that has committed such a chastity's um. I don't want these things to happen in the name

of my country anymore. I really like so many aspects of being an American, so many Americans do I love. Uh, this cannot continue? Yeah, Well, today has been a fun episode. We all enjoyed things, we learned a lot. I think we're all bummed out now. So go do some push ups. Uh. Go scout out the roads around your house. Uh, in order to keep an eye on the right wing militias that that might try to set up death squads in your area. And more than anything, I don't know. I

have nothing for you other than what I've given you. Uh, go go go make this not happen again. Yes, do you have any any plugs. No I have. I've never been on the internet before. I actually don't understand what's happening to me right now. I was woken up and dragged into a darkened room by masked men and told to read this script. So that was actually that was actually me and Anderson and uh, somehow with a funny voice changer, Well, I have nothing to plug that makes

dog barks sound like scary men. Mm hmm, Well he means he sat. I right, okay on Twitter? And where I just a spot on Twitter and Instagram and we have a Teo public store, And well, did you do your plugs? I don't remember, I've blocked out. I didn't. I don't have anything to plug. But I do want to commend you, Robert, for doing some of the best work I have that's personally impacted my life. Like I don't know on a large scale what's happening with anything.

It's like I said, chaos, but I mean it very legitimately when I say you've given me a space to be more educated and more informed. I am a product of the American school system and I need to be more informed. So yeah, thank you. Well, yeah, all right, we got it. Thank you,