[News] Another SOA? Police Academy in El Salvador Worries Critics

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Another SOA? Police Academy in El Salvador Worries Critics
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1182/1/

Written by Wes Enzinna
Tuesday, 18 March 2008

Source: 
<http://news.nacla.org/2008/03/17/another-soa-police-academy-in-el-salvador-worries-critics/>NACLA 
Report on the Americas

Semi-secretly established in 2005, a Salvadoran 
branch of the International Law Enforcement 
Academy, a U.S.-sponsored global network of 
police schools, has angered critics and human 
rights activists, who wonder if it will 
perpetuate long-standing patterns of police and 
military abuse in the country. A NACLA 
investigation sponsored by the Samuel Chavkin 
Investigative Fund finds that establishing 
transparency in the academy’s 
operations­including making public its course 
materials and the names of its graduates­is the 
first critical step in ensuring it does not 
become, or has not already become, a new School of the Americas.

With a salt-and-pepper beard and darting, 
intelligent eyes, Benjamin Cuellar explains how 
he has built a successful career as a human 
rights defender in El Salvador, where more than 
40,000 political assassinations have taken place 
since 1977. We are sitting in his office at the 
Institute for Human Rights (IDHUCA) on the campus 
of the University of Central America, and he is 
telling me about the time he was almost kidnapped 
and murdered. “It was October 4, 1995,” he 
begins, “and the sun had just gone down. Five men 
with guns came in a pickup truck.” The harrowing 
tale ends, luckily, with Cuellar’s escape. Framed 
on the wall behind him are some of the awards the 
IDHUCA has won since Cuellar became director of 
the organization in 1992: the French Medal for 
Human Rights, the Ignacio Ellacuria Human Rights 
Award, and the Washington Office on Latin 
America’s 2007 Award for Human Rights.

But despite Cuellar’s work, many are questioning 
his legitimacy as a human rights defender because 
of his most recent endeavor: working as an 
instructor and human rights monitor for a new 
U.S.-run police-training school called the 
International Law Enforcement Academy, or ILEA, 
located in San Salvador. Classes at the school 
began July 25, 2005, and as of July 2007 the 
academy had graduated 791 students, mostly police 
officers, as well as prosecutors and judges. A 
quarter of classroom seats are reserved for 
Salvadorans, while the remaining students are 
drawn from other countries throughout Latin America.

The academy is part of a network of ILEAs created 
in 1995 under President Bill Clinton, who 
envisioned a series of U.S. schools “throughout 
the world to combat international drug 
trafficking, criminality, and terrorism through 
strengthened international cooperation.” There 
are ILEAs in Budapest, Hungary; Bangkok, 
Thailand; Gaborone, Botswana; and Roswell, New 
Mexico. While the others have mostly been 
uncontroversial, the ILEA San Salvador has 
sparked outrage in both the United States and El 
Salvador, earning comparisons to the Western 
Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or 
WHINSEC, formerly known as the School of the 
Americas­the Fort Benning, Georgia, school for 
Latin American militaries that gained notoriety 
in the late 1990s for having trained some of the 
region’s worst human rights abusers.

“The legacy of U.S. training of security forces 
at the School of the Americas and throughout 
Latin America is one of bloodshed, of torture, of 
the targeting of civilian populations, of 
desaparecidos,” wrote SOA Watch founder Roy 
Bourgeois after Secretary of State Condoleezza 
Rice announced plans for the ILEA San Salvador at 
a June 2005 Organization of American States 
meeting in Miami. “Rice’s recent announcement 
about plans for the creation of an international 
law enforcement academy in El Salvador should 
raise serious concerns for anyone who cares about human rights,” he said.

And as recently as June, a member of the 
Committee in Solidarity With the People of El 
Salvador (CISPES) wrote, “The ILEA in El Salvador 
is functioning like another SOA, under a new name and in a new location.”

Unlike the SOA, the ILEA is run jointly by the 
Salvadoran Ministry of Government and the U.S. 
State Department­though virtually all its 
instructors come from the United States, and most 
of the school’s expenses are covered by U.S. tax 
dollars. By the end of 2007, the United States 
had spent at least $3.6 million on the academy, 
according to an estimate by ILEA director Hobart 
Henson. While the school is temporarily housed at 
the National Academy for Public Security in San 
Salvador, a permanent $4 million headquarters is under ­construction.

The school joins a slew of other police- and 
military-training facilities throughout Latin 
America run by U.S. agencies, among them the FBI, 
Customs Agency, and DEA, as well as training 
programs run by private U.S. security companies 
like DynCorp International. In 1999, the last 
year for which figures are available, Washington 
trained between 13,000 and 15,000 Latin American 
military and police personnel, according to the 
Center for International Policy.

U.S. and Salvadoran officials should not have 
been surprised with the opposition to the ILEA 
and the comparisons to the SOA. Before settling 
on El Salvador, the United States had hoped to 
establish an ILEA South in Costa Rica, but 
failed. “The story of what happened in Costa 
Rica,” says Guadalupe Erazo of the Popular Social 
Bloc, a coalition of Salvadoran activists, “is 
instructive because it shows the undemocratic 
nature of the ILEA, and the [lack of] accountability to the public.”

After a brief, aborted attempt to establish the 
school in Panama , U.S. officials chose Costa 
Rica to host the academy in 2002. An agreement 
with the Costa Rican government was signed, 
making the deal official, and the plan made 
headlines across the country. The agreement 
allowed for military topics to be taught and 
military personnel to participate in the school, 
and also gave immunity to U.S. officials. When 
this became public, a broad coalition of Costa 
Rican citizen, labor, and human rights groups 
demanded these clauses be removed from the 
agreement. The Costa Rican government ultimately 
adopted the public’s demands in its negotiations.

The United States, however, refused to meet these 
conditions, and as Kathryn Tarker of the Council 
on Hemispheric Affairs put it, “Washington 
decided to ‘pick up the marbles and go home’ 
rather than offer concessions to transparency and anti- military safeguards.”

Hoping to avoid the problems encountered in Costa 
Rica, the U.S. and Salvadoran governments worked 
quietly to establish the ILEA in San Salvador. In 
fact, at the time of Rice’s June 2005 
announcement at the OAS­the first time the school 
had been mentioned publicly­U.S. officials were 
already planning for classes to begin. Little 
more than a month after Rice’s announcement, 36 
students from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, 
and El Salvador began a course titled “Organized 
Crime and Human Rights” at the Comalapa air force 
base on the outskirts of San Salvador. Yet it 
wasn’t until almost two months later, on 
September 20, that then U.S. ambassador H. 
Douglas Barclay and Salvadoran minister of 
governance Rene Figueroa signed an agreement 
officially establishing the school.

In the months prior to September, public debate 
about the ILEA was scant. Members of the U.S. 
Congress were not briefed about the academy, nor 
was the main opposition party in El Salvador, the 
Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). 
But once the news media reported that the two 
countries had signed an official agreement in 
September, activists in El Salvador demanded to 
see the text of the document. Protesting their 
exclusion, a coalition of Salvadoran activists, 
including the Sinti Techan Citizens Network, 
demanded that President Antonio Saca make the 
agreement public and develop an open debate, 
consulting “all social sectors of the country 
before submitting it to the Legislative Assembly.”

This never happened. While FMLN senators 
denounced the school in the assembly and made a 
last-ditch effort to prevent the agreement from 
being ratified, their bile-filled rants, rather 
than critical arguments, did little to convince 
anyone. “We cannot support them coming in to 
deform the minds of our police, prosecutors and 
judges,” FMLN deputy Salvador Arias later said. 
Ultimately, the FMLN failed to mobilize the 
country’s social movements, and much of the 
public remained in the dark on the details of 
what was at stake. On November 30, 2005, the 
National Assembly ratified the ILEA agreement, 
with 48 out of 88 members voting in favor.

In the end, the United States achieved what it 
couldn’t in Panama or Costa Rica: The ILEA was 
official, and the ratified agreement making it so 
allowed for no mechanism of transparency or 
civilian oversight, included no agreement 
excluding military personnel or topics, and left 
the door open for a later clause that would give 
U.S. personnel immunity from prosecution.

*

While Salvadoran activists struggled to obtain 
more information about the ILEA in the months 
leading up to the Legislative Assembly vote, 
there was someone­outside of powerful police and 
political circles­who knew all about what the 
school was up to: Cuellar. “During this crucial 
time, Cuellar did not share key information with 
his supposed allies,” says Erazo. For this 
reason, many in the anti-ILEA camp distrust him 
and believe he is implicated in the school’s secrecy.

In May 2005, Cuellar and the IDHUCA were invited 
to discuss the ILEA at the U.S. Embassy with 
officials from the Department of Homeland 
Security and the FBI. IDHUCA was asked to 
participate in the ILEA by giving a course on 
human rights, based on similar courses they had 
given to police in the past. After researching 
the other ILEAs worldwide, Cuellar signed on. 
(Cuellar says he suggested to U.S. officials that 
they invite other Salvadoran human rights 
organizations to participate in the ILEA. These 
groups, including FESPAD, Las Dignas, and CENTA, 
could not be reached for comment or to confirm this claim.)

For its participation, the IDHUCA would be paid 
$500 for two days of human rights courses during 
every six-week “core program.” Cuellar and his 
colleagues would have no power to change the 
curriculum or to participate in organizational 
decisions, though they would be able to review 
everything taught at the school, attend any 
class, and speak with any instructor.

Many of El Salvador’s most prominent activists 
came out strongly against Cuellar’s 
participation. “Cuel lar is being fooled,” says 
labor leader Wilfredo Berrios. “It’s a shame 
because his presence at the school gives some 
people the impression that it is promoting and 
safeguarding human rights. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.”

Cuellar dismisses his critics as unrealistic. 
“The school is here, and that’s a fact­are we 
supposed to cry over spilled milk? You have to 
protect human rights with concrete plans, not 
screams,” he says. He also believes it is better 
to be on the inside monitoring the school, 
because you have to be “inside to have any influence.”

“We don’t know what the future holds,” he adds, 
“but for now, from our perspective, the school 
appears to simply offer technical training­it 
offers some of the resources we need.”

ILEA officials say their exclusive goal is to 
teach police, prosecutors, and judges in improved 
law enforcement techniques focusing primarily on 
drug and gang crime. Cuellar insists he has seen 
all the course materials and can verify this. But 
no one besides Cuellar can be sure what the 
school is up to because its curriculum is private 
(except for course titles, which are available 
online), as are the names of all its students and graduates.

Many observers are troubled by this secrecy, 
considering how some School of the Americas 
atrocities came to light: with Washington Post 
reporter Dana Priest’s discovery, in September 
1996, of SOA torture training manuals, and later 
with Roy Bourgeois’s acquisition of a previously 
classified list of SOA graduates, many of whom 
were recognized as leaders of death squads and 
notorious counterinsurgency groups. U.S. 
organizations like SOA Watch and CISPES, as well 
as the Popular Social Bloc and Sinti Techan, have 
demanded that the school make public its course 
materials and the names of its graduates. In a 
March 2007 visit to the school, ILEA officials 
promised to send course materials to leaders of a 
CISPES and SOA Watch delegation. The materials 
never arrived, and to date the ILEA has not made 
public any information on its courses or graduates.

“You can’t track the graduates of the ILEA in 
Salvador or their own country [in the case of 
non- Salvadoran students],” says Erazo. “So how 
are we supposed to monitor the school? We 
wouldn’t even know if an ILEA grad had been 
involved in something, or if the ILEA was 
teaching objectionable topics.” Course titles 
like “A Police Executive’s Role in Combating 
Terrorism” further worry critics about what is being taught at the school.

Presented with these concerns, the ILEA’s top 
official, Hobart Henson, who spent 24 years with 
the Indiana State Police before coming to El 
Salvador, assures me, “This isn’t the SOA. We’re 
not teaching torture or water boarding or 
anything like that. I wouldn’t be involved in 
something I didn’t feel good about.” When I ask 
to see course materials, Henson equivocates, at 
first saying he doesn’t have them in the office, 
then that it is school policy not to give them 
out. I also ask if I can speak with an ILEA 
graduate, and Henson says at first that the ILEA 
does not release the names of its graduates 
because some end up working as undercover agents. 
But when I repeat my request to speak with a 
graduate later in the interview, Henson asks 
Program Manager Juan Carlos Ibbott to make some phone calls.

The next day, I am speaking with Francisco Gómez, 
a midlevel officer in the National Civilian 
Police (PNC), who attended the “Law Enforcement 
Management Development Program” in early 2007. 
Gómez tells me his experience was a positive one 
and explains that it focused on technical matters 
like gathering evidence and crime-scene 
investigation, with a lesser focus on 
counter-terrorism (“This isn’t a problem in El 
Salvador,” he says, “but I suppose it could be”). 
He promises to get me the course materials and 
syllabi from his ILEA program. Nine months and 
many e-mails later, I haven’t received anything.

A Freedom of Information Act request for ILEA 
course materials, filed in October, has also gone unanswered.

*

ILEA critics point out not only the school’s lack 
of transparency, but also the record of abuse 
already established by the PNC, which most of the 
school’s Salvadoran students are drawn from. With 
about 16,000 officers, the PNC is El Salvador’s 
largest police force. Its establishment in 1992 
after the end of the Salvadoran civil war was 
seen by many as a step in the right direction, 
since it incorporated elements from the country’s 
various political factions. As a Human Rights 
Watch report explains: “The formation of a 
professional, apolitical police force was 
generally seen as the most transcendent potential 
contribution of the historic 1992 peace accords.” 
However, the PNC did not make good on its initial 
promise. “The most disturbing indication of 
setbacks in the establishment of this new force, 
the National Civilian Police,” the report 
continues, “came with the news . . . of the 
involvement of a PNC agent in the 1993 
assassination of FMLN leader Francisco Velis.”

Abuses attributed to the PNC have continued since 
then. A September article by Raúl Gutiérrez for 
the Inter Press Service titled “Death Squads 
Still Operating in El Salvador” details numerous 
instances of murder committed by PNC agents since 
1993, including a “social cleansing” death squad 
called Black Shadow, allegedly responsible for a 
spate of killings in 1994 and 1995.

In 2006, a little more than a year after the ILEA 
graduated its first class, three unknown men 
carrying large guns burst into the home of Carlos 
and Wilfredo Sánchez in the department of 
Sonsonate. The pair of brothers, both members of 
the Mara Salvatrucha gang, were pulled from their 
beds. As the Sánchez family looked on, the 
intruders beat the gang members, dragged them 
into the street, and shot them to death. Moments 
earlier, they had done the same to another Mara 
Salvatrucha member down the street.

A June 2006 report published by the Salvadoran 
government’s human rights ombudswoman, Beatrice 
de Carrillo, identifies the gunmen in the Sánchez 
case as PNC officers. It details this and other 
PNC abuses, including the case of Abimilet 
Ramírez, who after being picked up by PNC 
officers was thrown down a well and later 
murdered. Another report by the Archbishop’s 
Legal Aid and Human Rights Defense Office (Tutela 
Legal) provides evidence for 10 murders allegedly 
committed by PNC officers during 2006. One of the 
victims was, according to the report, tortured to 
death; one involved a nine-year-old boy shot to 
death; and eight of the murders resembled “death 
squad executions.” The report also notes patterns 
of attempted “social cleansing,” as well as 
strong evidence of political motivations behind several of the murders.

De Carrillo’s report also notes that between 2001 
and 2006, 40% of abuse complaints submitted to 
her office concerned the PNC. Despite the 
evidence of abuse, U.S. officials deny that the 
PNC has done anything wrong. Lisa Sullivan, an 
SOA Watch member who visited the ILEA as part of 
the March 2007 delegation, confronted U.S. 
Embassy officials with the evidence of PNC abuse 
detailed in the Salvadoran government’s human 
rights report. She says they showed “complete 
disdain” for the ombudswoman and said her reports 
were “illegitimate sources of information” and 
that there was no evidence to support her claims. 
Charles Glazer, the U.S. ambassador to El 
Salvador, would not go on record to comment about 
PNC abuse, but he did ask that I provide him with 
the human rights reports, which I did, offering 
to translate key passages for him. Neither Glazer 
nor his press attachés responded.

For his part, Cuellar does not deny PNC abuse and 
says the ILEA will nonetheless improve and reform 
the police force. “In the way that [the ILEA] 
will develop the technical skills of police 
officers . . . many victims [of human rights 
crimes] will see results, and we will be able to 
denounce their victimizers with more clarity and objectivity,” Cuellar says.

This, however, contradicts the official U.S. 
line: Officials, including Hobart Henson, have 
said El Salvador was chosen to host the school in 
the first place because of the PNC’s supposedly 
exemplary record. Ombudswoman de Carrillo 
believes that rather than reforming the PNC, the 
ILEA will only make it more “professional and elegant in its use of violence.”

*

The ILEA has arrived in El Salvador in a context 
of decades-long turmoil. The country is still 
struggling to overcome the legacies of a civil 
war that ended 16 years ago, one in which 75,000 
people were killed. Although the formal conflict 
ended, violence continues to rage. In 2005, a 
typical year, an average 15 people a day were 
murdered in El Salvador. Youth, faced with few 
opportunities for political representation or 
economic advancement, have turned in startling 
numbers to gangs­one police estimate puts the 
number at 25,000 gang members nationwide­that 
mirror the most reactionary elements of the 
Salvadoran state in their level of ultra-violence.

Since the war’s end, the country has become 
intensely polarized, with political 
assassinations con tinuing at a frightening pace. 
The violence and lack of economic opportunity 
continue to drive many into exile, and today 
remittances, primarily from the United States, 
account for an astounding 16% of the country’s 
GDP. Moreover, the environment for civil 
liberties is one of the worst in the hemisphere. 
The result of so many years of formal and 
informal civil war has led to a striking loss of 
faith among Salvadorans in the political 
institutions of their country: In a 2007 
Latinobarómetro poll, only 38% of Salvadorans 
said democracy is preferable to all other political systems.

The Salvadoran government has responded to the 
gang violence with zero tolerance, or mano dura 
(“iron fist”), policing. Mano dura policies have 
swept Central America in the 21st century, 
frequently combining military troops with police 
units to patrol crime-plagued areas. The first 
anti-gang mano dura law introduced in El 
Salvador, in July 2003, allowed police to use 
tattoos on a suspect’s body as evidence of gang 
membership. A November 2006 report by the 
Washington Office on Latin America points out 
that “in the year after [this] first mano dura 
law was enacted in El Salvador . . . 19,275 
people were detained by the police on the charge 
of belonging to a gang. In a striking 
illustration of what happens when police are 
allowed to carry out detentions based on such 
arbitrary criteria, 91% of those detained were 
released without charge due to lack of evidence.”

But the ILEA may have another goal besides 
training police to crack down on alleged gang 
members. The PNC has played an active role in a 
larger crackdown against civil liberties 
spearheaded by President Saca and his ARENA 
party, aimed at curbing both crime and social 
protest. Various government policies, especially 
free trade agreements like CAFTA, have been 
highly contentious, and Saca’s administration has 
gone to significant lengths to ensure that they 
succeed­including passing an anti-terror law in 
September 2006, modeled on the USA Patriot Act, 
that has been used to arrest everyone from 
anti-water-privatization activists in Suchitoto 
to San Salvador’s CD and DVD vendors who violated 
CAFTA’s intellectual property rights 
stipulations. Charges against the vendors have 
been dropped, but the 13 people arrested in 
Suchitoto will begin trial this February, and 
could face up to 65 years in prison. The judge 
presiding over this case, Ana Lucila Fuentes de 
Paz, was installed as the head of a new court 
created by the September 2006 anti-terrorism 
legislation­not long after she completed her training at the ILEA.

An authoritarian government supported by a 
corrupt police force in El Salvador can help 
safeguard U.S. economic interests in the country. 
As much of Latin America turns away from extreme 
free-market policies, El Salvador remains one of 
Washington’s key allies against the “pink tide” 
sweeping the region. El Salvador is, in many 
ways, one of the most important frontiers of 
Washington’s unquestioned economic influence, 
governed by a president who cited a desire to 
please the United States as a prime reason for why he supported CAFTA.

That ILEA officials and the Saca administration 
share similar economic interests is confirmed by 
a report I obtained titled the “Law Enforcement 
Training Needs Assessment for the Latin American 
Region.” This report, written in February 2005, 
is the founding document of the ILEA San 
Salvador, and was prepared by criminal justice 
expert Anthony Pate and the law-and-order think 
thank Police Executive Research Forum. (The 
president of this think tank is John Timoney, who 
has spearheaded mano dura law enforcement models 
in the United States; as the head of the 
Philadelphia and Miami police, respectively, he 
gained national notoriety for his jackbooted 
treatment of anti-free-trade protesters in the 
two cities, resulting in hundreds of injuries and several lawsuits.)

The “Needs Assessment” report establishes as one 
of the ILEA’s priorities­alongside drug 
trafficking, arms trafficking, and 
kidnapping­“intellectual property rights.” The 
raid on the bootleg vendors accused under the 
anti-terrorism law occurred less than a year 
after the ILEA opened its doors, and labor leader 
Berrios believes it is likely that ILEA graduates 
participated in the raid. He also speculates that 
pressure from the United States to enforce 
CAFTA’s regulations could have prompted the raids in the first place.

While it may not be the school’s primary 
function, promoting free trade and protecting 
U.S. economic interests is certainly part of the 
school. Henson acknowledges this much when he 
says, “A by-product of the school is to protect 
free trade and foreign investment.” The State 
Department also notes that one of the ILEA’s 
goals is to “enhance the functioning of free 
markets through improved legislation and law enforcement.”

*

Cuellar likes to tell a story to illustrate why 
he is involved with the ILEA. The Casquerilla 
brothers, aged 29 and 12, were eating breakfast 
one morning when several men entered their San 
Salvador home, which is also a small restaurant. 
When the men pulled out guns, the younger brother 
fled, and as he ran, the men shot him in the 
back. After the shooters left, the police 
arrived, and while they secured the house and 
restaurant, the boy, who had survived the 
shooting, bled to death. The police then told the 
women who had witnessed the shooting to leave.

“Beyond the fact of letting the child die,” 
Cuellar says with bewilderment, “they lost the 
principal witness [the boy] because of 
incompetence, and they let the women, who saw the 
shooters, leave without giving testimony and 
without getting their names or telephone numbers. 
This was five years ago, and his mother is a 
wreck. How can I look her in the face and deny 
her this opportunity to better train the police?”

But for all its pragmatism, Cuellar’s belief that 
the school will reform the PNC seems misguided. 
When U.S. officials categorically deny that the 
PNC is or has ever been involved in any abuses, 
it seems a contradiction to believe that they 
will reform them, or any other police force. 
Beatrice de Carrillo suggests that an earnest 
attempt to reform the PNC would take place at the 
Salvadoran National Police Academy, which is 
accountable to the Legislative Assembly, not the U.S. State Department.

And if Cuellar’s presence at the school might 
reassure some observers, trusting one man or 
organization is hardly a sound strategy to 
protect human rights. After all, in spite of the 
sacrifices he has made and the criticism he has 
received, it doesn’t appear as if Cuellar has 
challenged the secrecy that reigns supreme at the 
ILEA. The contradictions of Cuellar’s position 
are best illustrated by the way in which he is 
often compelled to defend the ILEA during our 
interview, frequently referring to the 
professionalism that the academy can offer El 
Salvador’s police and skirting the issue of PNC 
abuse. This is something he should not have to do 
as human rights monitor of the organization, and 
something it is hard to imagine him doing at any 
time before in his career: defending the police 
and the U.S. government. Another contradiction is 
the ambiguity of Cuellar’s jurisdiction at the 
school­for instance, ILEA director Henson does 
not refer to Cuellar as a human rights monitor, 
but rather as an “instructor of human rights courses.”

Considering this, it seems Washington is 
benefiting much more from its relationship with 
Cuellar than the other way around, and his 
presence at the school causes as many problems as 
it solves. As Lesley Gill, an anthropologist at 
American University and author of the book School 
of the Americas: Military Training and Political 
Violence in the Americas, explains, “The use of 
human rights discourses in U.S. military and 
police training is something that started with 
the SOA. After the SOA was criticized for 
promoting violence and torture, they started to 
include a human rights course in their 
curriculum, and to use human rights language to 
describe what they were doing.” She continues, 
“This human rights talk is more aimed at an 
outside, domestic audience­at the school’s 
potential critics­than it is indicative of any 
effort by the U.S. to reform the military or 
police forces they are involved with. It is 
designed to stave off criticism. It seems to me 
that this is what they are doing [at the ILEA] by 
bringing on board someone like Cuellar.”

The ILEA continues holding classes, training 
hundreds of PNC officers as well as police from 
countries like the Dominican Republic, Colombia, 
and others throughout the hemisphere. As U.S. 
officials work to build the school’s new 
headquarters in San Salvador and to expand the 
police academy’s presence throughout the 
Americas, Cuellar himself finally acknowledges 
the potential for abuse at the school.

“Contrary to what critics claim, the ILEA is not 
another SOA,” Cuellar says. “But it could become one.”

Wes Enzinna is a graduate student in Latin 
American studies at the University of 
California–Berkeley. His articles have appeared 
in The Nation and other magazines, and on 
CBSNews.com. Research assistance: Adam Evans.




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