Movie Review

The title of this video should warn the viewer of the nature of its contents. Father Roy: Inside the School of the Assassins is a cleverly made propaganda piece produced by the left wing of the Roman Catholic Church and the Public Broadcasting Corporation. It is the story of the crusade by Father Roy Bourgeois of the Maryknoll order against the United States Army School of the Americas, now located at Fort Benning, Georgia.	1
The producer makes little effort to be objective. An assistant secretary of defense and a congressman are given about thirty seconds to defend the school. The rest of the video hammers at the theme that the United States Army deliberately teaches Latin American soldiers and police to torture and murder the citizens of their countries. The army maintains that issues of human rights and civilian control of governments are incorporated in the school's core curriculum, but several of the film's commentators argue that this is only a facade. Yet, with graduates of the school controlling the military for the past decade, Latin America has been more free of military governments than at any other time in history—Cuba is the one exception, and it has no graduates of the school. So, perhaps many of the graduates of the School of the Americas have learned something other than infantry tactics.	2
At the end of World War II, the army had high hopes that training the Latin American military would produce a military more sympathetic to democracy and tied to the United States. Those hopes have been realized imperfectly, and certainly the Cold War led to an emphasis on defeating guerrillas. Indeed, from the 1950s on, the general policy of the United States was to support anticommunist regimes. To paraphrase President John F. Kennedy, the United States would prefer to support democratic, civilian governments. But if this choice were not available and the United States had to choose between a right-wing military regime and a Communist military one, it would choose the former. Such a regime was considered more susceptible to change.	3
During the Cold War, the United States Army School of the Americas (USARSA) developed into a school of antiguerrilla warfare. Character references were not required for admission. Certainly some of the graduates went back home and participated in "death squads"; the vast majority did not. Out of sixty thousand graduates less than 1 percent have ever been linked to human rights violations, and fewer still have actually had allegations substantiated against them. One of the alleged assassins of Archbishop Oscar Romero, Col. Roberto D'Aubuisson, is featured in this video. He took a course in radio operations several years before El Salvador's civil war began. But the killers hardly needed a class in order to perform such acts, and anyone with any knowledge of Latin American history knows that the military in the region dealt harshly with opposition groups long before the existence of the school.	. . .