Speaker 1: What burning down my entire West Coast. I'm Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: This is Behind the Bastards, the only podcast recorded in
Speaker 1: the midst of a haze of disaster smoke, uh and
Speaker 1: human misery. Um, talking about something that also generated a
Speaker 1: lot of horrible smoke and human misery, The School of
Speaker 1: the Americas. This is part two of our special series
Speaker 1: on the US just just fucking around in Latin America
Speaker 1: getting a lot of people killed. And my guest as
Speaker 1: all well as within part one is Joel Monique. Joel,
Speaker 1: you are a podcast producer. Uh and uh you are
Speaker 1: also the Are you the president? I'm not of of myself. Yes, okay,
Speaker 1: you're there, but not of the United States? No, not,
Speaker 1: thank god? No, okay, okay, I would. This is good
Speaker 1: to know because I was going to actually be very
Speaker 1: angry at you about the wildfire response, but apparently you
Speaker 1: had nothing to do with that. Um, so I guess, I'll,
Speaker 1: I guess, I guess we're cool. Um. Sorry, I forgot
Speaker 1: who the president was briefly, and since you were on
Speaker 1: my computer culture critic, that's a kind of president in
Speaker 1: a way, aren't we all the president of critiquing culture? Yes,
Speaker 1: wasn't that what Gamergate was about basically was it I
Speaker 1: don't know about a lot of things. So which happened? Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: uh so Joel, how are you? We're doing this normally
Speaker 1: we do both parts of a two part episode in
Speaker 1: the same day. We took a little breather, took a
Speaker 1: little breather, and then the entire country caught on fire. Yes,
Speaker 1: so I don't know, how are you? How are you
Speaker 1: holding up? I'm not yet on fire and counting my
Speaker 1: blessings and oh god, I'm actually really glad we took
Speaker 1: I'm trying to encourage more people to like allow themselves
Speaker 1: space to breathe in a very serious way, Like I
Speaker 1: feel like before this we had all of this culture
Speaker 1: surrounding like self care and also but like, guys, seriously,
Speaker 1: there was ever a time to like take a nap
Speaker 1: every once in a while and to like say no,
Speaker 1: you can't do that. Thing, which is something I'm really
Speaker 1: trying to work on now is absolutely it's so chaotic.
Speaker 1: This is easily the most chaos most of us have
Speaker 1: ever experienced in our lives. Ever. Um, you can you
Speaker 1: can rest at times now? All the time you have
Speaker 1: we have, say vigilant there's a lot to take care of,
Speaker 1: but my God, please like just allow yourself in space.
Speaker 1: So with that, I am not crying today yet, so
Speaker 1: I feel good to keep going, keep learning, hopefully make
Speaker 1: some pause to change in the near future. Well that's
Speaker 1: a good way to look at things. Um, let's let's
Speaker 1: pivot directly from that to talking about unbelievable war crimes
Speaker 1: committed on behalf of us interests in parts of the
Speaker 1: world that are very close to our country and and
Speaker 1: we're crying again. Yeah, let's let's do it behind the
Speaker 1: bastards does best and let everybody know that the world's
Speaker 1: more funcked up than they thought it was. It is
Speaker 1: kind of comforting, you know. I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people who I think there are a lot of people
Speaker 1: who have lived pretty comfortable existences because we've we've we've
Speaker 1: all sort of come up and our had our childhoods
Speaker 1: in this period of relative calm that's unusual in human
Speaker 1: history and also was very geographically isolated. The calm was localized, right, Um,
Speaker 1: And hearing stories like this makes you understand that like
Speaker 1: this chaos and like uncertainty and fear that we're feeling
Speaker 1: this like this, like gnawing terror that like death squads
Speaker 1: might start coming in the night, that like the state
Speaker 1: might send security forces out to murder you. This like
Speaker 1: thing that's new to most Americans. Uh is what we've
Speaker 1: been doing to a bunch of people for decades. And uh,
Speaker 1: let's let's yeah, let's so that's important to understand. So yes, yes,
Speaker 1: there's a reason we have been deserved and disrupted. And
Speaker 1: I feel like, at the very least, hopefully now we
Speaker 1: can have better empathy and you're like thoughtful action. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we can understand the patterns that we're about to
Speaker 1: see replicated in our own country and attempt to disrupt them. Perhaps.
Speaker 1: So in December of nineteen eight one, dozens of El
Speaker 1: Salvador and graduates of the School of the America's converged
Speaker 1: on El Mazotte, a tiny village in the northern hills
Speaker 1: of the Morazon Province. Now Morizon was a stronghold of
Speaker 1: for the Feri Bundo Martine National Liberation Front or f
Speaker 1: l m N, a leftist militant group resisting El Salvador's
Speaker 1: far right government, which was of course enthusiastically backed by
Speaker 1: the Reagan administration. Now, the US had been admitting increasing
Speaker 1: numbers of El Salvadoran soldiers into the School of the
Speaker 1: Americas for years as this conflict heat it up, so
Speaker 1: like leftist militants start gaining you know, power and sort
Speaker 1: of the hill areas and like fighting the government, and
Speaker 1: we start just just taking more and more of these
Speaker 1: guys into the s o A, which is generally the strategy.
Speaker 1: You see the government sees our government sees left wing
Speaker 1: activism sort of picking up in a country, and they
Speaker 1: start propagandizing and brainwashing more of that nation's soldiers in
Speaker 1: the School of the Americas. So once Reagan took office,
Speaker 1: he started sending in Special Forces advisers to help out
Speaker 1: in that neighborly way that only special Forces can. Elmazote
Speaker 1: was one of several small villages suspective hosting rebel fighters,
Speaker 1: acting as their u S trainers had taught them. The
Speaker 1: soldiers of Al Salvador's Elite Ulcado Battalion started their operations
Speaker 1: by pounding the outlying portions of several towns flat with
Speaker 1: a multi hour artillery barrage. Then grant, yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: what you do. Then ground troops moved in on December tenth,
Speaker 1: securing Almazote and ordering all residents out into the town square.
Speaker 1: By the way, as a pro tip, since this might
Speaker 1: be useful for everybody, if you find yourself in the
Speaker 1: middle of like a genocide or a government crackdown that
Speaker 1: involves death squads, and somebody tells you to gather in
Speaker 1: the town square, don't gather in the town square. It
Speaker 1: never ends. Well, that's like the top place for massacring
Speaker 1: people is the town square. Avoid the town square if
Speaker 1: things go real bad in your country. So anyway, the
Speaker 1: US trained soldiers of that Lakato battalion separated the men
Speaker 1: in Almazote from the women, which is, you know, another
Speaker 1: bad sign. They also separated out all of the children
Speaker 1: and forced them into a small building next to the
Speaker 1: village church. The soldiers spent the rest of the day
Speaker 1: executing every single person in Almazote. They killed the children last,
Speaker 1: perhaps because they needed to psych themselves up for such
Speaker 1: a gruesome task. Rather than look at what they were
Speaker 1: doing and look into the eyes of these little kids,
Speaker 1: the soldiers just fired into the building where the town's
Speaker 1: children were held. Then they set it on fire before
Speaker 1: they left. Years later, that building was excavated, revealing the
Speaker 1: remains of at least a hundred and forty three victims inside.
Speaker 1: The average age was six. After wiping Christ, Jesus Christ,
Speaker 1: what the how? Wow? Yeah, children, it's amazing. And this
Speaker 1: is specifically the battalion of the El Salvadoran Army that
Speaker 1: was that is trained and armed by the United States.
Speaker 1: Um like these guys were all trained by active due
Speaker 1: to US soldiers in how to do this like they
Speaker 1: were not. This isn't just some foreign country where people
Speaker 1: did a horrible thing because of some dictator. These are
Speaker 1: the guys we trained, using that training to, among other things,
Speaker 1: shoot a hundred and forty three children to death in
Speaker 1: a building outside of a Catholic church. So after wiping
Speaker 1: almostote off the map, the men of the Applicatto Battalion
Speaker 1: and their US advisors headed to the nearby town of
Speaker 1: Laoya to repeat the process. We know what happened thanks
Speaker 1: to the stories of a handful of lucky survivors. One
Speaker 1: of them, Rosario Lopez, was just fast enough to get
Speaker 1: out of town with her husband and three children. Ario
Speaker 1: hit up on a hill while twenty four of her
Speaker 1: family members were massacred, including her parents, two sisters, seventeen
Speaker 1: nieces and nephews. So yeah, her husband Jose later recalled
Speaker 1: to a journalist. I heard the commotion the prayers from
Speaker 1: where I was hiding up in the mountain. It was
Speaker 1: shooting at a bunch of kids, and some of them
Speaker 1: cried and others had stopped. Now, Jose Rosario and their
Speaker 1: children had on that mountain for five days until Jose
Speaker 1: finally felt brave enough to descend and check for survivors.
Speaker 1: The first body he found was one of his wife's sisters.
Speaker 1: She had clearly been raped before being executed. Further in,
Speaker 1: he saw the bodies of the town's children stacked in
Speaker 1: a pile, their faces too damaged by fire and decay
Speaker 1: for him to recognize. He and a few other days
Speaker 1: survivors did what they could to bury their bones. Altogether,
Speaker 1: the brave men of the at Licatto Battalion killed at
Speaker 1: least nine hundred and seventy eight people in just a
Speaker 1: couple of days. Nearly half of their victims were under
Speaker 1: the age of twelve. Years later, one survivor would report
Speaker 1: hearing an officer threatened to murder one soldier who expressed
Speaker 1: an unwillingness to shoot children. Now, as far as we know,
Speaker 1: I don't believe any US troops were present during the
Speaker 1: Elmazote massacre, but the killing was done by soldiers who
Speaker 1: had again been trained by US Special Forces uh and
Speaker 1: it was under the command of officers who'd all graduated
Speaker 1: from the School of the America's Those little boys and
Speaker 1: girls were also gunned down by US made M sixteen
Speaker 1: assault rifles, which had been given to El Salvador as
Speaker 1: part of the one million dollars a day in military
Speaker 1: aid that the Reagan administration sent into the country. When
Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan took office, Latin America was in the grip
Speaker 1: of yet another wave of revolutions. The Sandinistas had overthrown
Speaker 1: the dictator of Nicaragua in nineteen seventy nine, and by
Speaker 1: the time Ronnie was sworn in on a bible made
Speaker 1: of jelly beans, left wing guerrilla movements in Guatemala and
Speaker 1: El Salvador looked like they might be on the verge
Speaker 1: of victory. Two. And I'm gonna quote here from an
Speaker 1: article in the Intercept in retrospect, it's clear that these
Speaker 1: were inevitable revolutions. The title of one history of the period,
Speaker 1: tiny cruel white oligarchs had ruled over indigenous peasants across
Speaker 1: the region for hundreds of years, and sooner or later
Speaker 1: the dam was going to break. But to the Reaganites,
Speaker 1: this was all the work of the international communist conspiracy
Speaker 1: headquartered in Moscow and had to be crushed by any
Speaker 1: means necessary. Now, the article I just quoted from the
Speaker 1: intercept was written by John Schwarz, a journalist I quite
Speaker 1: respect he wrote that article this very year in partial
Speaker 1: response to some new developments in the decades old quest
Speaker 1: to hold some of the perpetrators of elma Zotte accountable
Speaker 1: for their crimes. But John's greater purpose was to highlight
Speaker 1: how similar many of the tactics the Reagan administration used
Speaker 1: to cover up its complicity and foreign massacres are two
Speaker 1: tactics being used right now by the Trump administration. And
Speaker 1: considering the number of armed Trump supporters talking about mass
Speaker 1: murdering their political foes, like within five minutes of my house, uh,
Speaker 1: you can see why it's relevant. Uh So this is
Speaker 1: really important to talk about for more reasons than just
Speaker 1: understanding a historic crime. This has bearing on what's going
Speaker 1: to happen to a lot of people listening to this
Speaker 1: podcast in the future. If things go as bad as
Speaker 1: they could go, so Elmazotte was never supposed to become
Speaker 1: public knowledge the Reagan administration when this happened. The An
Speaker 1: administration was in the process of trying to sell Congress
Speaker 1: on a partnership with the Salvadoran government, and one requirement
Speaker 1: that Congress had put forward was that the President would
Speaker 1: have to certify by January twenty nine, nine two, that
Speaker 1: El Salvador was quote making a concerted and significant effort
Speaker 1: to comply with internationally recognized human rights. Now, if he couldn't,
Speaker 1: all u s A del Salvador a million dollars a
Speaker 1: day and guns and other baby killing tools would be
Speaker 1: cut off. So there were high stakes here. Now. The
Speaker 1: Reagan administration was very unhappy when they started hearing the
Speaker 1: first reports from Almazote, not because of the thousand people
Speaker 1: who had been killed, but because this was bad for
Speaker 1: them politically. It was going to be providing yeah feed
Speaker 1: for the Democrats. So the first move that they took
Speaker 1: was to write off the rumors of the massacre as
Speaker 1: a trick by left wing guerrillas. But then on January
Speaker 1: nine two, two days before congress is deadline, the New
Speaker 1: York Times in the Washington Post both published front page
Speaker 1: stories about the massacre. Writing in the intercept, John de
Speaker 1: tales what happened next. Thomas Enders, a career diplomat who
Speaker 1: at the time was Assistant Secretary of State for inter
Speaker 1: American Affairs, later said that Elmazotte, if true, might have
Speaker 1: destroyed the entire effort in El Salvador. What to do?
Speaker 1: The answer had been articulated by Richard Nixon years earlier,
Speaker 1: as was born out by Nixon's direct experience during Watergate,
Speaker 1: few things are more dangerous to conservative priorities than good journalism. Therefore,
Speaker 1: as a top Nixon aid later recalled, Nixon believed that
Speaker 1: it was necessary to fight the press through the nutcutters,
Speaker 1: as the president called them, forcing our own news make
Speaker 1: a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition. That's what Nixon said,
Speaker 1: Fight the president through the nutcutters, forcing our own news,
Speaker 1: make a brutal attack on the opposition. So the pushback
Speaker 1: began with congressional testimony by Enders. There's no reason to
Speaker 1: confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians, he told a
Speaker 1: House subcommittee. What about the number of victims? Bonner's article
Speaker 1: had mentioned a list of seven hundred and thirty three
Speaker 1: compiled by villagers as well as Italian of nine twenty
Speaker 1: six from a human rights organization, Elliot Abrams, whod just
Speaker 1: taken off as a six assistant set Terry of State
Speaker 1: for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, and formed the Senate
Speaker 1: that the numbers, first of all, were not credible. Our
Speaker 1: information was that there were only three people in the canton.
Speaker 1: This was clear conscious deceit on part of Abram's. Both
Speaker 1: the Times and Post articles had written that the massacre
Speaker 1: had taken place in several locations. Then came the assault
Speaker 1: from the administration's outside allies. On February tenth, The Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal ran a lengthy editorial titled the Media's War.
Speaker 1: Americans were badly confused about the situation in El Salvador
Speaker 1: thanks to the US press. Almazote was not a massacre,
Speaker 1: the journal wrote, but a quote unquote massacre. What what
Speaker 1: unquote massacre? Yeah? Yeah. On the one hand, the number
Speaker 1: of dead had been obviously exaggerated, and on the other
Speaker 1: maybe the killing had been carried out by rebels dressed
Speaker 1: in government uniforms. Bonner was credulous, a reporter out on
Speaker 1: a limb and like reporters in Vietnam a sucker for
Speaker 1: communist sources. One of the editorials authors appeared on PBS
Speaker 1: to proclaim that obviously Ray Bonner has a political orientation,
Speaker 1: so there's a lot that's that that's going on here. Um,
Speaker 1: but it's all very familiar. So first of all, what
Speaker 1: you see is Abram's getting up there and throwing out
Speaker 1: a bunch of lies at once. Uh. Number one, like
Speaker 1: throwing out a sound by like Elzote is not a massacre.
Speaker 1: It's a quote unquote massacre. Uh. The number of dead
Speaker 1: have been exaggerated. Oh and maybe they were also killed
Speaker 1: by rebels dressed as soldiers. There's no evidence for any
Speaker 1: of this. He's just throwing out a bunch of claims
Speaker 1: that then have to be dealt with and like responded
Speaker 1: to by the Times and by the Washington Post. And
Speaker 1: it helps to drum up this idea that there's debate
Speaker 1: over whether or not anybody was killed, and that allows
Speaker 1: Americans to kind of shut their ears to it. And
Speaker 1: it works. This is the same thing the Trump administration
Speaker 1: does now. It always works. It works extremely well. Um.
Speaker 1: And of course he starts to attack. This is one
Speaker 1: of the reasons why I'm less concerned these days about
Speaker 1: pretending to not have a bias as a reporter, because
Speaker 1: Bonner here is doing as much as he possibly can.
Speaker 1: He's he's a very good traditional reporter doing very good
Speaker 1: tradition reporting, and he gets called a communist basically, because
Speaker 1: that's what they do. It doesn't matter what you say,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter how biased you are or aren't, They're
Speaker 1: going to call you a communist if you're reporting on
Speaker 1: things that are bad to them. So yeah, Accuracy in Media,
Speaker 1: which was a conservative media criticism organization, went further, declaring
Speaker 1: Bonner was raging a propaganda war favoring the Marxist guerrillas
Speaker 1: in El Salvador Um. So yeah, it worked. Bonner was
Speaker 1: pulled out of Central America by the Times and sent
Speaker 1: back to New York for more training in journalism. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Times did what they do. It's the It's the
Speaker 1: New York Times, right. They're always going to they're always
Speaker 1: going to publish that first good story, and they're always
Speaker 1: going to back away and run a bunch of op
Speaker 1: eds with wing nuts claiming that that story was bullshit
Speaker 1: because they're scared of being seen as taking a stance
Speaker 1: on anything. That's how it's gonna be. Yeah, that's how
Speaker 1: it That's how it was in the thirties too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, that's just the way it goes at all
Speaker 1: papers being reliant on advertising dollars. It's really I mean,
Speaker 1: we've already seen it destroy like most like solid sources
Speaker 1: of internet journalism, and the papers have been fighting it
Speaker 1: for so long. Like at the local level particularly, we've
Speaker 1: seen a lot of like good local journalism. But this
Speaker 1: idea that companies that are like oh god, to keep
Speaker 1: selling and being willing to print just the most ridiculous
Speaker 1: ship or good ship and then like retracting it and
Speaker 1: disrespecting their reporters who they must have a relationship with,
Speaker 1: they must know like this person's ability and their skills.
Speaker 1: Like it's such a pr move and so not about
Speaker 1: like the core ethics of journalism. It's astounding. It's astounding
Speaker 1: that it's allowed to permeate like this. It's not great,
Speaker 1: not very good. So yeah, the disinformation campaign worked, at
Speaker 1: least in the immediate term. Uh yeah. Bonder gets pulled out,
Speaker 1: sent back to New York for training, and other reporters
Speaker 1: learned from his example. It was dangerous to report on
Speaker 1: any story that might be seen as sympathetic to left
Speaker 1: wing militants in Latin America. Meanwhile, the right wing militants
Speaker 1: who controlled El Salvador continued to receive US aid. Their
Speaker 1: soldiers continued to attend the School of the America's in
Speaker 1: order to learn how to be the best desk ones
Speaker 1: they could be. By the time the violence was all over,
Speaker 1: they'd killed more than seventy five thousands El Salvadorans, the
Speaker 1: per capita equivalent of five million Americans, So this is
Speaker 1: a huge chunk of the country. The government was responsible
Speaker 1: for eighty five percent of these deaths. Now, the good
Speaker 1: news is that at present a number of culprits have
Speaker 1: finally been stripped of their immunity. There was a law
Speaker 1: for a while that basically was trying to make peace
Speaker 1: between the two sides and said that like, nobody gets
Speaker 1: punished for their war crimes. But that got partly at
Speaker 1: least reversed. And so some of these guys are in
Speaker 1: the process and these these these court cases are going
Speaker 1: on right now, right and there's even there's been requests made.
Speaker 1: The Obama administration released some evidence uh and declassified some
Speaker 1: files to allow the court case is to proceed. They
Speaker 1: made request of the Trump administration that obviously haven't been
Speaker 1: um listened to, in part because uh, the U S mility.
Speaker 1: Like while some of the El Salvadoran military leaders who
Speaker 1: helped make Elmazote happen have been punished, the Americans who
Speaker 1: were responsible never did. In fact, Elliot Abrams went on
Speaker 1: to become part of George W. Bush's National Security Council.
Speaker 1: In today he's Trump's Special Representative for Venezuela. Um So,
Speaker 1: speaking of nightmarish, unforgivable crimes against humanity committed at the
Speaker 1: behest of Republicans, you want to talk about Guatemala. WHOA,
Speaker 1: let's get into it. Yeah, I'm a big Guatemala fan.
Speaker 1: It's great country. It's a beautiful country. Yeah. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: been horrible to it. We've been real bad to it,
Speaker 1: real bad to it. Um it's one of the most
Speaker 1: beautiful places I've ever been in my life. Um I
Speaker 1: I ran across a T shirt over there that was like,
Speaker 1: I think the thing written on it was something like
Speaker 1: Guatemala is like how nature exaggerates or how nature puts
Speaker 1: in an exclamation point. And if you go to places
Speaker 1: like La La Lan, you really feel that because it's
Speaker 1: this like lan is one of the deepest lakes in
Speaker 1: Central America. Um, and it's just surrounded by a ring
Speaker 1: of volcanoes. Like look a look at pictures of this place.
Speaker 1: It's absolutely astonishing. Um. And when I was there at
Speaker 1: least um, Like, one of the things people would tell
Speaker 1: us is that, like the military is not allowed in
Speaker 1: here anymore, Like we don't let them in because of
Speaker 1: some of the things we're about to talk about. Um, wait,
Speaker 1: can you how do you keep the military out? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know, I think it's I think it was just
Speaker 1: sort of a matter of like after a lot of
Speaker 1: the massacres, they kind of pulled out of certain areas
Speaker 1: where they've been killing the Maya, and they were like,
Speaker 1: there's kind of like I don't know, I got we
Speaker 1: got stopped on the road a couple of times by
Speaker 1: just sort of groups of men with m sixteens and
Speaker 1: not wearing uniforms really but operating what we're clearly checkpoint.
Speaker 1: I don't like, it was very unclear to me. I'm
Speaker 1: not like guatemal In politics is extremely complicated. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so Robert, you want to know what isn't extremely complicated?
Speaker 1: The products and services that support this podcast. Word alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, so back in nineteen fifty four, Like, Guatemala
Speaker 1: is great, hard not to love it. Um. The problem
Speaker 1: is that in nineteen fifty four, the United Fruit Company
Speaker 1: was also in love with Guatemala UM, particularly they're they're
Speaker 1: wonderful bananas. Now. Unfortunately, the democratically elected leader of Guatemala
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty four was a dude named Jacobo Arbez
Speaker 1: who didn't like that a foreign country owned a large
Speaker 1: chunk of the Guatemalan economy. Because these fruit companies owned
Speaker 1: huge amounts of Guatemalan land that had been sold to
Speaker 1: them basically by corrupt like ali arcs in Guatemala who
Speaker 1: had stolen it from indigenous people um, and then sold
Speaker 1: it to US corporations for a fraction of what it
Speaker 1: was actually worked, which allowed these corporations to basically enslave
Speaker 1: Guatemalan workers. And it was horrible. It sounds like the
Speaker 1: typical chain of command. Yes, indigenous people to oligarch to
Speaker 1: United States. Yeah, and so our Beds comes to power
Speaker 1: and he's like, I'm going to nationalize all this ship, right,
Speaker 1: Like I'm gonna make all this ship. Everybody's like, I'm
Speaker 1: going to take this land that was sold illegally to
Speaker 1: these U S corporations, and I'm going to redistribute it
Speaker 1: to the peasants um and we're going to like try
Speaker 1: to undo the damage that the start of globalization has
Speaker 1: done to Guatemala. Beautiful dream, A beautiful dream. You may
Speaker 1: recognize this is not all that different from what was
Speaker 1: happening over in Chile with Saladora end A at a
Speaker 1: pretty similar time. Um. So yeah, our bez comes to power,
Speaker 1: he promises to do this, and United Fruit, who owns
Speaker 1: this land, goes to the CIA and it's like, guys,
Speaker 1: you gotta do something about this. He's gonna take away
Speaker 1: our banana land. And so the CIA is like, don't worry, bro,
Speaker 1: we got you. And then they pick up their US
Speaker 1: trained Guatemalan soldiers who would all like all these guys
Speaker 1: who've gone to the s o A and who were
Speaker 1: already inculcated, and like, yeah, I wanna I want to
Speaker 1: personally get wealthy, um by being a corrupt oligarch. And
Speaker 1: if all I have to do is murdersome indigenous people
Speaker 1: and Marxists and whatnot, that sounds great to me. I
Speaker 1: hate those people anyway, because that's partly what I've been
Speaker 1: trained to do in the School of the America. So
Speaker 1: they overthrow your Cobo r best Um and this winds
Speaker 1: up sparking a civil war in Guatemala. And that happens
Speaker 1: in a lot of countries too, But in Guatemala, that
Speaker 1: fucking war just does not end. It goes on for
Speaker 1: thirty six goddamn years. Yeah, it is, it is. They
Speaker 1: are just it is horrible in Guatemala. You can't exaggerate
Speaker 1: how much this completely fux society in that country, because
Speaker 1: it's just it's a generation and a half of of
Speaker 1: more or less constant sometimes low level sometimes you know.
Speaker 1: But but like war Um in the military junta that
Speaker 1: came to power didn't just hate Marxists, they hated again
Speaker 1: the local indigenous people who were descendants of the Maya
Speaker 1: um and the like. The these kind of local Maya
Speaker 1: groups were seen as being allies of the Marxist guerrillas
Speaker 1: in the hill Uh, and eventually the Guatemalan state, which
Speaker 1: was overwhelmingly run by military officers trained by the US,
Speaker 1: decided the only way to fight this insurgency was to
Speaker 1: destroy the indigenous villages that gave it shelter. Over thirty
Speaker 1: six long years of war, US trained forces killed as
Speaker 1: many as two hundred thousand people, many of whom were Maya.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote here from the Los Angeles Times
Speaker 1: reporting on sort of how this all shook out. A
Speaker 1: report by a United Nations backed truth commission after the
Speaker 1: thirty six years Civil war formally ended in nineteen nine six,
Speaker 1: found that security forces had inflicted multiple acts of savagery
Speaker 1: and genocide against Maya communities. The campaign included bombing villages
Speaker 1: and attacking fleeing residents, impaling victims, burning people alive, severing limbs,
Speaker 1: throwing children the pits filled with bodies and killing them,
Speaker 1: disemboweling civilians, and slashing open the wounds of pregnant women.
Speaker 1: Which let's think right now to the story that just
Speaker 1: broke today of the United States government giving forced hist
Speaker 1: ectomes to women who are in to migrant women who
Speaker 1: are in our custody at camps on the border, just
Speaker 1: the fancier version of what they were doing. Uh. The
Speaker 1: goal is the same to stop certain groups of people
Speaker 1: from having children. So the massacres, the scorch deirth operations,
Speaker 1: forced disappearances, and executions of Mayan authorities, leaders and spiritual
Speaker 1: guides were not only an attempt to destroy the social
Speaker 1: base of the guerrillas, but above all, to destroy the
Speaker 1: cultural values that ensured cohesion and collective action in Mayan communities.
Speaker 1: The Commission for Historical Clarification said the Guatemalan government was
Speaker 1: responsible for more than ninety percent of deaths, disappearances, and
Speaker 1: other human rights violations during the war. The Commission said,
Speaker 1: the state deliberately exaggerated a limited insurgent threat to justify
Speaker 1: large scale repression. The Commission found and again, what that
Speaker 1: what that quote from the Commission for Historical Clarification is saying,
Speaker 1: is that the Guatemalan government with the US, is backing
Speaker 1: committed genocide. That's what genocide is, an attempt to destroy
Speaker 1: a culture. So in the nineteen seventies, which is kind
Speaker 1: of in the middle of this whole war, President Jimmy
Speaker 1: Carter attempted to put a halt to the violence, and
Speaker 1: he did this by banning all military aid to Guatemala
Speaker 1: in order to force the government to take action on
Speaker 1: its horrible human rights record. Now, this was in general
Speaker 1: another period, Like I said, we're left wing insurgencies were
Speaker 1: starting to gain ground in Latin America, and Carter's decision
Speaker 1: infuriated the American right wing. In nineteen eighty two, a
Speaker 1: three man military and took headed by evangelical preacher and
Speaker 1: School of America's graduate, General Efrain Rios Mont, took power
Speaker 1: in Guatemala. Now, Rio's Mont had been one of the
Speaker 1: School of America's first students, graduating back in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: one when the school was just three years old, and
Speaker 1: when he finally took power, the Reagan administration was happy
Speaker 1: to know they had a steadfast ally they could trust
Speaker 1: to think the right way about things. And Rio's Mont
Speaker 1: is a very interesting guy because again he's in the
Speaker 1: military in nineteen seventies six. He comes under the influence
Speaker 1: of a bunch of America and evangelical preachers and he
Speaker 1: converts and becomes and like takes a break from being
Speaker 1: in the military to be like a radio preacher and stuff.
Speaker 1: Like he's like Jerry Folwell, but he's also a general
Speaker 1: um and he is a hard core like religious conservative,
Speaker 1: very much in mind with the American right wing. So
Speaker 1: Rio's Mont under his like, you know, again, the war
Speaker 1: had been going on for a while, but under Rio
Speaker 1: s Mont it, it escalates to a new stage of horror.
Speaker 1: And in objective terms, um yeah. Before we get onto
Speaker 1: objective terms, I want to read a couple of different
Speaker 1: quotes from survivors of the horror that Rios Mont put out.
Speaker 1: And this is from an article in h in a
Speaker 1: c l a Um called Rios Mont the evangelist so uh.
Speaker 1: An unnamed survivor from Aguacotton, Huetenango, the military came to
Speaker 1: burn whole families out, to burn their houses, and not
Speaker 1: just their houses, but the people themselves. They burned men,
Speaker 1: women and children who died in flames, incinerated. It caused
Speaker 1: us terror, It caused this a lot of fear. Another
Speaker 1: unnamed survivor from Robin al Baja Vera pause. The military
Speaker 1: officials raped the women who were twelve and thirteen years old.
Speaker 1: The girls couldn't do anything because there were so many
Speaker 1: soldiers lining up to take their turn. First they raped
Speaker 1: them and then they killed them. Another unnamed survivor from
Speaker 1: the same town. The children were kicked to death. The
Speaker 1: children shouted and shouted and then they were silent. So
Speaker 1: that's Rio's Mont, whoa uh trying sorry, trying to um
Speaker 1: kicking a person to death is such a laborious task,
Speaker 1: like it can't be done quickly, and as we you know,
Speaker 1: you spoke earlier about like soldiers not being allowed really
Speaker 1: to back out otherwise potentially suffering the same fate. That's
Speaker 1: so much psychological damage done, not just to the victims,
Speaker 1: but also to the people actively participating in these murder Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: what a human toll. I mean, it's one of those
Speaker 1: things you actually you read about things like the Nazi
Speaker 1: genocides and not just not like the constant like the
Speaker 1: one of the things people don't understand about the Holocaust
Speaker 1: is that the concentration camps were not plan a. The
Speaker 1: concentration camps were in part a result of the fact
Speaker 1: that the German high command learned during the course of
Speaker 1: executing genocides that their soldiers couldn't survive massacurring civilians. There
Speaker 1: was a particular massacre called body Yard where they shot
Speaker 1: like thirty thousand people to death in a single day,
Speaker 1: and it just destroyed a lot of these soldiers. Which
Speaker 1: is not to like not saying like these Nazis need sympathy,
Speaker 1: but like human beings can't do that, most of them,
Speaker 1: and so people men were shooting themselves and drinking themselves
Speaker 1: to death. And one of the reasons why the camps
Speaker 1: got built is because there was this understanding by the
Speaker 1: high command that like, oh shit, we can't like we're
Speaker 1: we're going to be suffering like casualties we can't afford
Speaker 1: in order to carry out these genocides. We need to
Speaker 1: find a way to do them while exposing the minimum
Speaker 1: number of soldiers to the savagery that's necessary in them. UM. Anyway,
Speaker 1: speaking line distinction is just that's why you do it.
Speaker 1: And it's also why you really need to have a
Speaker 1: religious justification for what you're doing, because it makes it
Speaker 1: easier to convince people that they're doing the right thing
Speaker 1: by killing these godless communists. Speaking of that, Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: won the presidency in nineteen eighty by flipping the evangelical
Speaker 1: vote away from the Democrats who had helped elect Carter
Speaker 1: a little bit earlier. UM and two of his big backers.
Speaker 1: Of Reagan's big backers where of course, Jerry Fallwell and
Speaker 1: Pat Robertson, we talked about this in our Fallwell episode.
Speaker 1: Carl Rio's mont was friends with Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson.
Speaker 1: They were great buddies. He considered them spiritual advisors, and
Speaker 1: Reagan developed a friendship with Rio's Mont. In nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 1: while all of this kicking children to death thing stuff
Speaker 1: was going on, Reagan traveled to Guatemala and basically said
Speaker 1: that all of the stories of genocide there were lies
Speaker 1: and that Rio's Mont was totally dedicated the democracy in Guatemala.
Speaker 1: He said, frankly, I'm inclined to believe that Rio's Mont
Speaker 1: has been getting a bum wrap. Yeah, easy to do.
Speaker 1: I guess when your agenda is being achieved. Yeah, overlook
Speaker 1: kicking babies to death. Yeah, well, it's just some babies.
Speaker 1: Reagan also said that Rio's Mont had great personal integrity. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he blamed the media. Uh. In nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: he lifted the arms embargo on Guatemala, flooding the country
Speaker 1: with helicopter parts that the government needed to continue its genocide.
Speaker 1: During his first year in power, Rios Monts soldiers massacred
Speaker 1: more than ten thousand civilians. Four villages were wiped off
Speaker 1: the face of the earth. Uh. Yeah. Years later, a
Speaker 1: Reconciliation Commission report would find that U s A during
Speaker 1: this period had a quote significant bearing on human rights
Speaker 1: violations during the armed confrontation. Now, typing that out excise
Speaker 1: as a major part of the story. Because the crimes
Speaker 1: committed by the Guatemalan government weren't just enabled by US
Speaker 1: weaponry and carried out by soldiers trained by the Army.
Speaker 1: Acts of torture and even genocide were regularly carried out
Speaker 1: with the help of active duty American soldiers. And this
Speaker 1: brings me to the story of Sister Diana Ortiz. She
Speaker 1: was a us Ursulin nun in n She traveled to
Speaker 1: Guatemala to teach little kids how to read. Unfortunately, the
Speaker 1: Guatemalan government was somewhat distrustful of the Catholic Church for
Speaker 1: reasons will discuss a little later. The church is part
Speaker 1: of its mission to help the poor, often wound up
Speaker 1: sending its people into the same impoverished communities that were
Speaker 1: such hotbeds from Marxist guerrillas. So the government caught sister
Speaker 1: Ortiz as she was traveling to an isolated rural community
Speaker 1: to deliver necessary aid. She was kidnapped, repeatedly raped, and
Speaker 1: burned with cigarettes while she was tortured for information. Now,
Speaker 1: thousands of other Guatemalan women found themselves in similar situations,
Speaker 1: and we didn't hear from most of them because most
Speaker 1: of them died or were too terrified of the consequences
Speaker 1: of talking to ever come out. But sister Ortiz managed
Speaker 1: to survive an escape, and she was eventually able to
Speaker 1: report on the details of her ordeal, particularly the fact
Speaker 1: that her torture sessions had been directed by an amor
Speaker 1: arikan man. He gave the orders while a knife was
Speaker 1: forced into her hand and she was made to stab
Speaker 1: another woman's body. Um. Yeah. Years later, she would write.
Speaker 1: So often it is assumed that torture is conducted for
Speaker 1: the purpose of gaining information. It is much more often
Speaker 1: intended to threaten populations into silence and submission. What I
Speaker 1: was to endure was a message, a warning to others
Speaker 1: not to oppose, to remain silent, and to yield to
Speaker 1: power without question. And Guatemala, the Catholic Church sought to
Speaker 1: walk in company with the suffering poor. I was to
Speaker 1: be a message board upon which those in power would
Speaker 1: write a warning to the Church to cease its opposition
Speaker 1: or be prepared to face the full force of the state.
Speaker 1: Something for everybody to keep in mind as the coming
Speaker 1: months come. That's what torture is. That's what police violence is.
Speaker 1: It's what happens in the streets of Portland when a
Speaker 1: police officer punches a seventeen year old in the face
Speaker 1: before macing them at point blank range. It's the same,
Speaker 1: I Dia. You forced them into silence by causing them
Speaker 1: pain and terror. Cool stuff, good, good things. Deep. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So while we're talking about the Catholic Church and the
Speaker 1: School of America's graduates, we should return to El Salvador
Speaker 1: and the story of a brave Catholic priest named Oscar Romero.
Speaker 1: Oscar was a leftist part of a wing of the
Speaker 1: established Catholic Church that was particularly prominent in Latin America.
Speaker 1: The pope at the time, John Paul the Second, and
Speaker 1: most of the leadership in Rome were much more conservative,
Speaker 1: and Romero preached something that's called liberation theology, which is
Speaker 1: a controversial shouldn't be controversial, but it is with especially
Speaker 1: within the Catholic Church. It was a controversial interpretation of
Speaker 1: the Gospel that stressed justice for the poor and freedom
Speaker 1: for the oppressed. So the leadership actually, like in Rome,
Speaker 1: a lot of the leadership of the Catholic Church considered
Speaker 1: Romero to basically be a terrorist. But this is you know,
Speaker 1: it's one of those things when we talk about the
Speaker 1: Catholic Church in Guatemala, and there's some other places in
Speaker 1: Latin America where they fulfill a similar role. This is
Speaker 1: kind of why our current pope is the dude that
Speaker 1: he is. He comes from this sort of tradition. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of very leftist Catholic priests and nuns and
Speaker 1: stuff within Latin America um and it's it's it's very
Speaker 1: tight into all of this and it's yeah, and he's
Speaker 1: also a Jesuit and that is not too like. It's
Speaker 1: one of those things we should like. The Catholic Church
Speaker 1: horrible organization, and I think is broadly the or leadership
Speaker 1: is broadly on the wrong side of this at the time.
Speaker 1: But you also have to acknowledge that, like a lot
Speaker 1: of the great heroes in this period were Catholic clergy
Speaker 1: um who were put their bodies on the line because
Speaker 1: they knew that if they were killed, people would pay attention.
Speaker 1: It's wait, so they thought that he was a terrorist
Speaker 1: because he wanted justice for the poor. Yeah, he wanted
Speaker 1: actual justice for the poor and not just alms for
Speaker 1: the poor, like liberation. Theologians were more on the side
Speaker 1: of like, well, the poor need to take back their
Speaker 1: fucking land that's been stolen from them. Um like breaking. Okay, listen,
Speaker 1: the only way that's gonna happen if they started breaking
Speaker 1: some commandments, y'all. And I know for a fact you
Speaker 1: don't like that. You get really testy when people get
Speaker 1: out here and start killing. So, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: the one time Jesus was physically aggressive in the entire
Speaker 1: Bible is when he needed to funk up some rich bankers.
Speaker 1: So I think I think people like Oscar Omero might
Speaker 1: say that Jesus is lesson for us is to funk
Speaker 1: up some rich bankers. Jesus, where is this Jesus and
Speaker 1: my Catholic Sunday schools? Not that we we I don't
Speaker 1: want to. You have to when you talk about like
Speaker 1: the church and this, you have to number one, give
Speaker 1: proper credit to heroes like Oscar Omero without pretending that
Speaker 1: like the broad swath of the Catholic Church supported what
Speaker 1: he was doing. But what he was doing was very heroic.
Speaker 1: So he goes into these places and he's he's preaching
Speaker 1: actively against these death squads that are uh killing the
Speaker 1: ship out of people. So he's he starts to he's
Speaker 1: speaking up like at the time in nineteen seventy nine, Um,
Speaker 1: the government of El Salvador is like kind of broadly
Speaker 1: left wing. But there's this because of how the most
Speaker 1: recent election with like nineteen seventy nine, this government comes
Speaker 1: to power and the right wing gets furious, um, and
Speaker 1: it sort of coalesces behind This graduate of the School
Speaker 1: of the America is named Roberto Dubuson, and Dobbuson starts
Speaker 1: organizing death squads with the funding of a bunch of
Speaker 1: rich like landowners and and like corporate magnates, um, and
Speaker 1: they start murdering left wing activists and basically anybody who
Speaker 1: speaks up on the left is a way to kind
Speaker 1: of pave the road for the return to power of
Speaker 1: the right in Al Salvador. So, in the wake of
Speaker 1: a bunch of executions, Oscar Romero, this Catholic priest takes
Speaker 1: to the radio and delivers a speech where he begs
Speaker 1: Al Salvadoran soldiers to refuse orders to kill. He tells them,
Speaker 1: in the name of God, in the name of this
Speaker 1: suffering people whose cries rise to heaven. More loudly each day.
Speaker 1: I implore you, I beg you, I order you, in
Speaker 1: the name of God, stop the repression. So the very
Speaker 1: next day, while he gave another speech, gunman under the
Speaker 1: command of Roberto Darbison entered his church and shot him dead.
Speaker 1: And the whole assassination was caught on tape. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna play an exerpt from that now because I really
Speaker 1: do think that Americans ought to hear it because we
Speaker 1: paid for it, right, all the guns, the guns these
Speaker 1: guys had, We gave them, the training that that Davison had,
Speaker 1: we provided, so people should hear what it sounded like
Speaker 1: when it was used. The the sound that the people
Speaker 1: make in the wake of that, the screaming from inside
Speaker 1: the church is um, like that's that's the sound of imperialism,
Speaker 1: and it's distilled and who its purest form, like that's
Speaker 1: the sound of the American empire. Uh, and and what
Speaker 1: it does to the human soul, Like that's screaming, the
Speaker 1: distortion and like the fear and the and the and
Speaker 1: the pain. Um. It's important to listen to that. I
Speaker 1: think i've as I can listen. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you've ever listened to the slate tape narratives, you know
Speaker 1: what those are. So in the nineteen thirties, late twenties,
Speaker 1: as we're able to start recording like audio, a group
Speaker 1: of folks decided that they need to record all of
Speaker 1: the last like living slaves in America, Yes, to hear
Speaker 1: the story. Yeah yeah, And like ever since, like I
Speaker 1: listened to most of them. There aren't that many because
Speaker 1: the quality of audio equipment and recording at the time
Speaker 1: wasn't great, So we lost a couple of the tapes,
Speaker 1: and they preserved and digitize what they can. But like
Speaker 1: ever since, like really taking and listen to those and
Speaker 1: understanding not just the connection to the past but to
Speaker 1: the present, and like in the way words are formed
Speaker 1: and the way certain sounds had our ears, Like I
Speaker 1: believe firmly in the preservation of atrocity in the hopes
Speaker 1: that people actually listen to it and take that in
Speaker 1: and you can't hear anguished screams like that, understand the
Speaker 1: similarities between what happened there and what's currently happening in
Speaker 1: our own backyards and not immediately feel called to action.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yep, yeah. So uh Dobison, who again is
Speaker 1: the guy who's organizing these death squads, the ones that
Speaker 1: kill um Romero. Uh and several supporters were caught on
Speaker 1: a farm shortly thereafter with the cash of guns and
Speaker 1: other equipment that tied them to the killing, but authorities
Speaker 1: received so many death threats from Dobbison's far right supporters
Speaker 1: that he was released very quickly. His political allies took
Speaker 1: power soon after. Dobison became a celebrated figure among the
Speaker 1: global right wing and even in the United States. In
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four, several US Republican political advocacy organizations invited
Speaker 1: Dobison to Washington, d c. To attend a dinner held
Speaker 1: in his honor. He was praised for his continuing efforts
Speaker 1: for freedom in the face of communist aggression, which is
Speaker 1: an inspiration to freedom loving people everywhere. No one has
Speaker 1: ever been brought to justice for Romero's murder. This is
Speaker 1: largely due to the fact that Dobison died early. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's one of the reasons. Um he didn't. He didn't
Speaker 1: live very long. He got like cancer or some ship.
Speaker 1: The Catholic Church did, however, canonize Oscar Omero in two
Speaker 1: thousand eighteen, turning him into a proper saint, So you know,
Speaker 1: that's good. He'd been. He had been um treated as
Speaker 1: a saint and considered a saint by people in El
Speaker 1: Salvador for decades by this point. By the way, like
Speaker 1: he was, he was immediately canonized by the people who
Speaker 1: lived there um, But it took the church some time
Speaker 1: to catch up. So Sister Ortiz, who did survive her
Speaker 1: ordeal um, is not a saint yet, but more progress
Speaker 1: has been made in bringing her assailants to justice. The
Speaker 1: man who orchestrated Guatemala torture program in the late nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties was Defense Minister General Hector Granmaho. He was trained,
Speaker 1: of course, at the School of the Americas. I feel
Speaker 1: like I'm becoming a bit of a broken record, but
Speaker 1: all of these guys went there. Um. In nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 1: a U. S Court found Grandmaho responsible for the rape
Speaker 1: and torture of Sister Diana and ordered him to pay
Speaker 1: forty seven point five million dollars in damages. Now that's interesting,
Speaker 1: and it may seem wild that, like you could, a
Speaker 1: government employee and a government salary might have forty seven
Speaker 1: eight million dollars to hand over. This was not so
Speaker 1: unusual for ambitious graduates of the School of the Americas.
Speaker 1: That was part of the point of going to the
Speaker 1: School of the Americas. And I'm gonna quote now from
Speaker 1: Leslie Gill's book. In Guatemala, for example, the outcome of
Speaker 1: the thirty five year old Civil War was a shift
Speaker 1: in the balance of power that created a new landowning
Speaker 1: elite among military officers. Income polarization increased in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: The portion of national wealth controlled by the poorest ten
Speaker 1: percent of the population dropped from two point four percent
Speaker 1: to point five percent, while the richest ten percent expanded
Speaker 1: their share from forty percent to forty six point six percent.
Speaker 1: Super familiar. That does sound super familiar, and it ties
Speaker 1: into a number of things. This is just always the
Speaker 1: truth with state with state security forces. People ask, like,
Speaker 1: why the police are being so unbelievably violent to just
Speaker 1: like random reporters filming them and stuff people not breaking
Speaker 1: any law. It's because, more than anything, their ability to
Speaker 1: continue to have a comfortable income. They make a ton
Speaker 1: of money. Cops make way so much fucking money. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're there, and they're they're only making more and more.
Speaker 1: They keep getting raises. Their ability to like it's what
Speaker 1: they found with the guy who killed George Floyd, that
Speaker 1: he had like this whole second house that he was
Speaker 1: not paying taxes legally on in Florida. Like, this is
Speaker 1: what happens. This is how security for why they do
Speaker 1: what they do. It's because they get paid to do it.
Speaker 1: It's because they're elevated. Yeah, they're elevated into the oligarchic
Speaker 1: class in order to maintain and preserve it. And this
Speaker 1: happens very nakedly in Guatemala. That's what the School of
Speaker 1: America's is for. Um, if you have it's very nakedly here.
Speaker 1: I am floored. Well, and it's like I think what's
Speaker 1: most frustrating is the fact that like it's partially it's
Speaker 1: just the blatancy this idea that like we see all
Speaker 1: these cops were clearly just not of the neighborhood, um
Speaker 1: and literally invading it, destroying not just you know, innocent people,
Speaker 1: put a ton of children along the way, wrecking their
Speaker 1: entire lives. It's like, yeah, I just commend an applaud
Speaker 1: like specifically, like that none to be able to voice
Speaker 1: what happened to her, Like I can't imagine the challenge
Speaker 1: of sharing. That's not just sharing that story, but then
Speaker 1: of course those people are looking at ways that they
Speaker 1: can get to you. Of course her life is still
Speaker 1: in danger. Um I can't. Yeah, it's it's overwhelming, Robbert,
Speaker 1: but it's necessaries, like trying to process all of it,
Speaker 1: trying to understand. Tony Morrison has this really great quote
Speaker 1: that I feel like I've used in like just everything,
Speaker 1: but it's been just at the forefront of my mind,
Speaker 1: which is like in times of crisis, like lean into
Speaker 1: what you do rightly, like whatever it is, don't let
Speaker 1: yourself be distracted by outside things because your way through
Speaker 1: it's through like your talent, and it's I have been
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how to use my talents in
Speaker 1: what is clearly a time that requires everyone to use
Speaker 1: their voice articulately, to be very practiced and specific in
Speaker 1: our actions so that we don't like falter further into
Speaker 1: that reality because that ship is just that is crazy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not killing somebody preaching mass like how like especially
Speaker 1: if their whole you know, motivation is like they're godless.
Speaker 1: You walk into a godless p worst church and kill
Speaker 1: their spiritual leader like I don't, I don't, I but
Speaker 1: I also know that it's not impossible. I know that
Speaker 1: it's happened so so many times. It's touched every continent
Speaker 1: at some point. So as far moved as I am
Speaker 1: from it, I'm aware of how present that action is,
Speaker 1: that that reaching that level is not it's not impossible
Speaker 1: so much. In nineteen eighty four, the School of the
Speaker 1: America's left Panama UM. It was re established in Columbus
Speaker 1: at a Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. UM. I think
Speaker 1: I said Columbus, Ohio in the first episode, will we'll
Speaker 1: fix that, But it was Columbus, Georgia. There's two Columbi,
Speaker 1: so yeah, they move it to Georgia outside of four
Speaker 1: or in Fort Benning, UM, which is a location that
Speaker 1: like not only like one of the things that this
Speaker 1: did that actually moving the School of the Americas to
Speaker 1: the United States did, was it allowed it to provide
Speaker 1: its foreign students with an even deeper appreciation and understanding
Speaker 1: of US culture. We talked about in the last episode
Speaker 1: how um new School of the America's students, who were
Speaker 1: generally there for about a year if they were taking
Speaker 1: the full course, like one of the first things they
Speaker 1: would all try to do is go buy American trucks
Speaker 1: so that they could take them back home with them.
Speaker 1: Is like a status symbol, now, um, and I I
Speaker 1: find I told you we're going to hear from a
Speaker 1: student who went there. And this This is a guy,
Speaker 1: a Bolivian named Juan Ricardo, who was interviewed by Leslie Gill.
Speaker 1: And he's a retired lieutenant colonel in the Bolivian Army.
Speaker 1: And he wound up being a major source for Leslie's book,
Speaker 1: in part due to the fact that, by more or
Speaker 1: less accident, he wound up being kind of a pretty
Speaker 1: left wing dude who still went through all of this
Speaker 1: like far right pro USA indoctrination, so he he understood
Speaker 1: what was happening to his fellow soldiers, like and he's
Speaker 1: he's able to kind of speak very lucidly on it,
Speaker 1: which I I appreciate quite a lot, now, Um. His
Speaker 1: introduction to American military culture came before he ever traveled
Speaker 1: to the United States or the School of the America's.
Speaker 1: When he was new to the military, he was taught
Speaker 1: by a number of instructors who themselves had been trained
Speaker 1: at the School of the America's and they came back
Speaker 1: with the lessons they had learned and even came back
Speaker 1: with printed teaching materials from the U. S. Military, and
Speaker 1: a lot of those lessons that these guys who've just
Speaker 1: been trained by the US brought back to Bolivia to
Speaker 1: give to their fellow soldiers involved torturing the ship out
Speaker 1: of people. One Ricardo later claimed that he was taught quote,
Speaker 1: how to tie up prisoners of war and how to
Speaker 1: torture them techniques that you have to utilize in order
Speaker 1: to get them to make declarations. For example, you don't
Speaker 1: let them sleep, and then you get results. Other knowledge
Speaker 1: that they brought from the School of the Americas. I
Speaker 1: remember very well it was axiomatic among the rangers, the U. S.
Speaker 1: Army rangers that taught the soldiers who were teaching him
Speaker 1: that a dead subversive was better than a prisoner. Having
Speaker 1: a prisoner interfered with the subsequent operations. Thus it's better
Speaker 1: that he is four meters underground than to have him alive. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was trying to picture, like between when we last
Speaker 1: spoke in today, like what are these classes like? And
Speaker 1: silly me, I was envisioning like very subtly, like like oh,
Speaker 1: you know, this is how you would maybe have to
Speaker 1: tie with somebody who like, you know, in the same
Speaker 1: way that they feel like often, like we've seen with
Speaker 1: cop training courses, the more we learn about those, the
Speaker 1: more it's it doesn't seem so insidious, right, It's not
Speaker 1: so directed. It's like, oh, this is how you pull
Speaker 1: your gun, and it's like a two second course and
Speaker 1: you're like, well, that's not enough information. Um So, of
Speaker 1: course we have like a lot of you know, misfires
Speaker 1: and people that are actually accidentally shooting other police officers
Speaker 1: and things like that. Uh, it sounds like this was
Speaker 1: like torture one oh one, welcome, here we go getting
Speaker 1: started by the way, shoot your prisoners, Yeah, makes if
Speaker 1: they're dead even better, no problem. Yeah, all right. So,
Speaker 1: well you think about executing prisoners in violation of international law,
Speaker 1: you should think about something else that violates international law.
Speaker 1: The products and services that support this podcast. We're back
Speaker 1: and I've been informed by UH Corporate that um our
Speaker 1: our sponsors do not violate international law. They in fact
Speaker 1: comply with international law. I apologize for the for the error.
Speaker 1: It's you can see how the mistake. It's a binary
Speaker 1: so it's easy to make, you know, get the wrong
Speaker 1: one of those two we do. We do apologize here.
Speaker 1: So yeah, in case you weren't a big war crimes
Speaker 1: buff um, it is a war crime to execute prisoners. Um.
Speaker 1: In fact, everything one Ricardo says about what they taught
Speaker 1: about counter insurgency, these US trained officers who trained him
Speaker 1: um is war crimes, are war crimes. Would would be
Speaker 1: war crimes were they done, and in fact they were.
Speaker 1: Now you might question how reliable a source One Ricardo
Speaker 1: is and whether or not we can trust him, because
Speaker 1: he's one guy, you know, with the with the clear
Speaker 1: political ideology, making very bold claims about things the United
Speaker 1: States did. Um. And there's a number of ways I
Speaker 1: could back up his his stories. Number one would be
Speaker 1: just reciting dozens of other anecdotes of people who were
Speaker 1: tortured and said U S soldiers were there, or who
Speaker 1: were tortured by soldiers trained by America. But the fastest
Speaker 1: way to back up what Wan told Leslie Gill is
Speaker 1: just to cite the Pentagon's own published teaching materials see.
Speaker 1: In nineteen six, the Clinton administration ordered the de classific
Speaker 1: caation of a number of training materials used at the
Speaker 1: School of the America's This tranche of documents included a
Speaker 1: Pentagon memo from nineteen nine two addressed to the Secretary
Speaker 1: of Defense. It's written by Werner Michael, who was the
Speaker 1: intelligence oversight assistant to the Sect Deaf, and Michael was,
Speaker 1: you know, I think, assigned to look into this problem
Speaker 1: once they started to be like Americans started to, you know,
Speaker 1: complain about how the School of America's was a terrible thing,
Speaker 1: and he was basically sent to like look into the
Speaker 1: training material these guys were being given. And from what
Speaker 1: I can tell reading this memo, he seems to be
Speaker 1: it seems like he's kind of a decent, a relatively
Speaker 1: decent person who wound up in this position of like
Speaker 1: having to analyze a horrific war crime being committed by
Speaker 1: his colleagues. Um, and it's it's it's a really interesting
Speaker 1: read for that reason. Now, one of the things he
Speaker 1: notes is that the manuals that he was reviewing, which
Speaker 1: are like broadly Ford referred to as the torture manuals,
Speaker 1: which were like the training documents starting in ninety nine,
Speaker 1: um that they were not. They were all out of
Speaker 1: compliance with US law and with international law. But the
Speaker 1: reason nobody found out about it for years is that
Speaker 1: they were only written in Spanish, so nobody reviewed them
Speaker 1: in the entire Department of Defense. And it's the second
Speaker 1: most spoken language in the country, that is faithfully. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but why would we have anybody looking at that ship? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's amazing ignorance. Yeah, and I'm gonna quote from his
Speaker 1: review now. An Army review dated February nine two, conducted
Speaker 1: at our request, concluded that five of the seven manuals
Speaker 1: contained language and statements and violation of legal, regulatory or
Speaker 1: policy prohibitions. These manuals are Handling of Sources, revolutionary war
Speaker 1: and communist ideology, Terrorism in the Urban, guerrilla interrogation, and
Speaker 1: combat intelligence. To illustrate the manual handling of sources, in
Speaker 1: depicting the recruitment and control of human intelligence sources, refers
Speaker 1: to motivation by fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead beatings,
Speaker 1: false imprisonment executions, and the use of truth serum. The
Speaker 1: manual also discloses like, Okay, so it's either a like
Speaker 1: it sounds like a manual for the mob or a
Speaker 1: super villain. Yes, yes, but it was the Army's Department
Speaker 1: of the Army's manual that was giving explicit illegal advice
Speaker 1: to foreign soldiers. Now, this memo is the closest you're
Speaker 1: going to get to an explicit condemnation by a member
Speaker 1: of the Department of Defense of all of the genocide
Speaker 1: and rape and child murder they willfully trained and allowed
Speaker 1: soldiers to commit. Um. It's it's interesting reading not just
Speaker 1: as a historic document, that as kind of a sociological text,
Speaker 1: because you can see in the guy writing this like
Speaker 1: someone who appears to be a broadly honorable person starting
Speaker 1: to realize that the organization he built his life around
Speaker 1: has done something unforgivable. This passage, I think is particularly
Speaker 1: enlightening in theory. The offending and improper material in the
Speaker 1: manuals should have been discovered during the Army's existing review
Speaker 1: and approval process. It is incredible that the use of
Speaker 1: the less and Plans since nineteen eighty two and the
Speaker 1: manual since nineteen eighties seven evaded the established system of
Speaker 1: doctrinal controls. Nevertheless, we could find no evidence that this
Speaker 1: was a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to violate d O
Speaker 1: d N Army policies violates. But then how did it happen? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is incredible, Like that's the closest you're going to
Speaker 1: get from an actual like company man to being like
Speaker 1: something fucked happened here and very much sounds like, well,
Speaker 1: it was written in Spanish, so we can't prove it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: who could do? Who can Nobody can read Spanish in
Speaker 1: America in the army. Oh my word. Yeah. So there
Speaker 1: are one of the difficulties and kind of putting this
Speaker 1: together for you, um, is that there's just so many
Speaker 1: different war crimes and war criminals you can tie to
Speaker 1: the School of the America's. We could have done like
Speaker 1: four straight episodes or more just laying out Guatemala, right,
Speaker 1: and what was done in Guatemala, and not even the
Speaker 1: broader story of the Guatemalan Civil War, but like just
Speaker 1: what School of him eric As graduates got up to
Speaker 1: in Guatemal. We could have done the same thing, probably
Speaker 1: without Salvador. We're not even going to talk about Operation
Speaker 1: Condor in this episode, which was like it was, it
Speaker 1: was an agreement between a bunch of Latin American government's.
Speaker 1: The best way I could describe it as like if
Speaker 1: the EU was just about killing left wing uh political organizers,
Speaker 1: that that was kind of Operation Condor. We're not even
Speaker 1: going to get into it, because there's there's there's I mean,
Speaker 1: we've are this has been a very full set of
Speaker 1: episodes already, and some of this stuff I want to
Speaker 1: like cover at a later date. There's a lot to
Speaker 1: go into because the the amount of factory that was
Speaker 1: perpetrated by the United States in Latin America for forever
Speaker 1: is just such a deep and complicated and a horrible story.
Speaker 1: But I think given the limited time we have, what's
Speaker 1: important to focus on next is the kind of men
Speaker 1: who were educated by the School of America's and how
Speaker 1: how the school changed them, and how the presence of
Speaker 1: putting such men back in their home countries could fundamentally
Speaker 1: to fundamental changes in the character of a nation. So
Speaker 1: more Bolivian soldiers were trained the School of the America's
Speaker 1: then were trained by any other foreign military establishment. As
Speaker 1: one of the poorest nations in Latin America, it was
Speaker 1: particularly at risk for a Marxist uprising, and so the
Speaker 1: US took precautions. Like I said, they would get worried
Speaker 1: about a country and they would start increasing the number
Speaker 1: of soldiers that they would invite to the School of
Speaker 1: the Americas. So they trained huge numbers of Bolivian officers
Speaker 1: and kind of introduced them to this cult of Americanism
Speaker 1: that they were. That's like what they did to everyone
Speaker 1: they invited in. And Leslie gil rights based on her
Speaker 1: interviews with Juan Ricardo, who is that Bolivian soldier who
Speaker 1: went to the School of the America's quote, the North
Speaker 1: Americans had everything, or so it seemed to the Bolivians.
Speaker 1: They enjoyed a level of comfort unheard of in Bolivia.
Speaker 1: If a soldier tore his uniform, the army provided him
Speaker 1: with a new one, and the amount of food served
Speaker 1: in the School of America's mess hall made the Bolivian's
Speaker 1: eyes bulge. The returning soldiers told us that you could
Speaker 1: eat like a beast at the School of the America's,
Speaker 1: laughed Juan Ricardo. The U. S. Army's high degree of
Speaker 1: specialization also impressed the Bolivians, whose military was not nearly
Speaker 1: as differentiated in terms of knowledge and skills of its members.
Speaker 1: To be a specialist implied that one was special in
Speaker 1: the ability to work with high tech weaponry or just
Speaker 1: modern weaponry. Set the North Americans apart from their Latin
Speaker 1: American peers and students. Technology, especially the esoteric knowledge that
Speaker 1: unlocked its power had a quasi magical appeal for the
Speaker 1: Bolivians and for many of these Latin Americans. U S.
Speaker 1: Army officers seemed to go everywhere in helicopters, a symbol
Speaker 1: of their power and superiority. The conclusion that they drew,
Speaker 1: according to Juan Ricardo, was that the Gringos made good allies.
Speaker 1: It was good to be on their side, and they
Speaker 1: would provide all the necessary support for the struggle against subversion.
Speaker 1: He paused, and then added, it's also better to have
Speaker 1: them as allies because they have a good intelligence system.
Speaker 1: So you can see part of what's happening here, like right,
Speaker 1: one of the reasons. One of the things that's that's
Speaker 1: a real hallmark of this period in right wing repression
Speaker 1: of the left is Pinochet throwing left wing militants from helicopters.
Speaker 1: Um helicopters which are the symbol of the United States,
Speaker 1: which are the symbol of modernity, which are the symbol
Speaker 1: of power. Right, these things aren't happening for for no reason,
Speaker 1: Like it's all it all ties in together. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: But also I think like about the idea of like
Speaker 1: just abundance again, it's just it's it's very cruel to
Speaker 1: offer people who have very little everything and then like
Speaker 1: expect them not to like fall in love with that
Speaker 1: comfort and the only and and there can be like
Speaker 1: you have to you have to convince these people what
Speaker 1: the school. One of the things that the the School of
Speaker 1: Americas is doing is it's drawing a border in the
Speaker 1: minds of these men between themselves and the rest of
Speaker 1: the country that they live in. And it's making their other,
Speaker 1: their fellow countrymen, these indigenous people, um, these these left
Speaker 1: wing you know, political organizers. It's making them into the
Speaker 1: other and again and into the thing that's that's separating
Speaker 1: you from abundance. You introduce these people to abundance, and
Speaker 1: then you tell them, these are the people who are
Speaker 1: stopping your country from being like this and yeah, and
Speaker 1: then they would turn them into the people who stopped
Speaker 1: them from their countrymen from having any kind of abundance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: who kicked children to death. Yeah, but some of them
Speaker 1: get rich, so that's good. Um. So one of the
Speaker 1: things I found really interesting in reading leslie Gill's book
Speaker 1: about this is that the kind of training the School
Speaker 1: of the America's cultivated and its students this like training
Speaker 1: them to be American um. It extended to what you
Speaker 1: might call the United States of America's number one pastime,
Speaker 1: which is, unfortunately the commodification of black bodies. And this
Speaker 1: is not going to be a super fun chunk to read,
Speaker 1: but let's do it here we go. S o A
Speaker 1: graduates cultivated images of themselves as manly men upon their
Speaker 1: return to Bolivia by regaling peers and academy students with
Speaker 1: accounts of their sexual exploits. Like a majority of their
Speaker 1: counterparts in the various armies of the America's many believe
Speaker 1: that access to the sexual services of local women was
Speaker 1: a basic right, and the Panama Canal zone was presented
Speaker 1: as a place where men could indulge their sexual fantasies
Speaker 1: and escape into allusions of men as men uh Pantoya,
Speaker 1: which is one of the other men that Leslie Gill interviews.
Speaker 1: One of the other guys who went to the school
Speaker 1: recalled that his instructors usually moved quickly from accounts of
Speaker 1: their professional experiences at the s o A to anecdotes
Speaker 1: about North American comfort, the prostitutes and how much they cost.
Speaker 1: Because of the enormous US military presence, sex workers from
Speaker 1: a variety of countries congregated in Panamanian cities. The brothels,
Speaker 1: explained Pantoya, complimented other aspects of life at the s
Speaker 1: o A. Cadets trained from Monday to Friday and Saturday
Speaker 1: and Sunday. They were free, they had money, so they
Speaker 1: went to the brothels that had black women. North Americans
Speaker 1: were there too, and everyone was equal. The Bolivians were
Speaker 1: fascinated with black women. There are none in Bolivia, and
Speaker 1: to make love with a black woman was supposedly an
Speaker 1: unforgettable experience, very exotic. It was the moment when the
Speaker 1: Obolivian military man had international contact. The aura of almost
Speaker 1: mystical transcendentalism that surrounded the Bolivian's accounts of sexual encounters
Speaker 1: with black women emerged from a belief that you could
Speaker 1: do things with foreigners, particularly members of subordinate racial groups,
Speaker 1: that you could not do at home. Part of the
Speaker 1: allure of going up rod was the opportunity to play
Speaker 1: out sexist and racist stereotypes away from the constraints of
Speaker 1: their own society. And Panama, single men had disposable income
Speaker 1: that was unencumbered by alternative claims that would shape its
Speaker 1: use in Bolivia, and this money gave them a feeling
Speaker 1: of power and strength. It also enabled them to enter
Speaker 1: a transnational world of power and pleasure that no one
Speaker 1: at home except for a select few new As these
Speaker 1: men lived the excitement of going abroad and took part
Speaker 1: in daily training exercises at the s o A, began
Speaker 1: to reflect on their own country in different ways. The
Speaker 1: s o A experience aggravated longstanding domestic hatreds of Indians
Speaker 1: and Communists, as officers struggled to separate themselves from their
Speaker 1: own modest origins and to explain the roots of Bolivian
Speaker 1: underdevelopment to themselves. I will never understand I some people
Speaker 1: think that um, black bodies are inherently magic beyond like
Speaker 1: the black cultures. Black women have co opted that to
Speaker 1: mean like you have val you essentially beyond what the
Speaker 1: world gives you, in the phrase quote unquote black girl magic.
Speaker 1: This the idea that like we are transcendent and beautiful
Speaker 1: and worthwhile because our community has to do those things
Speaker 1: because very clearly no one else is going to And
Speaker 1: the idea that as we are, we as Americans are
Speaker 1: going into other countries and basically disrupting an entire culture uh,
Speaker 1: then bring those people back to America and further degrade
Speaker 1: black bodies. It is uh not surprising, uh and yet
Speaker 1: still still frustrating, still maddening. Still again just confusing at
Speaker 1: our ability to just shrug at human life and just
Speaker 1: be like, yeah, my life has more value than yours.
Speaker 1: I can't have such a hard time processing it. Yep. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot going on there. Um, yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: lot going on there. I find it interesting this this
Speaker 1: the way in which these guys are kind of being,
Speaker 1: the way in which they're being trained with abundance, right,
Speaker 1: and and how dangerous that is because when you read
Speaker 1: about when you read like, you'll hear a lot about
Speaker 1: the School of the America's on Twitter, and it will
Speaker 1: usually be because it's Twitter, you know, nobody. People don't
Speaker 1: have time for super detailed explorations of things. But it
Speaker 1: will generally be something like, oh, the America, the United
Speaker 1: States has the school where it trained assassins and murderers
Speaker 1: and stuff, and it was the School of the America's
Speaker 1: and it you know it, it led to all these
Speaker 1: revolutions and that's bad. And I think the reality, like
Speaker 1: I think the focus actually on the torture curriculum and
Speaker 1: stuff is kind of a mistake because I don't think
Speaker 1: that's the most insidious and dangerous thing that the school did.
Speaker 1: What what what we just talked about in that last passage,
Speaker 1: This um bringing bringing the men from these countries, these
Speaker 1: military officers into the world of white men in the
Speaker 1: United States, and what that means, and the accumulation of
Speaker 1: of not just the umulation of like physical goods, but
Speaker 1: the domination of the bodies of people who are are
Speaker 1: sort of of a lower racial cast than you or whatever,
Speaker 1: like all of this stuff that were brought into whiteness
Speaker 1: in a real way, and that's a huge part of
Speaker 1: what led to the massacres. I think that's fascinating. I think.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's this super good documentary on Netflix right
Speaker 1: now which sort of attempts and I say attempts because
Speaker 1: it's coming from a tech company that like produces the
Speaker 1: same standards of being as the tech companies. The documentary
Speaker 1: is meant to like critique, but it's the idea essentially
Speaker 1: is that like tech companies have designed themselves based off
Speaker 1: of your existence. Essentially, you become the product or your
Speaker 1: ability to change and adhere to a um corporations need
Speaker 1: to use your dollars like held on, I can explain
Speaker 1: this better, give me a second. It's the idea that
Speaker 1: you were the product, right, Like, because the Internet is free,
Speaker 1: someone has to pay in order to keep these tech
Speaker 1: companies running, and so they run on ad revenue and
Speaker 1: adds the goal of an AD is to get you
Speaker 1: to change your behavior so you use the product. The
Speaker 1: ad is advertising. And what a lot of the documentary
Speaker 1: has done just with interviews of people who created It's
Speaker 1: like the guy who created the endless scroll on Twitter
Speaker 1: is one of the interviewees, and there's like at one
Speaker 1: point the producers ask all these interviewees like do you
Speaker 1: let your children use social media? And all of them
Speaker 1: across the border like, well, no, because I can't stop
Speaker 1: myself from using this tool I created because it's based
Speaker 1: off of human behavior, and human behavior cannot change as
Speaker 1: fast as computer technology changes technology a crazy rate. It's
Speaker 1: like exponentially faster than any other thing that exists. It's
Speaker 1: just constantly changing, so it can learn us faster than
Speaker 1: we can learn and adapt to it. And I think
Speaker 1: probably the same thing is that play here, this idea
Speaker 1: of once you understand humans and their desires, and you
Speaker 1: find small ways to manipulate that. It's most people can't
Speaker 1: help but fall in line because that's just their human Like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're supposed to be out picking fucking berries. And if
Speaker 1: you can replicate that berry picking thing like you can,
Speaker 1: you can make us do anything, because we really want
Speaker 1: them motherfucking berries. Um. It's just that you know now
Speaker 1: now the berries are ford trucks and um prostitutes. Uh,
Speaker 1: but you know it's about accumulation, right, It's this this
Speaker 1: thing in our animal brains that we feel compelled to
Speaker 1: do for reasons that are we're at one point necessary
Speaker 1: and aren't anymore. But if you can, if you can
Speaker 1: trick that part of the brain, um, we'll keep looking
Speaker 1: for those got damn berries. Um. I don't know, I
Speaker 1: don't know how much that ties into this, but yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll tire into it. Because you have all the entire
Speaker 1: group of people who are willing to do, like commit
Speaker 1: human atrocities but for like the like, and and then
Speaker 1: the question becomes like obviously, like people have free will,
Speaker 1: and I don't want to say like, oh, America came
Speaker 1: in and change these people, and you know they were
Speaker 1: something unable to do anything about it. That's not you know,
Speaker 1: the intention of the conversation, but it's like how how
Speaker 1: I guess I'm always trying to put myself in a
Speaker 1: situation of like how would I react to a similar
Speaker 1: set of circumstances and the ease with which I could
Speaker 1: picture myself loved ones falling into these headspaces of like
Speaker 1: how dare these people keep me from the comfort I've
Speaker 1: experienced here? And I don't want to go backwards that
Speaker 1: that fear constantly going backwards. It just it seems so easy,
Speaker 1: so just far too easy to trip into that land. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So this guy we've been talking about, Juan Ricardo UM
Speaker 1: later in his career, you know, he was initially trained
Speaker 1: by soldiers, had been trained at the s o A,
Speaker 1: but eventually he had the fortune to travel to Columbus
Speaker 1: and attend the School of the America's UM and in
Speaker 1: this next passage he recalls kind of the political education
Speaker 1: that he received when he got there. The sergeant said
Speaker 1: that all the communists in Latin America were trained in
Speaker 1: Cuba and that they hated their countries. Those of us
Speaker 1: who were at Fort Benning were going to become the
Speaker 1: leaders of our countries. We all had to unite against communism.
Speaker 1: I questioned the simplicity of all this. I was very imprudent.
Speaker 1: The sergeants just repeated what they learned from their own instructors.
Speaker 1: When I asked him to describe the course in more detail,
Speaker 1: this is Leslie gil writing. He continued, For example, there
Speaker 1: was a section of the course called civic action. It
Speaker 1: was one of the moments when the anti communist doctrine
Speaker 1: really came out. They taught you that when you enter
Speaker 1: a village and make contact with the population, you have
Speaker 1: to make sure there are no communists. They never said
Speaker 1: you never trust anybody. You never enter a home and
Speaker 1: accept a plate of food because a communist might have
Speaker 1: poisoned it. These people are not going to be free
Speaker 1: because of their Marxist indoctrination. I had an argument with
Speaker 1: one of the sergeants. I asked him to explain Marxist doctrine,
Speaker 1: but he couldn't, so I explained it to him. It
Speaker 1: was great. I had already taken a year of social
Speaker 1: science classes. As the university in Lapaz. The sergeants no
Speaker 1: only formulas. The objective is to homogenize the education of
Speaker 1: the school of the America's students. I mean, it's the
Speaker 1: same thing going on in a lot of ways in
Speaker 1: the heads of some of these people. Fucking setting up
Speaker 1: roadblocks near where I lived because they're scared of Antifa
Speaker 1: lighting forest fires. It's because they believe BLM. You know,
Speaker 1: they heard they heard someone talking about the Bureau of
Speaker 1: Land Management on a radio and they believe that BLM
Speaker 1: is a Marxist organization. And what who Marxists seek the
Speaker 1: destruction of their own countries? Because that's what these people,
Speaker 1: that's that's the propaganda. It's not it hasn't changed. It's
Speaker 1: just distributed differently. Like you had to have once upon
Speaker 1: a time. You needed this school to inculcate people, you know,
Speaker 1: and you had to do it in a very deliberate way.
Speaker 1: Now they get taught on Facebook and Twitter and it
Speaker 1: it it will lead to the same thing. It's like
Speaker 1: led to the same thing. I think, Yeah, it's starting to.
Speaker 1: It's starting to. You have a lot of Americans who
Speaker 1: are willing to murder large groups of other people because
Speaker 1: they vaguely think that they're Marxists. I mean, it was
Speaker 1: it two years ago. We had that kid walk right
Speaker 1: into a church and just assassinate people. He just prayed with,
Speaker 1: I mean it's oh no, that was years. That was
Speaker 1: Dylan Ruth. Yeah, time is a weird time, just not Yeah.
Speaker 1: It feels so yeah. Hearing all this, you won't be
Speaker 1: surprised that between nineteen seventy eight, UH in nineteen eighty,
Speaker 1: Bolivia held two general elections and went through five presidents,
Speaker 1: none of whom won an electoral victory. They endured four
Speaker 1: military coups UH, three of which succeeded, and it looks
Speaker 1: as if the nation is actually going through another one
Speaker 1: right now, with the overthrow of left wing president Evo
Speaker 1: Morales by the Bolivian military. It will not surprise you
Speaker 1: to know that a lot of the officers responsible for
Speaker 1: the the coup in Bolivia that happened started happening late
Speaker 1: last year is still kind of going on UM our
Speaker 1: School of the America's graduates. Now. By the later nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: the Department of Defense was beginning to receive a lot
Speaker 1: of complaints about all the horrible crimes committed by s
Speaker 1: A graduates. In nineteen Yeah, in nineteen eighty nine, they
Speaker 1: started mandating that all school instructors take sixteen whole hours
Speaker 1: of human rights training UM, which didn't solve the problem.
Speaker 1: Oddly enough, with the Cold War ended, the Pentagon rather
Speaker 1: seamlessly switched from funding anti communist death squads to funding
Speaker 1: anti narcotics efforts in places like Lumbia. The people s
Speaker 1: o A graduates murdered remained the same. They were still
Speaker 1: mostly left wing activists, indigenous people, you know, Marxist guerrillas,
Speaker 1: but like a lot of just like indigenous people, um
Speaker 1: more innocent local people who just might be sympathetic with
Speaker 1: a group of guerillas who were fighting the soldiers who
Speaker 1: kept murdering their family members, anybody else. That's who these
Speaker 1: groups were always killing. But the way they the victims
Speaker 1: were referred to change now. They weren't communists, they were
Speaker 1: narco guerrillas. And after Narco guerrillas, when the War on
Speaker 1: Terror started off, the victims started being called terrorists. Now.
Speaker 1: In response to a sizeable protest movement based near Fort
Speaker 1: Benning in two thousand, President Clinton made a big show
Speaker 1: of closing the School of the America's. It was reopened
Speaker 1: almost immediately under a new name, the Western Hemisphere Institute
Speaker 1: for Security Cooperation wine SEC. Now, Yeah, like when we
Speaker 1: ran out of America's. Yeah, it's different now, guys, we
Speaker 1: fixed it. They did rejigger. Their name is wine Sex.
Speaker 1: That's the acronym Wine. Second, I'm gonna call him Seck. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So they did have their curriculum rejiggered a bit to
Speaker 1: um appease the bleeding heart Democrats who were angry at
Speaker 1: all the murder um. There were new courses added in
Speaker 1: d mining and like the removal of minds, and like
Speaker 1: in human rights. Uh. And leslie Gill notes that like
Speaker 1: these were like the least attended courses at the school
Speaker 1: um and she was able to visit at this point
Speaker 1: once it got changed into Wine sec in the early aughts.
Speaker 1: Is part of this like full court pr press by
Speaker 1: the Pentagon to like deal with the fact that they
Speaker 1: had gotten a bad reputation, so they invited in a
Speaker 1: bunch of activists who campaign to shut down the School
Speaker 1: of the America's in order to like show them the
Speaker 1: new courses and like make the case that things had
Speaker 1: changed for the better. They invited in journalists, and of
Speaker 1: course they invited in leslie Gill. Now, as part of
Speaker 1: this pr blitz, Leslie got to meet with the head
Speaker 1: of the school, a general named Glenn Whitener. There's an
Speaker 1: American general. In one passage, she attempts to have him
Speaker 1: speak on the subject of the numerous massacres in war
Speaker 1: crimes committed by School of America's graduates. And I'm going
Speaker 1: to read this passage because his responses will sound very
Speaker 1: similar to anyone who's listened to a police press conference lately.
Speaker 1: Acknowledging that a few bad apples from Latin America had
Speaker 1: attended the School of the America's, Whitener insists that these
Speaker 1: individuals were never taught torture techniques and that their crimes
Speaker 1: represented the unconscionable acts of a few rogue actors, not
Speaker 1: the teachings of the s o A or the policies
Speaker 1: of terrorist states. He maintained that some graduates who stood
Speaker 1: accused of human rights violations had only taken short courses
Speaker 1: on benign topics such as auto maintenance, and had trained
Speaker 1: at the school years before their alleged crimes took place.
Speaker 1: It was unconscionable. He argued for critics to point fingers
Speaker 1: at the school and claimed that it caused these men
Speaker 1: to commit crimes. In a rationalization of the School of
Speaker 1: the America's that I would hear from others. Whitener pointed
Speaker 1: out that the UNI bomber went to Harvard. Does that mean,
Speaker 1: he asked rhetorically, that Harvard caused him to kill people?
Speaker 1: Does that mean that Harvard should be shut down? Whitener
Speaker 1: and others at the s o A thus did not
Speaker 1: deny the reality of human rights violations, but his argument
Speaker 1: treated a prominent university and a military school as comparable institutions. Harvard, however,
Speaker 1: did not teach combat skills to Latin American soldiers. Moreover,
Speaker 1: the United States government had used its military apparatus, including
Speaker 1: the s o A, to support Latin American armed forces
Speaker 1: with bad human rights records for decades. Yet if one
Speaker 1: objected to his confused logic, Widener dismissed the critique as
Speaker 1: anti military and thus unacceptable. Hey, can't be anti police.
Speaker 1: They protect you even if they don't. That's what they're doing.
Speaker 1: A lot going on here. That including the fact that
Speaker 1: he's like, well what about you know, UNI mom and
Speaker 1: went to Harvard? Why aren't people lingered hot and asshole?
Speaker 1: I would say, yeah, sorry, go ahead, no, No, I
Speaker 1: like imagine being like, hey, we've found like eleven people
Speaker 1: have committed atrocities can't be our problem. The only like
Speaker 1: seeing response to me is to be like, let me
Speaker 1: investigate that, because that seems wildly out of step with
Speaker 1: what I thought my institution was trying to do. To
Speaker 1: say like, like, serial colors come from all over the place,
Speaker 1: but no other schools produced eleven that become dictators. Get
Speaker 1: your head out of your ass, and thousands of perpetrates.
Speaker 1: Thousands of perpetrators tied to the School of the Americas.
Speaker 1: Thousands of individual people who committed acts of murder in
Speaker 1: genocide can be tied to the School of the Americas.
Speaker 1: If Harvard, if a thousand Harvard graduates in the course
Speaker 1: of like twenty years had started male bombing campaigns and
Speaker 1: be like, there might be something wrong with Harvard's going
Speaker 1: we should look into Harvard. Um. Yeah, Like everyone would
Speaker 1: be saying that if there was this one school that
Speaker 1: kept making unibombers, we would all be like, what the
Speaker 1: funk is going on at Harvard? Somebody should look into
Speaker 1: this ship. Maybe we shouldn't have Harvard anymore. It seems
Speaker 1: like all it does is make unibombers. There's also no institution,
Speaker 1: particularly one that carries guns and oftentimes produces policies for
Speaker 1: major like countries, networks, individuals. Uh, that should be above
Speaker 1: scrutiny and the idea to say like, oh, that's anti
Speaker 1: military and just the most to me, that's that's the first, like,
Speaker 1: that's the loudest signal to me that we're in cult territory.
Speaker 1: In the same way that I firmly believe that the
Speaker 1: police are a form of occult, that these people have
Speaker 1: just bought into their uniform and this idea that they
Speaker 1: are a military for the country, which was not at
Speaker 1: all your intended purpose. I can't, I cannot yep. I
Speaker 1: hate it here. It's not great here. Uh, it's not
Speaker 1: great here. I don't love it. Um. You know what
Speaker 1: I do love, though, Joel, Raytheon. You know, one of
Speaker 1: the few bright spots in this dark world of imperialism
Speaker 1: and murder are the wonderful products of the Raytheon Corporation. Joel,
Speaker 1: have you ever thought I want to fire missiles via
Speaker 1: robot at groups of indistinct men in vehicles, but I
Speaker 1: don't want to accidentally blow up as many school buses.
Speaker 1: Is that a thought you've had? Uh? Not yet, Robert, Well,
Speaker 1: if you want to wage a brutal counterinsurgency campaign and
Speaker 1: blow up slightly few school buses. After blowing up quite
Speaker 1: a few school buses, you need the new r X
Speaker 1: for a knife missile from rape. Yes, Sophie, you do
Speaker 1: know that you don't need to do another advert. I
Speaker 1: was gonna let you finish, but because you were doing
Speaker 1: so well and you do, I'm just I this is
Speaker 1: we're beyond money. So the my enthusiasm for Raytheon's fine
Speaker 1: product line is not is not a is not a
Speaker 1: shallow capitalist, right, this is this is your love. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the r X four is you know, like I said,
Speaker 1: there's no better way to murder the specific terrorists you
Speaker 1: want to murder without blowing up school buses as the
Speaker 1: r X four. If you're feeling like I've blown up
Speaker 1: too many school buses in Yemen, the r X four
Speaker 1: is the answer for you and for Yemen. How much
Speaker 1: is the r X four going to run me, Robert?
Speaker 1: Just enough to fund a couple of schools? Okay, that's
Speaker 1: reasonably we don't need any Yeah those schools that much?
Speaker 1: We gotta we gotta play anyway. Nobody needs schools. In fact,
Speaker 1: Target number two Yeah, yeah, shoots some shoots some nice
Speaker 1: knife missiles at the schools whatever fuck it? Raytheon anyway, Joel,
Speaker 1: you wanna how are you feeling at the end of
Speaker 1: all this? Um? At the end of this Uh informed, Robert.
Speaker 1: I feel informed and and better able to hopefully again
Speaker 1: just identify the patterns that we're seeing and be vocal
Speaker 1: in my opposition of them. It is um so upsetting
Speaker 1: to have lived in be a current member and party
Speaker 1: of a country that has committed such a chastity's um.
Speaker 1: I don't want these things to happen in the name
Speaker 1: of my country anymore. I really like so many aspects
Speaker 1: of being an American, so many Americans do I love. Uh,
Speaker 1: this cannot continue? Yeah, Well, today has been a fun episode.
Speaker 1: We all enjoyed things, we learned a lot. I think
Speaker 1: we're all bummed out now. So go do some push ups. Uh.
Speaker 1: Go scout out the roads around your house. Uh, in
Speaker 1: order to keep an eye on the right wing militias
Speaker 1: that that might try to set up death squads in
Speaker 1: your area. And more than anything, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: have nothing for you other than what I've given you. Uh,
Speaker 1: go go go make this not happen again. Yes, do
Speaker 1: you have any any plugs. No I have. I've never
Speaker 1: been on the internet before. I actually don't understand what's
Speaker 1: happening to me right now. I was woken up and
Speaker 1: dragged into a darkened room by masked men and told
Speaker 1: to read this script. So that was actually that was
Speaker 1: actually me and Anderson and uh, somehow with a funny
Speaker 1: voice changer, Well, I have nothing to plug that makes
Speaker 1: dog barks sound like scary men. Mm hmm, Well he
Speaker 1: means he sat. I right, okay on Twitter? And where
Speaker 1: I just a spot on Twitter and Instagram and we
Speaker 1: have a Teo public store, And well, did you do
Speaker 1: your plugs? I don't remember, I've blocked out. I didn't.
Speaker 1: I don't have anything to plug. But I do want
Speaker 1: to commend you, Robert, for doing some of the best
Speaker 1: work I have that's personally impacted my life. Like I
Speaker 1: don't know on a large scale what's happening with anything.
Speaker 1: It's like I said, chaos, but I mean it very
Speaker 1: legitimately when I say you've given me a space to
Speaker 1: be more educated and more informed. I am a product
Speaker 1: of the American school system and I need to be
Speaker 1: more informed. So yeah, thank you. Well, yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: we got it. Thank you,