Terrorst Camps at Home

The Western Hemisphere Institute

By Justin Molito
22 October 2001

By now we all know about the training camps in rural Afghanistan are where Osama Bin Laden and his army of “ evil-doers” are alleged to plot the terror that was unleashed on the world, most recently on September 11th. In this heightened state of awareness about the horrors of war and the horrors of the deaths of innocent civilians, Americans should know about the terrorist training camp that is responsible for the murder, torture, disappearances, and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people since 1950. A school where over 80,000 people, many of them terrorists have fine tuned their skills and learned the fine art of terror.

Columbian Journalist, Richard Velez, describes his treatment by troops trained at the terror camp:
“ I saw this group of soldiers, shooting their rifles, approaching from ahead, and as they passed in front of me, they began to beat me with the butts of their weapons and tips of their boots. I held tight to my camera, still running, until the blow from a rifle butt broke the camera gear…I recall that a solider with a gas mask on picked me up and a colleague from another news program came up to me. I gave him the tape and told him, ‘save the material, my friend.’ That night everyone saw those images while I recovered in a hospital with a perforated liver and my testicles destroyed by the blows. One year later I was seeking political asylum in the United States due to threats”

Another account of the terrorism as told by , Rufina Amaya, the sole witness to the El Mozote massacre in El Salavdor:

“There were 1,100 of us in all. The children were with the women. They kept us locked up all morning. At ten o’clock the soldiers began to kill the men who were in the church. First they machine-gunned them and then they slit their throats. By two o’clock the soldiers had finished killing the men and they came for the women. They left the children locked up. They separated me from my eight-month old daughter and my oldest son. They took us away to kill us. As we came to the place where they were going to kill us, I was able to slip away and hide under a small bush, covering myself with the branches. I watched the soldiers line up twenty women and machine-gun them. Then they brought another group. Another rain of bullets. Then another group. And another.

They killed four of my children: my nine-year-old, my six-year-old, my three-year-old, and my eight-month-old daughter. My husband was killed, too. I spent seven days and nights alone in the hills with nothing to eat or drink. I couldn’t find anyone else; the soldiers had killed everyone. God allowed me to live so that I can testify how the Army killed the men and women and burned their bodies. I didn’t see them kill the children, but I heard the children’s screams."

This incident included nine graduates of the terror camp. In 1993, the United Nations Truth Commission Report on El Salvador cited the officers responsible for the worst atrocities committed during that country’s brutal civil war. Over two-thirds of those named were trained at the terror camp. Their crimes include:

# Assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero (1980)
# Murder of four U.S. Churchwomen (1980)
# El Mozote Massacre (1980)—more than 900 killed
# Sheraton Hotel Murders of labor leaders (1981)
# Lake Suchitlan Massacre (1983)—117 killed
# Las Hojas Massacre (1983)—16 killed
# Los Llanitos Massacre (1984)—68 killed
# San Sebastian Massacre (1988)—10 killed
# University of Central America Massacre (1989)—8 killed

People trained at these camps are responsible for hundreds of incidents, in virtually every country in Central and South Amerca. The pages of this entire paper, and many more could be filled with horrible stories by the thousands of people whose lives have been destroyed by the graduates of this terror camp. Graduates form the school includes some of the most brutal dictators and violators of international law since Hitler. They have operated in shadows and governments of nearly all the nations of Central and South America.
So what is the United States of America, the leader of the free world, and defender of freedom doing about this terrorist camp? Is it next to be bombed? Will the U.S. build an international coalition to end this terror?
All of that is quite doubtful, because this terrorist camp is located in Georgia, and is funded by the United States Army. It was called the School of Americas, now it is called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security and Cooperation.

Where did the perpetrators of torture and genocide come from? Where did it all come from? It came from the world’s so-called leader in democracy, the United States. The United States trained more than 80,000 personnel in the School of the Americas and [other] military academies." -- Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Nobel Peace Prize winner who was imprisoned and tortured for 14 months in Argentina.
thanks to soawatch.org for sources and information

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