Trained for Torture

8/6/2019 Trained for Torture

1/19

Trained to Torture? The Human Rights Effects of Military Training at the School of theAmericasAuthor(s): Katherine E. McCoySource: Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 32, No. 6, Contested Terrains (Nov., 2005), pp. 47-64Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30040266 .

Accessed: 04/06/2011 16:24

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sage. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toLatin American

Perspectives.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sagehttp://www.jstor.org/stable/30040266?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sagehttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sagehttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/30040266?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sage


2/19

Trained to Torture?The Human Rights Effects of MilitaryTraining at the School of the Americas

byKatherine E. McCoyBy exposing military leaders to democratic values and working to fosterrespect for civilian authority and military professionalism, [foreign militarytraining] provides a window through which we can positively influence thedevelopment offoreign military institutions and their role in a democratic soci-ety. While such engagement cannot be expected to guarantee a perfect humanrights record on the part of any military force, it nonetheless represents animportant opportunity to encourage adherence to the rule of law, respect forbasic human rights, and appropriate professional conduct in the face of inter-nal or external challenges.-Department of State,Bureau f Political-Militaryffairs,March1, 2000

When the United States military provides trainingto foreign soldiers, theexplicit assumption is that trainees will not only become more effective butalso adhere to higher standardsof democracy and the rule of law, includingrespect for human rights. While this is a worthwhile goal, in most cases thedata that could test this assumption are either missing or incomplete. Onecase in which such information s available s the militarytraining nstitutionformerly known as the School of the Americas (SOA).1 Located in FortBenning, Georgia, the SOA is a facility thatprovides short-term, pecializedtraining to military personnel from throughoutLatin America. For years ithas been a source of controversy between the U.S. government and humanrightsorganizations.On the one hand,the armysubmitsthat he school's mis-sion has always been to "providedoctrinallysound, relevantmilitary educa-tion and trainingto the nations of LatinAmerica;to promotedemocraticval-ues and respect for human rights; and to foster cooperation amongmultinationalmilitary forces" (Office of the InspectorGeneral, 1997: 8). Onthe other hand, activists and watchdog organizationsargue that the rhetoricfails to line up with reality and that there is an uncomfortablepattern inkingKatherineE. McCoy is pursuingher Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.She thanks Robert Young, Mark Suchman, Daniel Long, Cdsar Rodriguez, Carolina Milesi,Michael Bell, Jane Morris, and Kara Sparks for their insights and suggestions.LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 145, Vol. 32 No. 6, November 2005 47-64DOI: 10.1177/0094582X05281113 2005 Latin American Perspectives

47


3/19

48 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

SOA graduates o "keyroles in nearlyevery coup and majorhumanrightsvio-lation in Latin America in the past fifty years" (Nelson-Pallmeyer,1997: 9).This vigorous public debate has led to calls for greater transparency(Amnesty International,2002: 34), prompting the release of governmentrecords through the Freedom of Information Act. The availability of theserecords, which tracktrainees of the school, makes the SOA uniquely appro-priate for a study of the humanrights effects of foreign militarytraining.Upuntil now, the data have been used only selectively by the parties in thedebate. In an attempt o make a linkage between the trainingsoldiers receivedand their subsequentcrimes, the watchdog organization SOAWatchhas usedthe records o compile a laundry ist of human rights violations committedbythe school's graduates.The army and the Department of Defense assert thatonly a "statistically insignificant" fraction of SOA graduates has beenaccused of violating humanrights (Toomey, 2001) and that "those graduateswho have committed human rights violations did not commit the violencebecause of their trainingat Fort Benning, but rather n spite of it" (Grimmettand Sullivan, 1997: 5).Using event history analysis, I examine the data to determinewhat, if any,patterns emerge. By providing empirical evidence on the relationshipbetween SOA trainingand humanrights, this study makes a contribution o apublic debate that has both policy implications and scholarly significance.My results point to the effects of such training and raise questions for futureresearch.

HUMAN RIGHTS, MILITARYPROFESSIONALIZATION, AND THE SOAThe United States currently trains over 100,000 foreign military andpolice officers per year, making it the world's single largest providerof mili-

tary training to other nations. The current system of training is diffuse,involving "over a dozen programs spread throughout several governmentagencies and involving some 275 U.S. facilities" (Amnesty International,2002: 5), including the SOA. Many of the nations that send troops to theUnited States for trainingare enmeshed in conflict and have less than stellarhuman rights records (Amnesty International,2002: 4). While humanrightsgroups present his fact as problematic,advocates of foreign military rainingview it as appropriate ndpowerful: t is precisely those countrieswhose mil-itaries struggle with human rights and the rule of law that can most benefitfrom U.S. training. This approach, called military professionalization, has


4/19

McCoy / TRAINED TO TORTURE? 49

been one of the main arguments for foreign military training since suchprogramsbegan in the early twentieth century.One of the original justifications for foreign militarytrainingwas the factthatmany Latin American militaries, initially among the largestrecipientsofU.S. militarytraining,had reputations or flouting civilian rule and engagingin coups and widespread repression. It was reasoned that exposure to mod-em, professional military training (as exemplified by that of the UnitedStates) could turn these seemingly unpredictable, mpulsive, and undisci-

plined militaries into modem, restrained orces that would use their new pro-fessional values-including respect for human rights-to help securedemocracy and stable markets in their home countries (see, e.g., Francis,1964; Wolpin, 1975; Huntington, 1981; Marcella, 1990; Buchanan, 1996;Leuer, 1996). For Huntington, an early proponent of military profes-sionalization, "professionalism is what distinguishes the military officer oftoday from the warriorsof previous ages" (1957: 7). While the undertrained"warrior"may be prone to violent excesses and abuses, the "professionalmilitary man" draws on his training to "contributea cautious, conservative,restraining oice to the formulationof statepolicy" (Huntington,1957: 69). Itwas in this context that the SOA was founded in Panama n 1946.2 Withinmilitary circles, the school was considered a premier training facility forLatin American forces on the road to professionalization (Leuer, 1996). Itscentral function was as a "coordinating nstitution for developing regionalmilitary policy and standardizing military operations" in Latin America(Leuer, 1996: 9).Yet, despite SOA training and expanded U.S. military influence in theregion overall, military repression remaineda problem n many LatinAmeri-can countriesthroughoutthe twentieth century.Beginning in the 1970s, U.S.Congressionalhearings investigated incidents n which U.S. forces appearedto have trained or assisted foreign military operatives in committing humanrights violations. In this context, the SOA itself startedto come under firefrom some sectors. In the 1980s, politicians and ournalists n Panamabeganto clamor for the school's closing, claiming that it promoted repressive andantidemocraticbehavior among its graduates.A leading Panamaniannews-papernicknamed the school "la escuela de golpes" (the School of Coups) forits seeming propensity to produce dictators and their supporters.3Leakedreports n Panama-later echoed in the U.S. press-claimed that the schooltaughttorture echniques and that traineeshoned their skills on the abductedbeggars and homeless of Panama (Haugaard,1996). In the early 1990s, afterthe school had been moved to Fort Benning, two revelations sparkedpublicopposition to it in the United States. The first was the fact that several SOAgraduateswere implicated in the 1989 massacre of six Jesuit priests and two


5/19


women at the Universidadde Centroamdrican El Salvador.The second reve-lation involved a federal investigation of seven training manuals that hadbeen in use at the school since the 1960s. The investigation determined hatthe manuals contained "objectionable"passages promoting the use of tor-ture, abduction, and extrajudicialexecutions. As a result, activists began toquestion the SOA's relation to repressive forces and starteda movement toclose it.

In response, the U.S. governmentbegan enacting a numberof reforms tothe school's curriculumand structure.These included adding human rightsinstruction,discontinuing use of the "objectionable"training manuals, andplacing the school under the direction of the Department of Defense ratherthan the army. Even as these changes were enacted, the school's defendersstressed that it had always promoted professionalization and human rightsand thatthe reformswere intended o strengthen hattradition.4Humanrightsadvocates rejected what they saw as a revisionist history of the SOA and thereforms offered by the government,which they considered window dressing(http//soaw.org/new/index.php). he movement's stance is thatSOA trainingactually makes soldiers more likely to engage in human rights violations byprovidingthe means and legitimacy for such abuses to occur (Amnesty Inter-national, 2002: 5-6).Thus, the centralquestion is whether SOA-style militarytraininghelps orhurts human rights. This debate need not remain entrenched in ideology.Using a dataset to be describedbelow, I test two of the key hypotheses under-lying the debate, both of which take the SOA as an example of militaryprofessionalization.The firstof these is that the more professional traininganSOA attendeehas, the less likely he or she is to violate humanrights.I test thishypothesis by examining whether students who took multiple courses at theschool were less likely to violate human rights than students who took onlyone course. The second hypothesis springs from the assumption ofprofessionalization heory that military training evolves over time. Hunting-ton's contemporaryMorris Janowitz implies this progression in his discus-sion of military professionalization, which he links to advances in science,technology, public administration, nd democracy (1977). While proponentsof the SOA maintain hat t has always promoted professionalizationand therule of law, they also acknowledge that in the past there have been someconcerns, such as the use of the condemned training manuals. They arequick to add that, since the late 1980s and early 1990s, a combination ofreforms and evolving professional standardshave helped the school accom-plish its goals of contributing o the formation of modern, professional mili-taries. In their report to Congress, Grimmett and Sullivan point out that"since 1989, [the SOA] has begun to emphasize human rights training


6/19


throughout ts curriculum, making it unique among U.S. Army Schools"(1997: 6). Hence, the second hypothesis is that more recent SOA graduateswill be less likely to engage in abusive behavior than their predecessors. Ifprofessionalization theory holds in the SOA case, we will observe a generaldownward trend to human rights violations with each successive decade,with a more marked decline at the end of the cold war.

DATA AND METHODSAs stated above, the available data on SOA graduates s unusual in that it

emerged in the context of public debate. In response to a Freedom of Infor-mation request submitted by SOAWatch, he U.S. governmentreleased thestudent records of nearly 60,000 SOA graduates,dating back to 1946 andcovering 14 countries. At the time of this study, the most recent availablerecords were from the year 2000. The government records provided thename, rank,and country of each student,along with the title and date of eachcourse he or she took. Researchers at SOAWatch hen cross-referenced hesenames with information on human rights abusers to determine who amongthe school's graduates had been implicated n such crimes. The informationon abusers was drawn from United Nations Truth Commission reports,national Truth Commission reports, reports by human rights monitoringorganizations(such as Human Rights Watch), and unclassified governmentdocuments. To my knowledge, this representsthe most complete publiclyavailable record on graduates of U.S. foreign military trainingprograms.STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS OF THE DATA SET

There are three main factors that proved challenging for the use of thesedata: he key roles played by the two sides in the debate n compiling the dataset, the use of human rights records across several countries and severaldecades, and the fact that the data set leaves out several variablesof potentialinterest.The best available data on the SOA come from militaryrecords aug-mented by a human rights organization, and the immediate question thatcomes to mind is whether the informationcompiled by SOAWatch s in anyway biased. Since the organization s openly opposed to the SOA, it is reason-able to assume that its researchers are interested n compiling as much evi-dence as possible against it. This high level of scrutinycan be an asset in thatit creates a very complete and unique data set, but it also opens up the possi-bility that the researchers will pay more attention to abuses committed bySOA graduates han by soldiers who had not attendedthe SOA. This would


7/19

52 LATINAMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

be problematic n a comparative tudy between these two populations (SOAgraduatesand non-SOA graduates).I avoid this potential problem by com-paring SOA graduateswith one another on the basis of the amount and typeof trainingthey received.

Another complication arising from the involvement of SOAWatchmightbe the credibility of the human rights information itself. This factor is miti-gated by the fact that SOAWatchonly compiles the data rather han generat-ing them (i.e., monitoringhuman rights firsthand and making accusations).The fact thatthe humanrightsdatawere drawn from recognized, mainstreamorganizations dedicated to human rights monitoring (such as UN reports,State Department iles, etc.), means that there is little reason to believe thatthese data are any more problematicthan other human rights data.Otherwriters have pointed to the complications inherent n using humanrights data for quantitativestudies (see esp. Blanton, 1999: 236). Theseinclude heterogeneity of outcomes, underreporting,and changes in humanrights monitoringover time. Because of the political natureof humanrightsviolations and the outsiderrole of most human rights monitoring organiza-tions, human rights violations are reported differently from other types ofcrimes. Whereas most crime statistics look at convictions, human rightsabuses arecommittedby the governmentor other politically powerful forces,making conviction unlikely and impunity the norm.5 As a result, humanrights data include some people who were convicted and some who weredeterminedguilty afterthorough nvestigation by a humanrights monitoringorganization,subsequentgovernmentalcommission, or UN body. Nonethe-less, such dataconstitute he humanrights record of a countryand as such areregularlyused by governmentsand the UN in determiningaid anddiplomaticrelations. In practice such records have a high degree of credibility andinfluence.Another complication of using longitudinal human rights data is the pos-sibility thathumanrightsmonitoringand reportinghave improvedover time,creating potential variation n the data. To the best of my knowledge, therehave been no systematic attempts to measure the change in human rightsmonitoringover time. Therefore, here is no way to control for or even verifythis possible source of variation.

A final complication of using human rights data arises from the fact that,no matterhow advancedthe system of monitoring, human rights abuses arealmost certainlyunderreported.While this is an unfortunate imitationof thedata, in effect it also means that any results produced here are likely based onconservative estimates of the actual levels of human rights abuses.Many variablesthatI would like to have used were missing from the gov-ernment records. There is no information on students' ages, educational


8/19


attainment, r numbersof years spent n the military.The recordsare mute onwhat types of military training and experience a soldier had before coming tothe SOA. Beyond the course title, in most cases the records do not provideany informationon the content of the SOA curriculum.They are essentiallyrostersof studentdata. The paucity of this informationhighlights the fact thatforeign military training is largely a black box offering the civilian scholarlittle opportunity o peek inside.Withthese limitations in mind, the data set exhibits many strengths.First,it is very large: it contains the records of nearly 60,000 students. Theserecordscomprise the entire population of SOA graduatesbetween 1946 and2000. Second, these records cover 14 countries, allowing us to examine thegeneraleffect of the school rather hanthe specific effect on any one country.Third, while the data offer merely snapshots of the lives of individual sol-diers, together these offer a longitudinal perspective on the life cycle of theinstitution.Fourth, they constitute the most complete and accurate nforma-tion available on a foreign military trainingprogram.THE SAMPLE

Using this data set, I created a sample of 11,792 graduates,each of whomwas assigned a unique identifying number.6This sample was then used tocarry out an institutional analysis of the likelihood of human rights abusesamong SOA graduates based on the variables listed below. The sampleincludes the entire population of students rom six countrieswho took one ormore courses at the school between 1960 and 2000.7I selected 1960 as the first year in the studybecause it roughly correspondsto the birth of a system of internationalhuman rights monitoring beforewhich no reliable data were available. In Latin America, the Inter-AmericanCommission on Human Rights of the Organizationof the American States(OAS) was established in 1959. The first global human rights monitoringorganization, Amnesty International,was founded in 1961. I have chosen1960 as a reasonable halfway point between those two dates.The six countries I used for this study are Argentina,Brazil, Peru, Guate-mala, El Salvador, and Panama. I used all of the student records from thesesix countries that fell between 1960 and 2000, meaning that the sampleincludes the entire population of SOA graduates rom these countries duringthat time period. I chose these countries as a representative ample of coun-tries that sent students to the school. The sample includes three countriesfrom CentralAmerica and three countries from South America. It includescountries that have had extended civil wars or dictatorshipsas well as coun-tries that have experienced relative peace. It incorporatescountries that have


9/19


sent a relatively arge portionof their soldiers to the school (Peru,with 4,009graduates)and countriesthat have sent relatively few students (Brazil, with291 graduates).While the sample includes two countries (El Salvador andGuatemala)that sent many students to the school during a protractedcoun-terinsurgency war, it excludes other countries (Colombia, Honduras, andMexico) thatalso sent a largenumberof students to the school andhad a largenumber of reported abusers.8Thus, the six countries used here should befairly representativeof the patternacross all the countries.VARIABLES

The dependentvariablewas the timing of human rights abuses, of whichthere were 153 reportedcases in the sample. "Human rights abuses" heremeans violations of "rights to personal integrity."These rights protect anindividual'sbasic physical and psychological well-being, and theirviolationincludes torture, extrajudicialexecution, forced disappearance,and illegaldetention. I also include dictators and persons directly involved in violentcoups as human rights abusers.Following hypothesis 1, the independent variable was the number ofcourses students ook at the school, which ranged from one to five in the sam-ple but was here divided into the categories of students who took one, two, orthree or more courses (listed as 2_crs and 3+_crs, with one course being thereference category).9Both sides of the debate have raised the question of course content.Humanrights advocates express concern over the inclusion of counterinsur-gency courses, while proponentsof the SOA highlight the fact that t teachesstandard military courses (such as infantry and weapons training) andincludes courses on human rights and "democratic sustainment" see, e.g.,Grimmettand Sullivan, 1997; Leuer, 1996). I created a set of variablesbasedon the type of training students received at the school in order to explorewhether different types of courses were associated with the presence orabsence of human rights violations. I used course titles and, in some cases,supplementalmaterials'1 o divide courses into three main categories:Coun-terinsurgency (cio), Infantry and Weapons (inf), and Non-Combat Opera-tions (the omitted category in Table2).11Obviously there are key factors exogenous to the SOA that might greatlyaffect human rights outcomes. I generated two related sets of control vari-ables to account for relevantpolitical and military conditions in a student'shome country.One set of variablescontrols for the effect of militarydictator-ships (dictator) or civil wars (civil war) that take place any time after a stu-dent completes his or her first class at the SOA. The second set of variables


10/19


TABLE 1Periods of Civil War and Dictatorship by Country, 1960-2000

Country Dictatorshipa Civil WarArgentina 1976-1983 1976-1983Brazil 1967-1983 n.a.El Salvador 1979-1984 1980-1992Guatemala 1960-1986 1960-1996Panama 1968-1989 n.a.Peru 1968-1980 1980-1992ba. This variableapplies to historical periods in which a militarygovernmentwas in power, nclud-ing years in which civilian presidents headed military untas. Although some military dictator-ships (such as the 1954 military coup in Guatemala)predate1960, here we can only set variablesaccording to the earliest times that appear in the sample.b. The Perucivil war variable refers to the most intense periods of conflict between governmentforces and the guerrilla forces of Tupac Amaru and Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), endingwith the captureof the major eaders of these insurgenciesandthe waningof the conflict in 1992.

controlsfor the same conditions in a student'shome countryduring his or hertrainingat the SOA (trn_dict or trn_civil), on the assumption hat such eventscould impact the training a student receives or his or her experience of suchtraining.The dates used for these variables are shown in Table 1.Some historical variables, such as the cold war, can be presumed to haveimpactedall countries simultaneously. Since the need for counterinsurgencytrainingwas generally justified in termsof cold warpolitics, we would expectthe humanrights situation to have improvedafter 1989. We can also expectthis date to have had particularsalience for the SOA, for we are told that"theSchool has undergone significant changes since the end of the Cold War"(U.S. Army School of the Americas official web site: http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usamhi/usarsa/main.htm). hus, we can expect studentswho werefirst trainedat the school in the post-cold-war era to have lower rates of viola-tions thantheir predecessors. Using the same distinctionemployed for dicta-torships and civil wars, I generated a set of variables to control for the coldwar (cold war and trn_cold).12Beyond the impact of the cold war, hypothesis 2 predicts a steadyimprovement n human rights over time. I used two sets of measurements ocontrol for time: historical decade (from the 1960s to the 1990s) and five-year intervals during the same time period. The first variable is listed as"Decade"; he second is discussed below.Lastly,I created a control variablefor a student'srankduringhis or her ini-tial course at the SOA. I divided rank into two basic categories: (1) commis-sioned officers, listed simply as "Officers" n the variable ist and comprising


11/19


21.9 percent of the sample, and (2) noncommissioned officers (NCOs) andcadets, including various specialists, comprising 77.4 percent of the sam-ple.13The professionalizationargument posits that soldiers with more pro-fessional formation-presumably, those of higher rank-are more likely torespect the rule of law and therefore less likely to violate human rights. Ifprofessionalization heory s correct n this case, we should expect officers tobe less likely to violate humanrights than lower-ranking students.EVENT HISTORY ANALYSIS

While some scholars have conducted quantitative analyses of humanrights outcomes (see, e.g., Wright, 1978; Poe and Tate, 1994; and Blanton,1999), few have examinedforeign military or security trainingprograms butsee Cockerhamand Cohen, 1980; and Norris, Birbeck, and Gabald6n,2002).Many studies of human rights outcomes (Mitchell and McCormick, 1988;Henderson, 1991; McKinlayand Cohan, 1975 and 1976; Poe and Tate, 1994)use an entire nation as the unit of analysis ratherthan individual trainees orsoldiers, making it difficult to attributechanges in human rights records toparticularmilitaryunits or trainingprograms.The small datasets and limitedstatistical tools used in these studies also make it hard to producegeneralizable results that account for change over time (see, e.g., Poe andTate, 1994; Blanton, 1999). For this study I drew upon a large longitudinaldata set thattracked he individualoutcomes of a single military rainingpro-gram and then applied a more complex statistical approachthan had previ-ously been used to study human rights. The combination of the data set andthe statistical tools make this study a significant improvement over theexisting quantitative iteratureon human rights.

I chose event history as the statistical approachfor this analysisl4becauseit is ideally suited to trackingevents in individuals' lives over time. Event his-tory or survival analysis is commonly used in demography and medicalresearch o study the timing of death. It has also been appliedto the timing ofother events in people's lives, such as school dropout, pregnancy,and unem-ployment (see, e.g., Singer and Willett, 2003; Willett and Singer, 1991; Wu,2003). I used event history methods to track the occurrence and timing ofhuman rights violations in the lives of SOA graduates. Each student wastracked from the date of his or her first course at the school until either thereporteddate of a humanrights violation (if there was one) or the year 2000(if no violation was reported).15 s mentioned earlier,many historicalfactorsmight also come into play during his period. Some studentswere first trainedin 1961, others in 1994. Students from Argentina who attendedthe SOA in1978 did so in the context of a civil war, while their classmates from Panama


12/19


faced no such threat. Because it tracks the trajectoriesof individual soldiersover time, this analysis is able to accountfor these important ources of varia-tion among graduates. This method is thereforeoptimal for testing the twohypothesesby measuring a student'srelativerisk16 f committingan abuse.

RESULTSLooking at the sample as a whole, only 1.3 percentof graduatesare listedas humanrights abusers. This finding is consistentwith the army's claim thatonly a small fraction of the school's graduateswas reported or human rights

violations. Taken alone, this seems to lend credence to Grimmett andSullivan's assertion that graduates engage in abuses in spite of, not becauseof, their SOA training (1997: 5). However, when the sample is broken downby the number of courses students took, a more complex picture emerges.The results presented in Figure 1 indicate precisely the opposite trend fromthe one predicted by the professionalization argument.Here, we see a clear leap in rates of abuse among graduateswho took morethan one course. This leap is especially notable in the jump from one to twocourses. These data imply that, while the overall rate of reported abuses islow, people who attend the SOA more than once are also more likely to vio-late humanrights. While the abuse rate for studentswith one course is only0.8 percent, that figure jumps to 4.6 percent for students who took twocourses and 5.6 percent for those who took three or more courses.These results stand up to statistical scrutiny.Even when control variablesare added,the patternremains essentially unchangedand the outcome is sta-tistically significant. Table 2 provides the results of an event history analysisusing humanrights violations as the dependentvariable.It shows the statisti-cal output of the simplest model, which accounts only for the number ofcourses, and the two fuller models used in the analysis. Looking at model 1,we see that when we compare students who took only one course with thosewho took more courses, the odds of committing a violation are 5.61 timeshigher for students who took two courses and 6.94 times higher for studentswho took three or more courses. This confirms the findings in Figure 1 anddirectly contradicts hypothesis 1, suggesting that more courses are in factassociated with much higher rates of abuse. This relationship between morecourses and increased likelihood of abuse is displayed in Figure 2, whichshows the change in the relative risk of abuse for each time a student returnsto the SOA before accounting for other variables. Students who took twocourses have a much higher risk of violating humanrights than students whotook only one course, and students who took three courses not only have an


13/19


1 2 3+

6

5

4

3

2

1

0Number of Courses

Percentage

of

Abusers

Figure 1: Percentage of Abusers by Number of Courses

even higherrateof abusebut also commit abuses sooner aftergraduation hanstudentswho took one or two courses. Again, these results are all highly sta-tistically significant (p < .001).These results hold when other variables are included in the analysis.When we control for the type of training students received while at the school(cio and inf), we still find strong and highly significant effects for the numberof courses. Both civil war and the presence of a dictatorshiphave a strong,highly significant correlationwith human rights abuses, but even when wecontrol for these variablesthe effect of multiple courses remains. There areno significant effects for historical decade, meaning that reportedabuses didnot change significantlyover time. However, the cold war variable s signifi-cant in model 2, implying that regardless of when students were trained,human rights violations were more likely to occur during the cold war.The effect of a student'srank s also strong and highly significant.In mod-els 2 and 3, officers arenearlyfour times more likely to be reportedas abusersthan enlisted soldiers. There could be various explanations for this result,which apparentlycontradictsa professionalization argument.One possibil-ity is that officers truly are much more likely to violate human rights thanlower-ranking oldiers. Another s that human rights monitorshave an inter-est in placing blame as high up the hierarchy as possible, in which casehigher-rankingofficers will be overrepresented among human rights abus-ers. It could also be argued,however, that governments have an incentive toscapegoat lower-ranked oldiers while hiding the roles of their superiors, inwhich case lower-ranked oldiers will be overrepresentedamong abusersand


14/19


TABLE 2Relative Risk of Human Rights Violations by SOA Graduates

Model 1 Model 2 Model 32_crs 5.611***

(1.009)6.944***(2.014)

3+_crscioinfofficeroff_ciocold warcivil wardictatordecadetrn coldtrn civtrn_dict

n = 11,792df=2LR = 92.67* p < .05 **

3.703***(0.751)2.934***(0.991)1.308

(0.41)1.494(0.316)3.817**

(0.833)1.667

(0.589)1.990*

(0.675)3.095***

(0.573)2.204***

(0.475)1.022

(0.018)

n= 11,792df= 10LR = 286.07

p .01***

3.889***(0.79)3.327***

(1.136)1.266

(0.401)1.475

(0.312)3.862***(0.843)1.579(0.563)

4.122***(0.794)2.631***

(0.553)1.006

(0.014)1.411

(1.495)0.649

(0.148)0.914

(0.177)n= 11,792

df= 12LR = 287.88p .001

this result will actually underestimate the difference between officers andenlisted soldiers. Whatever the explanation, these results show a strikingdifference between higher- and lower-rankedsoldiers.The introduction of rank into this model reduces the effect of three ormore courses to just below that of two courses. While it is possible that takingtwo courses has a strongereffect than takingthreeor more courses, it is likelythat the inclusion of rank has a strongermitigatingeffect on the "3+ courses"variable, since a higher percentage of students n this category are officers.17Taken together, these measures of the effects of additionalcourses provide


15/19


0 10 20 30 40 500.00

0.05

0.10

0.15

Years

Hazard

totalcrs=1 ----- totatcrs= 2---. totalcrs=3

Figure 2: Nelson-Aalen Cumulative Hazard Curve by Total Courses

strong evidence againsthypothesis 1, which predicts that ncreasedexposureto SOA-style professional training will reduce the likelihood that a studentwill engage in humanrights violations.Hypothesis 2 predicts hatrates of human rights abuses will decrease witheach subsequent class of SOA graduates. When students are divided intofive-year intervalsaccording o the date of their initial trainingat the school,only two of the eight time periods yields statistically significantresults in thesimple model regressing each one of those time periods individually.'8Ascould be predicted rom these results, the variable for whethera graduatewastrainedduringor after he cold war also failed to achieve significance. In fact,none of the variables accounting for when graduates were trained achievedstatistical significance. Thus, contrary to the expectations of militaryprofessionalization, the data reveal no improvement in the human rightsrecords of SOA graduatesover time.

CONCLUSIONThe results of this study do not support the prediction that students withthe most exposure to professional military training will show the greatest


16/19


respect for human rights. Looking at SOA graduates, we see that while theoverall number of abusers is small, the abusers themselves are disproportion-ately represented by officers (at nearly four times the rate of enlisted soldiers)and by repeat graduates: students who took multiple courses at the school aremore than three times more likely to violate human rights than their counter-parts who took only one course. These findings are highly significant acrossall analyses and over 40 years, implying that repeated exposure to SOA train-ing is associated with increased human rights violations in times of war andpeace, under democratic and dictatorial regimes, and both during and afterthe cold war.

As with any study that attempts to show large-scale patterns, there aremany important issues that are not addressed here. What types of soldiersattend the SOA and similar training programs? What does the training pro-cess entail? What place does SOA training occupy in a soldier's overallcareer? While the answers to these questions might contribute to a broaderpicture of the politics and psychology of SOA-style training, such questionscannot be adequately addressed with the limited information available onSOA graduates. Yet, despite the challenge of limited information, moreresearch is urgently needed on foreign military training programs. Theresults of this study suggest that such programs are problematic for humanrights and that systematic oversight and greater transparency are needed. Thefact that the School of the Americas, which fares poorly on human rights inthis study, is perhaps the most transparent U.S. foreign training programleaves one to wonder about the effects of dozens of other such programs bothin the United States and abroad. Given the results of this study, it is not unrea-sonable to ask whether such programs are in fact training people to torture.

NOTES1. In 2001 the School of the Americas was converted nto the WesternHemisphere Institute

for Security Cooperation.Since this paper addressesthe period from 1960 to 2000, I refer to theinstitute by the name that it held throughout most of that period.

2. The school has been moved a number of times. It was first established n Fort Amador, inthe PanamaCanal Zone, as the Latin America Center,GroundDivision. In 1949 it was moved toFort Gulick (also in the PanamaCanal Zone) and renamed he U.S. Army CaribbeanSchool. Upuntil that point, the curriculum had been bilingual English-Spanishand U.S. troops had beentrainedalongside theirLatin American counterparts. n 1963, the namewas again changed, to theU.S. Army School of the Americas. Under the terms of the PanamaCanalTreaty, n 1984 it wasmoved to Fort Benning, GA. In 1990 its name was shortened to simply the School of theAmericas.

3. Dictators who graduatedfrom the school include Hugo Banzer of Bolivia (1971-1978),who enacted the "Banzer Plan" to wipe out leftist activities; Leopoldo Galtieri of Argentina


17/19


(1981-1982) andhis predecessorLt. General Roberto Viola (1981), who oversaw the "dirtywar"in thatcountry;ManuelNoriega of Panama 1983-1989), arrestedon chargesof drugtrafficking,corruption,andrepression;Gen. OmarTorrijos 1968-1981), also of Panama,who overthrew hecivilian government;MajorGeneralJuanVelasco Alvarado (1968-1975) of Peru;MajorGeneralGuillermo Rodriguez (1972-1976) of Ecuador; and HondurandictatorBrigadierGeneral JuanMelgar Castro (1975-1978).

4. An army memorandumon human rights posted on the official SOA web page states:"Instruction n InternationalHumanitarianLaw (Law of Land Warfare)has always been pro-vided to our students."

5. Many countries, such as Colombia, Argentina, and Bolivia, have adopted or proposedamnesty laws to ensure that human rights abusers cannot be tried.

6. Some studentsappearseveral times in the SOA data, and every effort was made to deter-mine which entries corresponded o which individuals. In many cases, an exact name wouldappearmore thanonce, and these entries were assigned the same identificationnumber. n othercases, names thatwere apparently he same appeared n slightly differentvariations,such as oneentry with a first name, middle name, and last name and a second entry with a matching firstname, middle initial, and ast name. In potentially ambiguous cases such as these, I looked to thetime span between the entries as well as the change in rank over time to determine whether thesecond entrycould reasonablybe considered the same individualas the firstentry.In cases wheresimilar permutationsof very common names appeared (such as Jose Rodriguez and JoseRodriguez Martinez),I determined hat there was too little information o assume that the twoentries represented he same individual and assigned each a distinct identificationnumber.

7. Ilimited the study o six countries n order o keep the task of datacoding and analysis man-ageable.8. In the 1990s, Colombia and Mexico took the lead in sending students o the SOA. At thattime, Colombia was steppingup its civil conflict against leftist guerrillagroups and Mexico wasbeginning its offensive against the Zapatistas. Honduras also sent a large numberof students tothe SOA during he counterinsurgency perations of the 1980s, including entire battalions thatreceived specialized training here.All three countries had a relatively high proportionof humanrights abusersamong their students.

9. Although some students ook up to five courses, there were too few students in the four-and five-course categories to justify the creation of separate indicators for each of those.

10. Army field manuals available for some courses.11. "Counterinsurgency"ncludes courses such as "Counterinsurgency," Jungle Opera-tions," and "UrbanWarfare." Infantry nd Weapons" includes courses of that name as well as

cadet and officer trainingcourses. "Non-combat operations" ncludes courses such as vehiclemaintenance, ogistics, and democratic sustainment.

12. This is a simple dummy variable coded as "1" for the period from 1960 to 1989 (1989markingthe fall of the Berlin Wall), and "0" for the period from 1990 to 2000. While the sameinformationcould be obtainedby contrastingthe 1990 decade with otherdecades, having a spe-cific variable or the cold war makes it easier to compare that time period with general changesacross time as controlled in the "Decade" variable.

13. In addition,0.68 percent of the graduates were listed as civilians, had no rank listed, orhad a rankthat was not interpretable.

14. I employ a Cox proportionalhazard model.15. In eventhistoryanalysis, these occurrences are known as "theeventof interest"and "cen-

soring,"respectively.


18/19


16. Relative risk is the equivalent of an odds ratio in logistic regression.Thus, a coefficientless than one signifies a decreased risk (or odds) of committing an abuse, while a coefficientgreater hanone signifies an increased risk or odds of abuse.Normalconventionsregarding evelsof statistical significance apply here.17. Officers made up 21.52 percent of studentswho took only one course,29.5 percent of stu-dents who took two courses, and 43.9 percent of studentswho took threeor more courses. Thefact that there are fewer students in the "3+" category overall (287 students ook three or morecourses, as opposed to 1,109 students who took two courses) also makes the results potentiallymore susceptible to change than those in the two-course category.

18. Those periods were 1966-1970, with a coefficient of 1.73, and 1981-1985, with a coeffi-cient of 0.323.

REFERENCESAmnesty International

2002 UnmatchedPower UnmetPrinciples: TheHumanRightsDimensions of U.S. Trainingof Foreign Military and Police Forces. New York:Amnesty InternationalU.S.A. Publica-tions.

Blanton, ShannonLindsey1999 "Instruments f security or tools of repression?Arms importsand human rights condi-tions in developing countries."Journal of Peace Research 36: 233-244.

Buchanan, Paul G.1996 "U.S. defense policy for the Western Hemisphere:new wine in old bottles, old wine innew bottles, or something completely different?"Journalof Interamerican Studies andWorldAffairs 38: 1-31.

Cockerham,William C. and Lawrence E. Cohen1980 "Obedience o orders: ssues of morality and egality in combatamong U.S. Army para-troopers."Social Forces 58: 1272-1288.

Departmentof State, Bureau of Political-Military Affairs2000 Foreign Military Training and DoD EngagementActivities of Interest. Vol. 1. JointReport to Congress, March 1. Washington, DC.

Francis, Michael J.1964 "Militaryaid to Latin America in the U.S. Congress." ournaloflnteramerican Studiesand WorldAffairs 6: 45-82.

Grimmett,Richard F. and Mark P. Sullivan1997 U.S. Army School of the Americas: Backgroundand Congressional Concerns: Con-gressional Research Service Report to Congress, July 22, 1997. Washington,DC.

Haugaard,Lisa1996 "Torture 01." In These Times, October 14, 14-16.

Henderson, Conway W.1991 "Conditionsaffecting the use of political repression."Journal of Conflict Resolution35: 120-142.

Huntington,Samuel P.1957 The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-MilitaryRelations. Cam-bridge: Belknap Press of HarvardUniversity Press.1981 TheDilemma ofAmerican Ideals and Institutions n ForeignPolicy. Washington, DC:American EnterpriseInstitute for Public Policy Research.


19/19


Janowitz, Morris1977 MilitaryInstitutionsand Coercion in the Developing Nations. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

Leuer, Joseph C.1996 "School of the Americas and foreign policy attainment n Latin America."MS.Marcella, Gabriel

1990 "The Latin American military, low intensity conflict, and democracy."Journal ofInteramericanStudies and WorldAffairs 31: 45-82.1988 "Economicand political explanations of human rights violations." WorldPolitics 40:476-498.

McKinlay, R. D. and A. S. Cohan1975 "A comparativeanalysis of the political and economic performanceof military andcivilian regimes: a cross-nationalaggregate study."ComparativePolitics 8: 1-30.1976 "Performance nd instability in military and nonmilitary regime systems."AmericanPolitical Science Review 70: 850-864.

Nelson-Pallmeyer,Jack1997 School of the Assassins. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Norris, Michael, ChristopherBirbeck, and Luis GerardoGabald6n2002 "Practicingwhat we preach:outcomes of exporting U.S. training n police use of forceto Latin America."Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American SociologicalAssociation, Chicago.

Office of the InspectorGeneral, Department of Defense1997 "Evaluation eport on training of foreign military personnel-phase 2: School of theAmericas," n Policy and OversightReport PO 98-601, November 14. Washington,D.C.Poe, Steven C. and C. Neal Tate1994 "Repressionof human rights to personal integrity in the 1980s: a global analysis."American Political Science Review 88: 853-872.

Singer, J. D. and J. B. Willett2003 AppliedLongitudinalAnalysis: Modeling Change and Event Occurrence.New York:Oxford UniversityPress.

Toomey, Christine2001 "Thekilling fields."Sunday Times of London, November 18.

Willett, J. B. and J. D. Singer1991 "Fromwhetherto when: new methods for studying student dropoutand teacher attri-tion."Reviewof Educational Research 61: 407-450.

Wolpin, Miles D.1975 "Externalpolitical socialization as a source of conservative military behavior in theThirdWorld," p. 259-281 in KennethFidel (ed.), Militarism in Developing Countries.NewBrunswick:TransactionBooks.

Wright, Steve1978 "New police technologies: an exploration of the social implications and unforeseenimpacts of some recent developments."Journal of Peace Research 15: 305-322.Wu, LawrenceL.2003 "Eventhistory models for life course analysis," pp. 477-502 in J. Mortimer and M.Shanahan eds.), Handbook of the Life Course. New York:Plenum.

Documents

Trained for Torture