According to the recent report of the United Nations Independent Fact-Finding Mission, the current Venezuelan ministers of Defense and Interior are responsible for serious human rights violations that have occurred in the country since 2014. Both are on the list of graduates from the so-called “School of the Americas”, an institute created by the United States in 1946 that has been denounced by activists across the continent for being a center where torture and murder techniques were taught.
In 1946, the United States created a military training center in Panama for war and counterinsurgency operations. During the Cold War, hundreds of military personnel from all over Latin America were trained to keep the influence of the Soviet Union in the region at bay. As reported by Amnesty International in 2005: “In the mid-1990s, the US government revealed that the School of the Americas (SOA) had used training manuals that endorsed practices such as torture, extortion, kidnapping, and execution. While some curricular changes have been implemented at this training institute, no one has ever been held accountable for illegal training manuals or the behavior of SOA graduates. “
According to the organization SOA Watch, some of the former students of the School of the Americas “are prominent human rights offenders such as the Argentine Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola, Hugo Bánzer Suárez from Bolivia, Roberto d’Aubuisson from El Salvador, besides two of the three officers linked to the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero; three of the five officers cited in the rape and murder of four American nuns; and ten of the twelve soldiers who participated in the massacre of 900 civilians in El Mozote, El Salvador ”.
