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September 17, 2020 79 mins


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Speaker 1 (00:02):
What burning down my entire West Coast. I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards, the only podcast recorded in
the midst of a haze of disaster smoke, uh and
human misery. Um, talking about something that also generated a

(00:25):
lot of horrible smoke and human misery, The School of
the Americas. This is part two of our special series
on the US just just fucking around in Latin America
getting a lot of people killed. And my guest as
all well as within part one is Joel Monique. Joel,
you are a podcast producer. Uh and uh you are

(00:50):
also the Are you the president? I'm not of of myself. Yes, okay,
you're there, but not of the United States? No, not,
thank god? No, okay, okay, I would. This is good
to know because I was going to actually be very
angry at you about the wildfire response, but apparently you

(01:12):
had nothing to do with that. Um, so I guess, I'll,
I guess, I guess we're cool. Um. Sorry, I forgot
who the president was briefly, and since you were on
my computer culture critic, that's a kind of president in
a way, aren't we all the president of critiquing culture? Yes,

(01:34):
wasn't that what Gamergate was about basically was it I
don't know about a lot of things. So which happened? Yeah, okay,
uh so Joel, how are you? We're doing this normally
we do both parts of a two part episode in
the same day. We took a little breather, took a

(01:55):
little breather, and then the entire country caught on fire. Yes,
so I don't know, how are you? How are you
holding up? I'm not yet on fire and counting my
blessings and oh god, I'm actually really glad we took
I'm trying to encourage more people to like allow themselves

(02:17):
space to breathe in a very serious way, Like I
feel like before this we had all of this culture
surrounding like self care and also but like, guys, seriously,
there was ever a time to like take a nap
every once in a while and to like say no,
you can't do that. Thing, which is something I'm really
trying to work on now is absolutely it's so chaotic.
This is easily the most chaos most of us have

(02:38):
ever experienced in our lives. Ever. Um, you can you
can rest at times now? All the time you have
we have, say vigilant there's a lot to take care of,
but my God, please like just allow yourself in space.
So with that, I am not crying today yet, so
I feel good to keep going, keep learning, hopefully make

(02:59):
some pause to change in the near future. Well that's
a good way to look at things. Um, let's let's
pivot directly from that to talking about unbelievable war crimes
committed on behalf of us interests in parts of the
world that are very close to our country and and
we're crying again. Yeah, let's let's do it behind the

(03:22):
bastards does best and let everybody know that the world's
more funcked up than they thought it was. It is
kind of comforting, you know. I think a lot of
people who I think there are a lot of people
who have lived pretty comfortable existences because we've we've we've
all sort of come up and our had our childhoods
in this period of relative calm that's unusual in human

(03:45):
history and also was very geographically isolated. The calm was localized, right, Um,
And hearing stories like this makes you understand that like
this chaos and like uncertainty and fear that we're feeling
this like this, like gnawing terror that like death squads
might start coming in the night, that like the state
might send security forces out to murder you. This like

(04:06):
thing that's new to most Americans. Uh is what we've
been doing to a bunch of people for decades. And uh,
let's let's yeah, let's so that's important to understand. So yes, yes,
there's a reason we have been deserved and disrupted. And
I feel like, at the very least, hopefully now we
can have better empathy and you're like thoughtful action. Yeah,

(04:30):
and we can understand the patterns that we're about to
see replicated in our own country and attempt to disrupt them. Perhaps.
So in December of nineteen eight one, dozens of El
Salvador and graduates of the School of the America's converged
on El Mazotte, a tiny village in the northern hills
of the Morazon Province. Now Morizon was a stronghold of

(04:51):
for the Feri Bundo Martine National Liberation Front or f
l m N, a leftist militant group resisting El Salvador's
far right government, which was of course enthusiastically backed by
the Reagan administration. Now, the US had been admitting increasing
numbers of El Salvadoran soldiers into the School of the
Americas for years as this conflict heat it up, so
like leftist militants start gaining you know, power and sort

(05:14):
of the hill areas and like fighting the government, and
we start just just taking more and more of these
guys into the s o A, which is generally the strategy.
You see the government sees our government sees left wing
activism sort of picking up in a country, and they
start propagandizing and brainwashing more of that nation's soldiers in
the School of the Americas. So once Reagan took office,

(05:36):
he started sending in Special Forces advisers to help out
in that neighborly way that only special Forces can. Elmazote
was one of several small villages suspective hosting rebel fighters,
acting as their u S trainers had taught them. The
soldiers of Al Salvador's Elite Ulcado Battalion started their operations
by pounding the outlying portions of several towns flat with

(05:56):
a multi hour artillery barrage. Then grant, yeah, it's just
what you do. Then ground troops moved in on December tenth,
securing Almazote and ordering all residents out into the town square.
By the way, as a pro tip, since this might
be useful for everybody, if you find yourself in the
middle of like a genocide or a government crackdown that
involves death squads, and somebody tells you to gather in

(06:18):
the town square, don't gather in the town square. It
never ends. Well, that's like the top place for massacring
people is the town square. Avoid the town square if
things go real bad in your country. So anyway, the
US trained soldiers of that Lakato battalion separated the men
in Almazote from the women, which is, you know, another
bad sign. They also separated out all of the children

(06:40):
and forced them into a small building next to the
village church. The soldiers spent the rest of the day
executing every single person in Almazote. They killed the children last,
perhaps because they needed to psych themselves up for such
a gruesome task. Rather than look at what they were
doing and look into the eyes of these little kids,
the soldiers just fired into the building where the town's
children were held. Then they set it on fire before

(07:00):
they left. Years later, that building was excavated, revealing the
remains of at least a hundred and forty three victims inside.
The average age was six. After wiping Christ, Jesus Christ,
what the how? Wow? Yeah, children, it's amazing. And this
is specifically the battalion of the El Salvadoran Army that

(07:22):
was that is trained and armed by the United States.
Um like these guys were all trained by active due
to US soldiers in how to do this like they
were not. This isn't just some foreign country where people
did a horrible thing because of some dictator. These are
the guys we trained, using that training to, among other things,
shoot a hundred and forty three children to death in
a building outside of a Catholic church. So after wiping

(07:44):
almostote off the map, the men of the Applicatto Battalion
and their US advisors headed to the nearby town of
Laoya to repeat the process. We know what happened thanks
to the stories of a handful of lucky survivors. One
of them, Rosario Lopez, was just fast enough to get
out of town with her husband and three children. Ario
hit up on a hill while twenty four of her
family members were massacred, including her parents, two sisters, seventeen

(08:06):
nieces and nephews. So yeah, her husband Jose later recalled
to a journalist. I heard the commotion the prayers from
where I was hiding up in the mountain. It was
shooting at a bunch of kids, and some of them
cried and others had stopped. Now, Jose Rosario and their
children had on that mountain for five days until Jose
finally felt brave enough to descend and check for survivors.

(08:27):
The first body he found was one of his wife's sisters.
She had clearly been raped before being executed. Further in,
he saw the bodies of the town's children stacked in
a pile, their faces too damaged by fire and decay
for him to recognize. He and a few other days
survivors did what they could to bury their bones. Altogether,
the brave men of the at Licatto Battalion killed at
least nine hundred and seventy eight people in just a

(08:48):
couple of days. Nearly half of their victims were under
the age of twelve. Years later, one survivor would report
hearing an officer threatened to murder one soldier who expressed
an unwillingness to shoot children. Now, as far as we know,
I don't believe any US troops were present during the
Elmazote massacre, but the killing was done by soldiers who
had again been trained by US Special Forces uh and

(09:09):
it was under the command of officers who'd all graduated
from the School of the America's Those little boys and
girls were also gunned down by US made M sixteen
assault rifles, which had been given to El Salvador as
part of the one million dollars a day in military
aid that the Reagan administration sent into the country. When
Ronald Reagan took office, Latin America was in the grip
of yet another wave of revolutions. The Sandinistas had overthrown

(09:31):
the dictator of Nicaragua in nineteen seventy nine, and by
the time Ronnie was sworn in on a bible made
of jelly beans, left wing guerrilla movements in Guatemala and
El Salvador looked like they might be on the verge
of victory. Two. And I'm gonna quote here from an
article in the Intercept in retrospect, it's clear that these
were inevitable revolutions. The title of one history of the period,
tiny cruel white oligarchs had ruled over indigenous peasants across

(09:54):
the region for hundreds of years, and sooner or later
the dam was going to break. But to the Reaganites,
this was all the work of the international communist conspiracy
headquartered in Moscow and had to be crushed by any
means necessary. Now, the article I just quoted from the
intercept was written by John Schwarz, a journalist I quite
respect he wrote that article this very year in partial

(10:15):
response to some new developments in the decades old quest
to hold some of the perpetrators of elma Zotte accountable
for their crimes. But John's greater purpose was to highlight
how similar many of the tactics the Reagan administration used
to cover up its complicity and foreign massacres are two
tactics being used right now by the Trump administration. And
considering the number of armed Trump supporters talking about mass

(10:35):
murdering their political foes, like within five minutes of my house, uh,
you can see why it's relevant. Uh So this is
really important to talk about for more reasons than just
understanding a historic crime. This has bearing on what's going
to happen to a lot of people listening to this
podcast in the future. If things go as bad as
they could go, so Elmazotte was never supposed to become

(10:56):
public knowledge the Reagan administration when this happened. The An
administration was in the process of trying to sell Congress
on a partnership with the Salvadoran government, and one requirement
that Congress had put forward was that the President would
have to certify by January twenty nine, nine two, that
El Salvador was quote making a concerted and significant effort
to comply with internationally recognized human rights. Now, if he couldn't,

(11:20):
all u s A del Salvador a million dollars a
day and guns and other baby killing tools would be
cut off. So there were high stakes here. Now. The
Reagan administration was very unhappy when they started hearing the
first reports from Almazote, not because of the thousand people
who had been killed, but because this was bad for
them politically. It was going to be providing yeah feed
for the Democrats. So the first move that they took

(11:42):
was to write off the rumors of the massacre as
a trick by left wing guerrillas. But then on January
nine two, two days before congress is deadline, the New
York Times in the Washington Post both published front page
stories about the massacre. Writing in the intercept, John de
tales what happened next. Thomas Enders, a career diplomat who

(12:02):
at the time was Assistant Secretary of State for inter
American Affairs, later said that Elmazotte, if true, might have
destroyed the entire effort in El Salvador. What to do?
The answer had been articulated by Richard Nixon years earlier,
as was born out by Nixon's direct experience during Watergate,
few things are more dangerous to conservative priorities than good journalism. Therefore,
as a top Nixon aid later recalled, Nixon believed that

(12:24):
it was necessary to fight the press through the nutcutters,
as the president called them, forcing our own news make
a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition. That's what Nixon said,
Fight the president through the nutcutters, forcing our own news,
make a brutal attack on the opposition. So the pushback
began with congressional testimony by Enders. There's no reason to
confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians, he told a

(12:46):
House subcommittee. What about the number of victims? Bonner's article
had mentioned a list of seven hundred and thirty three
compiled by villagers as well as Italian of nine twenty
six from a human rights organization, Elliot Abrams, whod just
taken off as a six assistant set Terry of State
for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, and formed the Senate
that the numbers, first of all, were not credible. Our
information was that there were only three people in the canton.

(13:09):
This was clear conscious deceit on part of Abram's. Both
the Times and Post articles had written that the massacre
had taken place in several locations. Then came the assault
from the administration's outside allies. On February tenth, The Wall
Street Journal ran a lengthy editorial titled the Media's War.
Americans were badly confused about the situation in El Salvador
thanks to the US press. Almazote was not a massacre,

(13:30):
the journal wrote, but a quote unquote massacre. What what
unquote massacre? Yeah? Yeah. On the one hand, the number
of dead had been obviously exaggerated, and on the other
maybe the killing had been carried out by rebels dressed
in government uniforms. Bonner was credulous, a reporter out on
a limb and like reporters in Vietnam a sucker for

(13:52):
communist sources. One of the editorials authors appeared on PBS
to proclaim that obviously Ray Bonner has a political orientation,
so there's a lot that's that that's going on here. Um,
but it's all very familiar. So first of all, what
you see is Abram's getting up there and throwing out
a bunch of lies at once. Uh. Number one, like

(14:12):
throwing out a sound by like Elzote is not a massacre.
It's a quote unquote massacre. Uh. The number of dead
have been exaggerated. Oh and maybe they were also killed
by rebels dressed as soldiers. There's no evidence for any
of this. He's just throwing out a bunch of claims
that then have to be dealt with and like responded
to by the Times and by the Washington Post. And
it helps to drum up this idea that there's debate

(14:33):
over whether or not anybody was killed, and that allows
Americans to kind of shut their ears to it. And
it works. This is the same thing the Trump administration
does now. It always works. It works extremely well. Um.
And of course he starts to attack. This is one
of the reasons why I'm less concerned these days about
pretending to not have a bias as a reporter, because
Bonner here is doing as much as he possibly can.

(14:55):
He's he's a very good traditional reporter doing very good
tradition reporting, and he gets called a communist basically, because
that's what they do. It doesn't matter what you say,
it doesn't matter how biased you are or aren't, They're
going to call you a communist if you're reporting on
things that are bad to them. So yeah, Accuracy in Media,
which was a conservative media criticism organization, went further, declaring

(15:19):
Bonner was raging a propaganda war favoring the Marxist guerrillas
in El Salvador Um. So yeah, it worked. Bonner was
pulled out of Central America by the Times and sent
back to New York for more training in journalism. Yeah. Yeah,
the Times did what they do. It's the It's the
New York Times, right. They're always going to they're always

(15:40):
going to publish that first good story, and they're always
going to back away and run a bunch of op
eds with wing nuts claiming that that story was bullshit
because they're scared of being seen as taking a stance
on anything. That's how it's gonna be. Yeah, that's how
it That's how it was in the thirties too. Yeah,
you know, that's just the way it goes at all

(16:03):
papers being reliant on advertising dollars. It's really I mean,
we've already seen it destroy like most like solid sources
of internet journalism, and the papers have been fighting it
for so long. Like at the local level particularly, we've
seen a lot of like good local journalism. But this
idea that companies that are like oh god, to keep

(16:26):
selling and being willing to print just the most ridiculous
ship or good ship and then like retracting it and
disrespecting their reporters who they must have a relationship with,
they must know like this person's ability and their skills.
Like it's such a pr move and so not about
like the core ethics of journalism. It's astounding. It's astounding

(16:47):
that it's allowed to permeate like this. It's not great,
not very good. So yeah, the disinformation campaign worked, at
least in the immediate term. Uh yeah. Bonder gets pulled out,
sent back to New York for training, and other reporters
learned from his example. It was dangerous to report on
any story that might be seen as sympathetic to left
wing militants in Latin America. Meanwhile, the right wing militants

(17:10):
who controlled El Salvador continued to receive US aid. Their
soldiers continued to attend the School of the America's in
order to learn how to be the best desk ones
they could be. By the time the violence was all over,
they'd killed more than seventy five thousands El Salvadorans, the
per capita equivalent of five million Americans, So this is
a huge chunk of the country. The government was responsible
for eighty five percent of these deaths. Now, the good

(17:33):
news is that at present a number of culprits have
finally been stripped of their immunity. There was a law
for a while that basically was trying to make peace
between the two sides and said that like, nobody gets
punished for their war crimes. But that got partly at
least reversed. And so some of these guys are in
the process and these these these court cases are going
on right now, right and there's even there's been requests made.

(17:54):
The Obama administration released some evidence uh and declassified some
files to allow the court case is to proceed. They
made request of the Trump administration that obviously haven't been
um listened to, in part because uh, the U S mility.
Like while some of the El Salvadoran military leaders who
helped make Elmazote happen have been punished, the Americans who

(18:15):
were responsible never did. In fact, Elliot Abrams went on
to become part of George W. Bush's National Security Council.
In today he's Trump's Special Representative for Venezuela. Um So,
speaking of nightmarish, unforgivable crimes against humanity committed at the
behest of Republicans, you want to talk about Guatemala. WHOA,

(18:35):
let's get into it. Yeah, I'm a big Guatemala fan.
It's great country. It's a beautiful country. Yeah. Yeah, it's
been horrible to it. We've been real bad to it,
real bad to it. Um it's one of the most
beautiful places I've ever been in my life. Um I
I ran across a T shirt over there that was like,

(18:57):
I think the thing written on it was something like
Guatemala is like how nature exaggerates or how nature puts
in an exclamation point. And if you go to places
like La La Lan, you really feel that because it's
this like lan is one of the deepest lakes in
Central America. Um, and it's just surrounded by a ring
of volcanoes. Like look a look at pictures of this place.

(19:18):
It's absolutely astonishing. Um. And when I was there at
least um, Like, one of the things people would tell
us is that, like the military is not allowed in
here anymore, Like we don't let them in because of
some of the things we're about to talk about. Um, wait,
can you how do you keep the military out? Uh?

(19:39):
You know, I think it's I think it was just
sort of a matter of like after a lot of
the massacres, they kind of pulled out of certain areas
where they've been killing the Maya, and they were like,
there's kind of like I don't know, I got we
got stopped on the road a couple of times by
just sort of groups of men with m sixteens and
not wearing uniforms really but operating what we're clearly checkpoint.

(19:59):
I don't like, it was very unclear to me. I'm
not like guatemal In politics is extremely complicated. But yeah, yeah,
so Robert, you want to know what isn't extremely complicated?
The products and services that support this podcast. Word alright,

(20:22):
we're back, so back in nineteen fifty four, Like, Guatemala
is great, hard not to love it. Um. The problem
is that in nineteen fifty four, the United Fruit Company
was also in love with Guatemala UM, particularly they're they're
wonderful bananas. Now. Unfortunately, the democratically elected leader of Guatemala
in nineteen fifty four was a dude named Jacobo Arbez

(20:44):
who didn't like that a foreign country owned a large
chunk of the Guatemalan economy. Because these fruit companies owned
huge amounts of Guatemalan land that had been sold to
them basically by corrupt like ali arcs in Guatemala who
had stolen it from indigenous people um, and then sold
it to US corporations for a fraction of what it

(21:05):
was actually worked, which allowed these corporations to basically enslave
Guatemalan workers. And it was horrible. It sounds like the
typical chain of command. Yes, indigenous people to oligarch to
United States. Yeah, and so our Beds comes to power
and he's like, I'm going to nationalize all this ship, right,
Like I'm gonna make all this ship. Everybody's like, I'm

(21:25):
going to take this land that was sold illegally to
these U S corporations, and I'm going to redistribute it
to the peasants um and we're going to like try
to undo the damage that the start of globalization has
done to Guatemala. Beautiful dream, A beautiful dream. You may
recognize this is not all that different from what was
happening over in Chile with Saladora end A at a

(21:45):
pretty similar time. Um. So yeah, our bez comes to power,
he promises to do this, and United Fruit, who owns
this land, goes to the CIA and it's like, guys,
you gotta do something about this. He's gonna take away
our banana land. And so the CIA is like, don't worry, bro,
we got you. And then they pick up their US

(22:07):
trained Guatemalan soldiers who would all like all these guys
who've gone to the s o A and who were
already inculcated, and like, yeah, I wanna I want to
personally get wealthy, um by being a corrupt oligarch. And
if all I have to do is murdersome indigenous people
and Marxists and whatnot, that sounds great to me. I
hate those people anyway, because that's partly what I've been

(22:27):
trained to do in the School of the America. So
they overthrow your Cobo r best Um and this winds
up sparking a civil war in Guatemala. And that happens
in a lot of countries too, But in Guatemala, that
fucking war just does not end. It goes on for
thirty six goddamn years. Yeah, it is, it is. They
are just it is horrible in Guatemala. You can't exaggerate

(22:49):
how much this completely fux society in that country, because
it's just it's a generation and a half of of
more or less constant sometimes low level sometimes you know.
But but like war Um in the military junta that
came to power didn't just hate Marxists, they hated again
the local indigenous people who were descendants of the Maya

(23:09):
um and the like. The these kind of local Maya
groups were seen as being allies of the Marxist guerrillas
in the hill Uh, and eventually the Guatemalan state, which
was overwhelmingly run by military officers trained by the US,
decided the only way to fight this insurgency was to
destroy the indigenous villages that gave it shelter. Over thirty
six long years of war, US trained forces killed as

(23:31):
many as two hundred thousand people, many of whom were Maya.
And I'm gonna quote here from the Los Angeles Times
reporting on sort of how this all shook out. A
report by a United Nations backed truth commission after the
thirty six years Civil war formally ended in nineteen nine six,
found that security forces had inflicted multiple acts of savagery
and genocide against Maya communities. The campaign included bombing villages

(23:54):
and attacking fleeing residents, impaling victims, burning people alive, severing limbs,
throwing children the pits filled with bodies and killing them,
disemboweling civilians, and slashing open the wounds of pregnant women.
Which let's think right now to the story that just
broke today of the United States government giving forced hist
ectomes to women who are in to migrant women who
are in our custody at camps on the border, just

(24:18):
the fancier version of what they were doing. Uh. The
goal is the same to stop certain groups of people
from having children. So the massacres, the scorch deirth operations,
forced disappearances, and executions of Mayan authorities, leaders and spiritual
guides were not only an attempt to destroy the social
base of the guerrillas, but above all, to destroy the
cultural values that ensured cohesion and collective action in Mayan communities.

(24:38):
The Commission for Historical Clarification said the Guatemalan government was
responsible for more than ninety percent of deaths, disappearances, and
other human rights violations during the war. The Commission said,
the state deliberately exaggerated a limited insurgent threat to justify
large scale repression. The Commission found and again, what that
what that quote from the Commission for Historical Clarification is saying,

(25:00):
is that the Guatemalan government with the US, is backing
committed genocide. That's what genocide is, an attempt to destroy
a culture. So in the nineteen seventies, which is kind
of in the middle of this whole war, President Jimmy
Carter attempted to put a halt to the violence, and
he did this by banning all military aid to Guatemala
in order to force the government to take action on
its horrible human rights record. Now, this was in general

(25:21):
another period, Like I said, we're left wing insurgencies were
starting to gain ground in Latin America, and Carter's decision
infuriated the American right wing. In nineteen eighty two, a
three man military and took headed by evangelical preacher and
School of America's graduate, General Efrain Rios Mont, took power
in Guatemala. Now, Rio's Mont had been one of the
School of America's first students, graduating back in nineteen fifty

(25:44):
one when the school was just three years old, and
when he finally took power, the Reagan administration was happy
to know they had a steadfast ally they could trust
to think the right way about things. And Rio's Mont
is a very interesting guy because again he's in the
military in nineteen seventies six. He comes under the influence
of a bunch of America and evangelical preachers and he
converts and becomes and like takes a break from being
in the military to be like a radio preacher and stuff.

(26:07):
Like he's like Jerry Folwell, but he's also a general
um and he is a hard core like religious conservative,
very much in mind with the American right wing. So
Rio's Mont under his like, you know, again, the war
had been going on for a while, but under Rio
s Mont it, it escalates to a new stage of horror.
And in objective terms, um yeah. Before we get onto

(26:32):
objective terms, I want to read a couple of different
quotes from survivors of the horror that Rios Mont put out.
And this is from an article in h in a
c l a Um called Rios Mont the evangelist so uh.
An unnamed survivor from Aguacotton, Huetenango, the military came to
burn whole families out, to burn their houses, and not

(26:53):
just their houses, but the people themselves. They burned men,
women and children who died in flames, incinerated. It caused
us terror, It caused this a lot of fear. Another
unnamed survivor from Robin al Baja Vera pause. The military
officials raped the women who were twelve and thirteen years old.
The girls couldn't do anything because there were so many
soldiers lining up to take their turn. First they raped
them and then they killed them. Another unnamed survivor from

(27:16):
the same town. The children were kicked to death. The
children shouted and shouted and then they were silent. So
that's Rio's Mont, whoa uh trying sorry, trying to um
kicking a person to death is such a laborious task,
like it can't be done quickly, and as we you know,

(27:41):
you spoke earlier about like soldiers not being allowed really
to back out otherwise potentially suffering the same fate. That's
so much psychological damage done, not just to the victims,
but also to the people actively participating in these murder Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(28:02):
what a human toll. I mean, it's one of those
things you actually you read about things like the Nazi
genocides and not just not like the constant like the
one of the things people don't understand about the Holocaust
is that the concentration camps were not plan a. The
concentration camps were in part a result of the fact
that the German high command learned during the course of

(28:22):
executing genocides that their soldiers couldn't survive massacurring civilians. There
was a particular massacre called body Yard where they shot
like thirty thousand people to death in a single day,
and it just destroyed a lot of these soldiers. Which
is not to like not saying like these Nazis need sympathy,
but like human beings can't do that, most of them,

(28:42):
and so people men were shooting themselves and drinking themselves
to death. And one of the reasons why the camps
got built is because there was this understanding by the
high command that like, oh shit, we can't like we're
we're going to be suffering like casualties we can't afford
in order to carry out these genocides. We need to
find a way to do them while exposing the minimum

(29:03):
number of soldiers to the savagery that's necessary in them. UM. Anyway,
speaking line distinction is just that's why you do it.
And it's also why you really need to have a
religious justification for what you're doing, because it makes it
easier to convince people that they're doing the right thing
by killing these godless communists. Speaking of that, Ronald Reagan

(29:25):
won the presidency in nineteen eighty by flipping the evangelical
vote away from the Democrats who had helped elect Carter
a little bit earlier. UM and two of his big backers.
Of Reagan's big backers where of course, Jerry Fallwell and
Pat Robertson, we talked about this in our Fallwell episode.
Carl Rio's mont was friends with Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson.
They were great buddies. He considered them spiritual advisors, and

(29:45):
Reagan developed a friendship with Rio's Mont. In nineteen eighty two,
while all of this kicking children to death thing stuff
was going on, Reagan traveled to Guatemala and basically said
that all of the stories of genocide there were lies
and that Rio's Mont was totally dedicated the democracy in Guatemala.
He said, frankly, I'm inclined to believe that Rio's Mont
has been getting a bum wrap. Yeah, easy to do.

(30:13):
I guess when your agenda is being achieved. Yeah, overlook
kicking babies to death. Yeah, well, it's just some babies.
Reagan also said that Rio's Mont had great personal integrity. Um. Yeah,
and he blamed the media. Uh. In nineteen eighty three,
he lifted the arms embargo on Guatemala, flooding the country
with helicopter parts that the government needed to continue its genocide.

(30:36):
During his first year in power, Rios Monts soldiers massacred
more than ten thousand civilians. Four villages were wiped off
the face of the earth. Uh. Yeah. Years later, a
Reconciliation Commission report would find that U s A during
this period had a quote significant bearing on human rights
violations during the armed confrontation. Now, typing that out excise
as a major part of the story. Because the crimes

(30:57):
committed by the Guatemalan government weren't just enabled by US
weaponry and carried out by soldiers trained by the Army.
Acts of torture and even genocide were regularly carried out
with the help of active duty American soldiers. And this
brings me to the story of Sister Diana Ortiz. She
was a us Ursulin nun in n She traveled to
Guatemala to teach little kids how to read. Unfortunately, the

(31:17):
Guatemalan government was somewhat distrustful of the Catholic Church for
reasons will discuss a little later. The church is part
of its mission to help the poor, often wound up
sending its people into the same impoverished communities that were
such hotbeds from Marxist guerrillas. So the government caught sister
Ortiz as she was traveling to an isolated rural community
to deliver necessary aid. She was kidnapped, repeatedly raped, and
burned with cigarettes while she was tortured for information. Now,

(31:41):
thousands of other Guatemalan women found themselves in similar situations,
and we didn't hear from most of them because most
of them died or were too terrified of the consequences
of talking to ever come out. But sister Ortiz managed
to survive an escape, and she was eventually able to
report on the details of her ordeal, particularly the fact
that her torture sessions had been directed by an amor
arikan man. He gave the orders while a knife was

(32:02):
forced into her hand and she was made to stab
another woman's body. Um. Yeah. Years later, she would write.
So often it is assumed that torture is conducted for
the purpose of gaining information. It is much more often
intended to threaten populations into silence and submission. What I
was to endure was a message, a warning to others

(32:24):
not to oppose, to remain silent, and to yield to
power without question. And Guatemala, the Catholic Church sought to
walk in company with the suffering poor. I was to
be a message board upon which those in power would
write a warning to the Church to cease its opposition
or be prepared to face the full force of the state.
Something for everybody to keep in mind as the coming

(32:46):
months come. That's what torture is. That's what police violence is.
It's what happens in the streets of Portland when a
police officer punches a seventeen year old in the face
before macing them at point blank range. It's the same,
I Dia. You forced them into silence by causing them
pain and terror. Cool stuff, good, good things. Deep. Yeah.

(33:11):
So while we're talking about the Catholic Church and the
School of America's graduates, we should return to El Salvador
and the story of a brave Catholic priest named Oscar Romero.
Oscar was a leftist part of a wing of the
established Catholic Church that was particularly prominent in Latin America.
The pope at the time, John Paul the Second, and
most of the leadership in Rome were much more conservative,
and Romero preached something that's called liberation theology, which is

(33:34):
a controversial shouldn't be controversial, but it is with especially
within the Catholic Church. It was a controversial interpretation of
the Gospel that stressed justice for the poor and freedom
for the oppressed. So the leadership actually, like in Rome,
a lot of the leadership of the Catholic Church considered
Romero to basically be a terrorist. But this is you know,
it's one of those things when we talk about the
Catholic Church in Guatemala, and there's some other places in

(33:56):
Latin America where they fulfill a similar role. This is
kind of why our current pope is the dude that
he is. He comes from this sort of tradition. There's
a lot of very leftist Catholic priests and nuns and
stuff within Latin America um and it's it's it's very
tight into all of this and it's yeah, and he's
also a Jesuit and that is not too like. It's

(34:17):
one of those things we should like. The Catholic Church
horrible organization, and I think is broadly the or leadership
is broadly on the wrong side of this at the time.
But you also have to acknowledge that, like a lot
of the great heroes in this period were Catholic clergy
um who were put their bodies on the line because
they knew that if they were killed, people would pay attention.

(34:38):
It's wait, so they thought that he was a terrorist
because he wanted justice for the poor. Yeah, he wanted
actual justice for the poor and not just alms for
the poor, like liberation. Theologians were more on the side
of like, well, the poor need to take back their
fucking land that's been stolen from them. Um like breaking. Okay, listen,

(35:00):
the only way that's gonna happen if they started breaking
some commandments, y'all. And I know for a fact you
don't like that. You get really testy when people get
out here and start killing. So, I mean, you know,
the one time Jesus was physically aggressive in the entire
Bible is when he needed to funk up some rich bankers.
So I think I think people like Oscar Omero might

(35:23):
say that Jesus is lesson for us is to funk
up some rich bankers. Jesus, where is this Jesus and
my Catholic Sunday schools? Not that we we I don't
want to. You have to when you talk about like
the church and this, you have to number one, give
proper credit to heroes like Oscar Omero without pretending that

(35:44):
like the broad swath of the Catholic Church supported what
he was doing. But what he was doing was very heroic.
So he goes into these places and he's he's preaching
actively against these death squads that are uh killing the
ship out of people. So he's he starts to he's
speaking up like at the time in nineteen seventy nine, Um,
the government of El Salvador is like kind of broadly

(36:06):
left wing. But there's this because of how the most
recent election with like nineteen seventy nine, this government comes
to power and the right wing gets furious, um, and
it sort of coalesces behind This graduate of the School
of the America is named Roberto Dubuson, and Dobbuson starts
organizing death squads with the funding of a bunch of
rich like landowners and and like corporate magnates, um, and

(36:28):
they start murdering left wing activists and basically anybody who
speaks up on the left is a way to kind
of pave the road for the return to power of
the right in Al Salvador. So, in the wake of
a bunch of executions, Oscar Romero, this Catholic priest takes
to the radio and delivers a speech where he begs
Al Salvadoran soldiers to refuse orders to kill. He tells them,
in the name of God, in the name of this

(36:49):
suffering people whose cries rise to heaven. More loudly each day.
I implore you, I beg you, I order you, in
the name of God, stop the repression. So the very
next day, while he gave another speech, gunman under the
command of Roberto Darbison entered his church and shot him dead.
And the whole assassination was caught on tape. And I'm
gonna play an exerpt from that now because I really

(37:10):
do think that Americans ought to hear it because we
paid for it, right, all the guns, the guns these
guys had, We gave them, the training that that Davison had,
we provided, so people should hear what it sounded like
when it was used. The the sound that the people

(37:49):
make in the wake of that, the screaming from inside
the church is um, like that's that's the sound of imperialism,
and it's distilled and who its purest form, like that's
the sound of the American empire. Uh, and and what
it does to the human soul, Like that's screaming, the
distortion and like the fear and the and the and

(38:11):
the pain. Um. It's important to listen to that. I
think i've as I can listen. I don't know if
you've ever listened to the slate tape narratives, you know
what those are. So in the nineteen thirties, late twenties,
as we're able to start recording like audio, a group

(38:33):
of folks decided that they need to record all of
the last like living slaves in America, Yes, to hear
the story. Yeah yeah, And like ever since, like I
listened to most of them. There aren't that many because
the quality of audio equipment and recording at the time
wasn't great, So we lost a couple of the tapes,

(38:53):
and they preserved and digitize what they can. But like
ever since, like really taking and listen to those and
understanding not just the connection to the past but to
the present, and like in the way words are formed
and the way certain sounds had our ears, Like I
believe firmly in the preservation of atrocity in the hopes
that people actually listen to it and take that in

(39:14):
and you can't hear anguished screams like that, understand the
similarities between what happened there and what's currently happening in
our own backyards and not immediately feel called to action.
Yeah yeah, yep, yeah. So uh Dobison, who again is

(39:34):
the guy who's organizing these death squads, the ones that
kill um Romero. Uh and several supporters were caught on
a farm shortly thereafter with the cash of guns and
other equipment that tied them to the killing, but authorities
received so many death threats from Dobbison's far right supporters
that he was released very quickly. His political allies took
power soon after. Dobison became a celebrated figure among the

(39:56):
global right wing and even in the United States. In
nineteen eighty four, several US Republican political advocacy organizations invited
Dobison to Washington, d c. To attend a dinner held
in his honor. He was praised for his continuing efforts
for freedom in the face of communist aggression, which is
an inspiration to freedom loving people everywhere. No one has

(40:17):
ever been brought to justice for Romero's murder. This is
largely due to the fact that Dobison died early. I mean,
that's one of the reasons. Um he didn't. He didn't
live very long. He got like cancer or some ship.
The Catholic Church did, however, canonize Oscar Omero in two
thousand eighteen, turning him into a proper saint, So you know,
that's good. He'd been. He had been um treated as

(40:37):
a saint and considered a saint by people in El
Salvador for decades by this point. By the way, like
he was, he was immediately canonized by the people who
lived there um, But it took the church some time
to catch up. So Sister Ortiz, who did survive her
ordeal um, is not a saint yet, but more progress
has been made in bringing her assailants to justice. The

(40:58):
man who orchestrated Guatemala torture program in the late nineteen
eighties was Defense Minister General Hector Granmaho. He was trained,
of course, at the School of the Americas. I feel
like I'm becoming a bit of a broken record, but
all of these guys went there. Um. In nineteen eighty one,
a U. S Court found Grandmaho responsible for the rape
and torture of Sister Diana and ordered him to pay
forty seven point five million dollars in damages. Now that's interesting,

(41:22):
and it may seem wild that, like you could, a
government employee and a government salary might have forty seven
eight million dollars to hand over. This was not so
unusual for ambitious graduates of the School of the Americas.
That was part of the point of going to the
School of the Americas. And I'm gonna quote now from
Leslie Gill's book. In Guatemala, for example, the outcome of
the thirty five year old Civil War was a shift

(41:45):
in the balance of power that created a new landowning
elite among military officers. Income polarization increased in the nineteen eighties.
The portion of national wealth controlled by the poorest ten
percent of the population dropped from two point four percent
to point five percent, while the richest ten percent expanded
their share from forty percent to forty six point six percent.

(42:05):
Super familiar. That does sound super familiar, and it ties
into a number of things. This is just always the
truth with state with state security forces. People ask, like,
why the police are being so unbelievably violent to just
like random reporters filming them and stuff people not breaking
any law. It's because, more than anything, their ability to
continue to have a comfortable income. They make a ton

(42:27):
of money. Cops make way so much fucking money. Yeah,
they're there, and they're they're only making more and more.
They keep getting raises. Their ability to like it's what
they found with the guy who killed George Floyd, that
he had like this whole second house that he was
not paying taxes legally on in Florida. Like, this is
what happens. This is how security for why they do

(42:48):
what they do. It's because they get paid to do it.
It's because they're elevated. Yeah, they're elevated into the oligarchic
class in order to maintain and preserve it. And this
happens very nakedly in Guatemala. That's what the School of
America's is for. Um, if you have it's very nakedly here.

(43:10):
I am floored. Well, and it's like I think what's
most frustrating is the fact that like it's partially it's
just the blatancy this idea that like we see all
these cops were clearly just not of the neighborhood, um
and literally invading it, destroying not just you know, innocent people,

(43:33):
put a ton of children along the way, wrecking their
entire lives. It's like, yeah, I just commend an applaud
like specifically, like that none to be able to voice
what happened to her, Like I can't imagine the challenge
of sharing. That's not just sharing that story, but then

(43:54):
of course those people are looking at ways that they
can get to you. Of course her life is still
in danger. Um I can't. Yeah, it's it's overwhelming, Robbert,
but it's necessaries, like trying to process all of it,
trying to understand. Tony Morrison has this really great quote
that I feel like I've used in like just everything,

(44:15):
but it's been just at the forefront of my mind,
which is like in times of crisis, like lean into
what you do rightly, like whatever it is, don't let
yourself be distracted by outside things because your way through
it's through like your talent, and it's I have been
trying to figure out how to use my talents in
what is clearly a time that requires everyone to use

(44:37):
their voice articulately, to be very practiced and specific in
our actions so that we don't like falter further into
that reality because that ship is just that is crazy. Yeah,
it's not killing somebody preaching mass like how like especially
if their whole you know, motivation is like they're godless.

(44:58):
You walk into a godless p worst church and kill
their spiritual leader like I don't, I don't, I but
I also know that it's not impossible. I know that
it's happened so so many times. It's touched every continent
at some point. So as far moved as I am
from it, I'm aware of how present that action is,
that that reaching that level is not it's not impossible

(45:21):
so much. In nineteen eighty four, the School of the
America's left Panama UM. It was re established in Columbus
at a Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. UM. I think
I said Columbus, Ohio in the first episode, will we'll
fix that, But it was Columbus, Georgia. There's two Columbi,
so yeah, they move it to Georgia outside of four
or in Fort Benning, UM, which is a location that

(45:43):
like not only like one of the things that this
did that actually moving the School of the Americas to
the United States did, was it allowed it to provide
its foreign students with an even deeper appreciation and understanding
of US culture. We talked about in the last episode
how um new School of the America's students, who were
generally there for about a year if they were taking
the full course, like one of the first things they
would all try to do is go buy American trucks

(46:05):
so that they could take them back home with them.
Is like a status symbol, now, um, and I I
find I told you we're going to hear from a
student who went there. And this This is a guy,
a Bolivian named Juan Ricardo, who was interviewed by Leslie Gill.
And he's a retired lieutenant colonel in the Bolivian Army.
And he wound up being a major source for Leslie's book,
in part due to the fact that, by more or

(46:26):
less accident, he wound up being kind of a pretty
left wing dude who still went through all of this
like far right pro USA indoctrination, so he he understood
what was happening to his fellow soldiers, like and he's
he's able to kind of speak very lucidly on it,
which I I appreciate quite a lot, now, Um. His
introduction to American military culture came before he ever traveled
to the United States or the School of the America's.

(46:47):
When he was new to the military, he was taught
by a number of instructors who themselves had been trained
at the School of the America's and they came back
with the lessons they had learned and even came back
with printed teaching materials from the U. S. Military, and
a lot of those lessons that these guys who've just
been trained by the US brought back to Bolivia to
give to their fellow soldiers involved torturing the ship out
of people. One Ricardo later claimed that he was taught quote,

(47:09):
how to tie up prisoners of war and how to
torture them techniques that you have to utilize in order
to get them to make declarations. For example, you don't
let them sleep, and then you get results. Other knowledge
that they brought from the School of the Americas. I
remember very well it was axiomatic among the rangers, the U. S.
Army rangers that taught the soldiers who were teaching him
that a dead subversive was better than a prisoner. Having
a prisoner interfered with the subsequent operations. Thus it's better

(47:32):
that he is four meters underground than to have him alive. Um. Yeah,
I was trying to picture, like between when we last
spoke in today, like what are these classes like? And
silly me, I was envisioning like very subtly, like like oh,
you know, this is how you would maybe have to
tie with somebody who like, you know, in the same

(47:52):
way that they feel like often, like we've seen with
cop training courses, the more we learn about those, the
more it's it doesn't seem so insidious, right, It's not
so directed. It's like, oh, this is how you pull
your gun, and it's like a two second course and
you're like, well, that's not enough information. Um So, of
course we have like a lot of you know, misfires
and people that are actually accidentally shooting other police officers

(48:13):
and things like that. Uh, it sounds like this was
like torture one oh one, welcome, here we go getting
started by the way, shoot your prisoners, Yeah, makes if
they're dead even better, no problem. Yeah, all right. So,
well you think about executing prisoners in violation of international law,

(48:34):
you should think about something else that violates international law.
The products and services that support this podcast. We're back
and I've been informed by UH Corporate that um our
our sponsors do not violate international law. They in fact
comply with international law. I apologize for the for the error.

(48:59):
It's you can see how the mistake. It's a binary
so it's easy to make, you know, get the wrong
one of those two we do. We do apologize here.
So yeah, in case you weren't a big war crimes
buff um, it is a war crime to execute prisoners. Um.
In fact, everything one Ricardo says about what they taught
about counter insurgency, these US trained officers who trained him

(49:20):
um is war crimes, are war crimes. Would would be
war crimes were they done, and in fact they were.
Now you might question how reliable a source One Ricardo
is and whether or not we can trust him, because
he's one guy, you know, with the with the clear
political ideology, making very bold claims about things the United
States did. Um. And there's a number of ways I
could back up his his stories. Number one would be

(49:41):
just reciting dozens of other anecdotes of people who were
tortured and said U S soldiers were there, or who
were tortured by soldiers trained by America. But the fastest
way to back up what Wan told Leslie Gill is
just to cite the Pentagon's own published teaching materials see.
In nineteen six, the Clinton administration ordered the de classific
caation of a number of training materials used at the

(50:02):
School of the America's This tranche of documents included a
Pentagon memo from nineteen nine two addressed to the Secretary
of Defense. It's written by Werner Michael, who was the
intelligence oversight assistant to the Sect Deaf, and Michael was,
you know, I think, assigned to look into this problem
once they started to be like Americans started to, you know,
complain about how the School of America's was a terrible thing,

(50:24):
and he was basically sent to like look into the
training material these guys were being given. And from what
I can tell reading this memo, he seems to be
it seems like he's kind of a decent, a relatively
decent person who wound up in this position of like
having to analyze a horrific war crime being committed by
his colleagues. Um, and it's it's it's a really interesting

(50:45):
read for that reason. Now, one of the things he
notes is that the manuals that he was reviewing, which
are like broadly Ford referred to as the torture manuals,
which were like the training documents starting in ninety nine,
um that they were not. They were all out of
compliance with US law and with international law. But the
reason nobody found out about it for years is that

(51:07):
they were only written in Spanish, so nobody reviewed them
in the entire Department of Defense. And it's the second
most spoken language in the country, that is faithfully. Yeah,
but why would we have anybody looking at that ship? Yeah,
it's amazing ignorance. Yeah, and I'm gonna quote from his

(51:27):
review now. An Army review dated February nine two, conducted
at our request, concluded that five of the seven manuals
contained language and statements and violation of legal, regulatory or
policy prohibitions. These manuals are Handling of Sources, revolutionary war
and communist ideology, Terrorism in the Urban, guerrilla interrogation, and
combat intelligence. To illustrate the manual handling of sources, in

(51:49):
depicting the recruitment and control of human intelligence sources, refers
to motivation by fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead beatings,
false imprisonment executions, and the use of truth serum. The
manual also discloses like, Okay, so it's either a like
it sounds like a manual for the mob or a
super villain. Yes, yes, but it was the Army's Department

(52:12):
of the Army's manual that was giving explicit illegal advice
to foreign soldiers. Now, this memo is the closest you're
going to get to an explicit condemnation by a member
of the Department of Defense of all of the genocide
and rape and child murder they willfully trained and allowed
soldiers to commit. Um. It's it's interesting reading not just

(52:32):
as a historic document, that as kind of a sociological text,
because you can see in the guy writing this like
someone who appears to be a broadly honorable person starting
to realize that the organization he built his life around
has done something unforgivable. This passage, I think is particularly
enlightening in theory. The offending and improper material in the

(52:52):
manuals should have been discovered during the Army's existing review
and approval process. It is incredible that the use of
the less and Plans since nineteen eighty two and the
manual since nineteen eighties seven evaded the established system of
doctrinal controls. Nevertheless, we could find no evidence that this
was a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to violate d O
d N Army policies violates. But then how did it happen? Yeah, yeah,

(53:20):
it is incredible, Like that's the closest you're going to
get from an actual like company man to being like
something fucked happened here and very much sounds like, well,
it was written in Spanish, so we can't prove it. Yeah,
who could do? Who can Nobody can read Spanish in
America in the army. Oh my word. Yeah. So there

(53:40):
are one of the difficulties and kind of putting this
together for you, um, is that there's just so many
different war crimes and war criminals you can tie to
the School of the America's. We could have done like
four straight episodes or more just laying out Guatemala, right,
and what was done in Guatemala, and not even the
broader story of the Guatemalan Civil War, but like just
what School of him eric As graduates got up to

(54:01):
in Guatemal. We could have done the same thing, probably
without Salvador. We're not even going to talk about Operation
Condor in this episode, which was like it was, it
was an agreement between a bunch of Latin American government's.
The best way I could describe it as like if
the EU was just about killing left wing uh political organizers,
that that was kind of Operation Condor. We're not even
going to get into it, because there's there's there's I mean,

(54:22):
we've are this has been a very full set of
episodes already, and some of this stuff I want to
like cover at a later date. There's a lot to
go into because the the amount of factory that was
perpetrated by the United States in Latin America for forever
is just such a deep and complicated and a horrible story.
But I think given the limited time we have, what's

(54:43):
important to focus on next is the kind of men
who were educated by the School of America's and how
how the school changed them, and how the presence of
putting such men back in their home countries could fundamentally
to fundamental changes in the character of a nation. So
more Bolivian soldiers were trained the School of the America's
then were trained by any other foreign military establishment. As

(55:04):
one of the poorest nations in Latin America, it was
particularly at risk for a Marxist uprising, and so the
US took precautions. Like I said, they would get worried
about a country and they would start increasing the number
of soldiers that they would invite to the School of
the Americas. So they trained huge numbers of Bolivian officers
and kind of introduced them to this cult of Americanism
that they were. That's like what they did to everyone

(55:24):
they invited in. And Leslie gil rights based on her
interviews with Juan Ricardo, who is that Bolivian soldier who
went to the School of the America's quote, the North
Americans had everything, or so it seemed to the Bolivians.
They enjoyed a level of comfort unheard of in Bolivia.
If a soldier tore his uniform, the army provided him
with a new one, and the amount of food served
in the School of America's mess hall made the Bolivian's

(55:46):
eyes bulge. The returning soldiers told us that you could
eat like a beast at the School of the America's,
laughed Juan Ricardo. The U. S. Army's high degree of
specialization also impressed the Bolivians, whose military was not nearly
as differentiated in terms of knowledge and skills of its members.
To be a specialist implied that one was special in
the ability to work with high tech weaponry or just
modern weaponry. Set the North Americans apart from their Latin

(56:07):
American peers and students. Technology, especially the esoteric knowledge that
unlocked its power had a quasi magical appeal for the
Bolivians and for many of these Latin Americans. U S.
Army officers seemed to go everywhere in helicopters, a symbol
of their power and superiority. The conclusion that they drew,
according to Juan Ricardo, was that the Gringos made good allies.

(56:28):
It was good to be on their side, and they
would provide all the necessary support for the struggle against subversion.
He paused, and then added, it's also better to have
them as allies because they have a good intelligence system.
So you can see part of what's happening here, like right,
one of the reasons. One of the things that's that's
a real hallmark of this period in right wing repression
of the left is Pinochet throwing left wing militants from helicopters.

(56:53):
Um helicopters which are the symbol of the United States,
which are the symbol of modernity, which are the symbol
of power. Right, these things aren't happening for for no reason,
Like it's all it all ties in together. Um yeah,
But also I think like about the idea of like
just abundance again, it's just it's it's very cruel to

(57:14):
offer people who have very little everything and then like
expect them not to like fall in love with that
comfort and the only and and there can be like
you have to you have to convince these people what
the school. One of the things that the the School of
Americas is doing is it's drawing a border in the
minds of these men between themselves and the rest of

(57:36):
the country that they live in. And it's making their other,
their fellow countrymen, these indigenous people, um, these these left
wing you know, political organizers. It's making them into the
other and again and into the thing that's that's separating
you from abundance. You introduce these people to abundance, and
then you tell them, these are the people who are

(57:57):
stopping your country from being like this and yeah, and
then they would turn them into the people who stopped
them from their countrymen from having any kind of abundance. Yeah,
who kicked children to death. Yeah, but some of them
get rich, so that's good. Um. So one of the
things I found really interesting in reading leslie Gill's book
about this is that the kind of training the School

(58:19):
of the America's cultivated and its students this like training
them to be American um. It extended to what you
might call the United States of America's number one pastime,
which is, unfortunately the commodification of black bodies. And this
is not going to be a super fun chunk to read,
but let's do it here we go. S o A
graduates cultivated images of themselves as manly men upon their

(58:41):
return to Bolivia by regaling peers and academy students with
accounts of their sexual exploits. Like a majority of their
counterparts in the various armies of the America's many believe
that access to the sexual services of local women was
a basic right, and the Panama Canal zone was presented
as a place where men could indulge their sexual fantasies
and escape into allusions of men as men uh Pantoya,
which is one of the other men that Leslie Gill interviews.

(59:03):
One of the other guys who went to the school
recalled that his instructors usually moved quickly from accounts of
their professional experiences at the s o A to anecdotes
about North American comfort, the prostitutes and how much they cost.
Because of the enormous US military presence, sex workers from
a variety of countries congregated in Panamanian cities. The brothels,
explained Pantoya, complimented other aspects of life at the s

(59:23):
o A. Cadets trained from Monday to Friday and Saturday
and Sunday. They were free, they had money, so they
went to the brothels that had black women. North Americans
were there too, and everyone was equal. The Bolivians were
fascinated with black women. There are none in Bolivia, and
to make love with a black woman was supposedly an
unforgettable experience, very exotic. It was the moment when the
Obolivian military man had international contact. The aura of almost

(59:46):
mystical transcendentalism that surrounded the Bolivian's accounts of sexual encounters
with black women emerged from a belief that you could
do things with foreigners, particularly members of subordinate racial groups,
that you could not do at home. Part of the
allure of going up rod was the opportunity to play
out sexist and racist stereotypes away from the constraints of
their own society. And Panama, single men had disposable income

(01:00:08):
that was unencumbered by alternative claims that would shape its
use in Bolivia, and this money gave them a feeling
of power and strength. It also enabled them to enter
a transnational world of power and pleasure that no one
at home except for a select few new As these
men lived the excitement of going abroad and took part
in daily training exercises at the s o A, began
to reflect on their own country in different ways. The

(01:00:30):
s o A experience aggravated longstanding domestic hatreds of Indians
and Communists, as officers struggled to separate themselves from their
own modest origins and to explain the roots of Bolivian
underdevelopment to themselves. I will never understand I some people
think that um, black bodies are inherently magic beyond like

(01:00:54):
the black cultures. Black women have co opted that to
mean like you have val you essentially beyond what the
world gives you, in the phrase quote unquote black girl magic.
This the idea that like we are transcendent and beautiful
and worthwhile because our community has to do those things
because very clearly no one else is going to And
the idea that as we are, we as Americans are

(01:01:18):
going into other countries and basically disrupting an entire culture uh,
then bring those people back to America and further degrade
black bodies. It is uh not surprising, uh and yet
still still frustrating, still maddening. Still again just confusing at

(01:01:39):
our ability to just shrug at human life and just
be like, yeah, my life has more value than yours.
I can't have such a hard time processing it. Yep. Yeah,
there's a lot going on there. Um, yeah, there's a
lot going on there. I find it interesting this this

(01:02:01):
the way in which these guys are kind of being,
the way in which they're being trained with abundance, right,
and and how dangerous that is because when you read
about when you read like, you'll hear a lot about
the School of the America's on Twitter, and it will
usually be because it's Twitter, you know, nobody. People don't
have time for super detailed explorations of things. But it
will generally be something like, oh, the America, the United

(01:02:23):
States has the school where it trained assassins and murderers
and stuff, and it was the School of the America's
and it you know it, it led to all these
revolutions and that's bad. And I think the reality, like
I think the focus actually on the torture curriculum and
stuff is kind of a mistake because I don't think
that's the most insidious and dangerous thing that the school did.

(01:02:43):
What what what we just talked about in that last passage,
This um bringing bringing the men from these countries, these
military officers into the world of white men in the
United States, and what that means, and the accumulation of
of not just the umulation of like physical goods, but
the domination of the bodies of people who are are

(01:03:05):
sort of of a lower racial cast than you or whatever,
like all of this stuff that were brought into whiteness
in a real way, and that's a huge part of
what led to the massacres. I think that's fascinating. I think.
I mean, there's this super good documentary on Netflix right
now which sort of attempts and I say attempts because
it's coming from a tech company that like produces the

(01:03:27):
same standards of being as the tech companies. The documentary
is meant to like critique, but it's the idea essentially
is that like tech companies have designed themselves based off
of your existence. Essentially, you become the product or your
ability to change and adhere to a um corporations need

(01:03:51):
to use your dollars like held on, I can explain
this better, give me a second. It's the idea that
you were the product, right, Like, because the Internet is free,
someone has to pay in order to keep these tech
companies running, and so they run on ad revenue and
adds the goal of an AD is to get you
to change your behavior so you use the product. The
ad is advertising. And what a lot of the documentary

(01:04:13):
has done just with interviews of people who created It's
like the guy who created the endless scroll on Twitter
is one of the interviewees, and there's like at one
point the producers ask all these interviewees like do you
let your children use social media? And all of them
across the border like, well, no, because I can't stop
myself from using this tool I created because it's based

(01:04:34):
off of human behavior, and human behavior cannot change as
fast as computer technology changes technology a crazy rate. It's
like exponentially faster than any other thing that exists. It's
just constantly changing, so it can learn us faster than
we can learn and adapt to it. And I think
probably the same thing is that play here, this idea
of once you understand humans and their desires, and you

(01:04:57):
find small ways to manipulate that. It's most people can't
help but fall in line because that's just their human Like, Yeah,
we're supposed to be out picking fucking berries. And if
you can replicate that berry picking thing like you can,
you can make us do anything, because we really want
them motherfucking berries. Um. It's just that you know now

(01:05:20):
now the berries are ford trucks and um prostitutes. Uh,
but you know it's about accumulation, right, It's this this
thing in our animal brains that we feel compelled to
do for reasons that are we're at one point necessary
and aren't anymore. But if you can, if you can
trick that part of the brain, um, we'll keep looking

(01:05:42):
for those got damn berries. Um. I don't know, I
don't know how much that ties into this, but yeah,
we'll tire into it. Because you have all the entire
group of people who are willing to do, like commit
human atrocities but for like the like, and and then
the question becomes like obviously, like people have free will,
and I don't want to say like, oh, America came

(01:06:02):
in and change these people, and you know they were
something unable to do anything about it. That's not you know,
the intention of the conversation, but it's like how how
I guess I'm always trying to put myself in a
situation of like how would I react to a similar
set of circumstances and the ease with which I could
picture myself loved ones falling into these headspaces of like

(01:06:24):
how dare these people keep me from the comfort I've
experienced here? And I don't want to go backwards that
that fear constantly going backwards. It just it seems so easy,
so just far too easy to trip into that land. Yeah. Yeah,
So this guy we've been talking about, Juan Ricardo UM
later in his career, you know, he was initially trained
by soldiers, had been trained at the s o A,

(01:06:44):
but eventually he had the fortune to travel to Columbus
and attend the School of the America's UM and in
this next passage he recalls kind of the political education
that he received when he got there. The sergeant said
that all the communists in Latin America were trained in
Cuba and that they hated their countries. Those of us
who were at Fort Benning were going to become the
leaders of our countries. We all had to unite against communism.

(01:07:07):
I questioned the simplicity of all this. I was very imprudent.
The sergeants just repeated what they learned from their own instructors.
When I asked him to describe the course in more detail,
this is Leslie gil writing. He continued, For example, there
was a section of the course called civic action. It
was one of the moments when the anti communist doctrine
really came out. They taught you that when you enter
a village and make contact with the population, you have
to make sure there are no communists. They never said

(01:07:29):
you never trust anybody. You never enter a home and
accept a plate of food because a communist might have
poisoned it. These people are not going to be free
because of their Marxist indoctrination. I had an argument with
one of the sergeants. I asked him to explain Marxist doctrine,
but he couldn't, so I explained it to him. It
was great. I had already taken a year of social
science classes. As the university in Lapaz. The sergeants no
only formulas. The objective is to homogenize the education of

(01:07:52):
the school of the America's students. I mean, it's the
same thing going on in a lot of ways in
the heads of some of these people. Fucking setting up
roadblocks near where I lived because they're scared of Antifa
lighting forest fires. It's because they believe BLM. You know,
they heard they heard someone talking about the Bureau of
Land Management on a radio and they believe that BLM
is a Marxist organization. And what who Marxists seek the

(01:08:12):
destruction of their own countries? Because that's what these people,
that's that's the propaganda. It's not it hasn't changed. It's
just distributed differently. Like you had to have once upon
a time. You needed this school to inculcate people, you know,
and you had to do it in a very deliberate way.
Now they get taught on Facebook and Twitter and it
it it will lead to the same thing. It's like

(01:08:35):
led to the same thing. I think, Yeah, it's starting to.
It's starting to. You have a lot of Americans who
are willing to murder large groups of other people because
they vaguely think that they're Marxists. I mean, it was
it two years ago. We had that kid walk right
into a church and just assassinate people. He just prayed with,
I mean it's oh no, that was years. That was
Dylan Ruth. Yeah, time is a weird time, just not Yeah.

(01:08:58):
It feels so yeah. Hearing all this, you won't be
surprised that between nineteen seventy eight, UH in nineteen eighty,
Bolivia held two general elections and went through five presidents,
none of whom won an electoral victory. They endured four
military coups UH, three of which succeeded, and it looks
as if the nation is actually going through another one
right now, with the overthrow of left wing president Evo

(01:09:19):
Morales by the Bolivian military. It will not surprise you
to know that a lot of the officers responsible for
the the coup in Bolivia that happened started happening late
last year is still kind of going on UM our
School of the America's graduates. Now. By the later nineteen eighties,
the Department of Defense was beginning to receive a lot
of complaints about all the horrible crimes committed by s
A graduates. In nineteen Yeah, in nineteen eighty nine, they

(01:09:43):
started mandating that all school instructors take sixteen whole hours
of human rights training UM, which didn't solve the problem.
Oddly enough, with the Cold War ended, the Pentagon rather
seamlessly switched from funding anti communist death squads to funding
anti narcotics efforts in places like Lumbia. The people s
o A graduates murdered remained the same. They were still

(01:10:03):
mostly left wing activists, indigenous people, you know, Marxist guerrillas,
but like a lot of just like indigenous people, um
more innocent local people who just might be sympathetic with
a group of guerillas who were fighting the soldiers who
kept murdering their family members, anybody else. That's who these
groups were always killing. But the way they the victims
were referred to change now. They weren't communists, they were

(01:10:25):
narco guerrillas. And after Narco guerrillas, when the War on
Terror started off, the victims started being called terrorists. Now.
In response to a sizeable protest movement based near Fort
Benning in two thousand, President Clinton made a big show
of closing the School of the America's. It was reopened
almost immediately under a new name, the Western Hemisphere Institute
for Security Cooperation wine SEC. Now, Yeah, like when we

(01:10:50):
ran out of America's. Yeah, it's different now, guys, we
fixed it. They did rejigger. Their name is wine Sex.
That's the acronym Wine. Second, I'm gonna call him Seck. Yeah.
So they did have their curriculum rejiggered a bit to
um appease the bleeding heart Democrats who were angry at

(01:11:12):
all the murder um. There were new courses added in
d mining and like the removal of minds, and like
in human rights. Uh. And leslie Gill notes that like
these were like the least attended courses at the school
um and she was able to visit at this point
once it got changed into Wine sec in the early aughts.
Is part of this like full court pr press by
the Pentagon to like deal with the fact that they

(01:11:32):
had gotten a bad reputation, so they invited in a
bunch of activists who campaign to shut down the School
of the America's in order to like show them the
new courses and like make the case that things had
changed for the better. They invited in journalists, and of
course they invited in leslie Gill. Now, as part of
this pr blitz, Leslie got to meet with the head
of the school, a general named Glenn Whitener. There's an
American general. In one passage, she attempts to have him

(01:11:54):
speak on the subject of the numerous massacres in war
crimes committed by School of America's graduates. And I'm going
to read this passage because his responses will sound very
similar to anyone who's listened to a police press conference lately.
Acknowledging that a few bad apples from Latin America had
attended the School of the America's, Whitener insists that these

(01:12:15):
individuals were never taught torture techniques and that their crimes
represented the unconscionable acts of a few rogue actors, not
the teachings of the s o A or the policies
of terrorist states. He maintained that some graduates who stood
accused of human rights violations had only taken short courses
on benign topics such as auto maintenance, and had trained
at the school years before their alleged crimes took place.

(01:12:37):
It was unconscionable. He argued for critics to point fingers
at the school and claimed that it caused these men
to commit crimes. In a rationalization of the School of
the America's that I would hear from others. Whitener pointed
out that the UNI bomber went to Harvard. Does that mean,
he asked rhetorically, that Harvard caused him to kill people?
Does that mean that Harvard should be shut down? Whitener
and others at the s o A thus did not

(01:12:58):
deny the reality of human rights violations, but his argument
treated a prominent university and a military school as comparable institutions. Harvard, however,
did not teach combat skills to Latin American soldiers. Moreover,
the United States government had used its military apparatus, including
the s o A, to support Latin American armed forces
with bad human rights records for decades. Yet if one

(01:13:18):
objected to his confused logic, Widener dismissed the critique as
anti military and thus unacceptable. Hey, can't be anti police.
They protect you even if they don't. That's what they're doing.
A lot going on here. That including the fact that
he's like, well what about you know, UNI mom and
went to Harvard? Why aren't people lingered hot and asshole?
I would say, yeah, sorry, go ahead, no, No, I

(01:13:43):
like imagine being like, hey, we've found like eleven people
have committed atrocities can't be our problem. The only like
seeing response to me is to be like, let me
investigate that, because that seems wildly out of step with
what I thought my institution was trying to do. To
say like, like, serial colors come from all over the place,
but no other schools produced eleven that become dictators. Get

(01:14:07):
your head out of your ass, and thousands of perpetrates.
Thousands of perpetrators tied to the School of the Americas.
Thousands of individual people who committed acts of murder in
genocide can be tied to the School of the Americas.
If Harvard, if a thousand Harvard graduates in the course
of like twenty years had started male bombing campaigns and
be like, there might be something wrong with Harvard's going

(01:14:27):
we should look into Harvard. Um. Yeah, Like everyone would
be saying that if there was this one school that
kept making unibombers, we would all be like, what the
funk is going on at Harvard? Somebody should look into
this ship. Maybe we shouldn't have Harvard anymore. It seems
like all it does is make unibombers. There's also no institution,
particularly one that carries guns and oftentimes produces policies for

(01:14:51):
major like countries, networks, individuals. Uh, that should be above
scrutiny and the idea to say like, oh, that's anti
military and just the most to me, that's that's the first, like,
that's the loudest signal to me that we're in cult territory.
In the same way that I firmly believe that the
police are a form of occult, that these people have

(01:15:13):
just bought into their uniform and this idea that they
are a military for the country, which was not at
all your intended purpose. I can't, I cannot yep. I
hate it here. It's not great here. Uh, it's not
great here. I don't love it. Um. You know what
I do love, though, Joel, Raytheon. You know, one of

(01:15:38):
the few bright spots in this dark world of imperialism
and murder are the wonderful products of the Raytheon Corporation. Joel,
have you ever thought I want to fire missiles via
robot at groups of indistinct men in vehicles, but I
don't want to accidentally blow up as many school buses.

(01:15:58):
Is that a thought you've had? Uh? Not yet, Robert, Well,
if you want to wage a brutal counterinsurgency campaign and
blow up slightly few school buses. After blowing up quite
a few school buses, you need the new r X
for a knife missile from rape. Yes, Sophie, you do
know that you don't need to do another advert. I
was gonna let you finish, but because you were doing

(01:16:19):
so well and you do, I'm just I this is
we're beyond money. So the my enthusiasm for Raytheon's fine
product line is not is not a is not a
shallow capitalist, right, this is this is your love. Yeah,
and the r X four is you know, like I said,

(01:16:40):
there's no better way to murder the specific terrorists you
want to murder without blowing up school buses as the
r X four. If you're feeling like I've blown up
too many school buses in Yemen, the r X four
is the answer for you and for Yemen. How much
is the r X four going to run me, Robert?

(01:17:00):
Just enough to fund a couple of schools? Okay, that's
reasonably we don't need any Yeah those schools that much?
We gotta we gotta play anyway. Nobody needs schools. In fact,
Target number two Yeah, yeah, shoots some shoots some nice
knife missiles at the schools whatever fuck it? Raytheon anyway, Joel,
you wanna how are you feeling at the end of

(01:17:20):
all this? Um? At the end of this Uh informed, Robert.
I feel informed and and better able to hopefully again
just identify the patterns that we're seeing and be vocal
in my opposition of them. It is um so upsetting
to have lived in be a current member and party

(01:17:43):
of a country that has committed such a chastity's um.
I don't want these things to happen in the name
of my country anymore. I really like so many aspects
of being an American, so many Americans do I love. Uh,
this cannot continue? Yeah, Well, today has been a fun episode.
We all enjoyed things, we learned a lot. I think

(01:18:05):
we're all bummed out now. So go do some push ups. Uh.
Go scout out the roads around your house. Uh, in
order to keep an eye on the right wing militias
that that might try to set up death squads in
your area. And more than anything, I don't know. I

(01:18:26):
have nothing for you other than what I've given you. Uh,
go go go make this not happen again. Yes, do
you have any any plugs. No I have. I've never
been on the internet before. I actually don't understand what's
happening to me right now. I was woken up and
dragged into a darkened room by masked men and told

(01:18:48):
to read this script. So that was actually that was
actually me and Anderson and uh, somehow with a funny
voice changer, Well, I have nothing to plug that makes
dog barks sound like scary men. Mm hmm, Well he
means he sat. I right, okay on Twitter? And where
I just a spot on Twitter and Instagram and we

(01:19:08):
have a Teo public store, And well, did you do
your plugs? I don't remember, I've blocked out. I didn't.
I don't have anything to plug. But I do want
to commend you, Robert, for doing some of the best
work I have that's personally impacted my life. Like I
don't know on a large scale what's happening with anything.

(01:19:29):
It's like I said, chaos, but I mean it very
legitimately when I say you've given me a space to
be more educated and more informed. I am a product
of the American school system and I need to be
more informed. So yeah, thank you. Well, yeah, all right,

(01:19:57):
we got it. Thank you,

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