Here is one of many articles that can be found about SOA:
School of the Americas: A Black Eye to Democracy
By Eliana Monteforte
The Military Academy Where the Gothic Arts Have Been Taught The SOA first held classes in 1946 in Panama, and remained there until it was evicted from its Canal Zone location and moved to Fort Benning in 1984. This was done as a result of the upheaval brought about by the Canal reverting to Panamanian control due to the Carter-Torrijos Treaty of 1977. Over the past 59 years, the SOA has trained more than 60,000 soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. In 2006, WHINSEC offered its lectures to an estimated 670 students. It is not surprising that the largest group of its students were recruited from Colombia, a country which over the years has been vilified for its egregious human rights violations.
Military of Terror The military educational facility has been continuously referred to as the “School of Assassins”, since the Panamanian newspaper La Prensa first labeled it as such. It also has been revealed that torture techniques and coup procedures, prepared by Pentagon personnel, had become part of the SOA’s regular curriculum. The school also has been dubbed the “School of Dictators” and the “Nursery of Death Squads,” since rumors first circulated that training manuals promoted interrogation techniques that violated human rights and habeas corpus standards as defined by the U.S. military’s own protocol. Since its founding, SOA graduates have never entirely escaped notoriety for authorizing the raping, torturing and assassination of upwards of tens of thousands of Latin American civilians who had been victimized by death squads under the command of SOA alumni.
Former Panamanian President Jorge Llueca stated when the SOA was located in Panama, it was “the biggest base for destabilization in Latin America.” Also, education organizations such as Third World Travel were among those who had observed that “today, America’s image as a defender of democracy and justice has been further eroded by the SOA.”
SOA graduates have been implicated in atrocities committed in almost every Latin American country, including El Salvador, Honduras, Argentina, Peru and Guatemala, especially during the 1980s, when savage military dictatorships controlled the region. For example, this included Robert D’Aubuisson, who according to a 1993 United Nations Truth Commission Report, was a central figure behind the death squad activities which were implicated in many extrajudicial killings in El Salvador, including the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. D’Aubuisson attended the SOA in 1972. The 1980 massacre of El Mozote, which took the lives of 900 men, women and children in El Salvador, was carried out by the Atlactl Batallion much of whose leadership received training at the school.
Former leader of the Argentine junta Leopoldo Galtrieri was also a SOA graduate and has been judged as one of those most responsible for the “disappearance” of thousands of Argentine citizens who opposed repression as well as supported the right of dissidents to speak out. Honduran General Humberto Regalado Hernandes, also a SOA alumnus, has been connected with Colombian drug cartels and became one of the highest ranking officials of a Honduran death squad active in the early 1980s. Additionally, foreign Jesuit priests and two Salvadorian women on the Central American University Campus, were murdered by a small band of Salvadorian security forces and their SOA-led command.
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/5457/1/267/
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