Speaker 1: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the show about the
Speaker 1: worst people in all of history? UM, and boy howdy,
Speaker 1: is it an appropriate week for an episode of this
Speaker 1: show about the worst people in all of history? Because today,
Speaker 1: UH is the day that UM, I don't know. It's
Speaker 1: one of the days that a series of horrific wildfires
Speaker 1: have gripped my entire state, forcing ten percent of its
Speaker 1: population to flee. And there are armed militiamen setting up
Speaker 1: checkpoints based on racism in paranoia in small rural areas.
Speaker 1: And that may seem like it's not connected to other
Speaker 1: things in history, but it's actually connected very directly to
Speaker 1: the subject of our podcast today, which is a little
Speaker 1: something called the School of the America's UH. And the
Speaker 1: way that these two tied together is very fascinating. And
Speaker 1: the oh you just heard UH is my guest today
Speaker 1: Joel Monique, who is a culture critic and a podcast
Speaker 1: You know, the thing that this is that you're listening
Speaker 1: to a podcast producer. You produced the things that that
Speaker 1: are occurring right now in everyone's ears. Joel, how are
Speaker 1: you doing? I'm hanging in there. We're in the apocalypse done.
Speaker 1: It's orange and the sky is gray. I am just
Speaker 1: trying to keep it. It feels weird to keep going,
Speaker 1: Like I feel like I have to change something actively
Speaker 1: in my life to reflect the chaos outside. I haven't
Speaker 1: figured what that is yet. I don't know that's how
Speaker 1: I'm doing. I don't know how I'm doing. It's chaos. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we need a German word for how surreal it is
Speaker 1: to like go out to a grocery store or meet
Speaker 1: a friend for lunch, as like plumes of smoke the
Speaker 1: size of skyscrapers drift by and and like the smell
Speaker 1: of death fills the air, and fascist militias begin like bivouacking,
Speaker 1: you know, twenty minutes away from your door. It's surreal, um.
Speaker 1: But you know what's not surreal is how fashional the
Speaker 1: introduction of this episode was. I got right in there,
Speaker 1: like I directly connected it to a thing that was
Speaker 1: going on. I just I'm real proud of that. Proud
Speaker 1: of you, Robert, Thank you. School of the America's is
Speaker 1: uh spoilers horrific uh c I a slash Defense Department
Speaker 1: UM operation that that led to the overthrow of like
Speaker 1: a dozen different democratically elected governments in Latin America over
Speaker 1: the course of several decades. Um, oh yeah, no, it's
Speaker 1: a bad thing. School the America's is a bad thing.
Speaker 1: It's a bad It was a real terrible thing that
Speaker 1: existed for a while, only happened on this podcast on
Speaker 1: Our Home the episode it does tie in rather directly
Speaker 1: to what's going on right now in the United States
Speaker 1: because a lot of the things we're seeing the government
Speaker 1: clamping down on unrest, you know, illegal arrests, suppression of
Speaker 1: political opposition, the disappearance of political activists, the increasing um
Speaker 1: interorganization between state law enforcement uh in different sort of
Speaker 1: militias and paramilitary groups. All of that stuff that's happening
Speaker 1: right now that people are getting really terrified about in
Speaker 1: the United States is exactly the stuff that we've been
Speaker 1: doing in Latin America in a number of different countries
Speaker 1: for decades, going back to when like our parents were kids. Um,
Speaker 1: and today is the episode about how a lot of
Speaker 1: that was organized. So a lot of the things that
Speaker 1: are happening in America today have their genesis and things
Speaker 1: the United States was doing the Latin America and we're
Speaker 1: going to learn about that. So that's going to be good. Yeah, listen,
Speaker 1: I really am because the more people from who've been
Speaker 1: in countries where they're like, oh, yeah, no fascists took
Speaker 1: over here, They're like, pay attention to this small detail here,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, oh okay, and then they're like, and
Speaker 1: let me show you how that expanded into something that
Speaker 1: was horrible. Try to stop this before it becomes a fire.
Speaker 1: Uh sorry, that's maybe bad phrasing right now. So it
Speaker 1: actually I think it compares really well to a fire
Speaker 1: because it's one of those things where you don't have
Speaker 1: to have this kind of problem with fires like you
Speaker 1: can there there are ways that people dealt with, you know,
Speaker 1: the propensity and the fact that this both like every
Speaker 1: the West Coast needs to burn a lot every year. Um,
Speaker 1: it doesn't need to lead to hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: people losing their homes because it's it can be managed
Speaker 1: in predictable ways. But I mean, we they do control
Speaker 1: fires and like put them out and get rid of
Speaker 1: a lot of the nurseries that we have that exist
Speaker 1: to just like raise a bunch of trees for commodification,
Speaker 1: which you know are are much worse in terms of
Speaker 1: like areas, like like they contribute to making an area
Speaker 1: of vulnerable to fires, we can bury our power lines,
Speaker 1: we can shut off power access to areas. Like, there's
Speaker 1: a whole lot of things that can be done. And
Speaker 1: we want to solve a problem after it's become a
Speaker 1: problem never before. And the calamity that Oregon in California's
Speaker 1: experiencing right now, a lot of people saw it coming,
Speaker 1: just like a lot of people have seen the rise
Speaker 1: of fascism coming for decades in the United States, and
Speaker 1: instead of doing anything about it, we had that one
Speaker 1: TV show where Um Flavor Flav he does this like
Speaker 1: he had this he was looking for a wife. If
Speaker 1: I'm remembering correctly, Um, expect to be the next Reverence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I blame the rise of fascism in the United States
Speaker 1: entirely on Flavor Flav. Actually, Um, I would read that
Speaker 1: essay Robert Flavor Flav well known the backer of the
Speaker 1: c I A. Uh So let's look, I think we
Speaker 1: should start. If we're gonna we're gonna explain the school
Speaker 1: of the America's and how the United States did what
Speaker 1: is now happening in the United States to uh a
Speaker 1: huge chunk of the world and Americans didn't pay attention.
Speaker 1: If we want to really tell that story. We have
Speaker 1: to go back in time almost as well. It's our
Speaker 1: almost two centuries to eighteen twenty, you know, at that point,
Speaker 1: and the US was only established in like or you know,
Speaker 1: the whole Revolutionary War kicked off in seventeen seventy six,
Speaker 1: So the US was like younger than a lot of
Speaker 1: presidential candidates now um in in eighteen twenty three. But
Speaker 1: it had started to get like enough power and geographic
Speaker 1: reach that it was beginning to like look south at
Speaker 1: what was going on in Central and South America. UM.
Speaker 1: And you know, there were at that point all these
Speaker 1: kind of powers, these these rates, these burgeoning nations, and
Speaker 1: in what we call Latin America to day, we're starting
Speaker 1: to in a really effective way, throw off kind of
Speaker 1: the yoke of colonial oppression. They were there were a
Speaker 1: bunch of revolutions, they were kicking out their European masters,
Speaker 1: and kind of President Monroe, who was the guy in
Speaker 1: charge of the US at that point, looked at all
Speaker 1: this going on, um, and he started what came to
Speaker 1: be known decades later as the Monroe Doctrine, where he
Speaker 1: was basically like, hey, europe um, if you know, European
Speaker 1: powers aren't allowed to take over any new chunks of
Speaker 1: Latin America. Like, we the United States are not going
Speaker 1: to stand for that. Um, this is the area that
Speaker 1: we have influence in and you're not allowed to like
Speaker 1: keep coming in. It was for a country that had
Speaker 1: like just gotten the ship kicked out of it in
Speaker 1: the War of eighteen twelve and like barely held on
Speaker 1: it was it was it was quite a statement to make,
Speaker 1: but it was hard for the European powers to like
Speaker 1: get troops and shipped down to South America, so you know,
Speaker 1: the US had a big advantage there. It was basically
Speaker 1: like the Monroe would came to and the Monroe started
Speaker 1: making that, like made this statement in like eighty three,
Speaker 1: but the Monroe doctrine didn't get start to be called
Speaker 1: the Monroe Doctrine to like eighteen fifty. But it was
Speaker 1: basically the US saying to Europe, stay the funk out
Speaker 1: of our backyard. And this was initially kind of like
Speaker 1: an aspirational thing because we didn't really have the ability
Speaker 1: to project any power down there. But over the decades,
Speaker 1: as the United States grew into more of a functional
Speaker 1: nation and gained more sort of military and naval power,
Speaker 1: it became something that like we actually had the ability
Speaker 1: to back up somewhat. So Yeah, Now, there were a
Speaker 1: few different, big reasons why the United States felt it
Speaker 1: was so important, you know, even as early as the
Speaker 1: eighteen twenties to start telling Europe to stay the hell
Speaker 1: out of Latin America. One of the reasons was that
Speaker 1: Europeans of the mid eighteen hundreds were like they were
Speaker 1: just the messiest bitches in the world. Um, Like, they
Speaker 1: were constantly at war with each other, huge these huge,
Speaker 1: terrifying what seemed like you know, like you look at
Speaker 1: the Napoleonic wars and stuff, you look at that through
Speaker 1: a lens of like where ship wasn't it looked like
Speaker 1: the end of the world to a lot of people,
Speaker 1: and these revolutions that were just horribly bloody um. And
Speaker 1: so the monarchs in the street, there's no lawless you have.
Speaker 1: There's like a widespread starvation at that time, right because
Speaker 1: we're having like horrible droughts and things, and so the
Speaker 1: lower classes all suffer. Yeah, it feels very similar. Yea,
Speaker 1: and Napoleon is raising you know, you've got starting like
Speaker 1: European war lords are raising, like armies that are in
Speaker 1: the hundreds of thousands that look that are like a
Speaker 1: significant chunk of the entire US. It just seemed like
Speaker 1: a nightmare to a lot of Americans. UM and Europe
Speaker 1: was just seen as such, like what they like the
Speaker 1: the result of European squabbling and fighting was seen as
Speaker 1: so apocalyptic that the US. There were a lot of
Speaker 1: people in the U S who like thought about the
Speaker 1: idea of, like, what if they start coming back to
Speaker 1: South America and trying to make new colonies, like it
Speaker 1: will inevitably lead to horrible, horrible wars right at our
Speaker 1: doorstep that will pull us in. So there was there
Speaker 1: was and that's a that was a reasonable thing at
Speaker 1: the time to be scared at, Like the stuff that
Speaker 1: the year the British Empire was like getting up to
Speaker 1: all sorts of horrible bloody ship in India and Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: um in part as a result of their conflicts with
Speaker 1: Russia at this time. UM. So like the idea that
Speaker 1: like that that South America might become another European battleground,
Speaker 1: like that was a real thing to be afraid of
Speaker 1: the U S. What Like the President Monroe wasn't being
Speaker 1: unreasonable when he was like, uh, this is we don't
Speaker 1: want to let this happen. So there was a reasonable
Speaker 1: reason for the Monroe doctrine. There were also like racist
Speaker 1: reasons for it, which one of which is that like
Speaker 1: the US didn't want any competition when it came to
Speaker 1: politically dominating Latin America. Um. Yeah, so lots of lot
Speaker 1: a lot of former slaves down they're just chilling right
Speaker 1: to be recolonized. Yeah, it's not them. They have kings
Speaker 1: and ships, so stay over there. Yeah. And there were
Speaker 1: a lot of folks like the people who went on
Speaker 1: to be like part of the Confederacy, who you know,
Speaker 1: once upon a time, we're looking at Latin America and like, well,
Speaker 1: eventually we're gonna have to like, that's a lot of
Speaker 1: that's going to wind up being ours too. I Mean
Speaker 1: it makes sense that if we think about manifest destiny
Speaker 1: just being like we're going to conquer all of the
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to as we beheathens. Uh. Yeah. It always
Speaker 1: kind of surprised me that we didn't continue to go
Speaker 1: further down south aggressive takeover. A lot of folks wanted
Speaker 1: to um, like a lot of Americans wanted to um.
Speaker 1: And there were even cases of like like Confederate survivors
Speaker 1: sort of like packing up and moving down into Latin
Speaker 1: America to establish plantations and try to keep you know,
Speaker 1: their ship going for a while, just like similar things
Speaker 1: actually kind of happened with the Nazis. But so time
Speaker 1: goes by, you know, the Monroe Doctrine gets his name
Speaker 1: in eighteen fifty. It becomes like more and more kind
Speaker 1: of solid US policy every year, you know, the decades
Speaker 1: go by, the United States becomes more and more of
Speaker 1: a world power. It has a big civil war, it
Speaker 1: has a couple of wars with Mexico, um, and by
Speaker 1: and by, you know, time passes. The nineteen hundreds come
Speaker 1: and the United States finds itself with a dude named
Speaker 1: Teddy Roosevelt in the Oval Office. So Teddy tr Yeah,
Speaker 1: we all, we've all heard of Teddy, and he was
Speaker 1: He's like, he's one of these guys that if you
Speaker 1: if you don't think too much about aspects of what
Speaker 1: he believed, he's a fun dude to read about. Oh man,
Speaker 1: people love the burly back. He hunted his own bear.
Speaker 1: And then he's like, yeah, yeah, people people love him.
Speaker 1: If you don't think too much about what he actually believed.
Speaker 1: I would see that drunk history is just Ron Swanson
Speaker 1: virgin Teddy Roosevelt. That's a well and it is it
Speaker 1: is the truth most of our If you're a white
Speaker 1: person and you didn't talk about the things that he
Speaker 1: believed about race, you probably could get along with Teddy
Speaker 1: Roosevelt because he was a fun guy outside of the
Speaker 1: horrific genocidal racism. Every history's teacher's favorite president, Like this
Speaker 1: is going to get boys to read. Yeah. Um, but
Speaker 1: he was also like as as hardcore and imperialist as
Speaker 1: you can. Like, it doesn't get more imperialist than fucking
Speaker 1: Teddy Roosevelt. Um. He'd gone out of his way to
Speaker 1: fight in a hysterically unjust war of colonial domination down
Speaker 1: in Cuba. Um. And he's one of the reasons that
Speaker 1: we all have owned Guantanamobe today, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: have you ever do you enjoy partly on in Guantanamobe? Joel,
Speaker 1: I do not. It weirds me the hell out. We've
Speaker 1: committed human atrocities there. Uh, it seems like a place America,
Speaker 1: the land of the Free sition maybe not half I disagree.
Speaker 1: I love the fact that we just to own part
Speaker 1: of Cuba and use it just to torture people, and
Speaker 1: we don't talk about it all that often. I think
Speaker 1: it's a great thing to just forget about and just
Speaker 1: keep doing forever. Um. I love that Obama campaigned on
Speaker 1: getting rid of that and then just stop talking about it.
Speaker 1: Because what a fucking cool country. So by the turn
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century, Teddy's Teddy's the president, and the
Speaker 1: US is like a full continental power, right like we've
Speaker 1: we've we've achieved more or less our final form, like
Speaker 1: you can see, like the United States is the United States,
Speaker 1: and it's a real you don't want to you wouldn't
Speaker 1: want to funk with her. So Roosevelt like has the
Speaker 1: ability to project power now. And he was a big
Speaker 1: believer in the Monroe doctrine, and more to that, he
Speaker 1: wanted to kind of expand what the the idea behind
Speaker 1: the Monroe doctrine because he thought the United States had
Speaker 1: a right and a duty to act as the policeman
Speaker 1: of the America's And I know in the early two thousands,
Speaker 1: like we all started talking about America as like world
Speaker 1: police um as like a bad thing. But Roosevelt would
Speaker 1: have used those terms, and he thought it was a
Speaker 1: good thing. He thought, it's it's what we we ought
Speaker 1: to be doing, but not in the world, just in
Speaker 1: our hemisphere. Oh, very reasonable man. So you know, one
Speaker 1: of the things that Roosevelt gets concerned with is that
Speaker 1: Venezuela is in a huge amount of debt to a
Speaker 1: bunch of creditors in Europe, and he's worried that this
Speaker 1: is going to lead to her being invaded by European powers,
Speaker 1: which would destabilize Latin America and again lead to this thing.
Speaker 1: There's not entirely unreasonable thing, because nineteen o four, if
Speaker 1: you're at all aware of what's happening, most people know
Speaker 1: some horrible European war is coming. So again you've got
Speaker 1: this mix of he's an imperialist, but also he's just
Speaker 1: kind of looking at what Europe is doing and like,
Speaker 1: we gotta keep this ship away from as far away
Speaker 1: from us as possible, which again, not an entirely unreasonable
Speaker 1: thing to want to do. Okay, I guess yeah, So
Speaker 1: he's he's he's got both these racist reasons for what
Speaker 1: he's doing and these pretty reasonable reasons. It's a mix
Speaker 1: of things. Uh. And in nineteen o four he issues
Speaker 1: what's known as the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe doctrine quote,
Speaker 1: the United States would intervene as a last resort to
Speaker 1: ensure that other nations in the Western Hemisphere fulfilled their
Speaker 1: obligations to international creditors and did not violate the rights
Speaker 1: of the United States or invite foreign aggression to the
Speaker 1: detriment to the entire body of American nations. That's how
Speaker 1: our own State Department summarizes it. So we're not just
Speaker 1: the police, were also the bank. Yeah, kind of. He's like, basically,
Speaker 1: I don't want Europe coming in here to like ensure
Speaker 1: its own debts, so we will police and invade Latin
Speaker 1: American nations on behalf of European powers to keep them
Speaker 1: out of here. White nonsense. Yeah, that is some white nonsense.
Speaker 1: And again that quote I read is from our own
Speaker 1: State Department's Office of the Historian, and it goes on
Speaker 1: to note quote as the corollary worked out in practice,
Speaker 1: the United States increasingly used military force to restore internal
Speaker 1: stability to nations in the region. Roosevelt declared that the
Speaker 1: United States might exercise international police power in flagrant cases
Speaker 1: of such wrongdoing or impotence. So that's very broad stability. Yeah,
Speaker 1: remember what our state department calls stability. The people who
Speaker 1: live in those countries might not have called stability. Just
Speaker 1: a thing to keep in mind. So tr we we again,
Speaker 1: we tend to think about like the stuff he did
Speaker 1: as a person. His actual presidential policy is pretty overlooked,
Speaker 1: in part because he's like, he's in power right before
Speaker 1: all the cool ship century starts to happen, so like,
Speaker 1: you know, nobody really gives a ship. Most average person
Speaker 1: on the street about like fucking nineteen hundred and nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 1: you know, World War One starts and people start to
Speaker 1: get interested. But his corollary to the Monroe doctrine would
Speaker 1: go on to become one of the most tragically influential
Speaker 1: decisions made by a US president. More than a century later,
Speaker 1: the United States is still operating under the logic Teddy
Speaker 1: Roosevelt enshrined and policing large chunks of Latin America, always
Speaker 1: in the name of internal stability, but somehow never really
Speaker 1: helping to further that cause. Now you fast forward a
Speaker 1: couple of residents, right, uh, so tr has his time
Speaker 1: in the sun, and then it's nineteen twelve and this
Speaker 1: cool cat named Woodrow Wilson is running for president UM
Speaker 1: now Wood Drow. As part of his like election campaign,
Speaker 1: he starts shopping around something at campaign rallies called the
Speaker 1: Pan American Treaty UM. And his idea for the Pan
Speaker 1: American Treaty would have been a little bit like creating
Speaker 1: a US, like a not a U S, but an
Speaker 1: American EU. Right, So the you've got like this continent,
Speaker 1: all these states in it that have been independent, start
Speaker 1: to like form common economic and trade zones and stuff
Speaker 1: and in and in Wilson's mind, the Pan American Treaty
Speaker 1: was going to include the United States, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile,
Speaker 1: which were then kind of the most powerful nations in
Speaker 1: the region. Now, I found a really good master's thesis
Speaker 1: from a guy who's a historian now named Dr Matthew Hassett,
Speaker 1: and he kind of summarizes the goal of the Pan
Speaker 1: American Treaty, and I'm gonna quote from him. Now. His
Speaker 1: plan contained two main points. The first was mutual guarantees
Speaker 1: of political independence under republican forms of government and mutual
Speaker 1: guarantees of territorial integrity. The second was that the signatories
Speaker 1: to the treaty would acquire complete control within its jurisdiction
Speaker 1: of the manufacture and sale of munitions of war. The
Speaker 1: wording of these points is telling, and the first signatories
Speaker 1: must guarantee the survival of republican forms of government. Wilson
Speaker 1: believed peace and security rested on the establishment and maintenance
Speaker 1: of liberal democracies. Memor nations would only ensure the maintenance
Speaker 1: of republican forms of government. However, the United States would
Speaker 1: send in the Navy and the Marines to ensure compliant governments,
Speaker 1: regardless of how they came to power. So number one,
Speaker 1: he's ensuring, you know, quote unquote republican forms of government,
Speaker 1: and there's a difference between a republican government and a democracy.
Speaker 1: Number Two, he's he's insisting that these this new political
Speaker 1: union that he's working for, would acquire like complete control
Speaker 1: of the manufacture, of sale and of munitions um, which
Speaker 1: which essentially is saying like the United States and her
Speaker 1: allies are going to have complete control of what weapons
Speaker 1: get made and where the get distributed. That's that's the
Speaker 1: idea as early as nineteen twelve. And well, we must
Speaker 1: now pause here because imagine a world. It's just crazy
Speaker 1: to me how quickly we're like Oh, I don't care
Speaker 1: what's happening with any of the people that actually live there,
Speaker 1: like their entire indigenous community, that there are forms of government,
Speaker 1: and like I'm trying to imagine the braun the floors
Speaker 1: it takes to just walk into somebody else's neighborhood, district
Speaker 1: country and be like, no, this is how we do
Speaker 1: things now. So also, you can only buy guns from us,
Speaker 1: Please do each other with our weapons. And also, like
Speaker 1: whatever indigenous concern whatever concerns you as indigenous people have,
Speaker 1: the thing that matters most to us is making sure
Speaker 1: that arms sales are respected and that the kind of
Speaker 1: governments we like come to power, and we'll send our
Speaker 1: troops in if you funk with either of those things,
Speaker 1: which are the only things we care about in your
Speaker 1: whole country, with whatever history it has, Like funk that ship.
Speaker 1: We're here for selling guns and ensuring a form of
Speaker 1: government that we can dominate. So that's cool. Wilson was
Speaker 1: known as was what's known as a reformer imperialist. Now
Speaker 1: that means he did reject a lot of the obvious
Speaker 1: cruelties of European style colonialism, with like permanent and direct
Speaker 1: military occupation of foreign lands, but he still wanted the
Speaker 1: US to be able to loot and culturally dominate an
Speaker 1: entire content. He was still willing to use the military
Speaker 1: to do that. Just ask the people of Arrack Cruz. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: he framed this as simple compassion on his part. He
Speaker 1: thought the United States should use its power to ensure
Speaker 1: good government in nearby lands. And he never bothered to
Speaker 1: define what good government was, but he was emphatic that
Speaker 1: the U. S should use the basically use the Marines
Speaker 1: to violently force Latin American governments to have what he
Speaker 1: would consider to be good governments, which is where you
Speaker 1: ever hear the catchphrase like sending the Marines. It's not
Speaker 1: really used that much now, but it's like, um, deal
Speaker 1: with a problem, right, he send in the Marines. Um.
Speaker 1: Like it was the thing they used to say, like, well,
Speaker 1: my grandpa was like a young man, um and it
Speaker 1: But it comes out of this period because Wilson basically says,
Speaker 1: if anything starts happening in these Latin American governments that
Speaker 1: we don't approve of in the United States, will send
Speaker 1: in the Marines to fuck them up. Um. Because the Marines,
Speaker 1: the Marine Corps kind of like historically the people we
Speaker 1: send in to funk up folks. Hardcore like training program
Speaker 1: and I've yes, extremely that's a big part of it. Um.
Speaker 1: And they like boats, which are useful for traveling places.
Speaker 1: I've been told, so you know what is also useful
Speaker 1: for traveling places, Joel. The products and services that support
Speaker 1: this podcast, including our main sponsor, the United States Marine Corps.
Speaker 1: The United States Marine Corps. Do you need some guys
Speaker 1: on boats to funck to funk people up? Because that's
Speaker 1: essentially the Marine Corps. They're coming and they're gonna get you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they have helicopters too, but they will just replace your president.
Speaker 1: That's not what they're famous. Yeah, products, we're back. Thank you,
Speaker 1: United States Marine Corps. It was a weird choice to
Speaker 1: sponsor this podcast, but but but we appreciate it. Um.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know where to take I
Speaker 1: don't know where else to take this joke. Woodrow Wilson
Speaker 1: laid out his vision of the future very openly in
Speaker 1: campaign speeches. In declaring that the United States had a
Speaker 1: special place on the world stage as a disseminator of democracy,
Speaker 1: he told crowds, we are chosen and prominently chosen to
Speaker 1: show the way that to the nations of the world,
Speaker 1: how they show walk in the paths of liberty? Uh?
Speaker 1: Now the the guy, the historian who wrote this master's
Speaker 1: thesis that I found. Dr Hassett argues that Wilson's dedication
Speaker 1: to spreading democracy was real, kind of within Wilson's conception
Speaker 1: of democracy, but it was also heavily compromised by his
Speaker 1: outrageous racism. Um and doc Or Hassett rights, Wilson's racism
Speaker 1: obscured his vision of a new world order. While the
Speaker 1: president of Princeton University, Wilson successfully persuaded all African Americans
Speaker 1: to withdraw their applications for admission. Josepha's Daniels, a wilson
Speaker 1: campaign manager and later his secretary of the Navy, stoked
Speaker 1: racial fears in East St. Louis to garner votes. Once
Speaker 1: in office, Wilson told darky stories and jokes during cabinet
Speaker 1: meetings and presided over the segregation of the Department of
Speaker 1: the Treasury, Post Office and the Bureau of Engraving. These
Speaker 1: offices had been desegregated since the end of the Civil War.
Speaker 1: Wilson refused to condemn the lynching of blacks, and the
Speaker 1: only federal actions taken regarding racial conflict was to keep
Speaker 1: African Americans from attaining equality. So that's Wilson is the
Speaker 1: guy who, like in nineteen twelve, expands segregation. Um, that
Speaker 1: is the craziest thing, especially knowing like what's around the
Speaker 1: corner for black people in government jobs, Like if you
Speaker 1: like post like nineteen fifties, early nineteen sixties, we see
Speaker 1: a lot of black people starting to work for the
Speaker 1: post Office. Like the only like quote unquote respectable job
Speaker 1: you can get as black person is like doing some
Speaker 1: type of government work. Um, usually like low level, uh
Speaker 1: foot blue collar kind of stuff. I would argue that
Speaker 1: maybe the only respectable government job that exists as the
Speaker 1: post office, um and park rangers. Post office and park rangers.
Speaker 1: What else do we really need? We love you guys, yeah,
Speaker 1: so uh yeah, it's this is this is important not
Speaker 1: just because like, oh, here's a story about another racist
Speaker 1: American president, but because this plays directly into what Wilson
Speaker 1: is thinking about what he's doing in Latin America. Because
Speaker 1: Wilson is a guy who does believe in democracy, Like
Speaker 1: he worked himself ill trying to push forward this vision
Speaker 1: he had of the League of nations. And like one
Speaker 1: of the problems when whenever we have someone who's terrible
Speaker 1: and Woodrow Wilson's a horrible person, I think people tend
Speaker 1: to just kind of write it off as that and
Speaker 1: assume they don't really believe things. And Wilson is a
Speaker 1: big believer in his what he considers to be democracy, um,
Speaker 1: which people and in democracy it's a republic. Right, That's
Speaker 1: a big thing for him, is it's not he's not
Speaker 1: a fan of like this like a pure democracy. He's
Speaker 1: like a populist democracy. Um. Wilson believes that you should
Speaker 1: have a republic dominated by white people who are able
Speaker 1: to direct things and act as patient stewards for their
Speaker 1: racial inferiors. Wilson believed that democracy was the fullest form
Speaker 1: of state life, and non white people's were not ready
Speaker 1: to take part in that, which is why you need
Speaker 1: a part of why you need a republic um. He
Speaker 1: believed that they needed to undergo what he called a
Speaker 1: period of political tool in order to know how to
Speaker 1: be good democratic citizens. So this this is like very
Speaker 1: vital information to me, Robert, because it helps me understand
Speaker 1: like why some people still hold these beliefs, Like it's
Speaker 1: it's hard to wrap your mind around I think. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't like, I'll just be for myself, like from
Speaker 1: living in black skins, sometimes it's hard to be like, okay,
Speaker 1: but where where is this hate rooted in? And I
Speaker 1: understand from a larger perspective, like, Okay, you've believed that
Speaker 1: because of the way history has been taught to you.
Speaker 1: I know a lot of racist white people believe like, oh,
Speaker 1: white people invented everything, and white people are the ones
Speaker 1: who like colonize the world, and we made sure you
Speaker 1: believed in God or like saying things, and we invented
Speaker 1: all of the science that clearly we're like the superior race.
Speaker 1: But like to hear on a governmental level, like this
Speaker 1: idea of we can train the blackness, the part we fear,
Speaker 1: the part that doesn't sit right with us, the part
Speaker 1: that isn't like us, out of you, and then that's
Speaker 1: like the world that will be better, Like that's how
Speaker 1: we uplift and make the world better is by removing
Speaker 1: It's like it's horrifying, it's so scary, Like it's because
Speaker 1: it's happening right now. It is happening right now. And
Speaker 1: one of the reasons I think this is so important
Speaker 1: to understand is that Number one, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of people today who will say the same basic things
Speaker 1: about the US and its actions and the way that
Speaker 1: it influences and sort of changes the political course of
Speaker 1: other nations, like like political lives right now. There's people
Speaker 1: who will argue the same basic things Wilson will argue, Um,
Speaker 1: they will not argue the same things domestically. And the
Speaker 1: fact that because because you can't admit that right, you
Speaker 1: can't sit down. You can, as an American today say hey,
Speaker 1: like these people need to learn from us the ways
Speaker 1: of democracy, and it's our responsibility to teach the right
Speaker 1: like that that we fucking Afghanistan and Iraq and like
Speaker 1: a bunch of plays all around the world, like that's
Speaker 1: that's going on today, And there's people who will argue
Speaker 1: forcefully for that. You can't say black people aren't ready
Speaker 1: to be full democratic citizens and they need our tutelage
Speaker 1: as white people, which is why we have to oppress them.
Speaker 1: You can't say that openly in mainstream politics anymore. But
Speaker 1: the fact that people argue for that in foreign countries
Speaker 1: shows you what they believe about the domestic situation. And
Speaker 1: if they Yeah, looking at Woodrow Wilson, I think is
Speaker 1: important because we see, we can see the truth of
Speaker 1: what the people who believe that ship internationally are saying.
Speaker 1: What they also believe domestically. They're the same as Woodrow Wilson.
Speaker 1: They haven't changed. It's just not acceptable to say what
Speaker 1: he says or what say what he used to say. Um,
Speaker 1: I think that's important for people to kind of understand.
Speaker 1: We don't. It's vital age. So Dr Hassett goes on
Speaker 1: to write, quote the supposed need for a period of
Speaker 1: tutelage was Wilson's method of justifying interventions in Latin America
Speaker 1: and the disenfranchisement of blacks in the United States. Non
Speaker 1: whites needed the guidance of whites, often lasting many years
Speaker 1: until they were ready to operate autonomously in a democracy.
Speaker 1: Of course, it was white too then decided when their
Speaker 1: pupils passed their Civics courses. Yeah, probably like us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when when a majority. I feel like, especially if I
Speaker 1: look at like countries like Colombia and Brazil and the
Speaker 1: way that white passing people were sort of allowed to
Speaker 1: ascend the ranks while we look at read a lot
Speaker 1: of stories of like brown, black, indigenous former slaves talking
Speaker 1: about like where their class system is at and how
Speaker 1: similar almost exact actually the way it has worked in
Speaker 1: America has fostered over there as well. This the idea
Speaker 1: of segregation, idea of like even even the basic like
Speaker 1: non political stuff like the idea of good hair and
Speaker 1: who gets to be on billboards and things like that.
Speaker 1: It is absolutely insane. Even their attempts to like d desegregate,
Speaker 1: like to desegregate and to bring in like black people
Speaker 1: has had like horrifyingly racist connotations. If we look at
Speaker 1: like a lot of Spanish soaps where you're just like,
Speaker 1: good lord, is this still where we're at representation wise?
Speaker 1: And then sometimes I'll just slick around here too and
Speaker 1: be like, oh, well, you know, I can, I can
Speaker 1: complain and and maybe I get a little bit about
Speaker 1: on my Woodrow Wilson box and be like they should
Speaker 1: learn from us in the ways we've desegregated. Our Hollywood
Speaker 1: system are media empire, but we haven't. We still have
Speaker 1: so many issues here as well, and how we represent
Speaker 1: black people. Yeah, we don't seem to be good at it.
Speaker 1: We're good at a tear gas though gas. We know
Speaker 1: how to beat the hell out of a protest if
Speaker 1: you if you want entire city blocks tear gas. I
Speaker 1: know some guys who are just pros at it at
Speaker 1: this point. Oh my god. And now we know how
Speaker 1: to fence off the White House, so really defense off
Speaker 1: the White House. Yeah, we're growing anyway, So back to
Speaker 1: back to Wilson. Let's talk about So Wilson gets elected. Uh,
Speaker 1: this North American you know, Pan American Treaty thing gets signed.
Speaker 1: It takes a while though, it's not signed until but yeah,
Speaker 1: World War One happens and Wilson like, lets the US
Speaker 1: get pulled into that cluster fuck um, And it takes
Speaker 1: until after the war when the League of Nation gets established.
Speaker 1: The Pan American Treaty gets signed as part of a
Speaker 1: bunch of international League of Nations pacts, but kind of
Speaker 1: like a lot of the rest of the League of
Speaker 1: Nation ship, it doesn't amount to much, but the impulse
Speaker 1: that the pact represented, this idea that the US could
Speaker 1: could group up with the strongest nations in Latin America,
Speaker 1: sell them arms, and use them to dictate. However, one
Speaker 1: in the continent lived without using US troops. That idea
Speaker 1: never like went out of vogue. In the US government, um,
Speaker 1: up until the present day. And and just so you
Speaker 1: know where kind of we are eventually headed in here,
Speaker 1: it's equally popular with Republicans and Democrats. So like, no
Speaker 1: matter where you land on this, Joe Biden loves him
Speaker 1: some fucking we'll talk about playing Columbia maybe a little bit.
Speaker 1: That's but yeah, so uh, World War two kind of
Speaker 1: distracts the United States from affairs in you know, it's
Speaker 1: its own hemisphere for a while. We're not we're not
Speaker 1: focusing so much on Latin America during that whole war
Speaker 1: thing because it's you know, a lot of stuff is
Speaker 1: going on in the other parts of the world. Um,
Speaker 1: we have other people to kill. We have we have
Speaker 1: so many people to kill. Um and thankfully like some
Speaker 1: of them deserve it, which is better than we usually do. Um. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: World War two was the time where some of the
Speaker 1: people we bombed from this guy deserve to die. Man,
Speaker 1: how we have forgotten so quickly is crazy, demi So
Speaker 1: uh yeah. It also like World War two also saw
Speaker 1: the sudden pull out of European military advisors from a
Speaker 1: lot of South American states because while like they hadn't
Speaker 1: been like European colonialism never kind of in the in
Speaker 1: the modern era, got was even vaguely on the same
Speaker 1: levels like what happened in Africa. UM, because of the
Speaker 1: Monroe doctrine. There were still it was still a lot
Speaker 1: of European involvement in Latin America. They were they were
Speaker 1: selling arms to a lot of these states, and they
Speaker 1: would send in military advisors to train their militaries. And
Speaker 1: it was a way both of European states kind of
Speaker 1: projecting power, and of course it was very profitable. UM.
Speaker 1: And if you were in Latin America, you were an
Speaker 1: up and coming state and you wanted to get because
Speaker 1: there were all these wars between Latin American powers in
Speaker 1: this period of time to constant, constant, really horrific wars.
Speaker 1: So if you're one of these states, you have a
Speaker 1: lot of enemies all around you, and you want to
Speaker 1: get a jump on your opponents. UM. You you want
Speaker 1: to be partnered with some state that has a more
Speaker 1: advanced military, both access to better guns and access to
Speaker 1: better sort of training UM and like military organizational techniques.
Speaker 1: And you know, the US was certainly in a more
Speaker 1: advanced state than a lot of Latin America at this point.
Speaker 1: But Europe was the gold standard prior to World War Two. Um,
Speaker 1: So a lot of these Latin American countries before World
Speaker 1: War Two, they have like German, or French or Italian.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately Italian you don't want them as military advisors. But
Speaker 1: ideally you'd have like the Germans or the French or
Speaker 1: something advising your military. Like Argentina spent about a century
Speaker 1: using German officers to train their militaries. And actually up
Speaker 1: until like the present day, you can find pictures of
Speaker 1: the ship from the nineties. I don't know if it's
Speaker 1: continued pass that you can add pictures of Argentine soldiers
Speaker 1: giving the Fascist salute because that's how they were trained
Speaker 1: to salute, like a lot of actually one of Hitler's
Speaker 1: best friends, you know, best friends who Hitler then had killed.
Speaker 1: Um this guy, uh, like the leader of the brown
Speaker 1: Shirts went and trained Argentine soldiers while the Nazis were
Speaker 1: in power. So like a lot of different Latin American
Speaker 1: states have European advisors and stuff. But by the end
Speaker 1: of the Second World War, Europe was kind of broken
Speaker 1: as a military power. Even the states that had won
Speaker 1: were in ruins h France and Germany were like bled white,
Speaker 1: and the governments of Latin America like started having needing
Speaker 1: to look to the United States for military training and
Speaker 1: for equipment, because the US has all the guns at
Speaker 1: this point, and it has a huge military, It has
Speaker 1: a lot of excess shipped to sell, it has a
Speaker 1: lot of soldiers to send over to train them. Um,
Speaker 1: and Europe just doesn't so me at the same kind
Speaker 1: of time, while all these Latin American states are starting
Speaker 1: like turning from Europe to the United States for advice
Speaker 1: on how to have armies, the guys that sort of
Speaker 1: the top of the political establishment in the US, we're
Speaker 1: kind of starting to realize the position the end of
Speaker 1: World War Two had left them in. And you know,
Speaker 1: everyone knows in a World War two the US is
Speaker 1: kind of the big power in the world. But I
Speaker 1: don't think a lot of people know how what a
Speaker 1: dominant position we had. At the end of World War Two.
Speaker 1: The United States was in control of fully half of
Speaker 1: the planet's wealth. What yeah, half of the wealth in
Speaker 1: the world was controlled by the United States. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like I'm trying. I mean, I guess it makes sense
Speaker 1: if you think about like how much of the world
Speaker 1: was like absolutely death and made it just totally fu
Speaker 1: and how clean. Like it's always I love studying like
Speaker 1: what was happening as we come out of World War
Speaker 1: two culturally because the idea of like all of these
Speaker 1: women being forced back into their homes so rapidly asked
Speaker 1: to reduce their status and power in not just in
Speaker 1: like outside of their homes, not just in businesses and stuff,
Speaker 1: but in the government too, Like we had risen up
Speaker 1: to take so much power. And then this idea of
Speaker 1: like black people who had come back from the war
Speaker 1: and the way they were treated is basically like you
Speaker 1: didn't do anything for me, and you're still just a
Speaker 1: black person. There's so much people like there were so
Speaker 1: many opportunities for quick development on a social level that
Speaker 1: because I think because we had money, accent and access
Speaker 1: to guns and power and because we're really feeling ourselves, uh,
Speaker 1: was squashed so quickly and scary to think about how
Speaker 1: both when we are in power and when we are
Speaker 1: out of power we tend to take a dumb on
Speaker 1: everybody who isn't a white male. Yeah, it's the real
Speaker 1: One of the real tragedies of World War two is
Speaker 1: at the end of it, the US had the power
Speaker 1: and influence to do literally anything UM. And we basically
Speaker 1: chose to hoard that wealth and power and compromise every
Speaker 1: single thing we've ever claimed as a as a core
Speaker 1: belief of this nation UM, in order to try to
Speaker 1: keep it for as long as possible. And that this
Speaker 1: kind of thinking. People talk directly about this in the
Speaker 1: US government. And I'm gonna quote now from a State
Speaker 1: Department policymaker named George Kinnon, who was one of like
Speaker 1: the most influential minds in the US during the Cold War.
Speaker 1: This is something George Kinnon wrote in nineteen forty eight,
Speaker 1: and he's talking about kind of how he's talking about
Speaker 1: U S policy in Southeast Asia at this time. But
Speaker 1: it applies to kind of the the way that the
Speaker 1: men in charge of our government post World War Two,
Speaker 1: we're looking at the whole world. So this is something
Speaker 1: George Kinnon wrote for the State Department. We have about
Speaker 1: fifty of the world's wealth, but only six point three
Speaker 1: percent of its population. This disparity is particularly great as
Speaker 1: between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation,
Speaker 1: we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.
Speaker 1: Our real task in the coming period is to devise
Speaker 1: a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain
Speaker 1: this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.
Speaker 1: To do so, we will have to dispense with all
Speaker 1: sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attention will have to be
Speaker 1: concentrated everywhere on our most immediate national objective. If we
Speaker 1: need not deceive ourselves, that we can afford today the
Speaker 1: luxury of altruism and world benefaction. Wow, just laying it
Speaker 1: all out there now. Kennon was watching his nation, Like
Speaker 1: the specific thing that prompted him to write this as
Speaker 1: he was watching the United States start to flail round
Speaker 1: in China because at this point China civil wars still
Speaker 1: going on. We're backing, you know, the quote unquote democratic
Speaker 1: sort of side of things, the Republicans or whatever, which
Speaker 1: is not working out great, and we're starting like ship
Speaker 1: in South Korea, like that's beginning kind of like we're
Speaker 1: starting to see that like what what was called at
Speaker 1: the time, French indo China, like a bunch of ships
Speaker 1: going to go wrong there right, Like France is starting
Speaker 1: to get fucked up by Vietnamese rebels and it's it's
Speaker 1: becoming obvious to folks in the State Department that Southeast
Speaker 1: Asia is going to be a place where the US
Speaker 1: either has to just kind of abandon to the influence
Speaker 1: of these quote unquote communist powers or it's going we're
Speaker 1: gonna burn a lot of treasure in lives fighting there. Um.
Speaker 1: So Kennon at the time is kind of specifically referring
Speaker 1: to US policy in Asia. But again, the pattern of
Speaker 1: thinking that he talks about up there, this idea that
Speaker 1: the most important thing is to maintain the position of
Speaker 1: disparity we have with the rest of the world, and
Speaker 1: we can't we can't let ourselves. Um, you know, I'm reminded,
Speaker 1: like we can't let ourselves be human, like think about
Speaker 1: altruism and stuff. You have to think about holding onto power.
Speaker 1: And it does make me. Um, it reminds me reading
Speaker 1: that of a quote from Yard Kipling's White Man's Burden. Um,
Speaker 1: take up the white Man's burden. You dare not stoop
Speaker 1: to less nor call too loud on freedom to cloak
Speaker 1: your weariness. Like it's the same, the same pattern of thought, right,
Speaker 1: Like where you can't you can't let yourself what's important
Speaker 1: is maintaining this position of disparity and maintaining our position
Speaker 1: of power. And you can't let whatever we we claim
Speaker 1: to believe, you can't let that matter more to you
Speaker 1: than continuing to dominate. Um, that's it's interesting to me.
Speaker 1: You can draw it like it's the same kind of
Speaker 1: thinking that you see in the British Empire too. It
Speaker 1: just got transferred over to us when we took power.
Speaker 1: So again, this is Kennan talking about Southeast Asia, but
Speaker 1: it's you can generalize it to a lot of how
Speaker 1: a lot of American leaders in the late forties are
Speaker 1: thinking about Latin America. I want to read one more
Speaker 1: quote from George Kennon's right up there before we before
Speaker 1: we continue on, we should cease to talk about vague
Speaker 1: and for the Far East unreal objectives such as human rights,
Speaker 1: the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day
Speaker 1: is not far off when we are going to have
Speaker 1: to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are
Speaker 1: than hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. Wow. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: use a slogan from Don Draper and it's I have
Speaker 1: a life and it goes in only one direction forward
Speaker 1: And this whole like mentality of late forties, like needing
Speaker 1: to not just like you have almost all of the power,
Speaker 1: like that breakdown a fifty of the wealth to six
Speaker 1: percent of the population ideology that like we have to
Speaker 1: continue to build on that. But why would you? How
Speaker 1: could you possibly need to build like that? Is the
Speaker 1: most mind fucked thing ever. I can't imagine being like, oh,
Speaker 1: I have fifty of everything, how do I get more?
Speaker 1: Like yeah, and and and like the idea that like
Speaker 1: we have to immediately discard our beliefs about democracy and
Speaker 1: human rights in order to maintain the power that we
Speaker 1: currently holdings more important than the power. Yeah, and again,
Speaker 1: this isn't the period after which like kind of America,
Speaker 1: Like I think a lot of people who looking at
Speaker 1: the story, I think that like America's like idealism was
Speaker 1: broken by Vietnam. This is nineteen forty eight, right, we
Speaker 1: It wasn't like the Cold War wasn't even like really
Speaker 1: up to what it would become like there was still
Speaker 1: like World War two had just ended. Fascism have just
Speaker 1: been beated, and immediately were like, well nothing matters more
Speaker 1: than keeping all this money that we've got. Funck human rights.
Speaker 1: That's the people in those influential folks in the State
Speaker 1: Department are saying this ship. So again, Kennan was writing
Speaker 1: about Southeast Asia there, but you really can generalize what
Speaker 1: he's saying to what a lot of US State Department
Speaker 1: and in sort of military thinkers in Latin America belief.
Speaker 1: These people supported straight power, and they found themselves kind
Speaker 1: of discarding unrealistic objectives like human rights because straight power
Speaker 1: is they thought that they would have claimed that it's
Speaker 1: more realistic. It's really that it's just easier. It's easier
Speaker 1: to shoot people than to try to improve their material conditions, um,
Speaker 1: even though improving their material conditions probably does cost lesson
Speaker 1: as a general rule. So the school of the America's
Speaker 1: became this thing that we're talking about today. The actual
Speaker 1: focus of our article was what became these men's kind
Speaker 1: of the lynchpin in their plan to do that in
Speaker 1: Latin America. UM. And it's also sort of a It
Speaker 1: acted as kind of a fulfillment of Woodrow Wilson's dream
Speaker 1: the United States being able to act as a police
Speaker 1: force for Latin America to ensure good what we would
Speaker 1: consider good governance. So the US spens the first few
Speaker 1: years after World War two kind of rebuilding Europe and
Speaker 1: starting to sunk around in Asia, and there wasn't a
Speaker 1: lot of military manpower to spare in Latin America. So
Speaker 1: the decision was made to do something more subtle than
Speaker 1: the Pentagon traditionally, did you know, rather than just like
Speaker 1: sending in troops and like building bases. In nineteen forty six,
Speaker 1: the Army established a new training school for foreign soldiers
Speaker 1: in the Panama Canal zone, which is still under US
Speaker 1: control right Panama. The Panama Canal is like owned by
Speaker 1: the United States at this point, and it's it's not
Speaker 1: its own independent thing. Our government is basically like it's
Speaker 1: a little US outpost in Latin America. And so they
Speaker 1: build a new school there to train officers from all
Speaker 1: around Latin America. And they call it the Latin American
Speaker 1: Training Center ground Division. And at this point Ground Division
Speaker 1: is just kind of like what I'm going to call
Speaker 1: the schools. This is what it's named before. It's called
Speaker 1: the School of the America's. So in nineteen forty seven,
Speaker 1: the United States had signed the Rio Treaty with twenty
Speaker 1: different Latin American nations. Now, this was kind of an
Speaker 1: expansion of a lot of the ideas that Wilson had
Speaker 1: had back in nineteen twelve. It was a mutual defense
Speaker 1: pact meant on paper to provide a unified hemispheric front
Speaker 1: against like a foreign invasion. Um, this was all window dressing.
Speaker 1: The real agenda of the treaty had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with mutual defense for the hemisphere and everything to do
Speaker 1: with the maintenance of US political dominance in the region
Speaker 1: and control over raw material. And I'm gonna quote now
Speaker 1: from a book, a really good book called The School
Speaker 1: of the Americas by Leslie Gill. Quote, Well, the United
Speaker 1: States dedicated itself to containing the global expansion of the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union and persecuted domestic critics with varying degrees of intensity.
Speaker 1: It assigned its Latin American allies the task of guarding
Speaker 1: against the threat post by internal subversion. National Security Doctrine
Speaker 1: n s D provided the broad rationale for fighting communists
Speaker 1: by assigning the maintenance of internal order to Latin American
Speaker 1: security forces and by delegating to the United States the
Speaker 1: task of guarding the ramparts of the Western hemisphere from
Speaker 1: external aggression. So you see what what's what's being done here,
Speaker 1: This is being framed as like we need to protect
Speaker 1: our hemisphere from like a Soviet invasion. What's really happening
Speaker 1: is the US so because it doesn't have a lot
Speaker 1: of troops to spare at the moment, is setting up,
Speaker 1: arming and training Latin American national militaries to act as
Speaker 1: internal security forces to keep communism out of Latin America.
Speaker 1: That's what's being done here. We're building a continental police
Speaker 1: force to enforce American political ideology on an entire continent.
Speaker 1: When the school, like when the school opens, right, and
Speaker 1: there's this because I'm trying to picture like the type
Speaker 1: of person that goes into this, like I know, the
Speaker 1: type of person who believes they can go into the
Speaker 1: police force and change it and make it a force
Speaker 1: in a space for good. Very normal soldiers at first,
Speaker 1: so initially and this is like you hear a lot
Speaker 1: of folks on the left on like Twitter and stuff
Speaker 1: talk about the School of the Americas, and generally most
Speaker 1: of what they talk about is stuff that happened kind
Speaker 1: of later on when there was and we'll talk about
Speaker 1: like all the torture classes and ship that happened, But
Speaker 1: that wasn't how it started. It started as very normal
Speaker 1: military training. It's first class was a bunch of Argentine
Speaker 1: soldiers who were being taught to use US anti aircraft
Speaker 1: guns that their nation had just been allowed to purchase.
Speaker 1: So it was not there's nothing really shady there, right, Like,
Speaker 1: they buy these advanced weapons from the US that are
Speaker 1: primarily defensive in nature, and they need to be trained
Speaker 1: in how to use them. Um so the actual classes,
Speaker 1: the goal of the ground school at first, there's nothing
Speaker 1: really you wouldn't call that shady, right, Like, that's a
Speaker 1: reasonable thing to do if you believe selling arms as
Speaker 1: reasonable as reasonable We're like, oh, yeah, you should train
Speaker 1: them how to use the guns. Okay, that's fine. And
Speaker 1: the most dangerous thing that's going on here is not
Speaker 1: the actual curriculum of the school. It's what's happening around
Speaker 1: that curriculum. But yeah, we'll we'll talk about that in
Speaker 1: a little bit. I want to quote something Leslie gil
Speaker 1: writes here about sort of what the defense industry is
Speaker 1: starting to do in Latin America in this period. Quote,
Speaker 1: defense manufacturers sought out new markets for their wears, and
Speaker 1: Congress created generous military aid programs facilitating arms transfers not
Speaker 1: only helped secure US access to raw materials and the
Speaker 1: general cooperation of regional militaries. It also tied Latin American
Speaker 1: militaries to the use unless the continued purchase of technology
Speaker 1: produced in the United States. The Defense Establishment referred to
Speaker 1: the ladder as standardizing Latin American militaries. Yeah, and the
Speaker 1: Caribbean Defense Commander put up bluntly when he stated that
Speaker 1: standardizing Latin American armies with US equipment further the quote
Speaker 1: penetration of the United States and the military system of
Speaker 1: any countries, so that such nation becomes dependent on us.
Speaker 1: What's but you can standardize the equipment that they use,
Speaker 1: and then you make them dependent on you. They can't
Speaker 1: fight you, they can't rebel against you, they can't resist
Speaker 1: you if they need your factories to produce the weaponry
Speaker 1: that allows them to defend themselves from their neighbors. This
Speaker 1: is devious as hell. Yes, it's extremely insidious, because now
Speaker 1: we also know everything you have. We knows and can
Speaker 1: advance our ship before we give you access to the
Speaker 1: advanced ships. We're always one step ahead. Oh my god. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot going on here. U s weapons were
Speaker 1: again considered the most advanced on the planet at the time,
Speaker 1: and Latin American militaries were very much comparatively technologically backwards
Speaker 1: compared to the United States. In this period, a lot
Speaker 1: of them had recently been at war with each other,
Speaker 1: so there was really very reasonable fear of invasion, of
Speaker 1: losing territory. It had just happened for a lot of them. Um.
Speaker 1: So there says understanding that number one, you can defend yourself,
Speaker 1: you can gain massive local advantages by buying US guns.
Speaker 1: But it also on the U s side, it gives
Speaker 1: us this permanent influence in national politics because the ammunition
Speaker 1: that these weapons need, the parts that they need, the training,
Speaker 1: their reliant on the United States for all of that.
Speaker 1: But the thing that was truly insidious about the Ground
Speaker 1: School had nothing to do with weaponry and everything to
Speaker 1: do with what I would consider to be the deadliest
Speaker 1: fantasy in human history, probably the American Dream. And that's
Speaker 1: what we're going to talk about after we get back
Speaker 1: from the real American dream, which is products and services. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: let's do it. Buy some things, buy some things products.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back, and we're talking about the thing
Speaker 1: that was most dangerous about the American School. And this
Speaker 1: is the thing that everybody I see talking about this
Speaker 1: ship on Twitter, like really does seem to miss which
Speaker 1: is not that, Like they're not wrong about the torture
Speaker 1: programs being awful and like everything else we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about, but I don't see this being referenced and
Speaker 1: something that strikes the hope of having a dollar and
Speaker 1: a dream. Yeah, this is what and this is this
Speaker 1: is really fascinating to me. So in the late nineteen
Speaker 1: forties and fifties, right, the US winds up after the
Speaker 1: war with all of the money in the fucking world,
Speaker 1: and this leads to an unprecedented explosion in like the
Speaker 1: rates of home ownership, vehicle ownership, employment, job security, regular people.
Speaker 1: Suddenly we're gaining access to labor saving devices like washing
Speaker 1: machines and dishwashers, luxury products like television. It was a
Speaker 1: it was a heady period of time, and it it
Speaker 1: was easy to kind of when you see regular working
Speaker 1: people making these kinds of gains, it's easy for the
Speaker 1: propaganda of like this is because there's something special and
Speaker 1: beautiful about this, this dream America has what life can be.
Speaker 1: It's very easy to sell that when you've got because
Speaker 1: this is a period you do have to like obviously
Speaker 1: the benefits in this period weren't evenly shared, but like
Speaker 1: black people, you know, made a lot of like wealth
Speaker 1: improvements and stuff in this too. Everybody did. It wasn't
Speaker 1: evenly distributed. But you can look at damn near anybody
Speaker 1: in the United States who's working class in like the
Speaker 1: late forties, early fifties and be like, God, damn, there
Speaker 1: might be something to this us, this American dream thing, um.
Speaker 1: And the rest of the world isn't benefiting from that, right, Um.
Speaker 1: But they're look, they're they're able to look in from
Speaker 1: the outside and they're able to see what's happening in
Speaker 1: the United States. And the soldiers who are being sent
Speaker 1: from other Latin American countries to Panama to partake in
Speaker 1: the ground school, because Panama is run by the United States,
Speaker 1: they get to live in that world for a brief
Speaker 1: period of time. These students, most of whom had come
Speaker 1: from lower middle class families and very very poor nations,
Speaker 1: are able to get a glimpse into the American way
Speaker 1: of life. Um. They're they're they're getting paid money, they're
Speaker 1: getting they're able to buy American products, and so they're there.
Speaker 1: They kind of get get a taste of what American
Speaker 1: are enjoying in the late forties and early fifties. So
Speaker 1: in the in the Ground School starts to offer a
Speaker 1: special training program for Argentine officers and enlisted men that
Speaker 1: mixed technical training with what Leslie Gill calls cultural persuasion.
Speaker 1: The U. S Army officials at the Ground School wanted
Speaker 1: badly to make a good impression on the Argentines, who
Speaker 1: would broadly lean towards the axis during the war. Because remember,
Speaker 1: Germany had taught their army a lot, a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 1: So as Argentina was one of the great powers of
Speaker 1: Latin America, gaining their trust successfully, you know, and drawing
Speaker 1: them into the bosom of US power was seen as
Speaker 1: a really important thing to do. Um. It was a
Speaker 1: critical step and kind of locking down the continent in
Speaker 1: the whole hemisphere quote from leslie Guilt. They dwelled on
Speaker 1: every aspect of the training program, they being the US trainers,
Speaker 1: which they believed carried considerable symbolic weight for the United States.
Speaker 1: One individual effused that it is no exaggeration to state
Speaker 1: that the cooperation and the solidarity of the Western Hemisphere
Speaker 1: nations depends to a great degree upon the impressions which
Speaker 1: the Argentine personnel take back with them to their native country.
Speaker 1: Army officers described the Argentines as extremely high type personnel
Speaker 1: who are probably well qualified. They told everyone who interacted
Speaker 1: with them to learn the customs of the Argentine Army
Speaker 1: and to recognize the insignia used to designate particular ranks.
Speaker 1: Most importantly, the officials advised course instructors from the fifty
Speaker 1: six Anti Aircraft Artillery Group to instill among the trainees
Speaker 1: faith in the weapons, and in this way to draw
Speaker 1: a connection between the powerful weapons in the United States.
Speaker 1: They asserted that if the Argentines had confidence in the weapons,
Speaker 1: they would have confidence in the United States, and this
Speaker 1: confidence would spread when the Argentines returned home and taught
Speaker 1: others to use the guns. Building confidence in the United
Speaker 1: States was a complex undertaking that involved much more than
Speaker 1: impressive weaponry. The Argentine trainees held strong opinions about their
Speaker 1: national and racial superiority visa the other Latin Americans, and
Speaker 1: these views did not go unappreciated by their North American hosts.
Speaker 1: So fortunately for this whole dream of getting Argentina on
Speaker 1: the U S A side. If there's one thing you
Speaker 1: could rely on US military planners in Night to know
Speaker 1: how to do, it was how to be super fucking racist.
Speaker 1: So officers at the Ground School wrote that it was essential,
Speaker 1: in view of the nationalistic feelings of the Argentine and
Speaker 1: their belief in certain racial theories, that they be made
Speaker 1: to feel they enjoy equal privileges with American officers and
Speaker 1: enlisted men. Like most places in the American Empire, the
Speaker 1: Ground School and Panama was was pretty segregated. White American
Speaker 1: soldiers ate better food, lived in better dorms, and enjoyed
Speaker 1: higher standards of comfort than their Latin American students. Uh
Speaker 1: So they start issuing the Argentine soldiers passes that distinguished
Speaker 1: them from other Latin American students at the Ground School
Speaker 1: and grant them privileges such as special food rights, exemption
Speaker 1: from maintenance duties carried out by darker skinned Latin Americans.
Speaker 1: And you know, obviously the US military and Panama has
Speaker 1: kind of its own racial theories. Um. They believe that
Speaker 1: like white suffered more from prolonged exposure to intense heat
Speaker 1: and humidity than than other people's, were more susceptible to
Speaker 1: certain diseases. Um, yeah, so I laugh because racism is
Speaker 1: so easy, Like I get it, Like we we've I've
Speaker 1: been talking a lot about racism. I write about you know,
Speaker 1: black representation in media and this, Like it's so davidly
Speaker 1: easy to see, like the comfort racism provides, Like my
Speaker 1: skin is so fair? How can I possibly do the
Speaker 1: labor this person is to look at their dark skin
Speaker 1: and the side right off of it, this is where
Speaker 1: you belong. And you know, the idea that we essentially
Speaker 1: brainwashed people to believe that, like if we think about you,
Speaker 1: the way that the way racism separates and divides makes
Speaker 1: it nearly impossible to come together and have those conversations
Speaker 1: that allow you as like a community to grow and develop.
Speaker 1: So this idea of like, oh, make sure the lighter
Speaker 1: skin like Latin Americans understand that they're better, so that
Speaker 1: as a country they can never will always be unrest
Speaker 1: in that space that is so sick. Yeah, it's really
Speaker 1: fucked up. Um, And there's this, there's this, So what's
Speaker 1: happening there is like white people kind of believed had
Speaker 1: been like dark skinned people in Latin America and the
Speaker 1: Canal Zone had been doing all the physical labor because
Speaker 1: of this belief that like white people like they just
Speaker 1: weren't weren't as suited to hard labor. And we we
Speaker 1: add the Argentinean soldiers in like we treat them as
Speaker 1: white people as part of a propaganda campaign to kind
Speaker 1: of get the number one, to separate them from other
Speaker 1: Latin Americans further, um, and to kind of get them
Speaker 1: on our side. Um. So there's this kind of immediate
Speaker 1: willingness to like start racially playing the people's of Latin
Speaker 1: America against each other. Um. Now yeah, so this is
Speaker 1: this is uh has a big impact on Argentinian soldiers,
Speaker 1: and it provides them with a taste of the American
Speaker 1: way of life, a sample of what it's like to
Speaker 1: be a white American um. And this meshes well with
Speaker 1: kind of the other tastes they were offered at the
Speaker 1: ground school. Students were paid to attend, and as Panama
Speaker 1: was under you as control, it's a place where they
Speaker 1: could buy a lot of consumer goods. This included a
Speaker 1: lot of labor saving devices and luxury products that would
Speaker 1: have been unavailable back in these students home countries, things
Speaker 1: like laundry machines and dishwashers and blenders in the late
Speaker 1: forties and early fifties. A lot of this stuff was
Speaker 1: was just kind of like magic to many of these
Speaker 1: soldiers coming into the Canal Zone, and the fact that
Speaker 1: they could buy this stuff. Now when we're being like
Speaker 1: able to kind of participate in this this racially segregated
Speaker 1: society on the top of it for a period of time,
Speaker 1: not only does it reinforce the idea in their mind
Speaker 1: that the US is this kind of all powerful utopia,
Speaker 1: but it lets them feel like they're a part of it.
Speaker 1: Um And yeah, so that's that's a big aspect of
Speaker 1: what the American you know, at this point called the
Speaker 1: ground school is trying to do with these solds. To
Speaker 1: be fair, though, Robert, I still find washing machines and
Speaker 1: dishwashers to be magical. I hate them, not a fan.
Speaker 1: Not a fan. Well, I like washing machines, I don't
Speaker 1: like dishwashers. So, uh, school instructors worked hard to keep
Speaker 1: their students occupied constantly with very little unstructured downtime, and
Speaker 1: this too was part of the grander strategy Leslie Gill
Speaker 1: right quote. They did so for two reasons. First, they
Speaker 1: hope to convey to the students a particular vision of U.
Speaker 1: S citizens is industrious and successful. Second, they wanted to
Speaker 1: keep students in the canal zone and out of Panama.
Speaker 1: Officials worried that disorders created by students, such as public drunkenness,
Speaker 1: expressions of immorality, or fights, would provoke the ire of
Speaker 1: Panamanian authorities and cause of public relations difficulty for the
Speaker 1: US military. The Commandant did not mince words when he
Speaker 1: told a group of staff officers that in addition to
Speaker 1: taking care of these people and making them welcome and
Speaker 1: happy while here, they must be kept busy, organize their instructions,
Speaker 1: make the schedule so that they do not have too
Speaker 1: much free time, give them organized athletics that they will
Speaker 1: stay in the zone and out of Panama. They are
Speaker 1: here to learn the equipment and technique. They must carry
Speaker 1: with them the impression that this is the way we
Speaker 1: work and why we are a great nation. So again,
Speaker 1: this is all there's there's there's this kind of basic
Speaker 1: military training going on, but there's also this much deeper
Speaker 1: cultural training and what what the United States is and
Speaker 1: kind of us pushing like this is what your country
Speaker 1: should be. Um. This reminds me a lot of the vow.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you guys are Yeah, there's not
Speaker 1: enough set about that. Yeah, you're very like yeah, the
Speaker 1: brainwashing the way like a lot of the way they
Speaker 1: treat them like children. This idea of like, oh no,
Speaker 1: the devil and I don't mind, is the devil's workshop,
Speaker 1: Like make sure they're they're kept busy, because who knows
Speaker 1: what they'll get up to on their own devices. Like
Speaker 1: that wasn't, at least from what I just heard. It
Speaker 1: wasn't based off of like, oh, these are like young
Speaker 1: kids who are getting rowdy, Let's give them something constructive
Speaker 1: to do. It's like they might embarrass us, so let's
Speaker 1: make sure they stay under our thumb. Like yeah, so
Speaker 1: much of racism is infantilization of a people, and I
Speaker 1: it's yeah, yeah, there's a lot going on here. So
Speaker 1: for more than a decade, this kind of goes on,
Speaker 1: and the ground school quietly trains hundreds and then eventually
Speaker 1: thousands of soldiers from not just Argentina, but Guatemala, Chula
Speaker 1: and a bunch of other countries in Latin America, and
Speaker 1: these men walked away from their months. It was often
Speaker 1: like a year long course in Panama with more than
Speaker 1: just an expanded understanding of US weapon rate. They left
Speaker 1: with deep and personal knowledge of the wonders of American culture,
Speaker 1: American capitalism, the benefits that it could bring. And they
Speaker 1: they walked away in a lot of cases, with an understanding,
Speaker 1: a personal, brief and fleeting understanding of how good it
Speaker 1: felt to be a winner in that society. So these
Speaker 1: young ambitious men get this taste of America at its height,
Speaker 1: and then they go home to their own nations, which
Speaker 1: much must have felt like crude backwaters by comparison, there's
Speaker 1: not a lot of luxury goods and appliances to buy.
Speaker 1: People don't work in the same way like this capitalism
Speaker 1: thing that has taken over the whole world now hadn't yet.
Speaker 1: And it's this kind of like what what's one of
Speaker 1: the things that a lot of Latin American cultures are
Speaker 1: known for, you know, really really um putting a lot
Speaker 1: of emphasis on this idea of like a siesta or whatever,
Speaker 1: Like you don't always work all the time. There's like, culturally,
Speaker 1: you build in periods of rest because it's healthy to
Speaker 1: rest even in like the middle of the day. We
Speaker 1: don't fucking do that in America. We drink coffee so
Speaker 1: that you can work through you know, a sixteen hour shift. Right.
Speaker 1: So these guys, these these young ambitious men, get a
Speaker 1: taste of you know, American main manic work culture and
Speaker 1: the kind of the kind of benefits that it can
Speaker 1: bring in terms of like the things you get to
Speaker 1: own when you partake in it and succeed. And then
Speaker 1: they go home to these countries where like people don't
Speaker 1: have the same attitude towards work and don't have access
Speaker 1: to a lot of the same luxury goods and appliances,
Speaker 1: and they draw connections between all this stuff, and they
Speaker 1: start to they start to place blame on segments of
Speaker 1: their society for why they don't get to enjoy the
Speaker 1: same things they enjoyed, you know, in the Panama Zone,
Speaker 1: including the fact that indigenous cultures in these regions valued
Speaker 1: leisure and community over relentless capitalism um, and including the
Speaker 1: fact that there were a lot of left wing movements
Speaker 1: who were arguing that like things should be nationalized rather
Speaker 1: than this kind of free for all Lasi fairship that
Speaker 1: the US really wanted to push in all these Latin
Speaker 1: American countries because it benefited larger and already established American corporations.
Speaker 1: So not only you know, they're frustrated when they come back,
Speaker 1: and they also have a ready group of people than
Speaker 1: their own countries to blame for the fact that things
Speaker 1: aren't the way they want them to be at home
Speaker 1: now that they know how, you know, things are in
Speaker 1: the United States. So a lot of these soldiers, you know,
Speaker 1: they would finish their time in their respective militaries after
Speaker 1: going to the ground school, and they go on and
Speaker 1: do something else. But a significant number of them went
Speaker 1: on to be career officers, and since training at the
Speaker 1: ground school was prestigious, they often rose high in the
Speaker 1: ranks of their national militaries. As the fifties rolled along,
Speaker 1: there were a series of left wing revolutions in Latin America.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty two, Bolivia had a left wing coup,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of socialisty that brought in a new
Speaker 1: government that was dead set on nationalizing every mine in
Speaker 1: the country, which at that point we're basically owned by
Speaker 1: a bunch of US based corporations. Then, of course there's
Speaker 1: the Cuban Revolution of nineteen fifty nine, which brought that
Speaker 1: bearded heart throb Castro, you know, into the hearts and
Speaker 1: minds of everybody, um. And then kind of it seems
Speaker 1: like in the early fifties, the left is on the
Speaker 1: rise in Latin America. UM. And it was in the
Speaker 1: eyes of a lot of these officers who have been
Speaker 1: thoroughly if you know, you compared you compared it earlier
Speaker 1: to a cult. They've been thoroughly enraptured by the cult
Speaker 1: of the American way of life. It seems like these
Speaker 1: these left wing movements are hell bent on stopping Latin
Speaker 1: America from ever achieving that same dream. So the US
Speaker 1: government gets caught off guard by all of these revolutions,
Speaker 1: as it generally is, by everything that happens uh and
Speaker 1: Latin America like they saw it as basically our property.
Speaker 1: And suddenly, like the Russians are parking nuclear missiles in
Speaker 1: Cuba seventy miles off the Florida coast. So US officials
Speaker 1: kind of panic and they're afraid that they might start
Speaker 1: to lose the whole region to this new wave of
Speaker 1: left wing politicians. The prevailing kind of political wisdom at
Speaker 1: the time was something called the Domino theory, which stated
Speaker 1: the fall of one nation to communism would start this
Speaker 1: like horrible chain reaction would doom the whole continent, because yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's no way that people could be like, what
Speaker 1: have we just had free healthcare and we didn't let
Speaker 1: random foreign companies own everything in the country, And it's like, no,
Speaker 1: that the only that only leads to identical things, to
Speaker 1: Stalinism and Maoism. You could you couldn't just do that
Speaker 1: and then keep just like whatever. It's a very frustrating
Speaker 1: idea that people have. So the US, like Panics, as
Speaker 1: these revolutions start to take hold and they start turning
Speaker 1: to this network they have in Latin America of all
Speaker 1: of these military officers who are dedicated pro US capitalists
Speaker 1: just kind of waiting in the wings, furious at these
Speaker 1: damn commies who are like pulling their people away from
Speaker 1: the promised land of being able to buy washing machines.
Speaker 1: So by the time the Cuban Revolution succeeded, nearly about
Speaker 1: eight thousand students had graduated the ground school, and these
Speaker 1: guys were a good start, But Washington realized that kind
Speaker 1: of the revolutions sweeping Latin America were of such a
Speaker 1: scope that they were gonna need a lot more than
Speaker 1: eight thousand dudes to put a lid on all of this. Now,
Speaker 1: President Kennedy is the guy who issued orders for the
Speaker 1: Ground School to start training students in counter insurgency. US
Speaker 1: Special Forces were sent to the Ground School and they
Speaker 1: start teaching courses and traveling around to these countries too
Speaker 1: and teaching people. And you the exact nature of the
Speaker 1: counter terrorism courses that start getting counterinsurgency courses that start
Speaker 1: getting taught after Kennedy gives the order. UM Professor Michael
Speaker 1: McClintock describes them as the legitimization of state terrorism as
Speaker 1: a means to confront the sinse subversion and insurgency. And
Speaker 1: that's really what's. Yeah, the we start backing state terrorism
Speaker 1: in order to stop left wing politics in Latin America.
Speaker 1: That's what happens in this period. And that's again people
Speaker 1: accusing me of like going after the right wing. That's JFK. Like,
Speaker 1: let's just keep that all in mind. That that's sucking JFK.
Speaker 1: Who does this, right? Um, So, in nineteen sixty three
Speaker 1: they change the name of the Ground School to the
Speaker 1: School of the America's that's when that that alteration happens,
Speaker 1: and this new name kind of reflected its expanded role
Speaker 1: as a tool in the hands of the US government.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen sixty seven, just a couple of years later,
Speaker 1: that's when che Guevara, who had kind of gotten his
Speaker 1: start as acute like fighting with Castro, launches a guerrilla
Speaker 1: campaign and Southeast Bolivia. Uh, and the School of the
Speaker 1: America's you know, had started kind years before this a
Speaker 1: is left wing sort of militancy, and Bolivia had grown
Speaker 1: they started taking in more and more Bolivian students. Um.
Speaker 1: And so it was US trained soldiers who captured she
Speaker 1: Guavara shortly after his arrival in the country. Um. And
Speaker 1: you know, once he was captured, the U s forces,
Speaker 1: like who were kind of actually embedded there, actually wanted
Speaker 1: him at least a lot most of the stories you'll here,
Speaker 1: like wanted him to just kind of be taken into
Speaker 1: custody because they thought that killing him would turn him
Speaker 1: into a global martyr who had his face on a
Speaker 1: bunch of T shirts and music festivals for decades. Um.
Speaker 1: But the soldiers we'd trained were like, no, let's just
Speaker 1: murder him. So they murder him, and yeah, now he's
Speaker 1: he's on all sorts of T shirts. Um. Yeah, yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: I mean I mean, and you know, I'm not a
Speaker 1: big fan of schet, but it clearly like one of
Speaker 1: the things that's funny to me is that you've got
Speaker 1: some of the guys who were some of the US
Speaker 1: guys who were in the field instructing these troops are
Speaker 1: smart enough to recognize what's going to happen if, say,
Speaker 1: gets executed, But the actual soldiers in charge, these Latin
Speaker 1: American officers had learned so well from the United States
Speaker 1: who was doing nothing in this period but creating martyrs,
Speaker 1: that they like, they can't even listen to the direct
Speaker 1: advice in the field because they've been inculcated in this
Speaker 1: US style of thinking that that that yeah, they just
Speaker 1: murder this guy. It's very funny. So yeah, by opening
Speaker 1: up more slots in the school of the America's to
Speaker 1: students of a different nation, the US was able to
Speaker 1: kind of modulate like which countries got floods of these
Speaker 1: motivated far right um military officers who were willing to
Speaker 1: like take power and execute camp basically act as death
Speaker 1: squads against leftists. So they do that in Bolivia, right,
Speaker 1: which is a big part of like why ship what
Speaker 1: she's doing there doesn't work as the US had already
Speaker 1: flooded Bolivia with these trained and uh motivated um kind
Speaker 1: of right wing idealogue soldiers. UM. And we do that
Speaker 1: in every country that we start to see the left
Speaker 1: wing take offense. So in nineteen in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: that chill lay in left wing starts to organize and
Speaker 1: gain political power um, led by a charismatic socialist named
Speaker 1: Salvador Allende UM and one of one of you know
Speaker 1: for an understanding who a end was he was. He
Speaker 1: was a big backer of better educational policy. He wanted
Speaker 1: better education for like indigenous people, poor people in in
Speaker 1: in Chile. He want a monster pay for this by
Speaker 1: nationalizing a lot of the different resources in Chile because
Speaker 1: like corrupt politicians prior to him had made these very
Speaker 1: much illegal deals with US companies that basically gave them
Speaker 1: all of Chile's resources for for nothing. UM. So he
Speaker 1: was like, well, let's stop that ship. Let's use the
Speaker 1: money from the resources that we have in our country
Speaker 1: to make life better for our people. And a bunch
Speaker 1: of Americans with financial interest in stealing Chile's resources are like, oh,
Speaker 1: that doesn't seem like a good idea. UM. And so
Speaker 1: in the early late fifties early sixties, the School of
Speaker 1: America starts taking in more Chilean soldiers under the guys
Speaker 1: that will train them how to be more effective soldiers.
Speaker 1: And we'll also teach them about how salvadorai Ende and
Speaker 1: everybody like him need be fucking murdered. Um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: this again starts under the Kennedy administration. Um. But you know,
Speaker 1: as as the whole Kennedy thing doesn't work out so well,
Speaker 1: things actually do work out for a while for the
Speaker 1: Chilean Left. Something happen. Yeah, Bernard Montgomery Sanders made a
Speaker 1: couple of key decisions there. So as the as the
Speaker 1: Chilean Left begins to win more victories, they start kind
Speaker 1: of quietly inviting the U S starts quietly inviting more
Speaker 1: and more Chilean soldiers into the School of the America's um,
Speaker 1: and in fact, more Chilean soldiers trained at the School
Speaker 1: of the Americas than soldiers from any other country during
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies. Between nineteen seventy and nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 1: I have a quick question, are they like I know
Speaker 1: that the job like when if you graduate from school,
Speaker 1: you're more luckily to get a job. That's higher up
Speaker 1: in the ranks, which probably means more money. But is
Speaker 1: there other financial incentives from going to the school that
Speaker 1: like allow these people to maintain their power like or
Speaker 1: is there proper strictly come from their training. It gets
Speaker 1: them better positions, which gives them con troll of more
Speaker 1: and more men and higher numbers of their men are
Speaker 1: also trained at these schools, and they don't get money
Speaker 1: directly from that, but the fact that they're in this
Speaker 1: position means that suddenly there's this opportunity to Hey, if
Speaker 1: we take over, right, we have all the guns, we
Speaker 1: have the millet, we are the military. If we take over, well,
Speaker 1: then we can get all that money for ourselves and
Speaker 1: we can personally start to enjoy the benefits of this
Speaker 1: like this, this lucrative American life, Like we can get
Speaker 1: rich like that. That can happen for us if we
Speaker 1: take over the country. If we stop these resources from
Speaker 1: being nationalized and going to all of the people, we
Speaker 1: can just sell them, access to them to the United
Speaker 1: States and get this ship for ourselves. This is happening
Speaker 1: all over Latin America. That that's why all these people
Speaker 1: get fucking rich. A lot of them do, like when
Speaker 1: they when they do their coups is because like they
Speaker 1: take over the country and then they get to sit
Speaker 1: down with all these corporations who had backed the overthrows
Speaker 1: of the governments in these nations and say like, hey,
Speaker 1: we can keep this ship flowing to you, but like
Speaker 1: daddy needs a little cut, and it's cheaper to you
Speaker 1: than giving than the entire nation getting a cut, because
Speaker 1: all you gotta do is help me and my buddies out.
Speaker 1: But yes, there that's the financial incentive. And a lot
Speaker 1: of these guys, by the way, the ones who are
Speaker 1: really smart, wind up buying homes and property and immigrating
Speaker 1: to the United States. There's a bunch of America, Like
Speaker 1: they're a bunch of the School of the America's graduates,
Speaker 1: help overthrow their governments, loot their own countries, and then
Speaker 1: flee to the United States when things start to turn
Speaker 1: against them politically. It happens all the fucking time up
Speaker 1: to the present day. You know, we'll talk about Olivia
Speaker 1: a little bit at the end um of this of
Speaker 1: this series. So when Salvador and finally gets elected president
Speaker 1: of Chile. You know, the whole sixties were pumping soldiers
Speaker 1: who are you know, trained to be these right wing
Speaker 1: idealogues into Chile, and the Chilean left is rising politically,
Speaker 1: and I and finally gets elected president in nineteen seventy. Um,
Speaker 1: and you know, now he's going to be in a
Speaker 1: position to actually nationalize all these resources, help the Chilean
Speaker 1: people and kind of funk over some big US corporations
Speaker 1: that have financial interests in Chile. So as soon as
Speaker 1: this happens, as soon as I gets elected, and in fact,
Speaker 1: a little bit before he actually gets elected, talking the
Speaker 1: White House turns to cooing him out of power. Um,
Speaker 1: Henry Kissinger says, I don't see why we need to
Speaker 1: stand by and watch a country go communist because of
Speaker 1: the irresponsibility of its people. Because it's the seventies, so Nixon, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Nixon's in charge now. Yeah. But again, same basic idea
Speaker 1: under Nixon and JFK. And in fact, you look at
Speaker 1: that quote from Henry Kissinger, we don't why would we
Speaker 1: stand by and let a country go communist because it's
Speaker 1: people are irresponsible. That's the same attitude that Woodrow Wilson professed,
Speaker 1: you know, sixty years ago earlier. Too ignorant to run
Speaker 1: your own country. Yeah, the most bad ship thing. I've
Speaker 1: ever never understand that. Yeah, and of course Nixon expresses
Speaker 1: and again we have this on tape. That's what we know.
Speaker 1: Like Kissinger said that ship um, and Nixon is terrified
Speaker 1: that the nation might become another Cuba, which, like, I
Speaker 1: don't want to whitewash the bad things Castra did, but
Speaker 1: Cuba also has some of the best disaster response in
Speaker 1: the world and more doctors than basically any other country.
Speaker 1: Like it's not exactly the nightmare story of Commune, but whatever. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, every nation, because it's a nation, has bad
Speaker 1: shipped to it too. But like I it's just so
Speaker 1: crazy to me people looking at Cuba as this like
Speaker 1: nightmare when it's like, well you want to look at
Speaker 1: the grand scheme of every nation on the planet, They're
Speaker 1: like not in the worst part of the places in
Speaker 1: the world to be Yeah, I don't know whatever. Um. So,
Speaker 1: under Nixon, the US backs ends far right opposition for
Speaker 1: several years and it engages in a program of vicious
Speaker 1: economic sabotage aimed at collapsing the Chilean economy. Uh and
Speaker 1: thus you know, all support in the new president. So
Speaker 1: the CIA starts reaching out to officers in the military
Speaker 1: who were solid right wing anti communists. Uh. And one
Speaker 1: of the men that they reach out to is a
Speaker 1: general named Augusto Pinochet, um who I guess that name
Speaker 1: is at least familiar to a lot of people. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: there's some debate as to whether or not Pinochet was
Speaker 1: the main architect of the coup that followed, which he
Speaker 1: claimed um or if he was just brought in at
Speaker 1: the last minute as a bunch of other members of
Speaker 1: the coup claim. And again, Pinochet's a liar, so I'm
Speaker 1: not going to say what the actual truth is here.
Speaker 1: But he gets involved at a certain point, and he
Speaker 1: was not a graduate of the School of the America's.
Speaker 1: But basically a hundred percent of the other officers who
Speaker 1: were involved in the plot against Diende, including the guys
Speaker 1: who started the plot, were all graduates of the School
Speaker 1: of the America's. How did Pinochet like just get ahead
Speaker 1: of all of them. He's real smart. He's a very
Speaker 1: very very very cunning political operator, right, Like you just
Speaker 1: have to give it to them sometimes, Like he was
Speaker 1: good at what he did, which was become the dictator
Speaker 1: of Chile. Yeah, it's kind of like, how did Stalin
Speaker 1: wind up in power, because if you look at the
Speaker 1: way things were kind of at the start of the
Speaker 1: Bolshevik Revolution, he probably isn't the guy you would have
Speaker 1: guessed would wind up with all of the power. But
Speaker 1: he does. And it's a very complicated story as to how. Um,
Speaker 1: but it boils down to he's real fucking smart dude
Speaker 1: and hot. Well that is overblown, but he was very intelligent. Um.
Speaker 1: Get a lot of acne scars that get that, get
Speaker 1: photoshops out of skin shame him. I am gonna skin
Speaker 1: shave the dictator of the Soviet Union. Yeah, I'm not.
Speaker 1: I'm not. That's not the thing to and I actually
Speaker 1: they were like small box cars. Um. So yeah. The
Speaker 1: so all of these, basically all of the Chilean officers
Speaker 1: who start this plot to overthrow all End and organize
Speaker 1: the military against them are graduates of the School of
Speaker 1: the Americas, and these men saw Allende, who sought to
Speaker 1: improve public education and ensure Chile's resources were shared for
Speaker 1: the benefit of its people, as a threat. I End
Speaker 1: meant a future without shiny new American malls filled with
Speaker 1: shiny new luxury goods that they could buy with the
Speaker 1: bribes they received from the Western resource extraction companies that
Speaker 1: wanted Chile's wealth um So. In September of nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: a large group of Chilean officers, again basically all of
Speaker 1: whom were graduates of the s o A launch a coup.
Speaker 1: They surround the presidential palace and President i Ende is
Speaker 1: found dead from a self inflicted gunshot wounds. Shortly thereafter,
Speaker 1: there's the bait over whether or not he shot himself,
Speaker 1: whether or not an AID shot him, if the military
Speaker 1: killed him. We don't really need to get into that.
Speaker 1: He's certainly murdered by this coup, Like whether or not
Speaker 1: he pulled the trigger. He dies because there's a coup
Speaker 1: against him. Um yeah. So General Pinochet winds up in
Speaker 1: power and he would hold. He would stay in power
Speaker 1: until nineteen nine. During his reign, Chilean soldiers continued to
Speaker 1: train at the School of the America's. They learned fun
Speaker 1: new counterinsurgency tactics to suppress the left, like throwing suspected
Speaker 1: leftist militants out of helicopters. They learned how to torture,
Speaker 1: and they practice their new skills on tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of their fellow Chileans between twelve hundred and thirty two
Speaker 1: hundred people were executed by Pinochet, more than eighty thousand
Speaker 1: were interned, and again tens of thousands were tortured. Now,
Speaker 1: Pinochet himself didn't, you know, attend the School of the America's,
Speaker 1: but the head of his secret police, Manuel Contreres, did
Speaker 1: graduate from the s o A. Another graduate of the
Speaker 1: s o A was the deputy director of Pinochet's secret police,
Speaker 1: and so also another graduate of the s o A
Speaker 1: was the head of the Via Grimaldi, which was Pinochet's
Speaker 1: notorious torture castle. He had a castle where you tortured people. Uh,
Speaker 1: and the Via Grimaldi was was particularly famous for its
Speaker 1: signature punishment, which was rape. Like that was like one
Speaker 1: of the things that's notorious about this is like male
Speaker 1: or female, you get sent here. One of the things
Speaker 1: that happens, you're gonna get that you're gonna get really
Speaker 1: really raped, um like either by individuals or by individuals
Speaker 1: like using objects. And it's kind of it's to humiliate
Speaker 1: the men. I guess it's to humiliate the women too.
Speaker 1: But like this is like a lot pretty much every
Speaker 1: torture prison that exists rape as a part of it.
Speaker 1: But I'm wanna say it's just their guantanamo, but this
Speaker 1: it's particularly a thing here that is so uh. It's
Speaker 1: wild to me that in the desire for not just things,
Speaker 1: not just the ability to buy, and not just the
Speaker 1: American dream, but like prosperity and future and like growth
Speaker 1: and development, we all, like we as human being is
Speaker 1: always seem to take a step back to the dark age.
Speaker 1: Is like build a castle with giant walls and like
Speaker 1: assault people as a firm of development so that we
Speaker 1: can all be better. Like where is the logic? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I think they had this building and it
Speaker 1: was a good place for a prison, and they you know,
Speaker 1: for whatever reason. One of the things you find studying
Speaker 1: in the School of the Americas is that when people
Speaker 1: are trained in how to punish leftists by the US military,
Speaker 1: they wind up raping their prisoners all the fucking time. Um,
Speaker 1: it's a huge thing for s O A graduate big rapists.
Speaker 1: Graduates of the s O A huge fans of rape
Speaker 1: as a method of violent political control. Are we just
Speaker 1: seeing the same thing? And oh my god, there's a
Speaker 1: country right now where there's a coup happening and they
Speaker 1: just forced a guy to like assault himself with a bottle.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I forget where that was. I think so, yeah,
Speaker 1: that wouldn't have anything to do with the U. S.
Speaker 1: Real because Belarus not um not a lot of ties
Speaker 1: with the Belarusian Belarusian soldiers aren't being trained by the
Speaker 1: US military. Like that's one you can't That's that's kind
Speaker 1: of more rushes into things, but also like just kind
Speaker 1: of bellary. How different are we from like I feel
Speaker 1: like so much of our tactics are just very similar
Speaker 1: in the same results. This this is the thing. And
Speaker 1: again it's the thing when you start talking about like um,
Speaker 1: you know, people will talk about will praise the things
Speaker 1: that let's go back to Cuba, the things that Cuba
Speaker 1: do is right, and someone will bring up like all
Speaker 1: of the horrible human rights things that are real things
Speaker 1: the Cuban government has done some fucked up ship like
Speaker 1: a lot of like LGBT people, you know, what was
Speaker 1: happening during the AIDS crisis. A lot of reasons to
Speaker 1: criticize the Cuban government, But you try to find a
Speaker 1: single thing the Cubans did that the United States isn't
Speaker 1: also doing. In this period, two members of multiple foreign
Speaker 1: nations into its own nation. Um Like, we've got we've
Speaker 1: got no leg to stand on when it comes to
Speaker 1: criticizing these people, just because you personally didn't get brought
Speaker 1: taken into a rape castle and molested to death. Um Like,
Speaker 1: we trained people in how to do that, and then
Speaker 1: we were like, it's good that they're doing this. Let's
Speaker 1: be their friends while they do it, because this is
Speaker 1: what we want them to do because it gets us
Speaker 1: copper like funk everybody. Um So, yeah, the Via Grimaldi
Speaker 1: fucked up place. And I'm gonna quote from a report
Speaker 1: in Amnesty International on it. Quote. They took us to
Speaker 1: an interrogation room where they had a metal bunk bed.
Speaker 1: There was another detainee on the top, and my partner
Speaker 1: was tied to the side. They were interrogating all three
Speaker 1: of us at the same time, taking turns to electrocute
Speaker 1: us one after the other. The interrogation session lasted through
Speaker 1: the night into the next morning. Jesus Christ. Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: in Via Grimaldi, detainees would be electrocuted, water boarded, They
Speaker 1: had their heads forced into buckets of urine and excrement.
Speaker 1: They were suffocated with bags. They were hanged by their
Speaker 1: feets or their their feet or their hands and beaten.
Speaker 1: Women obviously were raped, and for some detainees the punishment
Speaker 1: was death. Um. The dark, cramped cells they were held
Speaker 1: in was just like, yeah, that was that was that
Speaker 1: was that was the world you lived at. Um. One
Speaker 1: detainee later recalled, after an interrogation, you would be thrown
Speaker 1: back in your cell. They would shut the door, and
Speaker 1: then the first thing you would experience as someone coming closer.
Speaker 1: They would hold you, help you lie down, take the
Speaker 1: blindfold off, and put some water to your lips. The
Speaker 1: electric shocks would make you stream with sweat and you'd
Speaker 1: get extremely dehydrated, so very thirsty. And about forty hundred
Speaker 1: people went to this place over the course of the
Speaker 1: time Pinochet was in charge. A lot of them never
Speaker 1: made it out. We'll never know how many died. They're
Speaker 1: huge numbers of people are still missing. UM horrible. Yeah.
Speaker 1: General Carlos Pratt's was one of the few members of
Speaker 1: the Chilean military command who remained loyal to President i Ende.
Speaker 1: For this, he and his wife were murdered by a
Speaker 1: car bomb in nineteen seventy four in Buenos Aires. Before
Speaker 1: his death, he mused on exactly how his former comrades
Speaker 1: in the Chilean military had, in his kind of words,
Speaker 1: confused Chilean national interest with the interest of the United States,
Speaker 1: betraying their own people. Because again, because of these ideas
Speaker 1: they buy into about like American the American way, like
Speaker 1: this American dream they want for themselves, they send thousands
Speaker 1: of their own people off to die. So this this general,
Speaker 1: who is one of like the loyal to the people
Speaker 1: of Chile generals, is kind of before his own murder,
Speaker 1: musing on how this happened. And this quote from him,
Speaker 1: I think is really really telling. As far as the
Speaker 1: internal enemy is concerned, the opinion acquired by those who
Speaker 1: have attended courses at the School of the Americas and
Speaker 1: others organized by the Pentagon has been increasingly prevalent. Many
Speaker 1: of these soldiers have responded to the stereotypes and thoughts
Speaker 1: which were inculcated into them during these courses, and, believing
Speaker 1: they were liberating the country from the internal enemy, have
Speaker 1: committed a crime which can only be explained by their ingenuousness,
Speaker 1: their ignorance, and their political shortsightedness. I used to tell
Speaker 1: the President that we should send our officers to know
Speaker 1: what it was like in the countries of Europe, Africa,
Speaker 1: and Asia, so as not to copy or imitate their
Speaker 1: armed forces, but so that they could widen their horizons
Speaker 1: and understand that the world does not begin to end
Speaker 1: in the Schools of the Pentagon. So this is kind
Speaker 1: of his blame, you know that, this is him specifically
Speaker 1: saying that, like the the the mindset, it's not the
Speaker 1: specific training at the at the School of the America's
Speaker 1: that has as much an impact on why these men
Speaker 1: do the things they do as the mindset the inculcated
Speaker 1: in them. It turns them into It turns them into
Speaker 1: the same kind of right wing, uh extractionary monsters that
Speaker 1: are currently government governing our own country and that have
Speaker 1: for a while determined US public policy. It turns them
Speaker 1: into little fucking Nixon's right. That's that's what's happening here now.
Speaker 1: Another famed School of the America's graduate was Hugo Banzer.
Speaker 1: He graduated from the s o A in nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 1: He went home to Bolivia. He rose through the ranks,
Speaker 1: and he became a general. In nineteen seventy one, he
Speaker 1: seized total power during a violent coup. He immediately closed
Speaker 1: universities and banned all political parties and activity. He jailed
Speaker 1: labor leaders, arrested three thousand political opponents, and had more
Speaker 1: than two hundred of them executed. Under Banzer's rule, the
Speaker 1: basement of the Ministry of the Interior was turned into
Speaker 1: a torture chamber, or more than two thousand prisoners were
Speaker 1: held for his good work. Bands are to spot on
Speaker 1: the Wall of Fame back at the School of the
Speaker 1: America's now shiit, Yeah, it sucks. It's It's one thing
Speaker 1: to go down there like mega school, brainwatch a bunch
Speaker 1: of people, spread them across the entire continent and allow
Speaker 1: them to take over. It is entirely another to be
Speaker 1: like this is a prime example of the students were
Speaker 1: trying to create. This is this guy did it. This
Speaker 1: is what we want you to do. I mean, you
Speaker 1: couldn't be more direct, You couldn't be more so. Now,
Speaker 1: remember how I kind of started talking about the ground
Speaker 1: school and like what it was trying to do to
Speaker 1: the minds of soldiers by talking about these Argentine soldiers
Speaker 1: who were like the first way into that school. Well,
Speaker 1: one of the men in that first wave was a
Speaker 1: young officer named Leopoldo Gaultieri, and he went on to
Speaker 1: again become a general because it's great for your career
Speaker 1: to go to the School of the America's UH, and
Speaker 1: eventually he helped carry out a military coup that took
Speaker 1: power in Argentina. In the late nineteen seventies, he became
Speaker 1: the dictator of Argentina UH and as the dictator School
Speaker 1: of the America's graduate gult Erry presided over more than
Speaker 1: thirty thousand executions other countries alone. We have to stop
Speaker 1: doing this ship right, stop messing with us other countries.
Speaker 1: And I mean honestly, right now, most of you have
Speaker 1: keep that up, like keep this coronavirus energy. Later, like
Speaker 1: protect your citizens. That's nuts. It's fun. A lot of
Speaker 1: stuff's fun. There's a lot I could say about this.
Speaker 1: One of the things that so fucked is that like
Speaker 1: we funk all these countries over and help them established dictatorships,
Speaker 1: and because of how badly it goes, you get this
Speaker 1: attitude that the U s should never do anything else ever,
Speaker 1: so that when the people of these countries rise up
Speaker 1: against their dictators UH, there's basically no nobody, there's no
Speaker 1: you can't you can't make a political argument for helping them. Um,
Speaker 1: because of how bad it works. Every time we like
Speaker 1: it's this, and it just it compounds the heart. It's
Speaker 1: just all fucked. Everything's fucked. Um. I wish a lot
Speaker 1: of different and there's a lot of people. If I
Speaker 1: could unborn people, there's a lot of people that would
Speaker 1: make not have been born. Um. And most of them
Speaker 1: are Americans. So over the decades that it was open,
Speaker 1: the School of the America's is known to have graduated
Speaker 1: at least eleven students who became dictators, which is a lot.
Speaker 1: That's so many dictators for one school. Is there any
Speaker 1: school competing with them for a number of dictor No, No,
Speaker 1: there's not, Like, Um, it's that so many fucking dictators
Speaker 1: from a single school. Yeah. I don't think anywhere has
Speaker 1: that kind of pedigree. Um, not even fucking Harvard. So
Speaker 1: the school. Yeah, many of the school's deadliest graduates weren't
Speaker 1: always the ones who became world leaders. Though. More than anything,
Speaker 1: School of America's men were the willing instruments of dictators,
Speaker 1: the happy killers who made the right wing authoritarian wave
Speaker 1: that crashed over Latin America in the seventies and eighties
Speaker 1: possible el Salvador in general, Juan Zapato was a graduate.
Speaker 1: He planned the assassination of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper,
Speaker 1: and their teenaged honor. The crime of these Jesuits was
Speaker 1: providing humanitarian aid to suffering left wing peasants. We'll talk
Speaker 1: a lot more about Catholics and jesue being murdered in
Speaker 1: the next episode, because they're a big part of in
Speaker 1: Latin America. They get killed all the time by these
Speaker 1: right wing death squads because like, say, what you all
Speaker 1: about the Catholic Church in Latin America. A lot of
Speaker 1: Catholic and Jesuit leaders are like, oh, there's all these
Speaker 1: people starving to death, and like we should help them.
Speaker 1: And those people are also left wing, so you've got
Speaker 1: to murder those priests and stuff. It's this whole thing,
Speaker 1: um all about Oscar Romero a bit, Yeah, um Jesuits, Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's like it's I of the things the Catholic Church
Speaker 1: has done, this is the best of them, is their
Speaker 1: attempts to reduce the horrors happening in Latin America in
Speaker 1: this period of time. Probably so uh Zapeta, against School
Speaker 1: of the America's graduate, was involved in two hundred and
Speaker 1: ten summary execution, sixty four tortures and a hundred and
Speaker 1: ten illegal detentions during his career. US training certainly influenced
Speaker 1: how he did what he did, but it's important to
Speaker 1: remember that a very deliberate campaign of US propaganda influenced
Speaker 1: why he did what he did. Leslie Gill, the author
Speaker 1: of that book The School of the Americas that I
Speaker 1: keep citing, interviewed a number of graduates of the school,
Speaker 1: including a Bolivian colonel who told her about the El
Speaker 1: Salvadoran soldiers he'd met there. And this guy is really interesting.
Speaker 1: We'll hear from him in part two because he's very
Speaker 1: critical of the School of the Americas and what he
Speaker 1: learned there, but he also went like he has this experience,
Speaker 1: he knows all these people who go there, so he's
Speaker 1: able to talk from direct experience about how would influences
Speaker 1: them as human beings and changes the way they think,
Speaker 1: which is part of why this book, The School of
Speaker 1: the Americas by Leslie Gill is such an incredible resource
Speaker 1: that really, if you care about this, you should buy
Speaker 1: and read. It's a very readable and and very detailed
Speaker 1: breakdown of what happened there. Um so I'm going to
Speaker 1: read a quote from this Bolivian colonel. He's talking again
Speaker 1: about the El Salvadoran soldiers he met at the School
Speaker 1: of the Americas. Those guys thought about three things. First,
Speaker 1: they wanted to train themselves well. Second, they wanted to
Speaker 1: buy pickup trucks and drive them back to El Salvador.
Speaker 1: When I finished class at the end of the day
Speaker 1: and went to the library, they would go out and
Speaker 1: look for cheap pickups to buy. And third, they had
Speaker 1: a lot of relatives. And this is during this is
Speaker 1: after nine, this is the period where the School of
Speaker 1: the America's has moved to the United States. And third,
Speaker 1: they had a lot of relatives who they wanted to
Speaker 1: see in the United States, especially Washington, and it was
Speaker 1: not the first time that they've been to the United States.
Speaker 1: They admired the United States and the same way as
Speaker 1: the Bolivians who trained at the School of the America's.
Speaker 1: So like this is um like like that. That's interesting
Speaker 1: to me. These guys when they get trained at the
Speaker 1: School of the Americas in the US, like the first
Speaker 1: thing they want to go do is buy cheap pickups
Speaker 1: and drive them back home. Against this thing, this continuous
Speaker 1: thing from the nineteen forties of being an American, the
Speaker 1: thing that I've been inculcated and is this idea of
Speaker 1: like easy access to luxury goods. That's huge for these guys, um.
Speaker 1: And they have family members who have moved here and
Speaker 1: like become part of the culture. They're they're very much
Speaker 1: in their head in a lot of ways, they're Americans,
Speaker 1: and they're frustrated by the fact that other people in Bolivia,
Speaker 1: most of their countrymen, don't want their country to be
Speaker 1: more like the United States, and the only thing way
Speaker 1: they can sort of it's the same thing you're seeing
Speaker 1: now with all these right wing militias in the United
Speaker 1: States who see folks on the left here who want
Speaker 1: things that are different from them, and the only thing
Speaker 1: they can think to do is kill them, because at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, like that's the kind of
Speaker 1: people that they are, and they have guns. Um, And
Speaker 1: it's the same thing going on in Latin America. It
Speaker 1: happens here, it happens there first, right, it happens there
Speaker 1: first is part of an organized plan by the United States,
Speaker 1: and it happens here sort of by this is just
Speaker 1: the way things are going to go you have all
Speaker 1: these people who believe the same thing, who here in
Speaker 1: the United States to believe the same things as the
Speaker 1: officers were training in Latin America about the American Dream,
Speaker 1: and they also come to believe the same thing about
Speaker 1: communists and Marxists and whatnot, making it impossible for them
Speaker 1: to live that dream by stopping the heedless extraction of
Speaker 1: resources and trying to build a more equitable society. And
Speaker 1: both groups come to the same conclusion, these soldiers in
Speaker 1: Latin America and these militia dudes in the United States,
Speaker 1: which is murder everyone who disagrees with me and doesn't
Speaker 1: want me to have a cool truck. There's like a
Speaker 1: level of absolutism to the American dream, which is like
Speaker 1: this idea of all or nothing, which is to me
Speaker 1: so fraught with like, I don't want to live my
Speaker 1: life on terms of like pass or fail, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, And then how that extends then to
Speaker 1: us versus them, and then pass that to you either
Speaker 1: live our way or die. I'm obsessed with this idea
Speaker 1: of like, especially if when you start to look at
Speaker 1: like the items that they obsess over, like not only
Speaker 1: is there like a very strict uniform code, Like if
Speaker 1: you've ever been in a protest with a ship tone
Speaker 1: of undercover cops, you can pick them out so fast
Speaker 1: they can't break that like uniform. Look. But then to
Speaker 1: this idea of like trucks, like trucks being a symbol
Speaker 1: not just of masculinity but of like freedom at the
Speaker 1: expensive others? Is that the way you say that, like
Speaker 1: this idea of like it's what is it about a
Speaker 1: pickup truck that makes you feel so much more? Is
Speaker 1: it the height? Is it the fact that you can
Speaker 1: haul a lot of things. I don't understand boys in
Speaker 1: their toys. I mean I I just bought I. I
Speaker 1: have a large off roading vehicle and they're fun. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't you know, uh, shoot babies to death and light
Speaker 1: a church on fire to have access to an off
Speaker 1: roading vehicle. But they do have a power to them. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Like, there's a lot there's a lot
Speaker 1: to be said about what trucks mean within the context
Speaker 1: of the American dream and within sort of the American
Speaker 1: willingness to do violence both to the world, like to
Speaker 1: the environment and to individuals around them. Like, there's actually
Speaker 1: a lot I think that should be ethnographically studied about
Speaker 1: how Americans view trucks. UM, but that is too much
Speaker 1: of a topic for this We're near the end of
Speaker 1: our episode and kind of before we close out, and
Speaker 1: in part two, we're gonna talk a lot more about
Speaker 1: you know, we're gonna talk about the Almosote massacre. We're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about Oscar Romero. We're gonna talk about horrible
Speaker 1: things that happened in Guatemala, and we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: kind of what happens in the United States when the
Speaker 1: School of the America's moves there and how it operates
Speaker 1: when it leaves Latin America, and and it's it's it's
Speaker 1: operated off of Columbus, Ohio after n UM, so like Columboids.
Speaker 1: That's what they call people from Columbus. Uh, we're talking
Speaker 1: about your backyard next episode. Hey, bastard fans, best start
Speaker 1: a renos whatever we call you. Just jumping in here
Speaker 1: to let you know that I made a mistake. Uh,
Speaker 1: I said Columbus, Ohio. There, it's actually Columbus, Georgia. Um.
Speaker 1: The School of the Americas in the United States was
Speaker 1: outside of Fort Bidding. I do apologize for the error.
Speaker 1: I've never actually made a mistake before in my entire life,
Speaker 1: so I you know, we we we regret uh this
Speaker 1: being my first one. I want to cite a passage
Speaker 1: from an article on the School of America's that I
Speaker 1: found in the Thomas Jefferson Law Review that just kind
Speaker 1: of runs through a horrific laundry list of the different
Speaker 1: things graduates of the s o A did to give
Speaker 1: you an understanding of just how widespread the destruction from
Speaker 1: this school is. It's almost impossible to keep in your head.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna read that quote now. Pedro Pimentel Rios,
Speaker 1: who an El Salvadoran soldier trained in the s o A,
Speaker 1: participated in the Dos Aires massacre, which resulted in the
Speaker 1: killing of two hundred and one people. Soldiers systematically murdered men,
Speaker 1: women and children, bludgeoned villagers with a sledgehammer, threw them
Speaker 1: down a well, and raped women and girls. Haitian colonel
Speaker 1: Frank Romain directed the Saint Jean Bosco massacre. As Father
Speaker 1: Jean bertrand Aristide was saying mass armed men broke into
Speaker 1: the church, killing twelve parishioners and wounding at least twenty seven.
Speaker 1: They then doused the church with gasoline and set it
Speaker 1: on fire. Honduran general Romero Veasquez led the two thousand
Speaker 1: nine military coup and Honduras that overthrew a democratically elected government.
Speaker 1: Beasquez is the third sa A graduate to overthrow governments
Speaker 1: in Honduras Nicaragua. During the Samosa dictatorship, more than four
Speaker 1: thousand National Guard troops graduated from the the s o A.
Speaker 1: Many of them became, contrast, responsible for the deaths of
Speaker 1: thousands of Nicaraguan peasants. Between nineteen forty seven and nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine, more soldiers from Nicaragua attended the school than
Speaker 1: from any other country Peru. Telmo Hurtado directed the massacre
Speaker 1: of sixty nine men, women and children and Echo Marca.
Speaker 1: After separating the women and children from the men, his
Speaker 1: unit raped them, ordered them into buildings, and then set
Speaker 1: them on fire, where they burned alive. That's a tiny
Speaker 1: it's five, maybe, of the of the crimes committed by
Speaker 1: s o A graduates. Um, that's just one pair. I
Speaker 1: could have picked a bunch of different ones. Just summarizing
Speaker 1: the fucking nightmares that come out of this place. And
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about a massacre that makes all
Speaker 1: of those look tiny tomorrow the almazote mascor we're talking
Speaker 1: about it on Thursday. I should say, um, not cool
Speaker 1: stuff hard hard, It's hard to like process right right? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean I think like I can won't you to
Speaker 1: say something? And I'm like, oh, but no, that's happening
Speaker 1: right now, Like how could you hate your fellow countrymen
Speaker 1: so much that you burned them on non we we've
Speaker 1: been stopping you from getting a truck. How dare you
Speaker 1: stop the progress of all of us? I must progress
Speaker 1: faster or even just the idea of like it's hard
Speaker 1: for me to Okay, So I have two thoughts. One
Speaker 1: is I've been so poor. I've almost been homeless before.
Speaker 1: I understand looking at a life of ease and coveting
Speaker 1: it and and being like that temptation of like what
Speaker 1: would you like and really having to face the question
Speaker 1: of like what would I do in order to have
Speaker 1: access to those things? Right? Like it's I have like
Speaker 1: some level of sympathy for the boys that went into
Speaker 1: this school and we're inundated with opportunity, Like that's the
Speaker 1: opportunity is a hell of a drug, Like, especially when
Speaker 1: it's fed to you in such a sense of like,
Speaker 1: if you work hard, it's going to be there for you.
Speaker 1: All you have to do. It's all within you, right,
Speaker 1: Like that that part of the American dream of like
Speaker 1: it's already in there, you just have to tap into
Speaker 1: it hard enough. Is what I think drive some people
Speaker 1: right over the line, um, because you don't want to
Speaker 1: be a thing that stops yourself. That should be the
Speaker 1: easiest hurdle to overcome. And then I'm thinking about like
Speaker 1: these men who returned to home, and like, there must
Speaker 1: be such a level of like self hate to look
Speaker 1: at people that look like you or have shared experiences
Speaker 1: as you and then not just violently rape them, but
Speaker 1: also burn them alive, women and children, and like it's just, yeah,
Speaker 1: I commend you on your ability to continue to find
Speaker 1: bastards after all these people. I truly wouldn't be like
Speaker 1: I hate you for what you've done. I can't understand it.
Speaker 1: And I'm mystified, Um, at the level of hate and
Speaker 1: destruction we as human beings are able to cause. It's
Speaker 1: just it's never ending. Yeah, it's it's it's amazing, and
Speaker 1: it is one of those things like I'm not going
Speaker 1: to pretend I don't see why part of what these
Speaker 1: people find appealing because like I am, I am someone
Speaker 1: who I don't think I'm I think as an adult,
Speaker 1: i've ever been taken in by the American dream as
Speaker 1: a an ideal, but I have been taken in by
Speaker 1: like I grew up poor and or at least poor
Speaker 1: by I don't know, kind of white people standards, right,
Speaker 1: Like we weren't we weren't in the streets, but with
Speaker 1: my parents were worried about like being bankrupt and stuff,
Speaker 1: and like it was it was really like economic anxiety
Speaker 1: is a huge part of my youth and it has
Speaker 1: kind of it did propel me to focus on making money, right,
Speaker 1: Like I I that has always been a huge thing
Speaker 1: for me is being able to like live comfortably on
Speaker 1: my own without any help from anybody. And that's not
Speaker 1: a healthy part of my personality. Like it's it's not
Speaker 1: a good thing that I that I did. It's a
Speaker 1: thing that I did because of the way in which
Speaker 1: I grew up in sort of an inability. I had
Speaker 1: to kind of um like this constant fear that I
Speaker 1: had to say before I could accomplish anything else, Like
Speaker 1: I had to not be scared about finances before I
Speaker 1: could do other things because of the it's not a
Speaker 1: good thing, right, it's it's not a it's not a
Speaker 1: good thing, but it's a I get how powerful the
Speaker 1: thing is. I'm looking forward to hearing more about the
Speaker 1: gentleman you were describing who went to the school but
Speaker 1: didn't come out brainwashed. Yeah. It's a really interesting and guy, Yeah,
Speaker 1: how did you? How were you like one of I
Speaker 1: imagine very few people who were like no, this is
Speaker 1: insane happening around us. There's some people who just kind
Speaker 1: of have that ability, even within you know, training regiments
Speaker 1: that are designed to I have a friend who was
Speaker 1: um who was in you know we're talking about the
Speaker 1: Marines and Marines, and like one of the things he'll
Speaker 1: say about basic training is that like he kind of
Speaker 1: immediately realized, like, oh, this is a game, and I
Speaker 1: have to pretend to agree with and believe and react
Speaker 1: in certain ways in order to succeed at it and
Speaker 1: and and get through this part that like I know
Speaker 1: what they're trying to do and how they're trying to
Speaker 1: alter me, and I have to pretend like it's having
Speaker 1: this effect so that I can get through this part
Speaker 1: and and do the stuff I guess that I want
Speaker 1: to do right like some some people just have. And
Speaker 1: you get the feeling from this guy that he kind
Speaker 1: of like goes to this school and he doesn't agree
Speaker 1: with a lot of what's happening and he but he's
Speaker 1: able to see what's happening to other people there. And
Speaker 1: it's good you know that he went and did that
Speaker 1: and brought back this experience so we're able to understand
Speaker 1: it on a human level. Right, we need witnesses. Yes,
Speaker 1: not bad that this guy brought that experience to us. Yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: this is exactly what James Baldwin talks about, is being
Speaker 1: a witness. It's a it's a legitimate role. Some people
Speaker 1: frown upon it because you're literally like I think some
Speaker 1: people view a witness is like just taking up space
Speaker 1: and documenting the story. But by not participating and by
Speaker 1: not stopping, you can better explain how things happened. And
Speaker 1: it's it's just as important as our quote unquote heroes
Speaker 1: who are are changing the world for the better. Like
Speaker 1: it's it's where would we be without understanding how we
Speaker 1: got here in the first place? Yeah, I mean, and
Speaker 1: it is one of those things like one of the critiques.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, like like Leslie Gill and her book,
Speaker 1: like they didn't stop anything. You know, the School of
Speaker 1: the America's was kind of already passed its period of
Speaker 1: real influence, of major influence by the time, you know,
Speaker 1: her book came out. But it's important that it be
Speaker 1: documented that we understand this stuff because it if if
Speaker 1: the information is allowed to get out to the people
Speaker 1: it needs to, it can act in building our cultural
Speaker 1: immunity to some of this stuff. And we have to
Speaker 1: have we have to let it do that. We have to.
Speaker 1: We can't we can't not learn these lessons, which is
Speaker 1: why I think and you get the feeling one of
Speaker 1: the this is really The School of the Americas is
Speaker 1: such an amazing book to me because of the depth
Speaker 1: Leslie gil goes into the number she talks to instructors
Speaker 1: at the school and in from different errors, She talks
Speaker 1: to people who went there, She talks to their victims,
Speaker 1: like she she is really you can see motivated and
Speaker 1: she is She's a person who had spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time living in and around and like writing about
Speaker 1: Latin America and Latin American issue. She's a very very
Speaker 1: um competent um, you know, ethnographer, I guess you'd say, um,
Speaker 1: but you get this feeling that it was there was
Speaker 1: this kind of she understood how important it was for
Speaker 1: the story of what this place did to people, how
Speaker 1: it succeeded in its goal, in the consequences, how crucial
Speaker 1: that is to get out to people, because I mean,
Speaker 1: for one thing, it's happening in Oregon right now, like
Speaker 1: we're seeing School of the America's ship starting just the
Speaker 1: earliest stages, thankfully not the mass grave stages, but the
Speaker 1: things that could lead to that if people aren't careful,
Speaker 1: like it's it's happening here, So we should understand what
Speaker 1: happened over there. Um that we did to these people,
Speaker 1: you know that that we did in a lot of cases,
Speaker 1: and and a lot of them did too, like you know,
Speaker 1: not too. I don't want to, like you don't want to.
Speaker 1: One of the problems sometimes with criticizing like the US
Speaker 1: influence on places like this is like then you you
Speaker 1: you don't criticize the fact that there's a lot of
Speaker 1: you know, folks who live in those countries and come
Speaker 1: from those countries who did a lot of fund up
Speaker 1: ship too. But like we what happened over there, the
Speaker 1: violence they committed in our name was part of a
Speaker 1: plan that US leaders had and executed, and that's important
Speaker 1: to know. So Joe out. We'll talk more later. Let's
Speaker 1: start two. Is it coming? I look forward to it.
Speaker 1: You want to plug anything? Uh, if you're intrigued by
Speaker 1: any of the comments I made about black representation in
Speaker 1: America and the horror story that that is. I am
Speaker 1: recapping Lovecraft Country for the A V Club right now.
Speaker 1: Uh is a doozy. There is a lot happening, especially
Speaker 1: if I don't know when this will be released. But
Speaker 1: if y'all have seen episode five, then you know what
Speaker 1: goes down. Um, so yeah, check that out. Otherwise, you
Speaker 1: can find me all over the internet at Joel Monique.
Speaker 1: That's j O E L L E M O N
Speaker 1: I q U E. Uh. Yeah, come chat with me
Speaker 1: about the crazy bastards. You muys talk about always fascinated
Speaker 1: by the show, and uh, you can't find me at
Speaker 1: those same places online because I am not Joel Monique.
Speaker 1: So that's the end of You can follow Robert on
Speaker 1: Twitter and I right, okay, you can follow us on Twitter.
Speaker 1: Scarab bastards thought we have a t public store. Uh,
Speaker 1: don't do it. I don't know. I was trying to
Speaker 1: explain to them where they couldn't find me because I
Speaker 1: thought that would be useful to people. Yeah, but they
Speaker 1: contact you. Post is important, all right, Well, thank you
Speaker 1: everybody Twitter. Uh, don't be in a fire, um,