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In this monumental work, American University anthropology professor Lesley Gill, granted an unprecedented level of access to the School of the Americas, presents a comprehensive portrait of the notorious institution.
1. Who is the primary audience of this book?I think there are 2 groups that I had in mind when I wrote the book. One group was an educated public that is interested in these kinds of issues and might become better informed by reading my book. And the second audience is university people, academics and students at universities where these kinds of issues are debated quite a lot nowadays.
I guess to finish answering that question I should say something about why I published the book with an academic press instead of a press which has a broader distribution. And there were two reasons for that. The first is that Duke agreed to treat my book as a trade book which means that they are putting more effort into advertising it and publicizing it than a regular or non-trade book on their lists. Secondly, the trade publishers that I did approach wanted me to write a book that I didn?t want to write. They basically wanted me to write a book that, in the words of one person, was simply a biography of the school. And I didn?t feel that was adequate. I felt that what is interesting about the school is what it can tell us about US imperialism, both in Latin America and abroad the world. But the commercial publishers that I spoke with basically didn?t want to touch that subject.
On the inside of the book cover it actually says that this book is a part of a series of books?
That?s right.
How does this fit in with the subject matter of other books?
Well, I know that there was another book in the series with a number of editors, one of which is edited by Gilbert Joseph who I believe is the editor of the series. The title of the book is called ?Close Encounters of Empire?. It basically looks at the cultural aspects of US imperialism in Latin America. So it touches on the theme in a different way.
At what point in the process did you make the agreement with Duke, how did that fit into your writing then, this whole idea of the series and the question of empire?
I made the agreement after I had finished writing the book, which was actually something that the commercial publishers found quite amusing that I would write a book and then look for a publisher. The way they usually work is they usually sign contracts with authors who have an idea or a concept and then give them an advance to develop the idea. But I basically had the book written and then I thought, ok, now who might be interested in publishing it? So I really started approaching publishers after I had the first draft already finished.
So it was a good fit?
I think so. I think Duke has been doing a good job and it?s satisfied my desire to, on the one hand, try to speak to a broader audience than just academics but at the same time to try to write a book that is serious and engages serious topics and isn?t dumbed down just to make it commercially viable.
2. What kind of responses have you gotten so far?The academic reviews are just starting to come out. There haven?t been very many yet because it usually takes a year or year and a half for the reviews to come out. But one review I just saw was very favorable. In the mainstream media the Washington Post reviewed it. It was a mixed review. The reviewer was Peter Kornbluh, from the National Security Archives, who felt that I had, he said good things about the book, but his main critique was that he felt that I undermined my case against the SOA by talking about US imperialism too much which I thought was quite interesting coming from someone like Kornbluh who seems to me to spend his time doing exactly that, but being perhaps a little more circumspect in the language that he uses so that he can still in some ways kind of fit into the NGO politics of the inside the beltway crowd.
Have others in the NGO group had the same response?
That I don?t know. Other than Kornbluh?s review, I don?t know what other people have been saying in that kind of crowd. I have done a number of interviews on the radio, mostly with hosts who are sympathetic. I have a research assistant here who is bound and determined to get me interviewed on the Pat Reilly show. But so far the interviews I have done are with people who basically are sympathetic to the book and groups or media outlets who are more rightwing have ignored it basically.
But you must have gotten responses by now from the school itself.
No, I haven?t, and I didn?t expect to. The response that I have received from the SOA and the military has been studded silence. Which is exactly what I expected because I think that the more attention that they give it, even if it is negative attention, the more the book will become known. And I don?t think they want that to happen.
3. How was it to work on this project as a woman in such a male-dominated setting?Yeah, that?s an interesting question and a question that a lot of people have asked me. In a lot of ways it wasn?t different than what a man who holds my political views might have experienced. Although on the other hand, I think that perhaps I am a woman- and I am small, I?m only 5?2?- I think perhaps people saw me as less threatening than they might have if I had been a man.
One of the drawbacks of being a woman, and I think it would have been a drawback for certain kinds of men as well, is that I have no military background. I?ve never been in the military, no one in my family is in the military. Before the SOA I really had no contact with the military. So what that meant was that it took me awhile to learn how to talk the talk, if you will. The military uses tons of acronyms, and it took awhile to get conversant in those acronyms and to understand what people were saying a lot of the time. A lot of things like that, that I think were required, were really hard for me in the beginning because, as I said, I don?t have any military experience.
I think some of the things that were beneficial to me, and again, this wasn?t particulary because I was a woman, but being a university professor helped me. Because a lot of people at the SOA, particularly in the US military, but in the Latin American militaries as well, have a lot of respect for people who are educated. I know a lot of the US military guys that I met went into the military because they see it as a way to get an education. So when people learned I was a professor, a lot of them would ask me about Latin American studies programs, which ones were the good ones, how to get in and that sort of thing. So it gave me a way to start talking to people.
What about your views as a woman, if you consider yourself a feminst, it?s an issue where surely sexism plays a huge role. Did your biases going into it have an effect on how you perceived how you were treated?
Well, I mean, as you know, the military is the most hierarchical, male-domincated, sexist institution on earth. I mean, I can?t think of one that is more so than the military. So that certainly flies in the face of any kind of feminist principles that I have. But I think that as an anthropologist you have to be willing to engage people, to be interested enough in other people and how they think and how they operate in the world and organize the world cognitively. You have to be interested enough so that you can get by that. Certainly sexism was everywhere that I looked. It imbues every aspect of daily life at the SOA. But you know, one has to be interested enough in what you are studying or what you are trying to find out to find a way to connect with people despite the fact that they hold views, and I mean, not just about women but about hr and a lot of things that I strongly disagree with. In other words, you have to be interested enough in trying to understand them that you find some way to connect and empathize and establish a relationship with them despite the fact that here are huge chasms of disagreements about a lot of things that separate you.
4. From the beginning, you state the intended goal of maintaining a ?critical distance? from the anti-SOA campaign, despite identifying with its goals. Do you feel you were able to do this? How?Yeah. I don?t think I?m doing it now. Actually, [at the end of March], Judy Liteky and some people from SOA Watch in San Francisco invited me to come and give some talks. And I am very happy to do that and I don?t feel the need to maintain that distance the same way I did when I was doing the research. But yeah, when I was doing the research I felt that I did.
First let me explain the reason why I think it is important to do it: I think that the anti-SOA movement, pretty much like every social movement that I am aware of has different currents within it, people who think differently even though everyone is united behind the idea that the School of the Americas should close. So I think that there was a reason in trying to maintain some distance and that?s to be able to appreciate those differences, and not just buy into what the leadership of the movement is saying simply because I like them, or because they are attractive and articulate people and so forth. And I think I was able to do that because I made a big effort at the vigil to talk to lots of different kinds of people, students at my university, and people from different segments of the movement. I feel like I did talk to a range of people without becoming too attached or too wedded to one particular view of why the SOA should be closed. Sort of what it signifies in a broader sense.
What about critical distance from the SOA? You wrote that it seemed that no matter what you said, you were seen as being against them.
Yeah, I think there are people that believed that from the beginning to the end. And it was basically true. It is true. But I think that because of the amount of time I spent there, I think I was able to convince some people that I was genuinely interested in what they had to say, and in hearing their perspective and their point of view and that wasn?t a misrepresentation. It was true, I was. I think that there were people that came to believe that. Now I?m not sure that they ever took the next step and thought that I was on their side. I doubt it. But I think that people did come to believe that I was serious about listening to their point of view and trying to understand their perspective, and that was true.
5. The introduction explains that the points of view covered in the book fit into three categories. How did you decide which players to include, which angles to cover? That is an interesting question. It was really something that developed as I went along. I mean, I?m sure you can look at that book and see 10 or 20 different ways that someone could conceptualize a book like that and certainly there are many facets of the SOA and its operations both in the US and Latin America that aren?t covered in the book simply because it?s too huge of a topic.
In terms of selecting the countries that I focused on, that was pretty easy, because the three countries: Colombia, Bolivia, and Honduras have historically sent a lot of students to the SOA, and with the exception of Honduras, still do. Bolivia is a country that I have had years of professional experience in so it made sense for me to include Bolivia just because I know it pretty well. Also, I wanted to talk about the movement because, as I say in the book, I don?t think a book on the School of Americas is really complete without trying to understand how people are opposing it and certainly in the case of Colombia and Bolivia, talking to people who are really at the front lines of military brutality today as well. Although in trying to understand the situation of the Cocaleros in Colombia, and certainly this was the case in 2000 when I was there, the depth of which one can go into a project is very limited. As an anthropologist I counldn?t just go to Putumayo and hang out the way that I could at the School of the Americas, you know, because it was just too dangerous. So it puts certain limitations on the depth into which you can go. Nevertheless, I felt that because these people are at the front lines of intrusive US foreign policy now a days, that something had to be said about them.
What about sides that weren?t included, for example congress.
Congress, yeah. I wasn?t particularly interested in Congress because, particularly after the vote in 1999 and particularly you know, after the election of Bush and the increasing influx of conservatives into the Congress, I just didn?t find it a particularly interesting place. I think the military, where they were successful with the name change was in buying off Congress. And I don?t really see Congress as a place where the school and what it stands for is going to be changed. So I just saw it as less interesting in that sense.
6. If the United States could be judged by looking at the track record of the SOA, what would that say about its commitment to democracy?It would say very little. I think two of the enduring legacies of the SOA, and two of the most important things that it tells us now in the post-Abu Ghraib context is A) that torture is not new to the US military, and B) that impunity has been an aspect of US policy in the Americas and elsewhere for a very long time. And what does that say for people like us who are citizens of a country like this?
7. How far-reaching, how long lasting is SOA training? Well, it?s difficult to say, because I don?t think you can talk about SOA training in isolation. Because the people who come to the school have already received training in their own countries. In many cases, the more advanced officers have received training at other military schools in the US or in other military schools in Latin America, or Europe, other US-approved venues. After the SOA they continue that training if they stay in the military. So it?s very difficult to talk about SOA training.
I don?t think that the training at the SOA is that different from training that goes on elsewhere. With the exception that nowadays maybe it is. Because, as I mention in the book, I don?t think that torture is taught at the SOA anymore because of all the pressure that the movement has put on it. But it clearly is something that is being taught elsewhere.
8. Some people assert that visiting the SOA and taking some of the opportunities that you had to do research onsite, sit in on classes, etc. is a chance to ?see the other side.? What can one expect by taking a stroll over to Ridgeway Hall?What one can expect is not to find the truth with a capital ?T?. I mean, obviously, the US military is not going to tell somebody like me or most other people about their crimes in Latin America. But I think that what one can see by taking a stroll over to Ridgeway Hall is about their truth, and the politics of their truth. That they have certain arguments and justifications and cases that they make for why the do what they do. And I don?t think that we should look at that as truth, but we should look at the politics that surround that truth. What are the policies and the arguments and the power relationships that sustain that truth, and silence and exclude other truths and other ways of understanding the world.
What would you say to teachers who are taking their school groups?
I would say that if they are taking their students to [the SOA] they should, for example, invite Javier Correa who is the president of SINALTRAINAL, the Coca-Cola workers? union in Colombia to come and talk to their class afterwards and come and tell them about how the paramilitaries shut down a local affiliate in northern Colombia and killed a union leader at a time when the military in that area was under the command of an SOA graduate, Rito Alejo del Rio, who was deeply implicated in paramilitary attacks in Urab? at that time.
That they should invite, you know, survivors like Carlos Mauricio who experienced torture in El Salvador. You know, hear the voices of torture survivors and people who?ve experienced the other side of military policies so that they can understand what they hear in a broader context.
And there was also another massacre recently in Colombia. What does that tell us about whether the SOA is to blame, or how SOA training figures into the blame?
I don?t know enough of the details about the massacre other than that the army is being implicated in it. And the army is receiving huge sums of money from our government. People have been asking for the cut off of military aid to Colombia for years, and certainly this would be the time to do that. But under the current political conditions, it doesn?t seem likely that this is going to happen. But I think it?s really important, especially nowadays with the press as controlled as it is in this country, to hear the experiences of other people, who are experiencing military brutality, the intrusive policies of the United States, and how it?s affecting them. Because I don?t know any other way to get Americans to care about people who are not themselves, and to try to get them to understand that their tragedies are not the only tragedies that matter.
I went to Colombia with a Witness for Peace delegation, and I mean, obviously these were activists on the delegation who didn?t need this kind of eye-opening experience. But nevertheless, the experience of being in Colombia and talking to Colombians and going to a place like Putumayo really made the situation in Colombia real for people in a way that can never be even reading the most vivid account of it in a book.
So I think that finding ways to try to connect with those kinds of experiences and to understand that other people experience really terrible things that we should care about and that our government is connected to is really important.
Connected to in which way, in relation to training foreign military?
In the sense that some soldiers are directly trained by the United States. In other senses, that the militaries are being supported financially and with arms by our government. In other ways, you know, just the kind of coercive economic policies that the US and the IMF [International Monetary Fund] have hoisted on Latin America which are very violent in their own ways and have contributed to a lot of widespread suffering and misery.
Basically to see the connection between what happens on the ground in Latin America and the kinds of practices and polices of our government, that include military training, but that don?t stop there.
9. What would success mean for the SOA, according to them?Well, I think they feel that they have already been successful, that they won the cold war, right? Why do they think it is still needed? Well, there are all kinds of national security threats, right? The drug war, the war on terrorism which has now basically replaced the drug war. We have to sustain market economies in Latin America, which might be threatened by people like Hugo Chavez, etc.
10. Can you comment on the scope of the debate as you encountered it through your interaction with various people on the issue of imperialism?Well, I think that the debate about imperialism has, well, I mean certainly you hear it. It hasn?t been a concept or a topic that has been anywhere near the center of public policy in this country. Nor is it something that has really been discussed much outside of certain segments of the academy and maybe a few other places in this country. But I think that 9-11 changed that both for better and for worse. Now you can find talk of empire, if not imperialism, almost everywhere, even on the web sites of very conservative organizations. But I think that what one sees happening now is that US empire is being celebrated instead of criticized and condemned. But I guess that one thing positive about it is that at least the delicate d?cor of that at least precluded that words like empire and imperialism from the major op-ed pages from before 9-11 have been changed, and it is at least something that enters the realm of debate a little more now.
11. What do you think is the most important thing to say about this issue, now that you spent so much time with it?I think it?s important now to link the SOA to the kinds of things that are going on in the Middle East. One of the main myths that seems to be propagated in the mainstream media right now is that 9-11 happened, George Bush signed a degree, the CIA took off its gloves, and torture was born in the military. I think the SOA experience is very important in educating people that torture has a long history in the US military and there is nothing particularly new about it. I think the SOA has a very important role to play in a discussion about impunity. The fact is that people, not just in Latin America, but in this country, have gotten away with murder and torture and acts of human rights crimes time and again. And that that is bad enough in itself, but to think about what are the consequences of impunity for the present? How does the past get whitewashed in a context of pervasive impunity and what does that have to say about people?s ability to mobilize against domination in the present? So I think that the SOA has a very important role in all of that.
I think it?s a very important place where one can understand how US imperialism operates, not just in the Americas, but elsewhere as well because so much has been done on the school, I mean, not just my book, but all the work that SOA Watch has done in terms of getting the list of graduates and the torture manuals. So much has been done on the SOA that it?s a very interesting case to think about many broader issues. So I think that all of that is really important.
12. What do you see the most significant successes of the campaign to close the SOA have been?I think the SOA Watch has been very significant in ways that I think people in the movement often don?t fully appreciate. Often I get the sense from talking to people that the only real success will be when the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation ceases to exist. And that success and failure are completely defined in those terms. But I think that SOA Watch has been a huge success. I mean, just in the sense that there was a name change. I think that was a huge, I mean, partial victory at least. It was, as you know, purely a political move to undermine the movement, and it failed. Well, it did what it set out to do in congress, but the movement is bigger now than it was before. So I think that was a huge success.
I think the movement is an important place where new people coming to activist politics for the first time can rub shoulders with veteran activists to learn about what happened in Central America, to learn about Vietnam, as they are learning about the SOA
I think the movement is really important, you know, to see it as a fight against impunity. Of forcing the military and anyone who listens to understand that there is a different past in Latin America than what the military wants us to understand. You see that every year at the vigil when the names of murdered Latin Americans are read out. That remembering these people is a way of fighting against the amnesia that the SOA and the military would like to force upon us. So I think that all of that is really important. And I wish that all of what the SOA Watch is doing could grow and include many more people and more institutions and really become a human rights movement.
Failures?
What about its failures? I think it hasn?t done a good enough job yet of building ties to secular organizations, in particular organizations of People of Color. Hispanic groups, other minority groups in the United States. I think that that?s really important. I think the tension between the religious and the secular is very interesting. I think the fact that it is largely a faith-based movement is one of the reasons why it has been around so long, and it has been so tenacious, but I think it really needs to build ties to secular organizations and to other groups who aren?t white, Christian, and middle class. Because I think that?s basically what the movement is- white, educated, middle class people of faith for the most part. I think that more ties need to be made to Hispanic groups, minority groups, working class groups, people who haven?t had the benefit of living a middle class existence.
13. Where should the movement be going in the future?
Part of me is kind of reticent about answering because I don?t think it?s for me to decide. I would like to see people start engaging the issue of US imperialism more, thinking about ways of broadening the focus from the SOA to US military training more broadly. But I realize the difficulties of doing that, too. The SOA is a good target. And trying to target us imperialism is very amorphous and broad. It becomes very difficult, especially in a context where we have a very hostile media. So, we?ll see. I don?t know.
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