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The CIA was not the only U.S. agency embarassed last month by
revelations concerning the murderous exploits of a paid Guatemalan
informant. The news left an Army-run training school for Latin
American soldiers scrambling to explain yet another graduate gone
wrong.
In 1989, while on the CIA payroll, Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez of
Guatemala spent a year at the Command and General Staff College of
the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Georgia.
He graduated from this elite U.S. training on December 8. Exactly
six months later, soldiers acting on his command murdered U.S.
citizen Michael DeVine in the heart of a Guatemalan jungle, tying him
to a tree and hacking him to death with machetes.
Two years later, and still on the CIA payroll, Alpirez supervised the
torture and extrajudicial execution of Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a
Guatemalan rebel married to lawyer/activist Jennifer Harbury of the
U.S. On one of the last occasions he was seen alive, Bamaca was
chained to a hospital bed in a prison camp run by Alpirez, his body
swollen horribly from head to toe.
The life and crimes of Julio Alpirez are hardly unique among the
Guatemalan military, or , for that matter, among graduates of the
U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA). Established in Panama in
1946, and currently located at Fort Benning, Ga., the school has a
long history of training thugs for the CIA.
Long-time CIA informant Manuel Noriega took five courses there. El
Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson attended in 1972.
A handful of Honduran officers trained repeatedly at the SOA in the
1970's and early 1980's before creating deadly Battalion 3-16 -- in
cooperation with the CIA.
According to journalist Allan Nairn, three recent commanders of the
Guatemalan G-2 (military intelligence) are former CIA operatives.
INFO SOA files show that all are graduates of the School of the
Americas. Like Colonel Julio Alpirez, two attended the school's
prestigious, year-long Command and General Staff College.
General Edgar Godoy Gaitian took a military intelligence course in
1975, and attended the SOA Command and General Staff College in 1987.
Colonel Otto Perez Molina took cadet training at the SOA in 1969,
and graduated from the Command and General Staff College in 1985 --
he even made the Commandant's list. Both are implicated in
high-profile assassinations.
In 1993 and 1994, Representative Joseph Kennedy (D-MA) sponsored
legislation to close the U.S. Army School of the Americas, which is
known throughout Latin America as "the school of assassins," or "the
school of coups." Both attempts failed.
This year, with Republicans dominating the House, the legislation may
never make it past the Rules Committee -- ensuring that for at least
one more year, the Army school at Fort Benning will continue to churn
out CIA-sponsored thugs at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer.
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LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD! WRITE, FAX, CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVE TODAY
AND REQUEST THAT S/HE SUPPORT REP. KENNEDY'S EFFORT TO CLOSE THE DOOR
ON THE SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS!