US Taxpayers have funded over 84,000 Latin American soldiers and police officers on how to kill, torture and how to stamp out political activists. Many so-called "communists" were actually indigenous people (who had never heard of Marx).

On November 16, 1989, the US-trained and funded Salvadoran Atlacatl Battalion entered the grounds of El Salvador’s Central American University (UCA) and brutally murdered six Jesuit priests, sixteen-year-old Celina Ramos, and her mother, Elba Ramos.

Nineteen of the twenty-five Atlacatl Battalion soldiers were graduates of the US Army School of the Americas (SOA) — a combat training institution with the ostensible aim of instructing Latin American militaries in control tactics over armed counterinsurgent groups.

SOA was founded in the Panama Canal Zone in 1946 and expelled from Panama to Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia, in 1984. The slain Jesuit priests worked in solidarity with El Salvador’s poor and marginalized and were outspoken critics of the country’s military dictatorship.

They are among the 75,000 civilians murdered during the US-backed war in El Salvador between 1980 and 1992.

Graduates of the SOA — including dozens of dictators and some of the worst human rights violators in the continent — are guilty of using torture, rape, assassination, forced disappearance, massacres, and forced displacement of communities to wage war against their own people.

Former Panamanian president Jorge Illueca stated that the School of the Americas was the “biggest base for destabilization in Latin America.” US-led and supported state violence abroad has ravaged and devastated communities in Central and South America.

On September 20, 1996, under intense public scrutiny, the Pentagon released the SOA training manuals, which advocated torture, extortion, blackmail, and the targeting of civilian populations.

The release of these manuals proved that US taxpayer money was used to teach Latin American state forces how to torture and repress civilian populations.

These documents can be accessed here:

There is virtually no discussion about freedom, democracy and human rights in the documents. Instead, there is an overwhelming obsession with communists and other “subversive” elements that must be destroyed at all costs

The manuals also give detailed directions on how and when to torture, who to kill and how to stamp out political and social movements.

A US congressional task force reported that those responsible for the 1989 UCA massacre in El Salvador were trained at the US Army School of the Americas. After this, groups of annoying Leftists started to bring awareness to the schools operations.

The Department of Defense responded by rebranding the School of the Americas with the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in January 2001.

The opening of WHINSEC is not grounded in critical assessment of the training, procedures, or consequences of the training program it copies. Further, it ignores congressional concerns and the public outcry over the SOA’s past and present links to human rights atrocities.

In 2015, the first US Border Patrol agent graduated from the infamous training facility. On October 24 of this year, a contract between Border Patrol and Winchester Ammunition became public, confirming that Border Patrol purchased...

...33 million rounds of bullets and could purchase more than 330 million additional rounds over the next five years.

Training of Border Patrol staff at Fort Benning coupled with their increased firepower is setting the stage for US state agents to wage war against undocumented migrants and refugees at border crossings and within the United States.

Over the past fifteen years, nearly one hundred people have been killed by US Border Patrol including the cross-border killings of fifteen-year-old Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca in 2010 and sixteen-year-old José Antonio Elena Rodríguez in 2012.

Both teenagers were on Mexican soil when they were shot at and killed by US Border Patrol agents located on US soil. Not a single Border Patrol agent has ever been held legally accountable for these crimes.

ICE [Immigration Customs Enforcement] agents have also been trained at SOA/WHINSEC. They have carried out violence against immigrants across the country.

The United States is directly implicated in training and financing the perpetrators of gross human rights violations. In South and Central America, this violence is marked by military, economic, and political intervention, in addition to training proxy fighters at the SOA/WHINSEC

Now, US Department of Homeland Security agents are being trained at the same location in the same tactics of civilian-targeted warfare. The results are already clear: lethally trained and heavily militarized state security forces that target civilian populations,

SCHOOL OF AMERICAS (SOA)/ WHINSEC. PART II As noted above in 1996, the Pentagon was pressured into releasing the school’s official training manuals. Even a casual glance through the nearly 1200 pages of instructions makes for sobering reading .

There is virtually no discussion about freedom, democracy and human rights in the documents.

Instead, there is an overwhelming obsession with communists and other “subversive” elements that must be destroyed at all costs, as well as detailed directions on how and when to torture, who to kill and how to stamp out political and social movements.

Students were taught that Communism is a radically evil specter attempting to dismantle society completely and that it must be stamped out at all costs.

Sure signs of communist subversion, the manuals note, include individuals refusing to pay rent, taxes or loans, people criticizing the police or judicial system, strikes or protests, student political activity, unrest among laborers, writing letters to newspapers...

...or politicians complaining about poor living conditions or signing petitions. Any democratic activity or political organization whatsoever could be deemed communist, and those participating marked for potential “liquidation” – the school’s preferred euphemism for murder.

Despite claiming that communism is inherently anti-democratic, the manuals also note that radicals can also: