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<font size=3>Another SOA? Police Academy in El Salvador Worries Critics
<br>
<a href="http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1182/1/" eudora="autourl">
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1182/1/<br><br>
</a>Written by Wes Enzinna <br>
Tuesday, 18 March 2008 <br><br>
Source:
<a href="http://news.nacla.org/2008/03/17/another-soa-police-academy-in-el-salvador-worries-critics/">
NACLA Report on the Americas</a><br><br>
</font><font face="georgia" size=3><i>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.<br><br>
</i>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
*<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.)<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
A Freedom of Information Act request for ILEA course materials, filed in
October, has also gone unanswered.<br><br>
*<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
*<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.)<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
*<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“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?”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“Contrary to what critics claim, the ILEA is not another SOA,” Cuellar
says. “But it could become one.”<br><br>
<i>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. <br><br>
<br><br>
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