0:02

What burning down my

0:06

entire West Coast. I'm

0:10

Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards,

0:13

the only podcast recorded in

0:15

the midst of a haze of disaster

0:18

smoke, uh and human

0:20

misery. Um, talking about

0:23

something that also generated a lot of

0:25

horrible smoke and human misery, The School

0:28

of the Americas. This is part two of our

0:30

special series on the US

0:32

just just fucking

0:35

around in Latin America getting

0:37

a lot of people killed. And my guest as

0:39

all well as within part one

0:42

is Joel Monique. Joel, you

0:44

are a podcast producer. Uh

0:48

and uh you are

0:50

also the Are

0:53

you the president? I'm

0:55

not of of myself. Yes,

0:57

okay, you're there, but not of the United States?

1:00

No, not, thank god? No, okay,

1:02

okay, I would. This

1:05

is good to know because I was going to actually

1:08

be very angry at you about the wildfire

1:10

response, but apparently you

1:12

had nothing to do with that. Um, so

1:15

I guess, I'll, I guess, I guess we're

1:17

cool. Um. Sorry, I forgot

1:19

who the president was briefly, and since you were

1:22

on my computer culture

1:24

critic, that's

1:27

a kind of president in a way, aren't

1:30

we all the president of critiquing

1:32

culture? Yes, wasn't

1:34

that what Gamergate was about basically was

1:38

it I don't know about

1:40

a lot of things. So which happened? Yeah,

1:45

okay, uh so

1:47

Joel, how are you? We're

1:49

doing this normally we do both parts of a two

1:51

part episode in the same day. We

1:53

took a little breather, took a little

1:56

breather, and then the entire country

1:58

caught on fire. Yes, so

2:01

I don't know, how are you? How are you holding

2:03

up? I'm

2:05

not yet on fire and counting my blessings

2:08

and oh

2:11

god, I'm actually really glad we took I'm

2:13

trying to encourage more people to like

2:16

allow themselves space to breathe in a very serious

2:18

way, Like I feel like before this we had all of this culture

2:21

surrounding like self care and also but

2:24

like, guys, seriously, there was ever a time to like take

2:26

a nap every once in a while and

2:28

to like say no, you can't do that.

2:31

Thing, which is something I'm really trying

2:33

to work on now is absolutely it's

2:35

so chaotic. This is easily the most chaos

2:37

most of us have ever experienced in our lives. Ever.

2:40

Um, you can you can rest

2:43

at times now? All the time you have we have, say

2:45

vigilant there's a lot to take care of, but my

2:47

God, please like just allow yourself

2:49

in space. So with

2:51

that, I am not crying today

2:53

yet, so I feel good to keep

2:56

going, keep learning, hopefully

2:59

make some pause to change in the near future.

3:01

Well that's a good way to look at things. Um,

3:05

let's let's pivot directly from

3:07

that to talking about unbelievable

3:09

war crimes committed on

3:12

behalf of us interests in parts

3:14

of the world that are very close to our country and

3:17

and we're crying again. Yeah,

3:21

let's let's do it behind the bastards does

3:23

best and let everybody know that

3:25

the world's more

3:28

funcked up than they thought it was. It

3:31

is kind of comforting, you know. I think a lot

3:33

of people who I think there are a lot of people

3:35

who have lived pretty comfortable existences

3:38

because we've we've we've all sort of come up

3:40

and our had our childhoods in this period of relative

3:43

calm that's unusual in human

3:45

history and also was very geographically

3:47

isolated. The calm was localized, right,

3:50

Um, And hearing stories like

3:52

this makes you understand that like this chaos

3:54

and like uncertainty and fear

3:57

that we're feeling this like this, like gnawing

4:00

terror that like death squads might start

4:02

coming in the night, that like the state might send

4:04

security forces out to murder you. This like thing

4:06

that's new to most Americans. Uh

4:10

is what we've been doing to a bunch of people for decades.

4:13

And uh, let's let's yeah,

4:15

let's so that's important to understand. So

4:17

yes, yes, there's a reason we have been

4:20

deserved and disrupted. And I

4:22

feel like, at the very least,

4:24

hopefully now we can have better empathy

4:26

and you're like thoughtful

4:28

action. Yeah, and

4:30

we can understand the patterns that we're about

4:33

to see replicated in our own country and

4:35

attempt to disrupt them. Perhaps. So

4:38

in December of nineteen eight one, dozens

4:40

of El Salvador and graduates of the School

4:43

of the America's converged on El Mazotte,

4:45

a tiny village in the northern hills of the Morazon

4:48

Province. Now Morizon was a stronghold

4:51

of for the Feri Bundo Martine National

4:53

Liberation Front or f l m

4:55

N, a leftist militant group resisting

4:57

El Salvador's far right government, which

4:59

was of course enthusiastically backed by

5:01

the Reagan administration. Now,

5:04

the US had been admitting increasing numbers of

5:06

El Salvadoran soldiers into the School of the

5:08

Americas for years as this conflict

5:10

heat it up, so like leftist militants

5:12

start gaining you know, power and sort

5:14

of the hill areas and like fighting

5:17

the government, and we start just just taking

5:19

more and more of these guys into the s o A, which is

5:21

generally the strategy. You see the government

5:23

sees our government sees left wing activism

5:26

sort of picking up in a country, and they start propagandizing

5:29

and brainwashing more of that nation's

5:32

soldiers in the School of the Americas.

5:34

So once Reagan took office, he started

5:36

sending in Special Forces advisers

5:38

to help out in that neighborly way that only special

5:41

Forces can. Elmazote

5:44

was one of several small villages suspective

5:46

hosting rebel fighters, acting as their

5:48

u S trainers had taught them. The soldiers of Al

5:50

Salvador's Elite Ulcado Battalion

5:52

started their operations by pounding the outlying

5:55

portions of several towns flat with a multi

5:57

hour artillery barrage. Then grant,

6:00

yeah, it's just what you do. Then ground troops

6:02

moved in on December tenth, securing Almazote

6:04

and ordering all residents out into the town

6:06

square. By the way, as a pro tip, since

6:09

this might be useful for everybody, if you find yourself

6:11

in the middle of like a genocide or

6:14

a government crackdown that involves death

6:16

squads, and somebody tells you to gather

6:18

in the town square, don't gather in

6:20

the town square. It never ends.

6:22

Well, that's like the top place

6:24

for massacring people is the town square.

6:26

Avoid the town square if things

6:29

go real bad in your country. So anyway,

6:32

the US trained soldiers of that Lakato battalion

6:34

separated the men in Almazote from the women,

6:36

which is, you know, another bad sign. They also

6:38

separated out all of the children and forced them

6:40

into a small building next to the village church.

6:43

The soldiers spent the rest of the day executing

6:45

every single person in Almazote. They killed

6:47

the children last, perhaps because they needed

6:49

to psych themselves up for such a gruesome task.

6:52

Rather than look at what they were doing and look into the eyes

6:54

of these little kids, the soldiers just fired into

6:56

the building where the town's children were held. Then

6:59

they set it on fire before they left. Years

7:01

later, that building was excavated, revealing the remains

7:04

of at least a hundred and forty three victims inside.

7:06

The average age was six. After

7:09

wiping Christ, Jesus

7:12

Christ, what the how?

7:14

Wow? Yeah, children,

7:18

it's amazing. And this is specifically

7:20

the battalion of the El Salvadoran Army that

7:22

was that is trained and armed by the United

7:24

States. Um like these guys were

7:27

all trained by active due to US soldiers in

7:29

how to do this like they were not. This

7:31

isn't just some foreign country where people did a horrible

7:33

thing because of some dictator. These are the

7:35

guys we trained, using that training to,

7:38

among other things, shoot a hundred and forty three

7:40

children to death in a building outside of a Catholic

7:42

church. So after wiping almostote

7:45

off the map, the men of the Applicatto Battalion and their

7:47

US advisors headed to the nearby town of

7:49

Laoya to repeat the process. We know

7:51

what happened thanks to the stories of a handful of lucky

7:53

survivors. One of them, Rosario Lopez,

7:56

was just fast enough to get out of town with her husband

7:58

and three children. Ario hit up

8:00

on a hill while twenty four of her family members

8:02

were massacred, including her parents, two

8:05

sisters, seventeen nieces and nephews.

8:08

So yeah, her husband Jose

8:10

later recalled to a journalist. I heard the commotion

8:12

the prayers from where I was hiding up in the mountain.

8:15

It was shooting at a bunch of kids, and some of them

8:17

cried and others had stopped. Now,

8:19

Jose Rosario and their children had on that

8:21

mountain for five days until Jose finally

8:24

felt brave enough to descend and check for survivors.

8:27

The first body he found was one of his wife's sisters.

8:29

She had clearly been raped before being executed.

8:32

Further in, he saw the bodies of the town's children

8:34

stacked in a pile, their faces too damaged

8:36

by fire and decay for him to recognize.

8:39

He and a few other days survivors did what they

8:41

could to bury their bones. Altogether,

8:43

the brave men of the at Licatto Battalion killed

8:45

at least nine hundred and seventy eight people

8:48

in just a couple of days. Nearly

8:50

half of their victims were under the age of twelve.

8:53

Years later, one survivor would report hearing

8:55

an officer threatened to murder one soldier who

8:57

expressed an unwillingness to shoot children.

9:00

Now, as far as we know, I don't believe

9:02

any US troops were present during the Elmazote

9:05

massacre, but the killing was done by soldiers who had again

9:07

been trained by US Special Forces uh

9:09

and it was under the command of officers who'd

9:11

all graduated from the School of the America's

9:14

Those little boys and girls were also gunned down

9:16

by US made M sixteen assault rifles,

9:18

which had been given to El Salvador as part of the one

9:20

million dollars a day in military aid that

9:22

the Reagan administration sent into the country.

9:25

When Ronald Reagan took office, Latin America

9:28

was in the grip of yet another wave of revolutions.

9:30

The Sandinistas had overthrown the dictator of

9:32

Nicaragua in nineteen seventy nine, and by the

9:34

time Ronnie was sworn in on a bible made of jelly

9:36

beans, left wing guerrilla movements in Guatemala

9:38

and El Salvador looked like they might be on the

9:40

verge of victory. Two. And I'm gonna quote

9:42

here from an article in the Intercept in

9:45

retrospect, it's clear that these were inevitable

9:47

revolutions. The title of one history of the

9:49

period, tiny cruel white oligarchs

9:52

had ruled over indigenous peasants across the

9:54

region for hundreds of years, and sooner

9:56

or later the dam was going to break.

9:58

But to the Reaganites, this was all the work of the international

10:01

communist conspiracy headquartered in Moscow

10:04

and had to be crushed by any means necessary.

10:07

Now, the article I just quoted from

10:09

the intercept was written by John Schwarz, a journalist

10:11

I quite respect he wrote that article this very

10:14

year in partial response to some new developments

10:16

in the decades old quest to hold some of the perpetrators

10:19

of elma Zotte accountable for their crimes. But

10:21

John's greater purpose was to highlight how

10:23

similar many of the tactics the Reagan administration

10:26

used to cover up its complicity and foreign massacres

10:28

are two tactics being used right

10:30

now by the Trump administration. And considering

10:33

the number of armed Trump supporters talking about mass

10:35

murdering their political foes, like within five

10:37

minutes of my house, uh, you can see

10:39

why it's relevant. Uh So this

10:42

is really important to talk about for more reasons than

10:44

just understanding a historic crime. This

10:47

has bearing on what's going to happen to a lot of

10:49

people listening to this podcast in the future. If

10:51

things go as bad as they could go, so

10:54

Elmazotte was never supposed to become

10:56

public knowledge the Reagan administration

10:59

when this happened. The An administration was in the process

11:01

of trying to sell Congress on a partnership

11:03

with the Salvadoran government, and one requirement

11:06

that Congress had put forward was that the President would

11:08

have to certify by January twenty

11:10

nine, nine two, that El Salvador

11:12

was quote making a concerted and significant

11:15

effort to comply with internationally recognized

11:18

human rights. Now, if he couldn't,

11:20

all u s A del Salvador a million

11:22

dollars a day and guns and other baby killing tools

11:25

would be cut off. So there were high stakes

11:27

here. Now. The Reagan administration

11:29

was very unhappy when they started hearing the first

11:32

reports from Almazote, not because of

11:34

the thousand people who had been killed, but because this was

11:36

bad for them politically. It was going to be providing

11:38

yeah feed for the Democrats. So

11:41

the first move that they took was to write off

11:43

the rumors of the massacre as a trick by

11:45

left wing guerrillas. But then on

11:47

January nine two,

11:49

two days before congress is deadline, the

11:52

New York Times in the Washington Post both

11:54

published front page stories about the massacre.

11:56

Writing in the intercept, John de tales what happened

11:59

next. Thomas Enders,

12:01

a career diplomat who at the time was Assistant

12:03

Secretary of State for inter American Affairs,

12:05

later said that Elmazotte, if true,

12:08

might have destroyed the entire effort in El Salvador.

12:10

What to do? The answer had been articulated

12:13

by Richard Nixon years earlier, as was born

12:15

out by Nixon's direct experience during Watergate,

12:17

few things are more dangerous to conservative priorities

12:20

than good journalism. Therefore, as a

12:22

top Nixon aid later recalled, Nixon believed

12:24

that it was necessary to fight the press

12:26

through the nutcutters, as the president called

12:29

them, forcing our own news make

12:31

a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition.

12:33

That's what Nixon said, Fight the president through the nutcutters,

12:36

forcing our own news, make a brutal attack

12:38

on the opposition. So the pushback

12:40

began with congressional testimony by Enders. There's

12:43

no reason to confirm that government forces systematically

12:45

massacred civilians, he told a House subcommittee.

12:48

What about the number of victims? Bonner's article

12:50

had mentioned a list of seven hundred and thirty three

12:52

compiled by villagers as well as Italian of

12:54

nine twenty six from a human rights organization,

12:57

Elliot Abrams, whod just taken off as a six

12:59

assistant set Terry of State for Human Rights

13:01

and Humanitarian Affairs, and formed the Senate

13:03

that the numbers, first of all, were not credible.

13:06

Our information was that there were only three people

13:08

in the canton. This was clear conscious

13:10

deceit on part of Abram's. Both the Times and Post

13:13

articles had written that the massacre had taken place

13:15

in several locations. Then came

13:17

the assault from the administration's outside allies.

13:19

On February tenth, The Wall Street Journal ran

13:21

a lengthy editorial titled the Media's

13:24

War. Americans were badly confused

13:26

about the situation in El Salvador thanks to

13:28

the US press. Almazote was not a massacre,

13:30

the journal wrote, but a quote unquote

13:33

massacre. What

13:36

what unquote

13:38

massacre? Yeah?

13:41

Yeah. On the one hand, the number of dead had been

13:43

obviously exaggerated, and on the other maybe

13:45

the killing had been carried out by rebels dressed in government

13:47

uniforms. Bonner was credulous, a reporter

13:49

out on a limb and like reporters in Vietnam a

13:51

sucker for communist sources. One

13:53

of the editorials authors appeared on PBS to

13:55

proclaim that obviously Ray Bonner has a political

13:58

orientation, so there's

14:01

a lot that's that that's going on

14:03

here. Um, but it's all very familiar.

14:05

So first of all, what you see is Abram's getting

14:08

up there and throwing out a bunch of lies at

14:10

once. Uh. Number one, like throwing

14:12

out a sound by like Elzote is not a massacre.

14:14

It's a quote unquote massacre. Uh. The number

14:17

of dead have been exaggerated. Oh and maybe

14:19

they were also killed by rebels dressed as soldiers.

14:21

There's no evidence for any of this. He's just

14:23

throwing out a bunch of claims that then have to be dealt

14:26

with and like responded to by

14:28

the Times and by the Washington Post. And

14:30

it helps to drum up this idea

14:32

that there's debate over whether or not anybody

14:35

was killed, and that allows Americans

14:37

to kind of shut their ears to it. And it

14:39

works. This is the same thing the Trump administration

14:41

does now. It always works. It works extremely

14:43

well. Um. And of course he starts

14:46

to attack. This is one of the reasons why

14:48

I'm less concerned these days about

14:50

pretending to not have a bias as a reporter,

14:52

because Bonner here is doing as much

14:54

as he possibly can. He's he's a

14:57

very good traditional reporter doing very

14:59

good tradition reporting, and he gets called

15:01

a communist basically, because that's

15:03

what they do. It doesn't matter what you say,

15:06

it doesn't matter how biased you are or aren't,

15:08

They're going to call you a communist if you're reporting

15:10

on things that are bad to them. So

15:14

yeah, Accuracy in Media, which was

15:16

a conservative media criticism organization,

15:18

went further, declaring Bonner was raging a

15:20

propaganda war favoring the Marxist guerrillas

15:22

in El Salvador Um.

15:24

So yeah, it worked. Bonner

15:27

was pulled out of Central America by the Times

15:29

and sent back to New York for more training in

15:31

journalism. Yeah.

15:33

Yeah, the Times did what

15:35

they do. It's the It's the New York

15:38

Times, right. They're always going to they're

15:40

always going to publish that first good story, and

15:42

they're always going to back away and run a

15:44

bunch of op eds with wing

15:46

nuts claiming that that story was bullshit because

15:49

they're scared of being seen as taking a stance

15:51

on anything. That's how it's gonna

15:53

be. Yeah,

15:55

that's how it That's how it was in the thirties too. Yeah,

15:58

you know, that's just the way it goes at

16:00

all papers

16:03

being reliant on advertising

16:06

dollars. It's really I

16:08

mean, we've already seen it destroy like

16:11

most like solid sources of internet

16:13

journalism, and the papers

16:15

have been fighting it for so long. Like

16:18

at the local level particularly,

16:20

we've seen a lot of like good local journalism.

16:22

But this idea that companies

16:25

that are like oh god, to keep selling and

16:27

being willing to print just the most ridiculous

16:29

ship or good ship and then like retracting

16:32

it and disrespecting

16:34

their reporters who they must have a relationship with,

16:36

they must know like this

16:39

person's ability and their skills. Like it's such a

16:41

pr move and so not

16:43

about like the core ethics of journalism.

16:45

It's astounding. It's astounding

16:47

that it's allowed to permeate like this. It's

16:50

not great, not very

16:52

good. So yeah, the disinformation

16:55

campaign worked, at least in the immediate term.

16:58

Uh yeah. Bonder gets pulled out, sent

17:00

back to New York for training, and other reporters learned

17:02

from his example. It was dangerous to report

17:04

on any story that might be seen as sympathetic

17:06

to left wing militants in Latin America.

17:09

Meanwhile, the right wing militants who controlled

17:11

El Salvador continued to receive US aid.

17:13

Their soldiers continued to attend the School of the

17:15

America's in order to learn how to be the best desk

17:17

ones they could be. By the time the violence

17:20

was all over, they'd killed more than seventy five

17:22

thousands El Salvadorans, the per capita

17:24

equivalent of five million Americans,

17:26

So this is a huge chunk of the country.

17:29

The government was responsible for eighty five percent

17:31

of these deaths. Now, the good news is

17:33

that at present a number of culprits

17:35

have finally been stripped of their immunity.

17:37

There was a law for a while that basically

17:40

was trying to make peace between the two sides and

17:42

said that like, nobody gets punished for their war crimes.

17:45

But that got partly at least reversed.

17:47

And so some of these guys are in the process and these

17:49

these these court cases are going on right now,

17:51

right and there's even there's been requests made.

17:54

The Obama administration released some evidence

17:56

uh and declassified some files

17:59

to allow the court case is to proceed. They made

18:01

request of the Trump administration that obviously haven't

18:03

been um listened to, in

18:06

part because uh, the U S

18:08

mility. Like while some of the El Salvadoran

18:10

military leaders who helped make Elmazote

18:13

happen have been punished, the Americans who

18:15

were responsible never did. In fact,

18:17

Elliot Abrams went on to become part of George

18:19

W. Bush's National Security Council. In today

18:22

he's Trump's Special Representative for Venezuela.

18:25

Um So, speaking

18:27

of nightmarish, unforgivable crimes against

18:29

humanity committed at the behest of Republicans,

18:32

you want to talk about Guatemala. WHOA,

18:35

let's get into it. Yeah,

18:37

I'm a big Guatemala

18:40

fan. It's great country.

18:43

It's a beautiful country. Yeah.

18:45

Yeah, it's been horrible to it.

18:47

We've been real bad to it, real bad

18:49

to it. Um it's one of the most beautiful

18:52

places I've ever been in my life. Um

18:54

I I ran across a T shirt

18:56

over there that was like, I think the thing written on it was

18:58

something like Guatemala is like how nature

19:02

exaggerates or how nature puts in an exclamation

19:04

point. And if you go to places like La La

19:07

Lan, you really feel that because it's this like lan

19:10

is one of the deepest lakes in Central

19:12

America. Um, and

19:14

it's just surrounded by a ring of volcanoes.

19:17

Like look a look at pictures of this place. It's absolutely

19:19

astonishing. Um. And when

19:22

I was there at least um, Like,

19:24

one of the things people would tell us is that, like the military

19:26

is not allowed in here anymore, Like we don't

19:29

let them in because of some of the things

19:31

we're about to talk about. Um,

19:33

wait, can you how do you keep

19:36

the military out? Uh?

19:39

You know, I think it's I think it was just sort of

19:41

a matter of like after a lot of

19:43

the massacres, they kind of pulled

19:45

out of certain areas where they've been

19:47

killing the Maya, and they were like, there's kind of like

19:49

I don't know, I got we got stopped on the road a

19:51

couple of times by just sort of groups of men with

19:53

m sixteens and not wearing

19:56

uniforms really but operating what

19:58

we're clearly checkpoint. I don't like, it was

20:00

very unclear to me. I'm not like guatemal

20:03

In politics is extremely complicated. But yeah,

20:07

yeah, so Robert, you

20:09

want to know what isn't extremely complicated?

20:13

The products and services that support this podcast.

20:16

Word alright,

20:22

we're back, so back

20:25

in nineteen fifty four, Like, Guatemala

20:28

is great, hard not to love it. Um.

20:30

The problem is that in nineteen fifty four, the

20:32

United Fruit Company was also in love with Guatemala

20:35

UM, particularly they're they're wonderful

20:37

bananas. Now. Unfortunately, the

20:39

democratically elected leader of Guatemala

20:42

in nineteen fifty four was a dude named Jacobo

20:44

Arbez who didn't like that a foreign country

20:46

owned a large chunk of the Guatemalan economy.

20:48

Because these fruit companies owned huge

20:50

amounts of Guatemalan land that had been sold

20:53

to them basically by corrupt

20:56

like ali arcs in Guatemala who

20:58

had stolen it from indigenous people um,

21:01

and then sold it to US corporations

21:04

for a fraction of what it was actually worked,

21:06

which allowed these corporations to basically enslave

21:08

Guatemalan workers. And it was horrible. It

21:11

sounds like the typical chain of command. Yes,

21:14

indigenous people to oligarch to

21:16

United States. Yeah, and so

21:18

our Beds comes to power and

21:21

he's like, I'm going to nationalize all this ship, right,

21:23

Like I'm gonna make all this ship. Everybody's

21:25

like, I'm going to take this land that was sold

21:27

illegally to these U S corporations, and

21:29

I'm going to redistribute it to the peasants

21:31

um and we're going to like try to undo

21:34

the damage that the start of globalization

21:36

has done to Guatemala. Beautiful

21:39

dream, A beautiful dream. You may recognize

21:41

this is not all that different from what was happening

21:43

over in Chile with Saladora end A at a pretty

21:45

similar time. Um. So

21:48

yeah, our bez comes to power, he promises

21:50

to do this, and United Fruit, who

21:52

owns this land, goes to the CIA and it's

21:55

like, guys, you

21:57

gotta do something about this. He's

22:00

gonna take away our banana land. And

22:03

so the CIA is like, don't worry, bro, we

22:05

got you. And then they pick up their US

22:07

trained Guatemalan soldiers who would all

22:09

like all these guys who've gone to the s o A and who

22:12

were already inculcated, and like, yeah, I wanna

22:15

I want to personally get wealthy,

22:17

um by being a corrupt oligarch.

22:19

And if all I have to do is murdersome indigenous

22:22

people and Marxists and whatnot, that sounds

22:24

great to me. I hate those people anyway,

22:26

because that's partly what I've been trained to do in the School

22:28

of the America. So they overthrow your Cobo

22:31

r best Um and this winds up sparking

22:33

a civil war in Guatemala. And that

22:35

happens in a lot of countries too, But in Guatemala,

22:38

that fucking war just does not end.

22:40

It goes on for thirty six goddamn

22:42

years. Yeah, it is, it

22:44

is. They are just it is horrible in Guatemala.

22:47

You can't exaggerate how much

22:49

this completely fux society

22:52

in that country, because it's just it's

22:54

a generation and a half of of more

22:56

or less constant sometimes low level

22:58

sometimes you know. But but like

23:01

war Um in

23:03

the military junta that came to power didn't just

23:05

hate Marxists, they hated again the local indigenous

23:07

people who were descendants of the Maya um

23:10

and the like. The these kind

23:12

of local Maya groups were seen as being

23:14

allies of the Marxist guerrillas in the hill Uh,

23:17

and eventually the Guatemalan state, which was overwhelmingly

23:19

run by military officers trained by the US,

23:22

decided the only way to fight this insurgency

23:24

was to destroy the indigenous villages

23:27

that gave it shelter. Over thirty

23:29

six long years of war, US trained forces

23:31

killed as many as two hundred thousand

23:33

people, many of whom were Maya. And

23:36

I'm gonna quote here from the Los Angeles Times

23:38

reporting on sort of how this all shook out. A

23:41

report by a United Nations backed truth

23:43

commission after the thirty six years Civil war formally

23:45

ended in nineteen nine six, found that security

23:47

forces had inflicted multiple acts of savagery

23:50

and genocide against Maya communities.

23:52

The campaign included bombing villages

23:54

and attacking fleeing residents, impaling victims,

23:57

burning people alive, severing limbs,

23:59

throwing children the pits filled with bodies and

24:01

killing them, disemboweling civilians, and

24:03

slashing open the wounds of pregnant women.

24:06

Which let's think right now to the story

24:08

that just broke today of the United States

24:10

government giving forced hist ectomes to women

24:12

who are in to migrant women who are in our

24:15

custody at camps on the border, just

24:18

the fancier version of what they were doing. Uh.

24:20

The goal is the same to stop certain groups

24:22

of people from having children. So the

24:24

massacres, the scorch deirth operations, forced

24:26

disappearances, and executions of Mayan authorities,

24:29

leaders and spiritual guides were not only an attempt

24:31

to destroy the social base of the guerrillas, but

24:33

above all, to destroy the cultural values that

24:35

ensured cohesion and collective action in Mayan

24:37

communities. The Commission for Historical Clarification

24:40

said the Guatemalan government was responsible

24:43

for more than ninety percent of deaths, disappearances,

24:45

and other human rights violations during the war.

24:47

The Commission said, the state deliberately

24:49

exaggerated a limited insurgent threat to

24:52

justify large scale repression. The Commission

24:54

found and again, what that

24:56

what that quote from the Commission for Historical Clarification

24:59

is saying, is that the Guatemalan government

25:01

with the US, is backing committed genocide.

25:03

That's what genocide is, an attempt to destroy

25:06

a culture. So in the nineteen

25:08

seventies, which is kind of in the middle of this

25:10

whole war, President Jimmy Carter attempted

25:12

to put a halt to the violence, and he did this by banning

25:14

all military aid to Guatemala in order to force

25:17

the government to take action on its horrible human

25:19

rights record. Now, this was in general

25:21

another period, Like I said, we're left wing insurgencies

25:24

were starting to gain ground in Latin America,

25:26

and Carter's decision infuriated the

25:28

American right wing. In nineteen

25:30

eighty two, a three man military and took

25:32

headed by evangelical preacher and School

25:35

of America's graduate, General Efrain Rios

25:37

Mont, took power in Guatemala.

25:39

Now, Rio's Mont had been one of the School of

25:41

America's first students, graduating back

25:43

in nineteen fifty one when the school was just three

25:46

years old, and when he finally took power,

25:48

the Reagan administration was happy to know they had a

25:50

steadfast ally they could trust to think the right way

25:52

about things. And Rio's Mont is a very interesting

25:54

guy because again he's in the military

25:56

in nineteen seventies six. He comes under the influence

25:59

of a bunch of America and evangelical preachers

26:01

and he converts and becomes and

26:03

like takes a break from being in the military to be

26:05

like a radio preacher and stuff. Like he's like Jerry

26:08

Folwell, but he's also a general um

26:11

and he is a hard core like religious

26:14

conservative, very much in mind with the

26:16

American right wing. So Rio's

26:19

Mont under his like, you know, again, the war

26:21

had been going on for a while, but under Rio s Mont

26:23

it, it escalates to a new

26:25

stage of horror. And in objective

26:28

terms, um

26:30

yeah. Before we get onto objective

26:32

terms, I want to read a couple of different quotes from survivors

26:35

of the horror that Rios Mont put out. And

26:37

this is from an article in

26:39

h in a c l a Um

26:42

called Rios Mont the evangelist

26:44

so uh. An unnamed survivor

26:47

from Aguacotton, Huetenango,

26:50

the military came to burn whole families out,

26:52

to burn their houses, and not just their houses, but

26:54

the people themselves. They burned men, women

26:56

and children who died in flames, incinerated.

26:58

It caused us terror, It caused this a lot of fear.

27:01

Another unnamed survivor from Robin al Baja

27:03

Vera pause. The military officials raped

27:05

the women who were twelve and thirteen years old. The girls

27:07

couldn't do anything because there were so many soldiers

27:10

lining up to take their turn. First they raped

27:12

them and then they killed them. Another

27:15

unnamed survivor from the same town. The

27:17

children were kicked to death. The children shouted

27:19

and shouted and then they were silent. So

27:22

that's Rio's Mont, whoa

27:26

uh trying sorry,

27:29

trying to um kicking

27:31

a person to death is such a laborious

27:34

task, like it can't be

27:37

done quickly, and

27:40

as we you know, you spoke earlier

27:42

about like soldiers not being allowed

27:45

really to back out otherwise potentially

27:47

suffering the same fate. That's

27:49

so much psychological damage done, not just to

27:52

the victims, but also to the people actively

27:55

participating in these murder

27:58

Yeah,

27:59

yeah, yeah,

28:02

what a human toll. I mean, it's one of those

28:04

things you actually you read about things like the Nazi

28:06

genocides and not just not like the constant like

28:08

the one of the things people

28:10

don't understand about the Holocaust is that the concentration

28:13

camps were not plan a. The concentration

28:15

camps were in part a result of the fact

28:17

that the German high command

28:20

learned during the course of executing

28:23

genocides that their soldiers

28:25

couldn't survive massacurring civilians.

28:27

There was a particular massacre called body Yard

28:29

where they shot like thirty thousand people

28:31

to death in a single day, and it

28:34

just destroyed a lot of these

28:36

soldiers. Which is not to like not saying like these Nazis

28:38

need sympathy, but like human beings

28:40

can't do that, most of them, and

28:43

so people men were shooting themselves and drinking

28:45

themselves to death. And one of the reasons why the camps got

28:47

built is because there was this understanding

28:49

by the high command that like, oh shit, we

28:52

can't like we're we're going to be

28:54

suffering like casualties

28:57

we can't afford in order to carry out these genocides.

28:59

We need to find a way to do them

29:01

while exposing the minimum number of soldiers

29:03

to the savagery that's necessary in them.

29:06

UM. Anyway, speaking

29:09

line distinction is just

29:12

that's why you do it. And

29:15

it's also why you really need to have a religious

29:17

justification for what you're doing, because it makes it

29:19

easier to convince people that they're doing the right

29:21

thing by killing these godless communists. Speaking

29:24

of that, Ronald Reagan won the presidency

29:26

in nineteen eighty by flipping the evangelical

29:28

vote away from the Democrats who had helped elect

29:30

Carter a little bit earlier. UM and two of

29:32

his big backers. Of Reagan's big backers

29:35

where of course, Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson,

29:37

we talked about this in our Fallwell episode. Carl

29:39

Rio's mont was friends with Jerry Fallwell

29:41

and Pat Robertson. They were great buddies. He considered

29:43

them spiritual advisors, and Reagan

29:46

developed a friendship with Rio's Mont. In nineteen

29:48

eighty two, while all of this kicking children to death

29:50

thing stuff was going on, Reagan traveled

29:52

to Guatemala and basically said that

29:55

all of the stories of genocide

29:57

there were lies and that Rio's Mont was

29:59

totally dedicated the democracy in Guatemala.

30:01

He said, frankly, I'm inclined to believe

30:03

that Rio's Mont has been getting a bum wrap.

30:11

Yeah, easy to do.

30:13

I guess when your agenda is being achieved.

30:16

Yeah, overlook

30:18

kicking babies to death. Yeah, well, it's

30:20

just some babies. Reagan also said

30:22

that Rio's Mont had great personal integrity.

30:25

Um. Yeah, and he blamed the media. Uh.

30:27

In nineteen eighty three, he lifted the arms

30:29

embargo on Guatemala, flooding the country with

30:31

helicopter parts that the government

30:34

needed to continue its genocide. During

30:36

his first year in power, Rios Monts soldiers

30:38

massacred more than ten thousand civilians.

30:40

Four villages were wiped off the face

30:42

of the earth. Uh. Yeah.

30:45

Years later, a Reconciliation Commission report

30:47

would find that U s A during this period had a quote

30:49

significant bearing on human rights violations

30:51

during the armed confrontation. Now,

30:54

typing that out excise as a major part

30:56

of the story. Because the crimes committed by the Guatemalan

30:58

government weren't just enabled by US weaponry

31:00

and carried out by soldiers trained by the Army.

31:03

Acts of torture and even genocide were regularly

31:05

carried out with the help of active duty American

31:07

soldiers. And this brings me to the story

31:09

of Sister Diana Ortiz. She was

31:11

a us Ursulin nun in n She

31:14

traveled to Guatemala to teach little kids how to read.

31:17

Unfortunately, the Guatemalan government was somewhat distrustful

31:19

of the Catholic Church for reasons will discuss

31:21

a little later. The church is part of its mission

31:24

to help the poor, often wound up sending its people

31:26

into the same impoverished communities that were such hotbeds

31:28

from Marxist guerrillas. So the government caught

31:30

sister Ortiz as she was traveling to an isolated

31:33

rural community to deliver necessary aid.

31:35

She was kidnapped, repeatedly raped, and burned

31:37

with cigarettes while she was tortured for information.

31:40

Now, thousands of other Guatemalan

31:42

women found themselves in similar situations,

31:44

and we didn't hear from most of them because most of them died

31:46

or were too terrified of the consequences

31:49

of talking to ever come out. But sister Ortiz

31:51

managed to survive an escape, and she was

31:53

eventually able to report on the details of her

31:55

ordeal, particularly the fact that her torture

31:58

sessions had been directed by an amor arikan

32:00

man. He gave the orders while a knife

32:02

was forced into her hand and she was made

32:04

to stab another woman's body. Um.

32:08

Yeah. Years later, she would write.

32:11

So often it is assumed that torture is conducted

32:13

for the purpose of gaining information. It

32:15

is much more often intended to threaten

32:18

populations into silence and submission.

32:20

What I was to endure was a message,

32:23

a warning to others not to oppose,

32:25

to remain silent, and to yield to

32:27

power without question. And Guatemala,

32:30

the Catholic Church sought to walk in company

32:32

with the suffering poor. I was to be a

32:34

message board upon which those in power would

32:36

write a warning to the Church to cease its opposition

32:39

or be prepared to face the full force of the state.

32:43

Something for everybody to keep in mind as

32:45

the coming months come. That's

32:49

what torture is. That's what police violence is.

32:51

It's what happens in the streets of Portland when

32:53

a police officer punches a seventeen

32:55

year old in the face before macing

32:57

them at point blank range. It's the same, I

33:00

Dia. You forced

33:02

them into silence by causing them

33:04

pain and terror. Cool

33:06

stuff, good, good things.

33:08

Deep. Yeah.

33:11

So while we're talking about the Catholic Church

33:13

and the School of America's graduates, we should

33:15

return to El Salvador and the story

33:17

of a brave Catholic priest named Oscar Romero.

33:20

Oscar was a leftist part of a wing of the

33:22

established Catholic Church that was particularly

33:24

prominent in Latin America. The pope

33:26

at the time, John Paul the Second, and most of the leadership

33:29

in Rome were much more conservative, and Romero

33:31

preached something that's called liberation theology,

33:34

which is a controversial shouldn't be controversial,

33:36

but it is with especially within the Catholic Church. It was

33:38

a controversial interpretation of the Gospel that stressed

33:41

justice for the poor and freedom for the

33:43

oppressed. So the leadership

33:45

actually, like in Rome, a lot of the leadership of

33:47

the Catholic Church considered Romero to basically

33:49

be a terrorist. But this is you

33:51

know, it's one of those things when we talk

33:53

about the Catholic Church in Guatemala, and there's some

33:55

other places in Latin America where they fulfill

33:57

a similar role. This is kind of why our current

34:00

pope is the dude that he is. He comes from this

34:02

sort of tradition. There's a lot of very leftist

34:05

Catholic priests and nuns

34:07

and stuff within Latin America um

34:09

and it's it's it's very tight into all

34:11

of this and it's yeah,

34:14

and he's also a Jesuit and that is not too

34:16

like. It's one of those things we should

34:18

like. The Catholic Church horrible organization,

34:21

and I think is broadly the or leadership

34:23

is broadly on the wrong side of this at the time. But

34:26

you also have to acknowledge that, like a lot of the

34:28

great heroes in this period were Catholic

34:31

clergy um who were put

34:33

their bodies on the line because they knew

34:35

that if they were killed, people would pay attention.

34:38

It's wait, so they thought that he was

34:40

a terrorist because

34:42

he wanted justice for the poor.

34:45

Yeah, he wanted actual

34:47

justice for the poor and not just alms for the poor,

34:50

like liberation. Theologians were more on the

34:52

side of like, well, the poor need to take back their

34:55

fucking land that's been stolen from them.

34:57

Um like breaking. Okay,

35:00

listen, the only way that's gonna happen if they started breaking some

35:02

commandments, y'all. And I know for a fact you

35:05

don't like that. You get really testy when

35:07

people get out here and start killing. So, I

35:10

mean, you know, the one time Jesus was physically

35:13

aggressive in the entire Bible is

35:16

when he needed to funk up some rich bankers.

35:19

So I think I think people

35:22

like Oscar Omero might say that Jesus

35:24

is lesson for us is to funk

35:26

up some rich bankers. Jesus,

35:29

where is this Jesus and my Catholic

35:31

Sunday schools? Not that we

35:35

we I don't want to. You have

35:37

to when you talk about like the church and this, you

35:39

have to number one, give proper credit to heroes

35:41

like Oscar Omero without pretending that

35:44

like the broad swath of the Catholic

35:46

Church supported what he was doing. But what

35:48

he was doing was very heroic. So he goes into these places

35:50

and he's he's preaching actively against

35:53

these death squads that are uh

35:56

killing the ship out of people. So he's he starts to he's

35:58

speaking up like at the time in

36:00

nineteen seventy nine, Um, the government

36:03

of El Salvador is like kind

36:05

of broadly left wing. But there's

36:07

this because of how the

36:09

most recent election with like nineteen

36:11

seventy nine, this government comes to power and the right

36:14

wing gets furious, um, and

36:16

it sort of coalesces behind This graduate of the

36:18

School of the America is named Roberto Dubuson,

36:20

and Dobbuson starts organizing death squads

36:23

with the funding of a bunch of rich like landowners

36:25

and and like corporate magnates, um,

36:28

and they start murdering left wing activists

36:30

and basically anybody who speaks up on the left

36:32

is a way to kind of pave the road for

36:35

the return to power of the right in Al Salvador.

36:37

So, in the wake of a bunch of executions, Oscar

36:40

Romero, this Catholic priest takes to the radio

36:42

and delivers a speech where he begs Al Salvadoran

36:44

soldiers to refuse orders to kill. He

36:47

tells them, in the name of God, in the name

36:49

of this suffering people whose cries rise

36:51

to heaven. More loudly each day. I implore

36:53

you, I beg you, I order you, in the name

36:55

of God, stop the repression. So

36:58

the very next day, while he gave another speech,

37:01

gunman under the command of Roberto Darbison entered

37:03

his church and shot him dead. And the whole assassination

37:06

was caught on tape. And I'm gonna play

37:08

an exerpt from that now because I really

37:10

do think that Americans ought to hear

37:12

it because we paid for it, right, all

37:14

the guns, the guns these guys had, We gave them, the

37:17

training that that Davison had, we

37:19

provided, so people should hear

37:22

what it sounded like when it was used. The

37:48

the sound that the people make in the wake

37:50

of that, the screaming from inside the church

37:53

is um,

37:55

like that's that's the sound

37:57

of imperialism, and it's distilled and

38:00

who its purest form, like that's the sound

38:02

of the American empire. Uh,

38:05

and and what it does to the human soul, Like

38:07

that's screaming, the distortion and

38:09

like the fear and the and the and the

38:12

pain. Um. It's important

38:14

to listen to that. I think i've

38:17

as I can listen. I

38:20

don't know if you've ever listened to

38:22

the slate tape narratives, you

38:24

know what those are. So in the

38:27

nineteen thirties, late twenties,

38:29

as we're able to start recording like

38:31

audio, a group of folks

38:33

decided that they need to record all of the last

38:37

like living slaves in America, Yes,

38:40

to hear the story. Yeah

38:43

yeah, And like ever since, like

38:45

I listened to most of them. There aren't

38:47

that many because the quality

38:50

of audio equipment and recording at the time wasn't great,

38:52

So we lost a couple of the tapes, and they

38:54

preserved and digitize what they can. But

38:56

like ever since, like really taking and listen to those

38:59

and understanding not just the connection

39:01

to the past but to the present, and like in

39:03

the way words are formed and the

39:05

way certain sounds had our ears, Like I believe

39:08

firmly in the preservation of atrocity

39:11

in the hopes that people actually listen

39:13

to it and take that in and you can't hear anguished

39:16

screams like that, understand

39:18

the similarities between what happened there and what's

39:21

currently happening in our own backyards

39:23

and not immediately feel called to action.

39:27

Yeah yeah,

39:29

yep, yeah.

39:32

So uh Dobison, who

39:34

again is the guy who's organizing these death

39:36

squads, the ones that kill um Romero.

39:39

Uh and several supporters were caught on a farm shortly

39:41

thereafter with the cash of guns and other equipment

39:43

that tied them to the killing, but authorities

39:46

received so many death threats from Dobbison's

39:48

far right supporters that he was released very

39:50

quickly. His political allies took

39:52

power soon after. Dobison

39:54

became a celebrated figure among the global

39:57

right wing and even in the United States.

39:59

In nineteen eighty four, several US Republican

40:02

political advocacy organizations invited

40:04

Dobison to Washington, d c. To attend

40:06

a dinner held in his honor. He was praised

40:08

for his continuing efforts for freedom

40:11

in the face of communist aggression, which is an

40:13

inspiration to freedom loving people everywhere.

40:16

No one has ever been brought to justice for Romero's

40:18

murder. This is largely due to the fact that Dobison died

40:21

early. I mean, that's one of the reasons. Um

40:23

he didn't. He didn't live very long. He got like cancer

40:25

or some ship. The Catholic Church did, however,

40:27

canonize Oscar Omero in two

40:29

thousand eighteen, turning him into a proper saint,

40:32

So you know, that's

40:35

good. He'd been. He had been um treated

40:37

as a saint and considered a saint by people

40:39

in El Salvador for decades by this

40:41

point. By the way, like he was, he was immediately

40:44

canonized by the people who lived there

40:46

um, But it took the church some time to catch

40:49

up. So Sister Ortiz, who did

40:51

survive her ordeal um, is not a

40:53

saint yet, but more progress

40:55

has been made in bringing her assailants to justice.

40:58

The man who orchestrated Guatemala torture

41:00

program in the late nineteen eighties was Defense

41:02

Minister General Hector Granmaho. He

41:05

was trained, of course, at the School of the Americas.

41:07

I feel like I'm becoming a bit of a broken record,

41:09

but all of these guys went there. Um.

41:11

In nineteen eighty one, a U. S Court found

41:13

Grandmaho responsible for the rape and torture of

41:15

Sister Diana and ordered him to pay forty

41:17

seven point five million dollars in damages.

41:20

Now that's interesting, and

41:22

it may seem wild that, like you could,

41:25

a government employee and a government salary might

41:27

have forty seven eight million dollars

41:29

to hand over. This was not so unusual

41:32

for ambitious graduates of the School of the Americas.

41:34

That was part of the point of going to the

41:36

School of the Americas. And I'm gonna quote now from

41:38

Leslie Gill's book. In Guatemala,

41:41

for example, the outcome of the thirty five year

41:43

old Civil War was a shift in the balance

41:45

of power that created a new landowning

41:48

elite among military officers.

41:50

Income polarization increased in the nineteen

41:52

eighties. The portion of national wealth controlled

41:55

by the poorest ten percent of the population dropped

41:57

from two point four percent to point five percent,

41:59

while the richest ten percent expanded their share

42:01

from forty percent to forty six point

42:03

six percent. Super familiar.

42:07

That does sound super familiar, and it ties into a number

42:09

of things. This is just always the truth with state

42:11

with state security forces. People ask, like,

42:13

why the police are being so unbelievably

42:16

violent to just like random reporters

42:18

filming them and stuff people not breaking any law.

42:21

It's because, more than anything, their

42:23

ability to continue to have

42:25

a comfortable income. They make a ton of money. Cops

42:27

make way so much fucking money.

42:30

Yeah, they're there, and they're they're

42:33

only making more and more. They keep getting raises.

42:35

Their ability to like it's what they

42:37

found with the guy who killed George Floyd, that he

42:39

had like this whole second house that he was not paying

42:42

taxes legally on in Florida. Like,

42:45

this is what happens. This is how security

42:48

for why they do what they do. It's

42:50

because they get paid to do it. It's because

42:52

they're elevated. Yeah, they're elevated

42:54

into the oligarchic class

42:56

in order to maintain and preserve it. And

42:59

this happens very nakedly in Guatemala.

43:01

That's what the School of America's is for. Um,

43:06

if you have it's very

43:08

nakedly here. I

43:10

am floored. Well, and it's

43:12

like I think what's most frustrating

43:15

is the fact that like it's

43:18

partially it's just the blatancy this idea that

43:20

like we see all these cops were clearly just

43:22

not of the neighborhood,

43:25

um and literally

43:27

invading it, destroying

43:30

not just you know, innocent

43:33

people, put a ton of children along the

43:35

way, wrecking their entire lives.

43:37

It's like, yeah,

43:40

I just commend

43:42

an applaud like specifically,

43:45

like that none to be able to voice what happened

43:47

to her, Like I can't

43:49

imagine the challenge of sharing. That's

43:51

not just sharing that story, but then of

43:54

course those people are looking at ways

43:56

that they can get to you. Of course her life

43:58

is still in danger. Um

44:01

I can't. Yeah, it's it's overwhelming,

44:03

Robbert, but it's necessaries, like

44:08

trying to process all of it, trying to understand.

44:11

Tony Morrison has this really great quote that I

44:13

feel like I've used in like just everything,

44:15

but it's been just at the forefront of my mind, which

44:17

is like in times of crisis,

44:20

like lean into what you do rightly,

44:22

like whatever it is, don't let yourself be

44:25

distracted by outside things

44:27

because your way through it's through like your

44:29

talent, and it's I

44:31

have been trying to figure out how to use

44:33

my talents in what is clearly a time

44:35

that requires everyone to use their voice

44:38

articulately, to be very practiced

44:40

and specific in our actions so

44:42

that we don't like falter further

44:44

into that reality because that ship

44:47

is just that is crazy.

44:50

Yeah, it's not killing

44:52

somebody preaching mass like how

44:54

like especially if their whole you know,

44:56

motivation is like they're godless. You walk

44:58

into a godless p worst church and kill their

45:01

spiritual leader like I

45:03

don't, I don't, I but I also

45:05

know that it's not impossible. I know that it's happened

45:08

so so many times. It's touched every continent

45:10

at some point. So as far moved

45:12

as I am from it, I'm aware of how present that

45:15

action is, that that reaching

45:17

that level is not it's not impossible

45:21

so much. In

45:24

nineteen eighty four, the School of the America's

45:26

left Panama UM. It was re established

45:28

in Columbus at a Fort

45:30

Benning in Columbus, Georgia. UM.

45:33

I think I said Columbus, Ohio in the first episode,

45:35

will we'll fix that, But it was Columbus, Georgia. There's

45:37

two Columbi, so yeah, they

45:39

move it to Georgia outside of four or in Fort

45:41

Benning, UM, which is a location that like

45:44

not only like one

45:46

of the things that this did that actually moving the School

45:48

of the Americas to the United States did, was

45:50

it allowed it to provide its foreign students with an even

45:52

deeper appreciation and understanding of US culture.

45:55

We talked about in the last episode how um

45:57

new School of the America's students, who were generally

46:00

there for about a year if they were taking the full course, like

46:02

one of the first things they would all try to do is go buy American

46:04

trucks so that they could take them back home with them.

46:06

Is like a status symbol, now, um,

46:09

and I I find I told

46:11

you we're going to hear from a student

46:14

who went there. And this This is a guy, a Bolivian

46:16

named Juan Ricardo, who was interviewed by Leslie

46:18

Gill. And he's a retired lieutenant colonel in

46:21

the Bolivian Army. And he wound up being a major source

46:23

for Leslie's book, in part due to the fact that,

46:25

by more or less accident, he wound up being

46:27

kind of a pretty left wing dude who still went

46:29

through all of this like far right pro USA indoctrination,

46:32

so he he understood what was

46:34

happening to his fellow soldiers, like and he's

46:36

he's able to kind of speak very lucidly on it,

46:38

which I I appreciate quite a lot, now,

46:41

Um. His introduction to American military

46:43

culture came before he ever traveled to the United States

46:45

or the School of the America's. When he was new to the

46:47

military, he was taught by a number of instructors

46:50

who themselves had been trained at the School of the America's

46:53

and they came back with the lessons they had learned

46:55

and even came back with printed teaching materials

46:57

from the U. S. Military, and a lot of those

46:59

lessons that these guys who've just been trained

47:01

by the US brought back to Bolivia to give to their

47:03

fellow soldiers involved torturing the ship

47:05

out of people. One Ricardo later

47:07

claimed that he was taught quote, how to tie up

47:09

prisoners of war and how to torture them techniques

47:12

that you have to utilize in order to get them to make declarations.

47:15

For example, you don't let them sleep, and then you get

47:17

results. Other knowledge that they brought from the School

47:19

of the Americas. I remember very well it was axiomatic

47:21

among the rangers, the U. S. Army rangers

47:24

that taught the soldiers who were teaching him that

47:26

a dead subversive was better than a prisoner.

47:28

Having a prisoner interfered with the subsequent

47:30

operations. Thus it's better that he is four

47:32

meters underground than to have him alive. Um.

47:36

Yeah, I was trying to picture,

47:39

like between when we last

47:41

spoke in today, like what are these

47:43

classes like? And silly

47:45

me, I was envisioning like very

47:47

subtly, like like oh, you know, this is how

47:50

you would maybe have to tie with somebody who like, you

47:52

know, in the same way that they feel like often, like we've

47:54

seen with cop training courses, the more we learn about

47:56

those, the more it's it doesn't seem

47:59

so insidious, right, It's not so directed. It's

48:01

like, oh, this is how you pull your

48:03

gun, and it's like a two second course and you're like, well,

48:05

that's not enough information. Um

48:07

So, of course we have like a lot of you know, misfires

48:10

and people that are actually accidentally

48:12

shooting other police officers and things like that. Uh,

48:15

it sounds like this was like torture one oh

48:17

one, welcome, here we go getting

48:19

started by the way, shoot your prisoners,

48:22

Yeah, makes if they're dead even

48:24

better, no problem. Yeah, all

48:26

right. So, well you think about executing

48:30

prisoners in violation

48:33

of international law, you should think about something

48:35

else that violates international law. The products

48:37

and services that support this podcast. We're

48:46

back and I've been informed by UH

48:49

Corporate that um our our

48:51

sponsors do not violate international

48:53

law. They in fact comply with international

48:55

law. I apologize for the

48:58

for the error. It's you can see how the mistake.

49:00

It's a binary so it's easy to make, you know, get

49:02

the wrong one of those two we

49:04

do. We do apologize here. So yeah,

49:07

in case you weren't a big war crimes buff um,

49:09

it is a war crime to execute prisoners.

49:12

Um. In fact, everything one Ricardo says about

49:15

what they taught about counter insurgency,

49:17

these US trained officers who trained

49:19

him um is war crimes, are

49:21

war crimes. Would would be war crimes

49:24

were they done, and in fact they were. Now

49:26

you might question how reliable a source One Ricardo

49:28

is and whether or not we can trust him, because he's one guy,

49:31

you know, with the with the clear political ideology,

49:34

making very bold claims about things the United

49:36

States did. Um. And there's a number of

49:38

ways I could back up his his stories. Number

49:40

one would be just reciting dozens of other anecdotes

49:43

of people who were tortured and

49:46

said U S soldiers were there, or

49:48

who were tortured by soldiers trained by America.

49:50

But the fastest way to back up what Wan told Leslie

49:52

Gill is just to cite the Pentagon's own

49:54

published teaching materials see.

49:56

In nineteen six, the Clinton administration

49:59

ordered the de classific caation of a number of training

50:01

materials used at the School of the America's This

50:03

tranche of documents included a Pentagon memo

50:05

from nineteen nine two addressed to the Secretary

50:08

of Defense. It's written by Werner Michael,

50:10

who was the intelligence oversight assistant to the

50:12

Sect Deaf, and Michael

50:15

was, you know, I think, assigned to look

50:17

into this problem once they started to be like

50:19

Americans started to, you know, complain

50:22

about how the School of America's was a terrible thing,

50:24

and he was basically sent to like look into the training

50:26

material these guys were being given. And

50:28

from what I can tell reading this memo, he

50:30

seems to be it seems like he's

50:32

kind of a decent, a relatively

50:35

decent person who wound

50:37

up in this position of like having to analyze

50:39

a horrific war crime being committed by his

50:41

colleagues. Um, and it's

50:43

it's it's a really interesting read for

50:45

that reason. Now, one of the things he notes

50:48

is that the manuals that he was

50:50

reviewing, which are like broadly

50:52

Ford referred to as the torture manuals, which were

50:55

like the training documents starting

50:57

in ninety nine, um

50:59

that they were not. They were all out of compliance

51:01

with US law and with international law.

51:03

But the reason nobody found out about it for

51:06

years is that they were only written in Spanish,

51:08

so nobody reviewed them in the entire Department

51:11

of Defense. And it's

51:13

the second most spoken language in the country,

51:16

that is faithfully. Yeah, but why

51:18

would we have anybody looking at that ship? Yeah,

51:21

it's amazing ignorance.

51:25

Yeah, and I'm gonna quote from his review

51:27

now. An Army review dated February

51:29

nine two, conducted at our request, concluded

51:32

that five of the seven manuals contained language

51:34

and statements and violation of legal, regulatory

51:37

or policy prohibitions. These manuals

51:39

are Handling of Sources, revolutionary

51:41

war and communist ideology, Terrorism

51:43

in the Urban, guerrilla interrogation, and combat

51:46

intelligence. To illustrate the manual

51:48

handling of sources, in depicting the recruitment

51:50

and control of human intelligence sources,

51:52

refers to motivation by fear, payment

51:54

of bounties for enemy dead beatings, false

51:56

imprisonment executions, and the use

51:58

of truth serum. The manual also

52:01

discloses like,

52:03

Okay, so it's either a like

52:05

it sounds like a manual for the mob or a

52:08

super villain. Yes, yes,

52:10

but it was the Army's Department of

52:12

the Army's manual that was

52:15

giving explicit illegal advice to

52:17

foreign soldiers. Now, this memo

52:19

is the closest you're going to get to an explicit condemnation

52:22

by a member of the Department of Defense of

52:24

all of the genocide and rape and child murder

52:27

they willfully trained and allowed soldiers to commit.

52:29

Um. It's it's interesting

52:31

reading not just as a historic document, that

52:33

as kind of a sociological text, because you can

52:36

see in the guy writing this like

52:39

someone who appears to be a broadly honorable

52:41

person starting to realize that the organization

52:44

he built his life around has done something unforgivable.

52:47

This passage, I think is particularly enlightening

52:50

in theory. The offending and improper

52:52

material in the manuals should have been discovered

52:54

during the Army's existing review and approval

52:56

process. It is incredible

52:58

that the use of the less and Plans since nineteen

53:01

eighty two and the manual since nineteen

53:03

eighties seven evaded the established

53:05

system of doctrinal controls. Nevertheless,

53:08

we could find no evidence that this was a deliberate

53:10

and orchestrated attempt to violate d O

53:12

d N Army policies violates.

53:17

But then how did it happen? Yeah,

53:19

yeah, it is incredible, Like that's the closest

53:21

you're going to get from an actual like company man

53:24

to being like something fucked happened

53:26

here and very much sounds like, well, it

53:28

was written in Spanish, so we can't prove it. Yeah,

53:31

who could do? Who can Nobody can read Spanish in

53:33

America in the

53:35

army. Oh

53:37

my word. Yeah. So

53:40

there are one

53:42

of the difficulties and kind of putting this together for

53:44

you, um, is that there's just so many

53:46

different war crimes and war criminals you can tie to the

53:48

School of the America's. We could have done like

53:51

four straight episodes or more just

53:53

laying out Guatemala, right, and what

53:55

was done in Guatemala, and not even the broader

53:57

story of the Guatemalan Civil War, but like just what School

53:59

of him eric As graduates got up to in Guatemal. We could

54:01

have done the same thing, probably without Salvador. We're

54:04

not even going to talk about Operation Condor in

54:06

this episode, which was like it

54:08

was, it was an agreement between a bunch of Latin American

54:10

government's. The best way I could describe it as like if the EU

54:13

was just about killing left wing uh

54:16

political organizers, that that was kind

54:18

of Operation Condor. We're not even going to get into it,

54:21

because there's there's there's I mean, we've are this

54:23

has been a very full set of episodes already,

54:26

and some of this stuff I want to like cover at a later

54:28

date. There's a lot to go into because

54:30

the the amount of factory that was perpetrated

54:32

by the United States in Latin

54:35

America for forever is

54:37

just such a deep and complicated

54:39

and a horrible story. But I think

54:41

given the limited time we have, what's important to

54:43

focus on next is the kind of men who

54:45

were educated by the School of America's and how

54:48

how the school changed them, and how the presence

54:50

of putting such men back in their

54:53

home countries could fundamentally to fundamental

54:55

changes in the character of a nation. So more

54:58

Bolivian soldiers were trained the School of the

55:00

America's then were trained by any other foreign

55:02

military establishment. As one of the

55:04

poorest nations in Latin America, it was particularly

55:07

at risk for a Marxist uprising, and so the US

55:09

took precautions. Like I said, they would get worried

55:11

about a country and they would start increasing the number

55:13

of soldiers that they would invite to the School of the Americas.

55:16

So they trained huge numbers of Bolivian

55:19

officers and kind of introduced them to this cult

55:21

of Americanism that they were. That's like what

55:23

they did to everyone they invited in. And

55:26

Leslie gil rights based on her interviews

55:28

with Juan Ricardo, who is that Bolivian soldier

55:31

who went to the School of the America's quote,

55:34

the North Americans had everything, or so it

55:36

seemed to the Bolivians. They enjoyed a level of

55:38

comfort unheard of in Bolivia. If a soldier

55:40

tore his uniform, the army provided him with a new

55:42

one, and the amount of food served in the School of America's

55:45

mess hall made the Bolivian's eyes bulge. The

55:47

returning soldiers told us that you could eat like a beast

55:49

at the School of the America's, laughed Juan Ricardo.

55:52

The U. S. Army's high degree of specialization also

55:54

impressed the Bolivians, whose military was not nearly

55:56

as differentiated in terms of knowledge and skills

55:59

of its members. To be a specialist implied

56:01

that one was special in the ability to work with high tech

56:03

weaponry or just modern weaponry. Set

56:05

the North Americans apart from their Latin

56:07

American peers and students. Technology,

56:10

especially the esoteric knowledge that unlocked

56:12

its power had a quasi magical

56:14

appeal for the Bolivians and for many of these

56:17

Latin Americans. U S. Army officers

56:19

seemed to go everywhere in helicopters,

56:21

a symbol of their power and superiority.

56:23

The conclusion that they drew, according to Juan

56:26

Ricardo, was that the Gringos made good

56:28

allies. It was good to be on their side,

56:30

and they would provide all the necessary support for the struggle

56:32

against subversion. He paused, and then added,

56:35

it's also better to have them as allies because they

56:37

have a good intelligence system.

56:39

So you can see

56:41

part of what's happening here, like right, one of the reasons. One of

56:43

the things that's that's a real hallmark

56:45

of this period in right wing repression

56:47

of the left is Pinochet throwing

56:50

left wing militants from helicopters.

56:53

Um helicopters which are the symbol of

56:55

the United States, which are the symbol of modernity,

56:57

which are the symbol of power. Right,

57:00

these things aren't happening for for

57:02

no reason, Like it's all it all ties in together.

57:05

Um yeah, But also I think

57:07

like about the idea of like just

57:10

abundance again, it's just it's

57:13

it's very cruel to offer people who

57:15

have very little everything and

57:17

then like expect them

57:19

not to like fall in love with that comfort

57:24

and the only and and there can be

57:26

like you have to you have to convince these

57:28

people what the school. One of the things that the the School of Americas is

57:30

doing is it's drawing a border

57:33

in the minds of these men between themselves

57:35

and the rest of the country that they live in.

57:38

And it's making their other, their fellow countrymen,

57:40

these indigenous people, um, these

57:43

these left wing you know, political organizers.

57:46

It's making them into the

57:48

other and again and into the thing that's

57:50

that's separating you from abundance.

57:54

You introduce these people to abundance, and then you

57:56

tell them, these are the people who are stopping

57:58

your country from being like this and yeah,

58:02

and then they would turn them into the people who

58:04

stopped them from their countrymen from

58:06

having any kind of abundance. Yeah, who

58:08

kicked children to death. Yeah,

58:11

but some of them get rich, so that's good.

58:13

Um. So one of the things I found really interesting

58:15

in reading leslie Gill's book about this is that

58:18

the kind of training the School of the America's

58:20

cultivated and its students this like training

58:23

them to be American um. It

58:25

extended to what you might call the United

58:27

States of America's number one pastime,

58:29

which is, unfortunately the commodification

58:31

of black bodies. And this is not going to be a super

58:34

fun chunk to read, but let's

58:36

do it here we go. S o A

58:38

graduates cultivated images of themselves

58:40

as manly men upon their return to Bolivia

58:42

by regaling peers and academy students with accounts

58:44

of their sexual exploits. Like a majority

58:47

of their counterparts in the various armies of the America's

58:49

many believe that access to the sexual services

58:51

of local women was a basic right, and the

58:53

Panama Canal zone was presented as a place where

58:55

men could indulge their sexual fantasies and

58:57

escape into allusions of men as men uh

59:00

Pantoya, which is one of the other men that Leslie

59:02

Gill interviews. One of the other guys who went to the school

59:04

recalled that his instructors usually moved quickly

59:06

from accounts of their professional experiences

59:08

at the s o A to anecdotes about North American

59:11

comfort, the prostitutes and how much they

59:13

cost. Because of the enormous US military

59:15

presence, sex workers from a variety of countries

59:18

congregated in Panamanian cities. The

59:20

brothels, explained Pantoya, complimented

59:22

other aspects of life at the s o A. Cadets

59:24

trained from Monday to Friday and Saturday and Sunday.

59:27

They were free, they had money, so they went to the

59:29

brothels that had black women. North Americans

59:31

were there too, and everyone was equal. The

59:33

Bolivians were fascinated with black women. There

59:35

are none in Bolivia, and to make love with a black

59:37

woman was supposedly an unforgettable experience,

59:40

very exotic. It was the moment when the Obolivian

59:42

military man had international contact.

59:45

The aura of almost mystical transcendentalism

59:47

that surrounded the Bolivian's accounts of

59:49

sexual encounters with black women emerged from

59:51

a belief that you could do things with foreigners,

59:54

particularly members of subordinate racial

59:56

groups, that you could not do at home. Part

59:58

of the allure of going up rod was the opportunity

1:00:01

to play out sexist and racist stereotypes

1:00:03

away from the constraints of their own society.

1:00:05

And Panama, single men had disposable

1:00:08

income that was unencumbered by alternative

1:00:10

claims that would shape its use in Bolivia, and

1:00:12

this money gave them a feeling of power and strength.

1:00:15

It also enabled them to enter a transnational

1:00:17

world of power and pleasure that no one at

1:00:19

home except for a select few new

1:00:22

As these men lived the excitement of going abroad

1:00:24

and took part in daily training exercises

1:00:26

at the s o A, began to reflect on

1:00:28

their own country in different ways. The

1:00:30

s o A experience aggravated longstanding

1:00:33

domestic hatreds of Indians and Communists,

1:00:36

as officers struggled to separate themselves

1:00:38

from their own modest origins and

1:00:40

to explain the roots of Bolivian underdevelopment

1:00:42

to themselves. I

1:00:45

will never understand I

1:00:48

some people think that um,

1:00:50

black bodies are inherently magic

1:00:53

beyond like the

1:00:55

black cultures. Black women have co opted

1:00:58

that to mean like you have val you

1:01:00

essentially beyond what the world gives

1:01:03

you, in the phrase quote

1:01:05

unquote black girl magic. This the idea that like

1:01:07

we are transcendent and beautiful and worthwhile because

1:01:09

our community has to do those things because very

1:01:12

clearly no one else is going to And the idea

1:01:14

that as we are, we

1:01:16

as Americans are going into other

1:01:19

countries and basically

1:01:21

disrupting an entire culture uh,

1:01:23

then bring those people back to America

1:01:26

and further degrade black

1:01:28

bodies. It is uh not surprising,

1:01:32

uh and yet still still frustrating,

1:01:35

still maddening. Still again

1:01:38

just confusing at our ability to

1:01:40

just shrug at human life and just be

1:01:42

like, yeah, my life has more

1:01:44

value than yours. I can't

1:01:47

have such a hard time processing it. Yep.

1:01:51

Yeah, there's a lot going

1:01:53

on there. Um,

1:01:56

yeah, there's a lot going on there. I find

1:01:58

it interesting this this the

1:02:01

way in which these guys are

1:02:03

kind of being, the

1:02:06

way in which they're being trained with abundance,

1:02:09

right, and and how dangerous that is because when

1:02:11

you read about when you read like, you'll hear a lot about the

1:02:13

School of the America's on Twitter, and it will usually be

1:02:15

because it's Twitter, you know, nobody. People don't have time

1:02:18

for super detailed explorations

1:02:20

of things. But it will generally be something like, oh,

1:02:22

the America, the United States has the school where

1:02:24

it trained assassins and murderers

1:02:27

and stuff, and it was the School of the America's and it you know

1:02:29

it, it led to all these revolutions and that's

1:02:31

bad. And I think the reality,

1:02:33

like I think the focus actually on the

1:02:36

torture curriculum and stuff is kind

1:02:38

of a mistake because I don't think that's the most

1:02:40

insidious and dangerous thing that the school

1:02:43

did. What what what we just talked about

1:02:45

in that last passage, This um

1:02:48

bringing bringing the men from

1:02:50

these countries, these military officers into

1:02:53

the world of white men in the United

1:02:55

States, and what that means, and the accumulation

1:02:58

of of not just the umulation of

1:03:00

like physical goods, but the domination

1:03:03

of the bodies of people who are are sort

1:03:05

of of a lower racial cast than you or whatever,

1:03:08

like all of this stuff that were brought into whiteness

1:03:10

in a real way, and that's a huge part

1:03:12

of what led to the massacres. I

1:03:15

think that's fascinating. I think. I

1:03:17

mean, there's this super good documentary

1:03:20

on Netflix right now which sort of

1:03:22

attempts and I say attempts because it's coming

1:03:24

from a tech company that like produces

1:03:27

the same standards of being as

1:03:29

the tech companies. The documentary is meant to like

1:03:32

critique, but it's the idea

1:03:34

essentially is that like tech companies

1:03:37

have designed themselves

1:03:40

based off of your

1:03:43

existence. Essentially, you become the

1:03:45

product or your ability to change and adhere

1:03:48

to a um corporations

1:03:51

need to use your dollars like

1:03:54

held on, I can explain this better, give me a second.

1:03:57

It's the idea that you were the product, right, Like,

1:03:59

because the Internet is free, someone has

1:04:02

to pay in order to keep these tech companies running,

1:04:04

and so they run on ad revenue and adds

1:04:06

the goal of an AD is to get you to change your behavior

1:04:08

so you use the product. The ad is advertising.

1:04:10

And what a lot of the documentary

1:04:13

has done just with interviews of people who created It's like the

1:04:15

guy who created the endless scroll on Twitter is

1:04:17

one of the interviewees, and

1:04:19

there's like at one point

1:04:22

the producers ask all these interviewees

1:04:24

like do you let your children use social

1:04:26

media? And all of them across the border like, well,

1:04:28

no, because I can't stop myself

1:04:31

from using this tool I created because

1:04:34

it's based off of human behavior, and human

1:04:36

behavior cannot change as fast as computer

1:04:38

technology changes technology a crazy

1:04:41

rate. It's like exponentially faster than any

1:04:43

other thing that exists. It's just constantly

1:04:45

changing, so it can learn us faster than we can

1:04:47

learn and adapt to it. And I think

1:04:50

probably the same thing is that play here,

1:04:52

this idea of once you understand

1:04:54

humans and their desires, and

1:04:57

you find small ways to manipulate

1:04:59

that. It's most people

1:05:01

can't help but fall in line because that's

1:05:03

just their human Like, Yeah,

1:05:06

we're supposed to be out picking fucking berries.

1:05:08

And if you can replicate that berry picking

1:05:11

thing like you can, you

1:05:13

can make us do anything, because we really

1:05:15

want them motherfucking berries. Um.

1:05:17

It's just that you know now now

1:05:20

the berries are ford trucks and

1:05:22

um prostitutes. Uh,

1:05:25

but you know it's about accumulation,

1:05:27

right, It's this this thing in our animal brains

1:05:30

that we feel compelled to do for

1:05:32

reasons that are we're at one

1:05:34

point necessary and aren't anymore.

1:05:37

But if you can, if you can trick that

1:05:39

part of the brain, um, we'll

1:05:41

keep looking for those got damn berries. Um. I

1:05:44

don't know, I don't know how much that ties into this,

1:05:46

but yeah, we'll tire into

1:05:48

it. Because you have all the entire group of people

1:05:50

who are willing to do, like commit human atrocities

1:05:53

but for like the like,

1:05:55

and and then the question becomes like

1:05:58

obviously, like people have free

1:06:00

will, and I don't want to say like, oh, America came

1:06:02

in and change these people, and you know they were something

1:06:05

unable to do anything about it. That's not you

1:06:07

know, the intention of the conversation,

1:06:09

but it's like how how

1:06:11

I guess I'm always trying to put myself in a situation

1:06:14

of like how would I react to a similar set

1:06:16

of circumstances and the ease

1:06:18

with which I could picture myself

1:06:20

loved ones falling into these

1:06:22

headspaces of like how dare these

1:06:24

people keep me from the comfort I've experienced here?

1:06:26

And I don't want to go backwards that that

1:06:29

fear constantly going backwards. It just it seems

1:06:31

so easy, so just far

1:06:33

too easy to trip into that land.

1:06:35

Yeah. Yeah, So

1:06:38

this guy we've been talking about, Juan Ricardo UM

1:06:40

later in his career, you know, he was initially

1:06:43

trained by soldiers, had been trained at the s o A, but eventually

1:06:45

he had the fortune to travel to Columbus

1:06:48

and attend the School of the America's UM

1:06:50

and in this next passage he recalls kind

1:06:52

of the political education that he received

1:06:55

when he got there. The sergeant

1:06:57

said that all the communists in Latin America were

1:06:59

trained in Cuba and that they hated their countries.

1:07:01

Those of us who were at Fort Benning were going to become the

1:07:03

leaders of our countries. We all had to unite

1:07:05

against communism. I questioned the simplicity

1:07:08

of all this. I was very imprudent. The sergeants

1:07:10

just repeated what they learned from their own instructors.

1:07:12

When I asked him to describe the course in more detail,

1:07:15

this is Leslie gil writing. He continued, For

1:07:17

example, there was a section of the course called civic

1:07:19

action. It was one of the moments when the anti communist

1:07:22

doctrine really came out. They taught you that when

1:07:24

you enter a village and make contact with the population,

1:07:26

you have to make sure there are no communists. They

1:07:29

never said you never trust anybody. You never

1:07:31

enter a home and accept a plate of food because

1:07:33

a communist might have poisoned it. These people

1:07:35

are not going to be free because of their Marxist indoctrination.

1:07:38

I had an argument with one of the sergeants. I asked him

1:07:40

to explain Marxist doctrine, but he couldn't, so

1:07:43

I explained it to him. It was great. I had already

1:07:45

taken a year of social science classes. As the university

1:07:47

in Lapaz. The sergeants no only formulas.

1:07:50

The objective is to homogenize the education

1:07:52

of the school of the America's students. I

1:07:55

mean, it's the same thing going on in a lot of

1:07:57

ways in the heads of some of these people. Fucking setting

1:07:59

up roadblocks near where I lived because they're scared

1:08:01

of Antifa lighting forest fires. It's because they

1:08:03

believe BLM. You know, they

1:08:05

heard they heard someone talking about the Bureau of Land Management

1:08:07

on a radio and they believe that BLM is a Marxist

1:08:10

organization. And what who Marxists seek

1:08:12

the destruction of their own countries? Because

1:08:15

that's what these people, that's that's

1:08:17

the propaganda. It's not it hasn't changed.

1:08:19

It's just distributed differently. Like you

1:08:22

had to have once upon a time. You

1:08:24

needed this school to inculcate people,

1:08:26

you know, and you had to do it in a very deliberate way.

1:08:28

Now they get taught on Facebook and Twitter and

1:08:31

it it it will lead to

1:08:33

the same thing. It's like led

1:08:35

to the same thing. I think, Yeah, it's starting

1:08:37

to. It's starting to. You have a lot of Americans

1:08:40

who are willing to murder large groups of other people

1:08:42

because they vaguely think that they're Marxists.

1:08:45

I mean, it was it two years ago. We had that kid walk

1:08:47

right into a church and just assassinate people.

1:08:49

He just prayed with, I mean it's oh no, that was years.

1:08:51

That was Dylan Ruth. Yeah,

1:08:54

time is a weird time, just

1:08:56

not Yeah. It feels

1:08:59

so yeah. Hearing

1:09:01

all this, you won't be surprised that between nineteen seventy

1:09:03

eight, UH in nineteen eighty, Bolivia held

1:09:05

two general elections and went through five presidents,

1:09:08

none of whom won an electoral victory. They

1:09:10

endured four military coups UH, three

1:09:13

of which succeeded, and it looks as if the nation

1:09:15

is actually going through another one right now, with

1:09:17

the overthrow of left wing president Evo Morales

1:09:19

by the Bolivian military. It will not surprise

1:09:22

you to know that a lot of the officers responsible

1:09:25

for the the coup in Bolivia that happened

1:09:27

started happening late last year is still kind of

1:09:29

going on UM our School

1:09:31

of the America's graduates. Now.

1:09:33

By the later nineteen eighties, the Department of Defense

1:09:35

was beginning to receive a lot of complaints about all the

1:09:37

horrible crimes committed by s A graduates.

1:09:40

In nineteen Yeah, in nineteen

1:09:42

eighty nine, they started mandating that all school

1:09:44

instructors take sixteen whole hours of human

1:09:47

rights training UM,

1:09:49

which didn't solve the problem. Oddly enough, with

1:09:52

the Cold War ended, the Pentagon

1:09:54

rather seamlessly switched from funding anti communist

1:09:56

death squads to funding anti narcotics efforts

1:09:59

in places like Lumbia. The people

1:10:01

s o A graduates murdered remained the same. They

1:10:03

were still mostly left wing activists, indigenous

1:10:06

people, you know, Marxist guerrillas,

1:10:08

but like a lot of just like indigenous people, um

1:10:11

more innocent local people

1:10:13

who just might be sympathetic with a group

1:10:15

of guerillas who were fighting the soldiers

1:10:17

who kept murdering their family members, anybody else. That's

1:10:19

who these groups were always killing. But

1:10:21

the way they the victims were referred

1:10:23

to change now. They weren't communists,

1:10:25

they were narco guerrillas. And after Narco

1:10:27

guerrillas, when the War on Terror started off, the

1:10:30

victims started being called terrorists.

1:10:33

Now. In response to a sizeable

1:10:35

protest movement based near Fort Benning in two thousand,

1:10:37

President Clinton made a big show of closing the School

1:10:39

of the America's. It was reopened almost

1:10:42

immediately under a new name, the Western Hemisphere

1:10:44

Institute for Security Cooperation

1:10:47

wine SEC. Now, Yeah,

1:10:50

like when we ran out of America's. Yeah,

1:10:52

it's different now, guys, we fixed it. They

1:10:55

did rejigger. Their

1:10:57

name is wine Sex. That's

1:10:59

the acronym Wine. Second, I'm gonna

1:11:02

call him Seck. Yeah.

1:11:06

So they did have their curriculum rejiggered

1:11:08

a bit to um appease the bleeding

1:11:10

heart Democrats who were angry at all the murder um.

1:11:12

There were new courses added in d mining and like

1:11:14

the removal of minds, and like in human rights.

1:11:17

Uh. And leslie Gill notes that like these

1:11:19

were like the least attended courses at the

1:11:21

school um and she

1:11:24

was able to visit at this point once it got

1:11:26

changed into Wine sec in the early aughts. Is part

1:11:28

of this like full court pr press by the Pentagon

1:11:31

to like deal with the fact that they had gotten a

1:11:33

bad reputation, so they invited in

1:11:35

a bunch of activists who campaign to shut down

1:11:37

the School of the America's in order to like show them

1:11:39

the new courses and like make the case that things had

1:11:41

changed for the better. They invited in journalists, and of course

1:11:43

they invited in leslie Gill. Now,

1:11:46

as part of this pr blitz, Leslie got to meet with

1:11:48

the head of the school, a general named

1:11:50

Glenn Whitener. There's an American general. In

1:11:52

one passage, she attempts to have him speak

1:11:54

on the subject of the numerous massacres

1:11:56

in war crimes committed by School of America's

1:11:58

graduates. And I'm going to read this

1:12:00

passage because his responses will sound very

1:12:03

similar to anyone who's listened to a police

1:12:05

press conference lately. Acknowledging

1:12:09

that a few bad apples from Latin

1:12:11

America had attended the School of the America's,

1:12:14

Whitener insists that these individuals were never

1:12:16

taught torture techniques and that their crimes

1:12:18

represented the unconscionable acts of

1:12:20

a few rogue actors, not

1:12:22

the teachings of the s o A or the policies

1:12:25

of terrorist states. He maintained

1:12:27

that some graduates who stood accused of

1:12:29

human rights violations had only taken short

1:12:31

courses on benign topics such as auto

1:12:33

maintenance, and had trained at the school years

1:12:35

before their alleged crimes took place. It

1:12:38

was unconscionable. He argued for critics to

1:12:40

point fingers at the school and claimed that it caused

1:12:42

these men to commit crimes. In a rationalization

1:12:45

of the School of the America's that I would hear from others.

1:12:47

Whitener pointed out that the UNI bomber went

1:12:49

to Harvard. Does that mean, he asked rhetorically,

1:12:51

that Harvard caused him to kill people? Does

1:12:54

that mean that Harvard should be shut down? Whitener

1:12:56

and others at the s o A thus did not deny

1:12:58

the reality of human rights violations, but

1:13:00

his argument treated a prominent university

1:13:02

and a military school as comparable institutions.

1:13:05

Harvard, however, did not teach combat

1:13:07

skills to Latin American soldiers. Moreover,

1:13:10

the United States government had used its military

1:13:12

apparatus, including the s o A, to support

1:13:15

Latin American armed forces with bad human rights

1:13:17

records for decades. Yet if one objected

1:13:19

to his confused logic, Widener dismissed

1:13:21

the critique as anti military and thus

1:13:23

unacceptable. Hey, can't

1:13:26

be anti police. They protect you even

1:13:29

if they don't. That's what they're doing. A

1:13:31

lot going on here. That including the fact that

1:13:33

he's like, well what about you know, UNI mom and went to Harvard?

1:13:35

Why aren't people lingered hot and asshole?

1:13:38

I would say, yeah, sorry,

1:13:40

go ahead, no, No, I

1:13:43

like imagine being like, hey, we've

1:13:45

found like eleven people have committed atrocities

1:13:48

can't be our problem. The

1:13:50

only like seeing response to me is

1:13:53

to be like, let me investigate that, because

1:13:55

that seems wildly out of step with what I

1:13:57

thought my institution was trying to do.

1:14:00

To say like, like, serial colors come from all

1:14:02

over the place, but no other schools

1:14:04

produced eleven that become dictators.

1:14:06

Get your head out of your ass, and thousands

1:14:09

of perpetrates. Thousands of perpetrators

1:14:11

tied to the School of the Americas. Thousands of individual

1:14:13

people who committed acts of murder in genocide can

1:14:15

be tied to the School of the Americas. If Harvard,

1:14:18

if a thousand Harvard graduates in

1:14:20

the course of like twenty years had started

1:14:22

male bombing campaigns and be like, there might be something

1:14:24

wrong with Harvard's going we

1:14:27

should look into Harvard. Um.

1:14:29

Yeah, Like everyone

1:14:31

would be saying that if there was this one school

1:14:34

that kept making unibombers, we would all

1:14:36

be like, what the funk is going on at Harvard?

1:14:38

Somebody should look into this ship. Maybe

1:14:40

we shouldn't have Harvard anymore. It

1:14:42

seems like all it does is make unibombers.

1:14:45

There's also no institution, particularly one that carries

1:14:47

guns and oftentimes produces

1:14:50

policies for major like countries,

1:14:53

networks, individuals. Uh, that should

1:14:55

be above scrutiny and the

1:14:57

idea to say like, oh, that's anti military

1:15:00

and just the most

1:15:02

to me, that's that's the first, like, that's the

1:15:05

loudest signal to me that we're in cult

1:15:07

territory. In the same way that I firmly

1:15:09

believe that the police are a

1:15:11

form of occult, that these people have just

1:15:13

bought into their uniform and this idea

1:15:16

that they are a military for the country,

1:15:18

which was not at all your intended purpose.

1:15:21

I can't, I cannot yep.

1:15:24

I hate it here. It's not great

1:15:27

here. Uh, it's not great

1:15:29

here. I don't love it. Um.

1:15:31

You know what I do love, though, Joel,

1:15:35

Raytheon. You

1:15:37

know, one of the few bright spots in this

1:15:40

dark world of imperialism and murder

1:15:42

are the wonderful products of the Raytheon Corporation.

1:15:45

Joel, have you ever thought I

1:15:48

want to fire missiles via robot

1:15:50

at groups of indistinct men

1:15:53

in vehicles, but I don't want to accidentally

1:15:56

blow up as many school buses. Is

1:15:58

that a thought you've had? Uh?

1:16:01

Not yet, Robert, Well, if

1:16:03

you want to wage a brutal counterinsurgency

1:16:06

campaign and blow up slightly few

1:16:08

school buses. After blowing up quite a few

1:16:10

school buses, you need the new r

1:16:12

X for a knife missile from rape. Yes, Sophie,

1:16:14

you do know that you don't need to do another advert.

1:16:17

I was gonna let you finish, but because you were

1:16:19

doing so well and you do, I'm

1:16:21

just I this is we're beyond money.

1:16:24

So the my enthusiasm

1:16:27

for Raytheon's fine product line is not

1:16:29

is not a is not a shallow capitalist,

1:16:32

right, this is this is your

1:16:34

love. Yeah, and the r

1:16:37

X four is you know, like

1:16:39

I said, there's no better way to

1:16:42

murder the specific terrorists you want

1:16:44

to murder without blowing up

1:16:46

school buses as the r X four. If

1:16:48

you're feeling like I've blown up too many school

1:16:51

buses in Yemen, the r X

1:16:53

four is the answer for you and

1:16:55

for Yemen. How

1:16:57

much is the r X four going to run me, Robert? Just

1:17:00

enough to fund a couple of schools? Okay,

1:17:03

that's reasonably we don't need any Yeah those

1:17:05

schools that much? We gotta we gotta play anyway.

1:17:08

Nobody needs schools. In fact, Target

1:17:10

number two Yeah, yeah,

1:17:12

shoots some shoots some nice knife missiles at

1:17:14

the schools whatever fuck it? Raytheon

1:17:17

anyway, Joel, you wanna how

1:17:19

are you feeling at the end of all this? Um?

1:17:22

At the end of this Uh informed,

1:17:24

Robert. I feel informed and

1:17:26

and better able to hopefully

1:17:29

again just identify the patterns

1:17:32

that we're seeing and

1:17:34

be vocal in my opposition

1:17:37

of them. It is um

1:17:39

so upsetting to have lived

1:17:41

in be a current member and party

1:17:43

of a country that has committed

1:17:45

such a chastity's um.

1:17:48

I don't want these things to happen in the name of my country

1:17:50

anymore. I really like so

1:17:52

many aspects of being an American, so

1:17:54

many Americans do I love. Uh,

1:17:57

this cannot continue? Yeah,

1:18:00

Well, today has been a fun episode. We

1:18:02

all enjoyed things, we learned a lot. I

1:18:04

think we're all bummed

1:18:07

out now. So go do some push

1:18:09

ups. Uh. Go scout out

1:18:12

the roads around your house.

1:18:14

Uh, in order to keep an eye on

1:18:17

the right wing militias that that might

1:18:19

try to set up death squads in your area.

1:18:21

And more than anything, I

1:18:25

don't know. I have nothing for you other than what

1:18:27

I've given you. Uh, go

1:18:30

go go make this not happen

1:18:33

again. Yes, do

1:18:35

you have any any plugs. No

1:18:38

I have. I've never been on the internet before.

1:18:40

I actually don't understand what's happening to me

1:18:42

right now. I was woken up and dragged

1:18:45

into a darkened room by masked men

1:18:47

and told to read this script. So

1:18:49

that was actually that was actually me and Anderson

1:18:52

and uh, somehow with a

1:18:54

funny voice changer, Well,

1:18:57

I have nothing to plug that makes dog barks

1:18:59

sound like scary men. Mm

1:19:01

hmm, Well

1:19:04

he means he sat. I right, okay on Twitter? And

1:19:06

where I just a spot on Twitter and Instagram and we have a Teo

1:19:08

public store, And

1:19:12

well, did you do your plugs? I don't remember, I've

1:19:14

blocked out. I didn't.

1:19:17

I don't have anything to plug. But

1:19:19

I do want to commend you,

1:19:21

Robert, for doing some of the best work

1:19:24

I have that's personally impacted my life.

1:19:26

Like I don't know on a large scale what's happening

1:19:29

with anything. It's like I said, chaos,

1:19:31

but I mean it very legitimately

1:19:33

when I say you've given me a space to

1:19:36

be more educated and more informed. I

1:19:38

am a product of the American school

1:19:40

system and I need to be more informed. So

1:19:45

yeah,

1:19:48

thank you. Well, yeah,

1:19:56

all right, we got it. Thank you,