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SOA Graduate Takes Control of Security in Michoacán, Mexico
U.S. Army School of The Americas (SOA) graduate general Pedro Felipe Gurrola Ramírez takes control of security in Michoacan, Mexico.
SOA Graduate Takes Control of Security in Michoacán, Mexico
by Simón Sedillo
Alfredo Castillo, the federal envoy in charge of security for the State of Michoacán since January 2014 has stepped down and is being replaced by General Pedro Felipe Gurrola Ramírez, a US Army School of the America’s (SOA) graduate. The School of the Americas is notorious for training a wide variety of infamous military officials from all over Latin America in strategies and tactics which include but are not limited to torture, coercion, kidnapping, rape, murder, mutilations, massacres, mass media manipulation, political manipulation, and paramilitarism. In 1989, religious based faith groups and concerned individuals created the School of the America’s Watch, an organization that has outspokenly opposed the SOA, demanded the release of the names of individuals trained at the school, and exposed a number of atrocities and crimes committed by SOA graduates throughout Latin America.
In 2002 the SOA changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation and has continued to function as a primary US based military training camp for Latin American soldiers. Mexico has had over 1700 military personnel trained at the school between 1955 and 2003. Due to the diligent work of SOA Watch, the names and courses taken by these 1700 Mexican military personnel have all been made public; however, names of trainees after 2003 continue to be withheld from the public. The last attempt to release names between 2003 and the present was shut down by the Obama administration.
General Pedro Felipe Gurrola Ramírez boasts participating in an Army Ranger course at Fort Benning and is among other infamous military personnel trained at the SOA who are still on active duty, including Mexican general trained at the SOA General Jose Ruben Rivas Peña, who is primarily responsible for the creation of militarily trained civilian paramilitary organizations in the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero. Of these paramilitary organizations, armed civilian death squads were created to confront the Zapatista National Liberation Army and their civilian support base communities, resulting in several ongoing confrontations, the worst of which was the 1997 massacre of unarmed civilians at a church in Acteal, Chiapas, Mexico. Mexican authorities claim that Mexican officials trained at the SOA during this time period were being trained in counter narcotics strategies, however after the 1994 Zapatista rebellion began, the bulk of Mexican soldiers trained at the SOA were specifically trained in psychological operations, which include counterinsurgency tactics and the creation of paramilitary organizations.
Other famous Mexican SOA graduates are today, in fact, members of the very narcotics cartels that are bringing Mexico to its knees. 31 ex-soldiers once part of an elite division of the Mexican army –the Special Air Mobile Force Group– deserted their official positions and became the security arm of the Cartel del Golfo, only to later break off and create the most violent cartel in Mexican history, the Zetas. Mexican military deserters turned cartel hit men are not limited to the Zetas cartel but also include Michoacán’s own Knights Templar cartel. In a twisted sequence of events, somehow the head of security in Michoacán is now a military general trained at the same institution as some of the most dangerous hit men for the Knights Templar Cartel.
The use of paramilitary organizations has been a signature strategy used by SOA trained Latin American military personnel. The fact that an SOA graduate is now in charge of security for Michoacán is alarming to say the least. This only adds to the mounting evidence that there is indeed a US military counterinsurgency strategy in Mexico aimed at securing political and economic interests by any means necessary.
Through the North American Free Trade Agreement, politicians, banks, and corporations have been imposing a military, economic, and political strategy in Mexico since 1992, which has included the privatization of telecommunications, transportation, education, healthcare, energy, and of course, land and natural resources. Indigenous communities throughout Mexico have organized and resisted the privatization of their communally owned lands. In response to a largely unsuccessful land privatization strategy, the Mexican government with the help of the US government has increasingly employed a military strategy of internal defense and paramilitarism. Today, a culture of paramilitarism permeates all walks of Mexican society, not just indigenous communities. For every social group that attempts to resist and organize against the military, political, and economic impositions of neoliberalism, there is a paramilitary counterpart ready to act as a provocateur, a shock troop, or even a death squad in order to derail efforts for social change through the threat of violence and the use of brute force.
Paramilitarism entails several specific criteria:
1. That the paramilitary organization be conformed of civilians with an opposing point of view to a given civilian social movement, be it social, cultural, labor, religious, geographic, economic, or political.
2. That the paramilitary organization be financed and trained by an official entity such as the military, police or other official government entities, corporations, banks, or local land barons.
3. That the paramilitary organization carry out acts of violence and brutality as a primary strategy in order to take control of territory and natural resources.
4. That the paramilitary organization functions with complete impunity from prosecution by official government entities.
5. That the acts of violence carried out by the paramilitary organization function as “deniable atrocities” from which state, corporate, banking, or government officials can deny involvement or responsibility, claim internal civilian disputes, and therefore justify further military or police intervention in a given region.
The whole purpose of paramilitarism is to divide and conquer without appearing to do so on an official level, to then justify official militarism and accomplish the ultimate goal of controlling territories and natural resources. The most prevalent cases of paramilitarism in Mexico can be found in land dispute issues within indigenous communities, in particular in the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero under the auspices of the SOA trained general, Jose Ruben Rivas Peña. Extensive analysis, research, and investigations have unveiled the extent to which the strategy of paramilitarism has been used to undermine indigenous struggles for land autonomy and self-determination in these states. There is no longer a single doubt about the existence of this low intensity warfare strategy in these regions.
When it comes to states such as Michoacán however, somehow the mainstream media, academia, and many solidarity activists have ignored the paramilitary tendencies of organized crime cartels. The people of Michoacán have struggled to survive and persevere in the face of a violent onslaught by three different cartels: The Familia Michoacana, the Zetas, and now the Knights Templar. Michoacán is known worldwide for marijuana cultivation and trafficking, but with a growing trend towards marijuana decriminalization and legalization in the United States of America, today the Knights Templar cartel has now diversified into the production and trafficking of methamphetamine. In a globalized marketplace for cheap labor, land, and natural resources, cartels throughout Mexico have also diversified into a much more profitable industry, which is the use of coercion through violence in order to gain territorial control. Today the Knights Templar cartel continues to harvest terror with the precision of a military death squad and engages in an international drug smuggling operation. The cartel, however, has also quietly been engaging in private security roles in the interest of illegal natural resource extraction strategies employed by corporations, banks, and political oligarchies.
If we apply the five aforementioned criteria that constitute a paramilitary organization to the cartels, what we see is a level of professional paramilitarism that has now surpassed classic forms of paramilitarism, in that the territorial control exercised is absolute. In addition to trafficking narcotics, kidnappings, torture, coercion, the charging of protection money, rapes, assassinations, organ trafficking, cannibalism and public displays of mutilations, in Michoacán the Knights Templar cartel has taken control of entire legitimate industries, such as avocado and lime agribusinesses and mining operations. In other cases like Cherán and Ostula, the cartel has provided armed security for illegal logging endeavors. This is the true face of narco-paramilitarism in Mexico today.
Today organized crime profits continue to pour into transnational banking institutions as laundered and legitimate investment capital. In Mexico, narcotics cartels are simply emulating the neoliberal military political economy, which condones and exacerbates violence as the primary means to attaining power and social, psychological, and territorial control. It is no wonder that major organized crime cartels have risen to power and control of entire territories of Mexico and the USA. In Mexico, neoliberalism is a narco-paramilitary political economy whose primary enemy is the Mexican people.
by Simón Sedillo
Alfredo Castillo, the federal envoy in charge of security for the State of Michoacán since January 2014 has stepped down and is being replaced by General Pedro Felipe Gurrola Ramírez, a US Army School of the America’s (SOA) graduate. The School of the Americas is notorious for training a wide variety of infamous military officials from all over Latin America in strategies and tactics which include but are not limited to torture, coercion, kidnapping, rape, murder, mutilations, massacres, mass media manipulation, political manipulation, and paramilitarism. In 1989, religious based faith groups and concerned individuals created the School of the America’s Watch, an organization that has outspokenly opposed the SOA, demanded the release of the names of individuals trained at the school, and exposed a number of atrocities and crimes committed by SOA graduates throughout Latin America.
In 2002 the SOA changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation and has continued to function as a primary US based military training camp for Latin American soldiers. Mexico has had over 1700 military personnel trained at the school between 1955 and 2003. Due to the diligent work of SOA Watch, the names and courses taken by these 1700 Mexican military personnel have all been made public; however, names of trainees after 2003 continue to be withheld from the public. The last attempt to release names between 2003 and the present was shut down by the Obama administration.
General Pedro Felipe Gurrola Ramírez boasts participating in an Army Ranger course at Fort Benning and is among other infamous military personnel trained at the SOA who are still on active duty, including Mexican general trained at the SOA General Jose Ruben Rivas Peña, who is primarily responsible for the creation of militarily trained civilian paramilitary organizations in the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero. Of these paramilitary organizations, armed civilian death squads were created to confront the Zapatista National Liberation Army and their civilian support base communities, resulting in several ongoing confrontations, the worst of which was the 1997 massacre of unarmed civilians at a church in Acteal, Chiapas, Mexico. Mexican authorities claim that Mexican officials trained at the SOA during this time period were being trained in counter narcotics strategies, however after the 1994 Zapatista rebellion began, the bulk of Mexican soldiers trained at the SOA were specifically trained in psychological operations, which include counterinsurgency tactics and the creation of paramilitary organizations.
Other famous Mexican SOA graduates are today, in fact, members of the very narcotics cartels that are bringing Mexico to its knees. 31 ex-soldiers once part of an elite division of the Mexican army –the Special Air Mobile Force Group– deserted their official positions and became the security arm of the Cartel del Golfo, only to later break off and create the most violent cartel in Mexican history, the Zetas. Mexican military deserters turned cartel hit men are not limited to the Zetas cartel but also include Michoacán’s own Knights Templar cartel. In a twisted sequence of events, somehow the head of security in Michoacán is now a military general trained at the same institution as some of the most dangerous hit men for the Knights Templar Cartel.
The use of paramilitary organizations has been a signature strategy used by SOA trained Latin American military personnel. The fact that an SOA graduate is now in charge of security for Michoacán is alarming to say the least. This only adds to the mounting evidence that there is indeed a US military counterinsurgency strategy in Mexico aimed at securing political and economic interests by any means necessary.
Through the North American Free Trade Agreement, politicians, banks, and corporations have been imposing a military, economic, and political strategy in Mexico since 1992, which has included the privatization of telecommunications, transportation, education, healthcare, energy, and of course, land and natural resources. Indigenous communities throughout Mexico have organized and resisted the privatization of their communally owned lands. In response to a largely unsuccessful land privatization strategy, the Mexican government with the help of the US government has increasingly employed a military strategy of internal defense and paramilitarism. Today, a culture of paramilitarism permeates all walks of Mexican society, not just indigenous communities. For every social group that attempts to resist and organize against the military, political, and economic impositions of neoliberalism, there is a paramilitary counterpart ready to act as a provocateur, a shock troop, or even a death squad in order to derail efforts for social change through the threat of violence and the use of brute force.
Paramilitarism entails several specific criteria:
1. That the paramilitary organization be conformed of civilians with an opposing point of view to a given civilian social movement, be it social, cultural, labor, religious, geographic, economic, or political.
2. That the paramilitary organization be financed and trained by an official entity such as the military, police or other official government entities, corporations, banks, or local land barons.
3. That the paramilitary organization carry out acts of violence and brutality as a primary strategy in order to take control of territory and natural resources.
4. That the paramilitary organization functions with complete impunity from prosecution by official government entities.
5. That the acts of violence carried out by the paramilitary organization function as “deniable atrocities” from which state, corporate, banking, or government officials can deny involvement or responsibility, claim internal civilian disputes, and therefore justify further military or police intervention in a given region.
The whole purpose of paramilitarism is to divide and conquer without appearing to do so on an official level, to then justify official militarism and accomplish the ultimate goal of controlling territories and natural resources. The most prevalent cases of paramilitarism in Mexico can be found in land dispute issues within indigenous communities, in particular in the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero under the auspices of the SOA trained general, Jose Ruben Rivas Peña. Extensive analysis, research, and investigations have unveiled the extent to which the strategy of paramilitarism has been used to undermine indigenous struggles for land autonomy and self-determination in these states. There is no longer a single doubt about the existence of this low intensity warfare strategy in these regions.
When it comes to states such as Michoacán however, somehow the mainstream media, academia, and many solidarity activists have ignored the paramilitary tendencies of organized crime cartels. The people of Michoacán have struggled to survive and persevere in the face of a violent onslaught by three different cartels: The Familia Michoacana, the Zetas, and now the Knights Templar. Michoacán is known worldwide for marijuana cultivation and trafficking, but with a growing trend towards marijuana decriminalization and legalization in the United States of America, today the Knights Templar cartel has now diversified into the production and trafficking of methamphetamine. In a globalized marketplace for cheap labor, land, and natural resources, cartels throughout Mexico have also diversified into a much more profitable industry, which is the use of coercion through violence in order to gain territorial control. Today the Knights Templar cartel continues to harvest terror with the precision of a military death squad and engages in an international drug smuggling operation. The cartel, however, has also quietly been engaging in private security roles in the interest of illegal natural resource extraction strategies employed by corporations, banks, and political oligarchies.
If we apply the five aforementioned criteria that constitute a paramilitary organization to the cartels, what we see is a level of professional paramilitarism that has now surpassed classic forms of paramilitarism, in that the territorial control exercised is absolute. In addition to trafficking narcotics, kidnappings, torture, coercion, the charging of protection money, rapes, assassinations, organ trafficking, cannibalism and public displays of mutilations, in Michoacán the Knights Templar cartel has taken control of entire legitimate industries, such as avocado and lime agribusinesses and mining operations. In other cases like Cherán and Ostula, the cartel has provided armed security for illegal logging endeavors. This is the true face of narco-paramilitarism in Mexico today.
Today organized crime profits continue to pour into transnational banking institutions as laundered and legitimate investment capital. In Mexico, narcotics cartels are simply emulating the neoliberal military political economy, which condones and exacerbates violence as the primary means to attaining power and social, psychological, and territorial control. It is no wonder that major organized crime cartels have risen to power and control of entire territories of Mexico and the USA. In Mexico, neoliberalism is a narco-paramilitary political economy whose primary enemy is the Mexican people.
For more information:
http://www.elenemigocomun.net/2015/01/soa-...
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Mr. Sedillo missed some facts in his discussion, the first being that General Gurrola's name does not appear in the SOAW database of 'graduates.' For another, there is no evidence whatsoever that this series of schools ever taught anything illegal, unethical or immoral, and more importantly, no evidence that anyone used anything learned there for bad purposes. Yes, General Rivas attended the Command and General Staff Course, but that is the same course every Army has for its mid-level officers, preparing them for leading larger units or serving on their staffs. Some of those soldiers who went to work for the cartels did get some training from the U.S., but not from the SOA--it never had courses for units, just individuals. The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, which has been in operation for more than 14 years, is open for anyone to see. Visitors may sit in classes, talk with students and faculty, review instructional materials. Anyone can make his/her own evaluation of who we are and what we do. February begins a period of intense activity, with six or seven different courses in session most of the time until October, when the load begins to lessen.
For more information:
http://www.benning.army.mil/tenant/whinsec
Thank you Mr. Rials. There was one mistake and we are working on correcting it asap.
It is true that General Gurrola is not on the list of SOA graduates from 1953-1996. As you well know, this list is however very incomplete. It does not include names from 1997 to the current date.
General Gurrola is cited in the Mexican Newspaper article http://www.quadratin.com.mx/principal/%C2%BFQuien-es-Felipe-Gurrola-Ramirez/ as listing on his resume as having received an Army Ranger course at Fort Benning, which is another way of saying "I am an SOA graduate." Mexico has its own list of SOA graduates and that list is slowly beginning to come to light. While WHINSEC may carry out its current activities with a supposed transparency, the SOA Watch http://soaw.org/ has been instrumental in gathering testimonies of atrocities committed by SOA graduates and has even uncovered training manuals from the SOA which expose the true nature of this military institution. My qustion to you Mr. Rials is: If WHINSEC is so transparent, why won't you release the names of trainees from 2003 until the current date? Do you have something to hide?
-El Enemigo Común
It is true that General Gurrola is not on the list of SOA graduates from 1953-1996. As you well know, this list is however very incomplete. It does not include names from 1997 to the current date.
General Gurrola is cited in the Mexican Newspaper article http://www.quadratin.com.mx/principal/%C2%BFQuien-es-Felipe-Gurrola-Ramirez/ as listing on his resume as having received an Army Ranger course at Fort Benning, which is another way of saying "I am an SOA graduate." Mexico has its own list of SOA graduates and that list is slowly beginning to come to light. While WHINSEC may carry out its current activities with a supposed transparency, the SOA Watch http://soaw.org/ has been instrumental in gathering testimonies of atrocities committed by SOA graduates and has even uncovered training manuals from the SOA which expose the true nature of this military institution. My qustion to you Mr. Rials is: If WHINSEC is so transparent, why won't you release the names of trainees from 2003 until the current date? Do you have something to hide?
-El Enemigo Común
For more information:
http://www.elenemigocomun.net/
Mr. Sedillo, WHINSEC is a small tenant organization on the huge installation that is Fort Benning. The Ranger School is a component of the Maneuver Center of Excellence, which is the major command of Fort Benning and has not only the Ranger School, but also the Airborne School, the Infantry School, the Armor School, Army Basic Training and Army One-Station Unit Training. Ranger School is completely unrelated to WHINSEC, although the School of the Americas did offer a 'Commando Course' for a time, based on the Army's Ranger Course. The use of the term 'graduate' is disingenuous, attempting to give a significance to attendance at the SOA that is unwarranted. People took adult, professional courses, then returned to their jobs better prepared to do those jobs. As for transparency, WHINSEC is likely the most transparent of all organizations in the Department of Defense. Anyone can come any workday, sit in classes, talk with students and faculty, review instructional materials. What does knowing by name who has been here tell you about what we teach? Absolutely nothing. You can know everything else about attendees of courses, especially what countries and services they are from. So, I'll offer again, come see who we are and what we do. You are welcome any time.
For more information:
http://www.benning.army.mil/tenant/whinsec
The arguments about the violent history of US militarism, in particular covert operations in Latin America do not reside in the SOA or WHINSEC alone. Nobody is arguing that either institution has that level of importance. However when piecing together a broader history of US militarism, The SOA, WHINSEC, Fort Benning, and many other places such as Ft. Bragg, NC; Ft. Huachuca, AZ; and Ft. Leavenworth, KS., have some how managed to graduate a disproportionate amount of heinous Latin American criminals who used military strategies to impose political and economic foreign policy in Latin America. This line of thinking about Latin America has been going on as formal US foreign policy since the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, way before the SOA and WHINSEC.
SOA graduates however as a whole are an embarrassing bunch of soldiers based upon their military records in their home countries. Graduating from the SOA might not have made these men criminals, but academic, military, and economic support for criminal military operations including military dictatorships in Latin America does make the US a criminal for supporting these corrupt political regimes.
You might want to fact check yourself or at least have a talk with the institution you are doing PR for. SOA attendees were called graduates by the SOA itself, and apparently each received a diploma for his attendance; the diploma lists them all as graduates as seen here: http://imagehost.epier.com/31592/AMERICAS.jpg
It is interesting however that today you are trying to shy away from this embarrassing fact.
The SOA is only one small piece of evidence in a much larger puzzle of international human rights abuses. These are war crimes that in Mexico continue to take place today. Mexico is getting ever closer to Argentina's 30,000 disappeared during the US backed military dictatorship there. Despite ample warning from the UN, the European Union, and countless other international human rights organizations and agencies the US government continues to train individuals and send financial aid and military equipment to nations such as Mexico, where the military is known to be working with organized crime and enforcing repressive internal defense strategies.
The fact that General Gurrola was trained "next door" and "not" at the SOA demonstrates the failure of the U.S. government to deal seriously with the record of the SOA/ WHINSEC, the most intensely scrutinized aspect of US military training in Latin America. This raises questions about the quality and emphasis in the vast array of other training programs.
I hope you are bracing yourself for the hail storm of criticisms against the SOA and WHINSEC in the coming months as Archbishop Oscar Romero is officially made a saint by the catholic church. Oscar Romero's assassins were members of Salvadoran death squads, including two graduates of the School of the Americas. The 1993 United Nations Truth Commission report on El Salvador identified SOA graduate Major Roberto D'Aubuisson as the man who ordered the assassination. SOA graduates murdered this archbishop, 4 American nuns, 6 Jesuit priests, their cook and her child all in El Salvador.
The SOA graduates who massacred16-year old Celina Ramos, her mother Elba Ramos and six Jesuit priests in 1989 at the University of Central America (UCA) in El Salvador, took courses like Urban Counterinsurgency Ops, Commando Operations, Small Unit Training and Management.
We are not just matching up names to lists of graduates. We are consistently matching up names of graduates of this and many other military institutions to real life atrocities and ongoing horror stories.
Another SOA graduate, Jose Ruben Rivas Peña of Mexico, was responsible for the creation of paramilitary death squads responsible for the December 22, 1997 assassination of 45 civilians attending a Catholic mass. Boy do those SOA graduates have a thing against Catholics. You will note that SOA graduates sent to Mexico after 1994 were specifically being trained in Psy-Ops. These facts are problematic and worrisome.
"Sources at the [SOA] say that when…soldiers go through the urban-combat exercise with blanks in their weapons, half the time the village priest (played by a U.S. Army chaplain) is killed or roughed up."
–Newsweek Magazine, August 9, 1993
"Many of the critics [of the SOA] supported Marxism — Liberation Theology — ; which was defeated with the assistance of the U.S. Army."
– United States Army School of the Americas web page, June, 1999
In 2005 an SOA graduate by the name of Lt. Col. Geoffrey Demarest engaged in an illegal military mapping scandal in Mexico violating national sovereignty. Demarest entered several indigenous communities who practice communal land ownership in the states of San Luis Potosi and Oaxaca with a military mapping project obfuscated as academic research by the University of Kansas.
The military targets were communally owned indigenous lands. Demarest has clarified US military, political, and economic strategy towards communal indigenous land in Latin America in a series of essays published through the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth. Before his work on the “Mexico Indigena” project, Demarest was implementing his land data strategies in Colombia, at least up until 2003. You know Colombia, where the US military strategy for the war on drugs failed miserably?
A March 2003 FMSO essay written by Demarest titled “Mapping Colombia: Land Data and Strategy,” clearly states: “While the forensic value of land ownership data is relatively obvious, not so obvious is the correlation between land data and military strategy, but this correlation precisely marks an essential attribute of successful counterinsurgent campaigns.”
In the same essay, Demarest takes it a step further and exposes a very imperialistic attitude towards land strategy: “Strategic power becomes the ability to keep and acquire ownership rights around the world. National, sub-, supra- or transnational power can be measured accordingly.”
In a textbook titled "Geoproperty: Foreign Affairs, National Security and Property Rights" Demarest claims that communal land owner ship is informal land ownership and "informally owned and unregulated land ownership favors illicit use and violence.."
Demarest believes that traditional forms of land tenure in places like Colombia and Mexico are both criminal and a direct military threat. This is at the core of so many of the major, internationally recognized human rights abuses taking place against indigenous communities in Mexico right now. The SOA is just one small part of this much larger and very serious issue.
Today the international headlines about Mexico have to do with 43 of the over 25,000 people disappeared in Mexico since 2005. That is right, disappearances just like the good ole SOA dirty war days.
In September of 2014, 43 rural education students from a school in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, Mexico disappeared in the town of Iguala, Guerrero. The local mayor, his wife, the local, state, and federal police, and the military along with a local drug cartel have all been implicated in this mass disappearance.
In December, the federal government rearranged the command of several military zones throughout Mexico. Alejandro Saavedra Hernández, the military official in charge of the 35th military region in Mexico based in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, which includes Iguala, was given a promotion from Brigadier General to Division General. Yes, he was given a promotion.
His replacement in the military zone where the 43 students disappeared is Brigadier General Raúl Gámez Segovia. Raúl Gámez Segovia is a specialist in military intelligence and a former military professor teaching subjects such as irregular warfare and civil unrest.
From the 6th of February to the 17th of April in 1995, then Major Raúl Gámez Segovia took a course at the U.S. Army School of the Americas at Fort Benning, in Columbus, Georgia, and was recognized as a distinguished GRADUATE in Military Intelligence for Officers.
I don't know about you, but I for one will be paying attention to Brigadier General Raúl Gámez Segovia's movements in the face of mass civil unrest in the aftermath of this horrible human rights atrocity in Guerrero, Mexico
Other infamous Mexican SOA graduates are now cartel members. That is right Mr. Rials, cartel members once part of an elite division of the Mexican army who deserted their official positions and have since joined cartels, and in the case of the Zetas, created a most brutal cartel of their own.
How can you claim that "Some of those soldiers who went to work for the cartels did get some training from the U.S., but not from the SOA," if you also still want to claim that the US Army is not actually tracking their graduates and that you have no idea what the grads are doing after they leave the institute?
The information about these SOA graduates inside of Mexican cartels is coming from main stream Mexican media and in-depth investigative journalism taking place in Mexico.
The effects of the strategies employed by a disproportionate amount of Latin American soldiers and US advisors graduating from places like the SOA have been and continue to be absolutely devastating to the people of Latin America. These effects are coming to a critical boiling point in Mexico, and the whole world is watching.
Are you really willing to lay your name and your career on the line for an institution that is under serious political fire for these and many many more atrocities by the Pope, religious groups and organizations, world leaders, students, university groups, professors, professionals, collectives, cooperatives, workers, musicians, and average every day people?
I really wish I had time to get away from my extremely busy and underpaid work schedule to continue this conversation with you, but I simply do not. You see I don't get paid to troll web sites in order to defend a military institution's reputation, and I certainly don't get paid to defend my work against a well paid troll.
At a time when there are scandals such as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and the evidence of systematic rape and torture at military detention facilities, including cases of soldiers raping young boys in front of their mothers (!!!!????), my guess is that your job must be very well paid.
I just wish that the money from your salary would instead go to doing something about the post traumatic stress US troops are suffering from implementing US military strategy around the world. You do know the painfully sad fact that since 2012 there have been more military suicides than combat deaths? Doing something about that could really make a huge difference.
I know you must provide for your family and I am not one to judge, but I assure you that commenting on blog posts on the weekdays and barbecuing on the weekends is not going to cut it. It is going to take a lot more to clean up the image of the SOA, WHINSEC, Fort Benning, The US Army, and the political and economic interests behind these military strategies.
Thank you for your observations. They have been duly noted.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/nation/2014/10/31/suicide-deaths-us-military-war-study/18261185/
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/feb/01/us-military-suicides-trend-charts
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/01/14/169364733/u-s-militarys-suicide-rate-surpassed-combat-deaths-in-2012
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-military-suicides-exceed-combat-deaths/
P.S.
I do want to make sure I read you correctly however. So you are telling me that if we send someone over, you will make public the names of all of the SOA/WHINSEC attendees and the courses they took, including names from 2003 - 2015? If so someone from the SOA Watch SOAW.ORG will be in touch with you so that we can start matching up those names to atrocities since 2003. Thank you.
SOA graduates however as a whole are an embarrassing bunch of soldiers based upon their military records in their home countries. Graduating from the SOA might not have made these men criminals, but academic, military, and economic support for criminal military operations including military dictatorships in Latin America does make the US a criminal for supporting these corrupt political regimes.
You might want to fact check yourself or at least have a talk with the institution you are doing PR for. SOA attendees were called graduates by the SOA itself, and apparently each received a diploma for his attendance; the diploma lists them all as graduates as seen here: http://imagehost.epier.com/31592/AMERICAS.jpg
It is interesting however that today you are trying to shy away from this embarrassing fact.
The SOA is only one small piece of evidence in a much larger puzzle of international human rights abuses. These are war crimes that in Mexico continue to take place today. Mexico is getting ever closer to Argentina's 30,000 disappeared during the US backed military dictatorship there. Despite ample warning from the UN, the European Union, and countless other international human rights organizations and agencies the US government continues to train individuals and send financial aid and military equipment to nations such as Mexico, where the military is known to be working with organized crime and enforcing repressive internal defense strategies.
The fact that General Gurrola was trained "next door" and "not" at the SOA demonstrates the failure of the U.S. government to deal seriously with the record of the SOA/ WHINSEC, the most intensely scrutinized aspect of US military training in Latin America. This raises questions about the quality and emphasis in the vast array of other training programs.
I hope you are bracing yourself for the hail storm of criticisms against the SOA and WHINSEC in the coming months as Archbishop Oscar Romero is officially made a saint by the catholic church. Oscar Romero's assassins were members of Salvadoran death squads, including two graduates of the School of the Americas. The 1993 United Nations Truth Commission report on El Salvador identified SOA graduate Major Roberto D'Aubuisson as the man who ordered the assassination. SOA graduates murdered this archbishop, 4 American nuns, 6 Jesuit priests, their cook and her child all in El Salvador.
The SOA graduates who massacred16-year old Celina Ramos, her mother Elba Ramos and six Jesuit priests in 1989 at the University of Central America (UCA) in El Salvador, took courses like Urban Counterinsurgency Ops, Commando Operations, Small Unit Training and Management.
We are not just matching up names to lists of graduates. We are consistently matching up names of graduates of this and many other military institutions to real life atrocities and ongoing horror stories.
Another SOA graduate, Jose Ruben Rivas Peña of Mexico, was responsible for the creation of paramilitary death squads responsible for the December 22, 1997 assassination of 45 civilians attending a Catholic mass. Boy do those SOA graduates have a thing against Catholics. You will note that SOA graduates sent to Mexico after 1994 were specifically being trained in Psy-Ops. These facts are problematic and worrisome.
"Sources at the [SOA] say that when…soldiers go through the urban-combat exercise with blanks in their weapons, half the time the village priest (played by a U.S. Army chaplain) is killed or roughed up."
–Newsweek Magazine, August 9, 1993
"Many of the critics [of the SOA] supported Marxism — Liberation Theology — ; which was defeated with the assistance of the U.S. Army."
– United States Army School of the Americas web page, June, 1999
In 2005 an SOA graduate by the name of Lt. Col. Geoffrey Demarest engaged in an illegal military mapping scandal in Mexico violating national sovereignty. Demarest entered several indigenous communities who practice communal land ownership in the states of San Luis Potosi and Oaxaca with a military mapping project obfuscated as academic research by the University of Kansas.
The military targets were communally owned indigenous lands. Demarest has clarified US military, political, and economic strategy towards communal indigenous land in Latin America in a series of essays published through the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth. Before his work on the “Mexico Indigena” project, Demarest was implementing his land data strategies in Colombia, at least up until 2003. You know Colombia, where the US military strategy for the war on drugs failed miserably?
A March 2003 FMSO essay written by Demarest titled “Mapping Colombia: Land Data and Strategy,” clearly states: “While the forensic value of land ownership data is relatively obvious, not so obvious is the correlation between land data and military strategy, but this correlation precisely marks an essential attribute of successful counterinsurgent campaigns.”
In the same essay, Demarest takes it a step further and exposes a very imperialistic attitude towards land strategy: “Strategic power becomes the ability to keep and acquire ownership rights around the world. National, sub-, supra- or transnational power can be measured accordingly.”
In a textbook titled "Geoproperty: Foreign Affairs, National Security and Property Rights" Demarest claims that communal land owner ship is informal land ownership and "informally owned and unregulated land ownership favors illicit use and violence.."
Demarest believes that traditional forms of land tenure in places like Colombia and Mexico are both criminal and a direct military threat. This is at the core of so many of the major, internationally recognized human rights abuses taking place against indigenous communities in Mexico right now. The SOA is just one small part of this much larger and very serious issue.
Today the international headlines about Mexico have to do with 43 of the over 25,000 people disappeared in Mexico since 2005. That is right, disappearances just like the good ole SOA dirty war days.
In September of 2014, 43 rural education students from a school in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, Mexico disappeared in the town of Iguala, Guerrero. The local mayor, his wife, the local, state, and federal police, and the military along with a local drug cartel have all been implicated in this mass disappearance.
In December, the federal government rearranged the command of several military zones throughout Mexico. Alejandro Saavedra Hernández, the military official in charge of the 35th military region in Mexico based in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, which includes Iguala, was given a promotion from Brigadier General to Division General. Yes, he was given a promotion.
His replacement in the military zone where the 43 students disappeared is Brigadier General Raúl Gámez Segovia. Raúl Gámez Segovia is a specialist in military intelligence and a former military professor teaching subjects such as irregular warfare and civil unrest.
From the 6th of February to the 17th of April in 1995, then Major Raúl Gámez Segovia took a course at the U.S. Army School of the Americas at Fort Benning, in Columbus, Georgia, and was recognized as a distinguished GRADUATE in Military Intelligence for Officers.
I don't know about you, but I for one will be paying attention to Brigadier General Raúl Gámez Segovia's movements in the face of mass civil unrest in the aftermath of this horrible human rights atrocity in Guerrero, Mexico
Other infamous Mexican SOA graduates are now cartel members. That is right Mr. Rials, cartel members once part of an elite division of the Mexican army who deserted their official positions and have since joined cartels, and in the case of the Zetas, created a most brutal cartel of their own.
How can you claim that "Some of those soldiers who went to work for the cartels did get some training from the U.S., but not from the SOA," if you also still want to claim that the US Army is not actually tracking their graduates and that you have no idea what the grads are doing after they leave the institute?
The information about these SOA graduates inside of Mexican cartels is coming from main stream Mexican media and in-depth investigative journalism taking place in Mexico.
The effects of the strategies employed by a disproportionate amount of Latin American soldiers and US advisors graduating from places like the SOA have been and continue to be absolutely devastating to the people of Latin America. These effects are coming to a critical boiling point in Mexico, and the whole world is watching.
Are you really willing to lay your name and your career on the line for an institution that is under serious political fire for these and many many more atrocities by the Pope, religious groups and organizations, world leaders, students, university groups, professors, professionals, collectives, cooperatives, workers, musicians, and average every day people?
I really wish I had time to get away from my extremely busy and underpaid work schedule to continue this conversation with you, but I simply do not. You see I don't get paid to troll web sites in order to defend a military institution's reputation, and I certainly don't get paid to defend my work against a well paid troll.
At a time when there are scandals such as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and the evidence of systematic rape and torture at military detention facilities, including cases of soldiers raping young boys in front of their mothers (!!!!????), my guess is that your job must be very well paid.
I just wish that the money from your salary would instead go to doing something about the post traumatic stress US troops are suffering from implementing US military strategy around the world. You do know the painfully sad fact that since 2012 there have been more military suicides than combat deaths? Doing something about that could really make a huge difference.
I know you must provide for your family and I am not one to judge, but I assure you that commenting on blog posts on the weekdays and barbecuing on the weekends is not going to cut it. It is going to take a lot more to clean up the image of the SOA, WHINSEC, Fort Benning, The US Army, and the political and economic interests behind these military strategies.
Thank you for your observations. They have been duly noted.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/nation/2014/10/31/suicide-deaths-us-military-war-study/18261185/
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/feb/01/us-military-suicides-trend-charts
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/01/14/169364733/u-s-militarys-suicide-rate-surpassed-combat-deaths-in-2012
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-military-suicides-exceed-combat-deaths/
P.S.
I do want to make sure I read you correctly however. So you are telling me that if we send someone over, you will make public the names of all of the SOA/WHINSEC attendees and the courses they took, including names from 2003 - 2015? If so someone from the SOA Watch SOAW.ORG will be in touch with you so that we can start matching up those names to atrocities since 2003. Thank you.
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