NARRATOR: The Cold War supposedly was a war that never boiled over. In reality, the Cold War spawned lots of little hot wars around the globe. The US trained many of the foreign foot soldiers in these regional conflicts.

I spent 33 years and four months in active

service as a member of our country's most

agile military force -- the Marine Corps.

And during that period...I helped in the

raping of half-a-dozen Central American

republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

- General Smedley Butler

NARRATOR: From the time of the Monroe Doctrine, Latin America has been central to US economic, political and strategic interests. An entire country, Panama, was created through US intervention to ensure an American-controlled shipping lane between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

In the past century, in Central America and the Caribbean alone, the United States has intervened militarily in the Dominican Republic, Panama, Honduras, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Grenada.

Dr. WILLIAM LEOGRANDE: Our concern has always been from the turn of the century onwards very, very similar. It's only the identity of the enemy that's really shifted.

NARRATOR: Dr. William LeoGrande, professor and Dean of History at American University, is a prolific author and expert on Latin American history and political development.

Dr. LEOGRANDE: We've been worried about our economic interests and/or our strategic or security interests, and we've always wanted to make sure that governments that came to power in this region were friendly towards us and hostile towards our enemies.

NARRATOR: The United States has had a long and unfortunate history of supporting anti-democratic, pro-military governments in the region. Often these interventions were to support American business interests. The phrase "banana republic" comes from the invasion of Honduras by US troops in 1903 to protect the interests of American banana growers.

During the Cold War, the United States also intervened to support its own political and strategic goals along with its economic interests. The US supported governments which claimed they were anti-communist in order to prevent an increased Soviet influence in the developing world. In addition to direct US military involvement, this support took the form of military assistance and training. During the Cold War, the US trained troops and officers from nations around the world, from Vietnam to Panama, from Korea to Haiti.

Dr. LEOGRANDE: Since the early 1960s, a large part of US security policy has been focused on turmoil in the Third World. The original concern was that Khrushchev's promotion of wars of national liberation would make the Third World an arena of the East-West struggle.

NARRATOR: US military training of foreign soldiers during the Cold War was done under the auspices of the International Military Education and Training Program, or IMET.

Dr. CALEB ROSSITER: The International Military Education and Training Program, IMET, is a US foreign aid program. It's a Cold War program par excellence.

NARRATOR: Caleb Rossiter is the outspoken founder and director of the Project on Demilitarization and Democracy.

Dr. ROSSITER: Its whole rationale was to strengthen in the 1950s, and 60s, and 70s, and 80s the military forces for friendly governments.

The original objectives were to produce an officer corps throughout the developing world, and particularly in Latin America, that knew United States officers. This is essentially an intelligence program. Its purpose is to make sure we know the people who are in power.

NARRATOR: The vast majority of foreign soldiers trained by the United States -- over 500,000 officers and enlisted personnel -- have been trained with money from the IMET budget, money that comes from the American taxpayer.

While IMET funding trained troops around the world, one of its most visible impacts has been in Latin America.

We bought [Panama]. We paid for it, we built it, and we intend to keep it.

Ronald Reagan

1946 - Panama. The US starts a military and language school to provide training in jungle warfare to American troops to make them more effective in intervening in Latin American conflicts. But before long, this small school became the premier institution for training Latin American troops in sophisticated war-making techniques. It was eventually called the School of the Americas.

The School of the Americas is funded under the IMET program and is just one of 69 facilities in the United States where foreign soldiers are trained. The school was relocated to Fort Benning, Georgia in 1984. But questions are now being asked about the need to continue a Cold War program like the School of the Americas.

Colonel Jose Alvarez is the commandant of the School of the Americas and one of its staunchest defenders.

COL JOSE ALVAREZ: On the simplest level, it would just be a shame to pass up the opportunity to let the United States -- not even the US Army -- to let the United States impact on people the way it can just by being here at what is relatively in the arena of either defense spending or foreign assistance spending, really some very little money for the good that it does.

NARRATOR: Many of the school's proponents argue that this type of training not only teaches military tactics, but allows the US to build relationships with the Latin American leaders of tomorrow, who will be friendly to American policies in the region.

Colonel Walter Navarro, a former student of the school from Costa Rica, is assistant commandant of the school.

COL WALTER NAVARRO: As a student, I think that the instruction that I received here at the school was very important, has been very important basically for the functioning of the organization to which I belong in my country. To see the way of life here in the United States, to see how that democratic machinery works, and that's very important for the Latin American student.

NARRATOR: Until 1994, students were exposed to what was loosely termed "American values." Most of this exposure was in the form of cultural entertainment, where students at the school were taken to American sporting events and Disneyland. This practice was banned in 1994 by congressional intervention because of its obvious frivolity and expense.

For most of its history, the IMET program and the School of the Americas has escaped the notice of the US public and policymakers alike. Its reputation in Latin America, however, like the legacy of US intervention in the region, is less innocuous.

Dr. LEOGRANDE: The perception was that we were helping these countries become more modern. What happened, in fact, was that the intervention of the United States tended to disrupt the normal political development of these countries. And when the United States left, the professionalized military that we left behind was the most powerful institution in these countries.

And the result was that whoever gained control of the military institution then became a dictatorial strongman. So, US intervention unintentionally produced such dictators as Batista in Cuba, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Somoza in Nicaragua, and so on.

NARRATOR: The School of the Americas has been called

La Escuela de Golpes, or "School of Coups." La Prensa, an influential Panamanian newspaper, called it the "School of Assassins."

Despite a stated American goal of promoting democratic development, this military training has often had the opposite effect. Critics charge that the techniques taught at the school help the armies of autocratic governments destroy democratic opposition.

The type of training that is done at the school is often called "low intensity conflict training." Low intensity conflict is a euphemism for war. It is usually used to describe military activity where there are no front lines and the conflict is widespread. Urban assault and counterinsurgency tactics utilized in low intensity conflicts are used in situations where there are unarmed civilians who often get caught in the crossfire.

Dr. ROSSITER: The IMET program and the School of the Americas does very little with learning how to defend your borders against external attacks by another armed force. They're training them in small unit patrol and in counterinsurgency work within their borders.

The enemy of democracy in Latin America has been the armed forces since the 1930s. Military dictatorship and military rule behind the throne has been the enemy of democracy. The most massive human rights violations have occurred in Guatemala and El Salvador by the armed forces, who have nothing to do with democracy there.

So, the IMET program and the School of the Americas certainly imparts skills, but they're skills that then are misused within the country.

NARRATOR: Unlike most military training, where it is assumed that an enemy is invading your nation, low intensity conflict training assumes that the enemy comes from within. And the "enemy" too often is defined by dictatorial governments as anyone who opposed their rule.

Father ROY BOURGEOIS: This is a school where soldiers are taught to kill.

NARRATOR: Father Roy Bourgeois was a combat Navy officer in Vietnam and is currently a Maryknoll priest. He is the leading critic of the School of the Americas.

Father BOURGEOIS: Who do they kill? Those who call for reform in their countries. These soldiers go back and they defend a socio-economic system that protects the power of the land and the wealth of a small elite.

NARRATOR: Since its founding in 1946, the school has graduated over 58,000 students from all over Latin America. Supporters claim that the School of the Americas and the IMET program is one of the cheapest yet most successful forms of military aid. According to the US Army, the School of the Americas is a successful program because a large number of former students have become high ranking officers when they return to their own countries.

Outside investigators, however, believe this assessment of the program is simplistic. The General Accounting Office decided to investigate the matter in 1990. Their report concluded that IMET training was not an unqualified success just because a number of former students achieved high positions in their governments or military regimes. In fact, the GAO found that this simple accounting method was often the only kind of follow-up ever done to see if the training indeed helped further US policy goals.

And what the US Army does not mention is how many of these leaders have been implicated in human rights abuses.

Those who make peaceful revolution

impossible make violent revolution

inevitable.

John Kennedy

NARRATOR: Many of the students who were trained at the School of the Americas for the last 50 years come from countries whose reputations are stained with a history of human rights abuses and undemocratic military regimes, including Haiti, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

The students are not screened for involvement in human rights abuses before they come. Nor at they monitored by the Pentagon when they return to their own countries.

Father BOURGEOIS: This school, we feel, is causing a lot of death and suffering to the poor and those who work with the poor in Latin America, and we want the doors of this school closed.

The victims, the targets are the campesinos who call for food for their children. They are the university students. They're health care workers, human rights advocates, church leaders. They become the targets of those who learn their lessons at the US Army School of the Americas.

NARRATOR: This is the Hall of Fame at the School of the Americas, where portraits of the most successful graduates are hung. Some of the worst dictators and human rights abusers in the developing world have passed through the school's doors, including people like Roberto D'Aubisson from El Salvador and Manuel Noriega of Panama.

Dr. ROSSITER: Let's look at the practice, let's look at the record. The countries where we have the most IMET trainees, the largest percentage of people trained, were Guatemala in the 70s and El Salvador in the 1980s.

Both of those armed forces committed abuses that the United States privately and publicly railed against. And yet, we had given them the tools, we had given them the imprimatur, we had given them the aid, and we were surprised when they didn't do what we said. Let's stop being surprised. The theory's alright, but the practice has been a disaster for Latin America.

NARRATOR: El Salvador, known for the bloodiness of its civil war and the extreme human rights abuses committed by its armed forces, was a major recipient of IMET funding. Over 5000 Salvadoran soldiers attended the school since the 1950s and one-fifth of those were trained during the nation's civil war in the 1980s.

Chuck Call of the Washington Office on Latin America has followed the School of the Americas for many years.

CHUCK CALL: In El Salvador, 48 of 69 people named in the UN Truth Commission Report as human rights violators, graduates of the school. Half of the people named in a recent report done by NGOs of alleged human rights violators in Colombia, 128 of 247, graduates of the School of the Americas. This is at such a level that you can't ignore it. And what's important about that is that it associates the US military with these abusive forces.

NARRATOR: Supporters of the school counter that, in fact, large numbers of students who have graduated have been able to put their training to good use in their countries, and that less than one-half of one percent of students from the school have been cited as human rights abusers by independent monitoring organizations.

COL NAVARRO: We cannot judge the whole student body who have graduated here, nor judge the School of the Americas as a teaching institution based on an act committed by maybe a bad apple who graduated from the school.

Dr. ROSSITER: We're not talking about one bad apple here or a few bad apples, we're talking about training virtually the entire officer corps in countries where the officer corps becomes a mafia and tries to make money and tries to rule by force. El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Haiti. These are not countries where there was one bad apple; the whole armed forces has been an impediment to democracy.

Mr. CALL: You know, people say, sure, Harvard produces a few bad apples, too. You don't close it down for that reason. But if Harvard had the kind of record that the School of the Americas does, they would have closed it down quite a bit of time ago, I think.

NARRATOR: To counter what was perceived as a lack of concern for human rights, the school has added human rights training to all its courses. And in 1993, the Pentagon began a review of IMET training programs to redress human rights concerns.

COL NAVARRO: One of the things that the School of the Americas stresses most is the instruction of human rights, respect for life. Especially the School of the Americas has been changing its education or gearing its education towards the circumstances, present day circumstances. The human rights is of primary importance to the school, both in theory and in practice.

NARRATOR: Joseph Lore is the human rights coordinator at the School of the Americas. Before coming to the school, he worked in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. He explains what the human rights training consists of.

JOSEPH LORE: When students are going through the training out in the field, they have to function underneath those para-meters and they are thrown into situations where they must react. And if they're not reacting according to the established norms, which are necessity, proportionality, humanity and honorable conduct, which are the four principles that we try and instill into our students, then they must repeat, and repeat, and repeat that activity, because we are after changing their behavior on the battlefield.

NARRATOR: But what exactly does human rights training at the school include?

This looks like target practice, and it is. But the human rights element of the course, according to the instructors, is that students are being taught to hit the narco-terrorists, the bad guys, and avoid the targets with civilian faces. If it sounds too easy, this, according to its critics, is precisely the problem.

Father BOURGEOIS: This school teaches them to be professional, true, but it does not teach them to turn over their power and control to civilians where democracy and peace will come. In Latin America, the militaries are too professional.

NARRATOR: Many critics dismiss the human rights training as window dressing that does not teach respect for democracy. Critics also point at who teaches the human rights curriculum. Despite the school's claims that human rights training is an important part of the curriculum, Chuck Call found a very different attitude at the school. As the first guest lecturer on human rights, he found that some of the instructors were from countries where human rights are violated on a massive scale.

Mr. CALL: What I found was two instructors from Peru and Guatemala, countries whose human rights record is so bad that we're not training those soldiers as students, yet here they are as instructors. What I found was incredibly hostile reaction not only to organizations of human rights, but to the concept of human rights, in general, and an aversion to promoting human rights in the curriculum. And these are instructors who -- supposedly who the Pentagon is telling Congress here are there promoting values of human rights and democracy.

NARRATOR: But why should this type of training program be held responsible for human rights abuses and undemocratic practices in Latin America, a program whose expressed purpose is to train a professional officer corps? To critics, the problem is not so much what is taught, but how it's being used.

Dr. ROSSITER: A professional officer corps is not simply one that can give and take orders and carry out an operation. A professional officer corps is one that is accountable to the rules of international law for its behavior. There's got to be accountability.

We train these officer corps that demonstrated year after year that they had no accountability. There was never any punishment if your troops committed human rights abuses. That's not professional. Snapping to attention is not professional.

NARRATOR: Many people are questioning in the face of continued criticism why US taxpayers are paying to train the armies of Latin America, especially now that the Cold War is over. Defenders of the school maintain that its primary missions are still intact and new missions have emerged.

COL ALVAREZ: Its larger role is still a policy issue of, you know, what does the US Government look to accomplish in the region, and that's the larger role. I think the smaller role, to continue to provide the best training possible that we can, you know, within the resources that we have, remains the same. We will continue to provide professional training to US Army standards in Spanish.

COL NAVARRO: I think that at the present time, the School of the Americas is such an important institution for Latin America, as well as for the United States. At this time, we have a common enemy and one such enemy is narco-trafficking. The School of the Americas fosters education for fighting or dealing with this narco-trafficking problem which plagues Latin America as well as the United States.

NARRATOR: Despite the lofty goals to which the School of the Americas and IMET were designed to meet, there are many critics who believe that this program should be ended. Even though the goals of the school are now to train soldiers to fight the drug war, many believe that it is a program which does more harm than good.

Dr. ROSSITER: I would say the IMET program was about the biggest mistake we could make in our relations with Latin America. It strengthened repressive armed forces. It sent a message that we were willing to play ball with them both to them and to their citizens, so they could get away with murder, frankly. And in the end, it's discredited us badly.

NARRATOR: "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" discovered that in one shocking case, Haiti, the US gave almost $7 million in military assistance between 1982 and 1991. In 1991, the democratically elected leader, President Aristide, was overthrown by the military. Despite the coup, the US continued to train Haitian officers in the United States. And in Haiti, IMET money was targeted to fighting the drug war. Clearly, this training, while for a good cause, went awry.

There was a dangerous irony to the fact that American troops sent to restore President Aristide to power wound up facing the same Haitian military trained by the United States.

IMET and the School of the Americas are expensive operations. Although supporters claim that this type of training is a cheap way to maintain good relations with Latin America, critics point out that this is a massive oversimplification. In 1994, the IMET budget was $21 million, the budget for the School of the Americas -- $4.4 million.

According to a report by the Congressional Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus, however, the majority of money going to support the IMET program is not even listed in the IMET budget. According to the report, $110 million was contributed to the IMET training program from the Defense Department. This contribution included instructors' salaries, training facilities and overhead.

Caleb Rossiter, a former staffer at the caucus, explains.

Dr. ROSSITER: The School of the Americas is an extremely expensive program. The entire IMET program costs the taxpayer, from different pots of the US budget, about $140 million a year. Forty million of that was coming out of the foreign aid budget. But another $100 million was the Department of Defense's estimate for the true cost the salaries of the US personnel there, of the maintenance of the facility, the training materials. Most of that's covered in the defense budget.

The School of the Americas, as roughly one-fifth to a quarter of the training conducted by IMET, would be in the neighborhood, I would say, of a $35 million program, total real cost to the US taxpayer.

NARRATOR: Although Congress cut the IMET budget in half, from $42 million in 1993 to 21 million in 1994, instructors' salaries and facility maintenance are still not counted as program costs. There have been attempts in Congress to eliminate funding entirely for the program.

Mr. CALL: I think, in general, the US Government needs to rethink the kinds of missions and training and objectives of its training in the wake of the Cold War in Latin America, and it needs to cut those programs where it doesn't make sense to do them anymore.

NARRATOR: The controversy over the school is only part of a broader debate over the changing role of US foreign policy and military missions now that the Cold War is over. Perhaps the US should be helping to develop the economies of the developing world and not their militaries.

Admiral CARROLL: Somehow it seems that training warriors to be more skillful professional killers and training those same people to promote democracy and respect human rights just doesn't work very well. Manuel Noriega may be the most infamous example of that fact, but he's far from the only one. The United States has trained generations of Latin American military leaders who have gone home with their new skills and used them to suppress democracy and violate human rights. Constructive measures of economic and political support provided to friendly nations will do far more to promote the cause of democracy in Latin America than any number of military middle men.

Until the next time, for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Eugene Carroll.