Part One: The Deadliest School in History

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the show about the
worst people in all of history? UM, and boy howdy,
is it an appropriate week for an episode of this
show about the worst people in all of history? Because today,
UH is the day that UM, I don't know. It's
one of the days that a series of horrific wildfires

(00:23):
have gripped my entire state, forcing ten percent of its
population to flee. And there are armed militiamen setting up
checkpoints based on racism in paranoia in small rural areas.
And that may seem like it's not connected to other
things in history, but it's actually connected very directly to
the subject of our podcast today, which is a little

(00:46):
something called the School of the America's UH. And the
way that these two tied together is very fascinating. And
the oh you just heard UH is my guest today
Joel Monique, who is a culture critic and a podcast
You know, the thing that this is that you're listening
to a podcast producer. You produced the things that that

(01:06):
are occurring right now in everyone's ears. Joel, how are
you doing? I'm hanging in there. We're in the apocalypse done.
It's orange and the sky is gray. I am just
trying to keep it. It feels weird to keep going,
Like I feel like I have to change something actively
in my life to reflect the chaos outside. I haven't

(01:27):
figured what that is yet. I don't know that's how
I'm doing. I don't know how I'm doing. It's chaos. Yeah,
we need a German word for how surreal it is
to like go out to a grocery store or meet
a friend for lunch, as like plumes of smoke the
size of skyscrapers drift by and and like the smell
of death fills the air, and fascist militias begin like bivouacking,

(01:51):
you know, twenty minutes away from your door. It's surreal, um.
But you know what's not surreal is how fashional the
introduction of this episode was. I got right in there,
like I directly connected it to a thing that was
going on. I just I'm real proud of that. Proud
of you, Robert, Thank you. School of the America's is

(02:14):
uh spoilers horrific uh c I a slash Defense Department
UM operation that that led to the overthrow of like
a dozen different democratically elected governments in Latin America over
the course of several decades. Um, oh yeah, no, it's
a bad thing. School the America's is a bad thing.
It's a bad It was a real terrible thing that

(02:36):
existed for a while, only happened on this podcast on
Our Home the episode it does tie in rather directly
to what's going on right now in the United States
because a lot of the things we're seeing the government
clamping down on unrest, you know, illegal arrests, suppression of
political opposition, the disappearance of political activists, the increasing um

(03:03):
interorganization between state law enforcement uh in different sort of
militias and paramilitary groups. All of that stuff that's happening
right now that people are getting really terrified about in
the United States is exactly the stuff that we've been
doing in Latin America in a number of different countries
for decades, going back to when like our parents were kids. Um,

(03:25):
and today is the episode about how a lot of
that was organized. So a lot of the things that
are happening in America today have their genesis and things
the United States was doing the Latin America and we're
going to learn about that. So that's going to be good. Yeah, listen,
I really am because the more people from who've been

(03:46):
in countries where they're like, oh, yeah, no fascists took
over here, They're like, pay attention to this small detail here,
and I'm like, oh okay, and then they're like, and
let me show you how that expanded into something that
was horrible. Try to stop this before it becomes a fire.
Uh sorry, that's maybe bad phrasing right now. So it
actually I think it compares really well to a fire
because it's one of those things where you don't have

(04:08):
to have this kind of problem with fires like you
can there there are ways that people dealt with, you know,
the propensity and the fact that this both like every
the West Coast needs to burn a lot every year. Um,
it doesn't need to lead to hundreds of thousands of
people losing their homes because it's it can be managed

(04:29):
in predictable ways. But I mean, we they do control
fires and like put them out and get rid of
a lot of the nurseries that we have that exist
to just like raise a bunch of trees for commodification,
which you know are are much worse in terms of
like areas, like like they contribute to making an area

(04:49):
of vulnerable to fires, we can bury our power lines,
we can shut off power access to areas. Like, there's
a whole lot of things that can be done. And
we want to solve a problem after it's become a
problem never before. And the calamity that Oregon in California's
experiencing right now, a lot of people saw it coming,
just like a lot of people have seen the rise
of fascism coming for decades in the United States, and

(05:12):
instead of doing anything about it, we had that one
TV show where Um Flavor Flav he does this like
he had this he was looking for a wife. If
I'm remembering correctly, Um, expect to be the next Reverence. Yeah,
I blame the rise of fascism in the United States
entirely on Flavor Flav. Actually, Um, I would read that
essay Robert Flavor Flav well known the backer of the

(05:36):
c I A. Uh So let's look, I think we
should start. If we're gonna we're gonna explain the school
of the America's and how the United States did what
is now happening in the United States to uh a
huge chunk of the world and Americans didn't pay attention.
If we want to really tell that story. We have
to go back in time almost as well. It's our

(05:57):
almost two centuries to eighteen twenty, you know, at that point,
and the US was only established in like or you know,
the whole Revolutionary War kicked off in seventeen seventy six,
So the US was like younger than a lot of
presidential candidates now um in in eighteen twenty three. But
it had started to get like enough power and geographic

(06:19):
reach that it was beginning to like look south at
what was going on in Central and South America. UM.
And you know, there were at that point all these
kind of powers, these these rates, these burgeoning nations, and
in what we call Latin America to day, we're starting
to in a really effective way, throw off kind of
the yoke of colonial oppression. They were there were a
bunch of revolutions, they were kicking out their European masters,

(06:42):
and kind of President Monroe, who was the guy in
charge of the US at that point, looked at all
this going on, um, and he started what came to
be known decades later as the Monroe Doctrine, where he
was basically like, hey, europe um, if you know, European
powers aren't allowed to take over any new chunks of
Latin America. Like, we the United States are not going

(07:03):
to stand for that. Um, this is the area that
we have influence in and you're not allowed to like
keep coming in. It was for a country that had
like just gotten the ship kicked out of it in
the War of eighteen twelve and like barely held on
it was it was it was quite a statement to make,
but it was hard for the European powers to like
get troops and shipped down to South America, so you know,

(07:24):
the US had a big advantage there. It was basically
like the Monroe would came to and the Monroe started
making that, like made this statement in like eighty three,
but the Monroe doctrine didn't get start to be called
the Monroe Doctrine to like eighteen fifty. But it was
basically the US saying to Europe, stay the funk out
of our backyard. And this was initially kind of like
an aspirational thing because we didn't really have the ability

(07:47):
to project any power down there. But over the decades,
as the United States grew into more of a functional
nation and gained more sort of military and naval power,
it became something that like we actually had the ability
to back up somewhat. So Yeah, Now, there were a
few different, big reasons why the United States felt it
was so important, you know, even as early as the

(08:08):
eighteen twenties to start telling Europe to stay the hell
out of Latin America. One of the reasons was that
Europeans of the mid eighteen hundreds were like they were
just the messiest bitches in the world. Um, Like, they
were constantly at war with each other, huge these huge,
terrifying what seemed like you know, like you look at
the Napoleonic wars and stuff, you look at that through
a lens of like where ship wasn't it looked like
the end of the world to a lot of people,

(08:30):
and these revolutions that were just horribly bloody um. And
so the monarchs in the street, there's no lawless you have.
There's like a widespread starvation at that time, right because
we're having like horrible droughts and things, and so the
lower classes all suffer. Yeah, it feels very similar. Yea,
and Napoleon is raising you know, you've got starting like

(08:51):
European war lords are raising, like armies that are in
the hundreds of thousands that look that are like a
significant chunk of the entire US. It just seemed like
a nightmare to a lot of Americans. UM and Europe
was just seen as such, like what they like the
the result of European squabbling and fighting was seen as
so apocalyptic that the US. There were a lot of

(09:11):
people in the U S who like thought about the
idea of, like, what if they start coming back to
South America and trying to make new colonies, like it
will inevitably lead to horrible, horrible wars right at our
doorstep that will pull us in. So there was there
was and that's a that was a reasonable thing at
the time to be scared at, Like the stuff that
the year the British Empire was like getting up to
all sorts of horrible bloody ship in India and Afghanistan,

(09:32):
um in part as a result of their conflicts with
Russia at this time. UM. So like the idea that
like that that South America might become another European battleground,
like that was a real thing to be afraid of
the U S. What Like the President Monroe wasn't being
unreasonable when he was like, uh, this is we don't
want to let this happen. So there was a reasonable
reason for the Monroe doctrine. There were also like racist

(09:56):
reasons for it, which one of which is that like
the US didn't want any competition when it came to
politically dominating Latin America. Um. Yeah, so lots of lot
a lot of former slaves down they're just chilling right
to be recolonized. Yeah, it's not them. They have kings
and ships, so stay over there. Yeah. And there were
a lot of folks like the people who went on

(10:17):
to be like part of the Confederacy, who you know,
once upon a time, we're looking at Latin America and like, well,
eventually we're gonna have to like, that's a lot of
that's going to wind up being ours too. I Mean
it makes sense that if we think about manifest destiny
just being like we're going to conquer all of the
I'm sorry to as we beheathens. Uh. Yeah. It always
kind of surprised me that we didn't continue to go

(10:40):
further down south aggressive takeover. A lot of folks wanted
to um, like a lot of Americans wanted to um.
And there were even cases of like like Confederate survivors
sort of like packing up and moving down into Latin
America to establish plantations and try to keep you know,
their ship going for a while, just like similar things

(11:02):
actually kind of happened with the Nazis. But so time
goes by, you know, the Monroe Doctrine gets his name
in eighteen fifty. It becomes like more and more kind
of solid US policy every year, you know, the decades
go by, the United States becomes more and more of
a world power. It has a big civil war, it
has a couple of wars with Mexico, um, and by
and by, you know, time passes. The nineteen hundreds come

(11:23):
and the United States finds itself with a dude named
Teddy Roosevelt in the Oval Office. So Teddy tr Yeah,
we all, we've all heard of Teddy, and he was
He's like, he's one of these guys that if you
if you don't think too much about aspects of what
he believed, he's a fun dude to read about. Oh man,
people love the burly back. He hunted his own bear.

(11:45):
And then he's like, yeah, yeah, people people love him.
If you don't think too much about what he actually believed.
I would see that drunk history is just Ron Swanson
virgin Teddy Roosevelt. That's a well and it is it
is the truth most of our If you're a white
person and you didn't talk about the things that he

(12:06):
believed about race, you probably could get along with Teddy
Roosevelt because he was a fun guy outside of the
horrific genocidal racism. Every history's teacher's favorite president, Like this
is going to get boys to read. Yeah. Um, but
he was also like as as hardcore and imperialist as
you can. Like, it doesn't get more imperialist than fucking

(12:29):
Teddy Roosevelt. Um. He'd gone out of his way to
fight in a hysterically unjust war of colonial domination down
in Cuba. Um. And he's one of the reasons that
we all have owned Guantanamobe today, which is, you know,
have you ever do you enjoy partly on in Guantanamobe? Joel,
I do not. It weirds me the hell out. We've

(12:50):
committed human atrocities there. Uh, it seems like a place America,
the land of the Free sition maybe not half I disagree.
I love the fact that we just to own part
of Cuba and use it just to torture people, and
we don't talk about it all that often. I think
it's a great thing to just forget about and just
keep doing forever. Um. I love that Obama campaigned on

(13:12):
getting rid of that and then just stop talking about it.
Because what a fucking cool country. So by the turn
of the twentieth century, Teddy's Teddy's the president, and the
US is like a full continental power, right like we've
we've we've achieved more or less our final form, like
you can see, like the United States is the United States,
and it's a real you don't want to you wouldn't

(13:33):
want to funk with her. So Roosevelt like has the
ability to project power now. And he was a big
believer in the Monroe doctrine, and more to that, he
wanted to kind of expand what the the idea behind
the Monroe doctrine because he thought the United States had
a right and a duty to act as the policeman
of the America's And I know in the early two thousands,

(13:53):
like we all started talking about America as like world
police um as like a bad thing. But Roosevelt would
have used those terms, and he thought it was a
good thing. He thought, it's it's what we we ought
to be doing, but not in the world, just in
our hemisphere. Oh, very reasonable man. So you know, one
of the things that Roosevelt gets concerned with is that

(14:13):
Venezuela is in a huge amount of debt to a
bunch of creditors in Europe, and he's worried that this
is going to lead to her being invaded by European powers,
which would destabilize Latin America and again lead to this thing.
There's not entirely unreasonable thing, because nineteen o four, if
you're at all aware of what's happening, most people know
some horrible European war is coming. So again you've got

(14:36):
this mix of he's an imperialist, but also he's just
kind of looking at what Europe is doing and like,
we gotta keep this ship away from as far away
from us as possible, which again, not an entirely unreasonable
thing to want to do. Okay, I guess yeah, So
he's he's he's got both these racist reasons for what
he's doing and these pretty reasonable reasons. It's a mix

(14:56):
of things. Uh. And in nineteen o four he issues
what's known as the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe doctrine quote,
the United States would intervene as a last resort to
ensure that other nations in the Western Hemisphere fulfilled their
obligations to international creditors and did not violate the rights
of the United States or invite foreign aggression to the
detriment to the entire body of American nations. That's how

(15:17):
our own State Department summarizes it. So we're not just
the police, were also the bank. Yeah, kind of. He's like, basically,
I don't want Europe coming in here to like ensure
its own debts, so we will police and invade Latin
American nations on behalf of European powers to keep them
out of here. White nonsense. Yeah, that is some white nonsense.

(15:40):
And again that quote I read is from our own
State Department's Office of the Historian, and it goes on
to note quote as the corollary worked out in practice,
the United States increasingly used military force to restore internal
stability to nations in the region. Roosevelt declared that the
United States might exercise international police power in flagrant cases
of such wrongdoing or impotence. So that's very broad stability. Yeah,

(16:05):
remember what our state department calls stability. The people who
live in those countries might not have called stability. Just
a thing to keep in mind. So tr we we again,
we tend to think about like the stuff he did
as a person. His actual presidential policy is pretty overlooked,
in part because he's like, he's in power right before
all the cool ship century starts to happen, so like,

(16:28):
you know, nobody really gives a ship. Most average person
on the street about like fucking nineteen hundred and nineteen fourteen,
you know, World War One starts and people start to
get interested. But his corollary to the Monroe doctrine would
go on to become one of the most tragically influential
decisions made by a US president. More than a century later,
the United States is still operating under the logic Teddy

(16:49):
Roosevelt enshrined and policing large chunks of Latin America, always
in the name of internal stability, but somehow never really
helping to further that cause. Now you fast forward a
couple of residents, right, uh, so tr has his time
in the sun, and then it's nineteen twelve and this
cool cat named Woodrow Wilson is running for president UM
now Wood Drow. As part of his like election campaign,

(17:10):
he starts shopping around something at campaign rallies called the
Pan American Treaty UM. And his idea for the Pan
American Treaty would have been a little bit like creating
a US, like a not a U S, but an
American EU. Right, So the you've got like this continent,
all these states in it that have been independent, start
to like form common economic and trade zones and stuff

(17:32):
and in and in Wilson's mind, the Pan American Treaty
was going to include the United States, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile,
which were then kind of the most powerful nations in
the region. Now, I found a really good master's thesis
from a guy who's a historian now named Dr Matthew Hassett,
and he kind of summarizes the goal of the Pan
American Treaty, and I'm gonna quote from him. Now. His

(17:53):
plan contained two main points. The first was mutual guarantees
of political independence under republican forms of government and mutual
guarantees of territorial integrity. The second was that the signatories
to the treaty would acquire complete control within its jurisdiction
of the manufacture and sale of munitions of war. The
wording of these points is telling, and the first signatories
must guarantee the survival of republican forms of government. Wilson

(18:15):
believed peace and security rested on the establishment and maintenance
of liberal democracies. Memor nations would only ensure the maintenance
of republican forms of government. However, the United States would
send in the Navy and the Marines to ensure compliant governments,
regardless of how they came to power. So number one,
he's ensuring, you know, quote unquote republican forms of government,

(18:36):
and there's a difference between a republican government and a democracy.
Number Two, he's he's insisting that these this new political
union that he's working for, would acquire like complete control
of the manufacture, of sale and of munitions um, which
which essentially is saying like the United States and her
allies are going to have complete control of what weapons

(18:59):
get made and where the get distributed. That's that's the
idea as early as nineteen twelve. And well, we must
now pause here because imagine a world. It's just crazy
to me how quickly we're like Oh, I don't care
what's happening with any of the people that actually live there,
like their entire indigenous community, that there are forms of government,

(19:19):
and like I'm trying to imagine the braun the floors
it takes to just walk into somebody else's neighborhood, district
country and be like, no, this is how we do
things now. So also, you can only buy guns from us,
Please do each other with our weapons. And also, like
whatever indigenous concern whatever concerns you as indigenous people have,

(19:43):
the thing that matters most to us is making sure
that arms sales are respected and that the kind of
governments we like come to power, and we'll send our
troops in if you funk with either of those things,
which are the only things we care about in your
whole country, with whatever history it has, Like funk that ship.
We're here for selling guns and ensuring a form of
government that we can dominate. So that's cool. Wilson was

(20:04):
known as was what's known as a reformer imperialist. Now
that means he did reject a lot of the obvious
cruelties of European style colonialism, with like permanent and direct
military occupation of foreign lands, but he still wanted the
US to be able to loot and culturally dominate an
entire content. He was still willing to use the military
to do that. Just ask the people of Arrack Cruz. Um. Now,

(20:26):
he framed this as simple compassion on his part. He
thought the United States should use its power to ensure
good government in nearby lands. And he never bothered to
define what good government was, but he was emphatic that
the U. S should use the basically use the Marines
to violently force Latin American governments to have what he
would consider to be good governments, which is where you

(20:47):
ever hear the catchphrase like sending the Marines. It's not
really used that much now, but it's like, um, deal
with a problem, right, he send in the Marines. Um.
Like it was the thing they used to say, like, well,
my grandpa was like a young man, um and it
But it comes out of this period because Wilson basically says,
if anything starts happening in these Latin American governments that
we don't approve of in the United States, will send

(21:08):
in the Marines to fuck them up. Um. Because the Marines,
the Marine Corps kind of like historically the people we
send in to funk up folks. Hardcore like training program
and I've yes, extremely that's a big part of it. Um.
And they like boats, which are useful for traveling places.

(21:30):
I've been told, so you know what is also useful
for traveling places, Joel. The products and services that support
this podcast, including our main sponsor, the United States Marine Corps.
The United States Marine Corps. Do you need some guys
on boats to funck to funk people up? Because that's

(21:50):
essentially the Marine Corps. They're coming and they're gonna get you. Yeah,
they have helicopters too, but they will just replace your president.
That's not what they're famous. Yeah, products, we're back. Thank you,

(22:12):
United States Marine Corps. It was a weird choice to
sponsor this podcast, but but but we appreciate it. Um.
I don't know, I don't know where to take I
don't know where else to take this joke. Woodrow Wilson
laid out his vision of the future very openly in
campaign speeches. In declaring that the United States had a
special place on the world stage as a disseminator of democracy,

(22:34):
he told crowds, we are chosen and prominently chosen to
show the way that to the nations of the world,
how they show walk in the paths of liberty? Uh?
Now the the guy, the historian who wrote this master's
thesis that I found. Dr Hassett argues that Wilson's dedication
to spreading democracy was real, kind of within Wilson's conception
of democracy, but it was also heavily compromised by his

(22:57):
outrageous racism. Um and doc Or Hassett rights, Wilson's racism
obscured his vision of a new world order. While the
president of Princeton University, Wilson successfully persuaded all African Americans
to withdraw their applications for admission. Josepha's Daniels, a wilson
campaign manager and later his secretary of the Navy, stoked
racial fears in East St. Louis to garner votes. Once
in office, Wilson told darky stories and jokes during cabinet

(23:20):
meetings and presided over the segregation of the Department of
the Treasury, Post Office and the Bureau of Engraving. These
offices had been desegregated since the end of the Civil War.
Wilson refused to condemn the lynching of blacks, and the
only federal actions taken regarding racial conflict was to keep
African Americans from attaining equality. So that's Wilson is the
guy who, like in nineteen twelve, expands segregation. Um, that

(23:42):
is the craziest thing, especially knowing like what's around the
corner for black people in government jobs, Like if you
like post like nineteen fifties, early nineteen sixties, we see
a lot of black people starting to work for the
post Office. Like the only like quote unquote respectable job
you can get as black person is like doing some
type of government work. Um, usually like low level, uh
foot blue collar kind of stuff. I would argue that

(24:06):
maybe the only respectable government job that exists as the
post office, um and park rangers. Post office and park rangers.
What else do we really need? We love you guys, yeah,
so uh yeah, it's this is this is important not
just because like, oh, here's a story about another racist
American president, but because this plays directly into what Wilson

(24:28):
is thinking about what he's doing in Latin America. Because
Wilson is a guy who does believe in democracy, Like
he worked himself ill trying to push forward this vision
he had of the League of nations. And like one
of the problems when whenever we have someone who's terrible
and Woodrow Wilson's a horrible person, I think people tend
to just kind of write it off as that and

(24:48):
assume they don't really believe things. And Wilson is a
big believer in his what he considers to be democracy, um,
which people and in democracy it's a republic. Right, That's
a big thing for him, is it's not he's not
a fan of like this like a pure democracy. He's
like a populist democracy. Um. Wilson believes that you should

(25:09):
have a republic dominated by white people who are able
to direct things and act as patient stewards for their
racial inferiors. Wilson believed that democracy was the fullest form
of state life, and non white people's were not ready
to take part in that, which is why you need
a part of why you need a republic um. He
believed that they needed to undergo what he called a

(25:31):
period of political tool in order to know how to
be good democratic citizens. So this this is like very
vital information to me, Robert, because it helps me understand
like why some people still hold these beliefs, Like it's
it's hard to wrap your mind around I think. I mean,
I don't like, I'll just be for myself, like from
living in black skins, sometimes it's hard to be like, okay,

(25:51):
but where where is this hate rooted in? And I
understand from a larger perspective, like, Okay, you've believed that
because of the way history has been taught to you.
I know a lot of racist white people believe like, oh,
white people invented everything, and white people are the ones
who like colonize the world, and we made sure you
believed in God or like saying things, and we invented

(26:12):
all of the science that clearly we're like the superior race.
But like to hear on a governmental level, like this
idea of we can train the blackness, the part we fear,
the part that doesn't sit right with us, the part
that isn't like us, out of you, and then that's
like the world that will be better, Like that's how
we uplift and make the world better is by removing

(26:33):
It's like it's horrifying, it's so scary, Like it's because
it's happening right now. It is happening right now. And
one of the reasons I think this is so important
to understand is that Number one, there are a lot
of people today who will say the same basic things
about the US and its actions and the way that
it influences and sort of changes the political course of

(26:55):
other nations, like like political lives right now. There's people
who will argue the same basic things Wilson will argue, Um,
they will not argue the same things domestically. And the
fact that because because you can't admit that right, you
can't sit down. You can, as an American today say hey,
like these people need to learn from us the ways

(27:15):
of democracy, and it's our responsibility to teach the right
like that that we fucking Afghanistan and Iraq and like
a bunch of plays all around the world, like that's
that's going on today, And there's people who will argue
forcefully for that. You can't say black people aren't ready
to be full democratic citizens and they need our tutelage
as white people, which is why we have to oppress them.
You can't say that openly in mainstream politics anymore. But

(27:38):
the fact that people argue for that in foreign countries
shows you what they believe about the domestic situation. And
if they Yeah, looking at Woodrow Wilson, I think is
important because we see, we can see the truth of
what the people who believe that ship internationally are saying.
What they also believe domestically. They're the same as Woodrow Wilson.
They haven't changed. It's just not acceptable to say what

(28:01):
he says or what say what he used to say. Um,
I think that's important for people to kind of understand.
We don't. It's vital age. So Dr Hassett goes on
to write, quote the supposed need for a period of
tutelage was Wilson's method of justifying interventions in Latin America
and the disenfranchisement of blacks in the United States. Non

(28:22):
whites needed the guidance of whites, often lasting many years
until they were ready to operate autonomously in a democracy.
Of course, it was white too then decided when their
pupils passed their Civics courses. Yeah, probably like us. Yeah,
when when a majority. I feel like, especially if I
look at like countries like Colombia and Brazil and the

(28:43):
way that white passing people were sort of allowed to
ascend the ranks while we look at read a lot
of stories of like brown, black, indigenous former slaves talking
about like where their class system is at and how
similar almost exact actually the way it has worked in
America has fostered over there as well. This the idea

(29:04):
of segregation, idea of like even even the basic like
non political stuff like the idea of good hair and
who gets to be on billboards and things like that.
It is absolutely insane. Even their attempts to like d desegregate,
like to desegregate and to bring in like black people
has had like horrifyingly racist connotations. If we look at

(29:26):
like a lot of Spanish soaps where you're just like,
good lord, is this still where we're at representation wise?
And then sometimes I'll just slick around here too and
be like, oh, well, you know, I can, I can
complain and and maybe I get a little bit about
on my Woodrow Wilson box and be like they should
learn from us in the ways we've desegregated. Our Hollywood
system are media empire, but we haven't. We still have

(29:49):
so many issues here as well, and how we represent
black people. Yeah, we don't seem to be good at it.
We're good at a tear gas though gas. We know
how to beat the hell out of a protest if

(30:09):
you if you want entire city blocks tear gas. I
know some guys who are just pros at it at
this point. Oh my god. And now we know how
to fence off the White House, so really defense off
the White House. Yeah, we're growing anyway, So back to
back to Wilson. Let's talk about So Wilson gets elected. Uh,
this North American you know, Pan American Treaty thing gets signed.

(30:32):
It takes a while though, it's not signed until but yeah,
World War One happens and Wilson like, lets the US
get pulled into that cluster fuck um, And it takes
until after the war when the League of Nation gets established.
The Pan American Treaty gets signed as part of a
bunch of international League of Nations pacts, but kind of
like a lot of the rest of the League of
Nation ship, it doesn't amount to much, but the impulse

(30:53):
that the pact represented, this idea that the US could
could group up with the strongest nations in Latin America,
sell them arms, and use them to dictate. However, one
in the continent lived without using US troops. That idea
never like went out of vogue. In the US government, um,
up until the present day. And and just so you

(31:14):
know where kind of we are eventually headed in here,
it's equally popular with Republicans and Democrats. So like, no
matter where you land on this, Joe Biden loves him
some fucking we'll talk about playing Columbia maybe a little bit.
That's but yeah, so uh, World War two kind of
distracts the United States from affairs in you know, it's
its own hemisphere for a while. We're not we're not
focusing so much on Latin America during that whole war

(31:36):
thing because it's you know, a lot of stuff is
going on in the other parts of the world. Um,
we have other people to kill. We have we have
so many people to kill. Um and thankfully like some
of them deserve it, which is better than we usually do. Um. Yeah. Yeah,
World War two was the time where some of the
people we bombed from this guy deserve to die. Man,

(31:57):
how we have forgotten so quickly is crazy, demi So
uh yeah. It also like World War two also saw
the sudden pull out of European military advisors from a
lot of South American states because while like they hadn't
been like European colonialism never kind of in the in
the modern era, got was even vaguely on the same

(32:19):
levels like what happened in Africa. UM, because of the
Monroe doctrine. There were still it was still a lot
of European involvement in Latin America. They were they were
selling arms to a lot of these states, and they
would send in military advisors to train their militaries. And
it was a way both of European states kind of
projecting power, and of course it was very profitable. UM.
And if you were in Latin America, you were an

(32:39):
up and coming state and you wanted to get because
there were all these wars between Latin American powers in
this period of time to constant, constant, really horrific wars.
So if you're one of these states, you have a
lot of enemies all around you, and you want to
get a jump on your opponents. UM. You you want
to be partnered with some state that has a more
advanced military, both access to better guns and access to
better sort of training UM and like military organizational techniques.

(33:04):
And you know, the US was certainly in a more
advanced state than a lot of Latin America at this point.
But Europe was the gold standard prior to World War Two. Um,
So a lot of these Latin American countries before World
War Two, they have like German, or French or Italian.
Unfortunately Italian you don't want them as military advisors. But
ideally you'd have like the Germans or the French or
something advising your military. Like Argentina spent about a century

(33:27):
using German officers to train their militaries. And actually up
until like the present day, you can find pictures of
the ship from the nineties. I don't know if it's
continued pass that you can add pictures of Argentine soldiers
giving the Fascist salute because that's how they were trained
to salute, like a lot of actually one of Hitler's
best friends, you know, best friends who Hitler then had killed.
Um this guy, uh, like the leader of the brown

(33:49):
Shirts went and trained Argentine soldiers while the Nazis were
in power. So like a lot of different Latin American
states have European advisors and stuff. But by the end
of the Second World War, Europe was kind of broken
as a military power. Even the states that had won
were in ruins h France and Germany were like bled white,
and the governments of Latin America like started having needing

(34:11):
to look to the United States for military training and
for equipment, because the US has all the guns at
this point, and it has a huge military, It has
a lot of excess shipped to sell, it has a
lot of soldiers to send over to train them. Um,
and Europe just doesn't so me at the same kind
of time, while all these Latin American states are starting
like turning from Europe to the United States for advice
on how to have armies, the guys that sort of

(34:33):
the top of the political establishment in the US, we're
kind of starting to realize the position the end of
World War Two had left them in. And you know,
everyone knows in a World War two the US is
kind of the big power in the world. But I
don't think a lot of people know how what a
dominant position we had. At the end of World War Two.
The United States was in control of fully half of

(34:53):
the planet's wealth. What yeah, half of the wealth in
the world was controlled by the United States. Um. Yeah,
like I'm trying. I mean, I guess it makes sense
if you think about like how much of the world
was like absolutely death and made it just totally fu
and how clean. Like it's always I love studying like

(35:17):
what was happening as we come out of World War
two culturally because the idea of like all of these
women being forced back into their homes so rapidly asked
to reduce their status and power in not just in
like outside of their homes, not just in businesses and stuff,
but in the government too, Like we had risen up
to take so much power. And then this idea of

(35:39):
like black people who had come back from the war
and the way they were treated is basically like you
didn't do anything for me, and you're still just a
black person. There's so much people like there were so
many opportunities for quick development on a social level that
because I think because we had money, accent and access
to guns and power and because we're really feeling ourselves, uh,

(36:02):
was squashed so quickly and scary to think about how
both when we are in power and when we are
out of power we tend to take a dumb on
everybody who isn't a white male. Yeah, it's the real
One of the real tragedies of World War two is
at the end of it, the US had the power
and influence to do literally anything UM. And we basically

(36:23):
chose to hoard that wealth and power and compromise every
single thing we've ever claimed as a as a core
belief of this nation UM, in order to try to
keep it for as long as possible. And that this
kind of thinking. People talk directly about this in the
US government. And I'm gonna quote now from a State
Department policymaker named George Kinnon, who was one of like

(36:44):
the most influential minds in the US during the Cold War.
This is something George Kinnon wrote in nineteen forty eight,
and he's talking about kind of how he's talking about
U S policy in Southeast Asia at this time. But
it applies to kind of the the way that the
men in charge of our government post World War Two,
we're looking at the whole world. So this is something
George Kinnon wrote for the State Department. We have about

(37:07):
fifty of the world's wealth, but only six point three
percent of its population. This disparity is particularly great as
between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation,
we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.
Our real task in the coming period is to devise
a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain
this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.

(37:31):
To do so, we will have to dispense with all
sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attention will have to be
concentrated everywhere on our most immediate national objective. If we
need not deceive ourselves, that we can afford today the
luxury of altruism and world benefaction. Wow, just laying it

(37:51):
all out there now. Kennon was watching his nation, Like
the specific thing that prompted him to write this as
he was watching the United States start to flail round
in China because at this point China civil wars still
going on. We're backing, you know, the quote unquote democratic
sort of side of things, the Republicans or whatever, which
is not working out great, and we're starting like ship

(38:12):
in South Korea, like that's beginning kind of like we're
starting to see that like what what was called at
the time, French indo China, like a bunch of ships
going to go wrong there right, Like France is starting
to get fucked up by Vietnamese rebels and it's it's
becoming obvious to folks in the State Department that Southeast
Asia is going to be a place where the US
either has to just kind of abandon to the influence

(38:32):
of these quote unquote communist powers or it's going we're
gonna burn a lot of treasure in lives fighting there. Um.
So Kennon at the time is kind of specifically referring
to US policy in Asia. But again, the pattern of
thinking that he talks about up there, this idea that
the most important thing is to maintain the position of
disparity we have with the rest of the world, and
we can't we can't let ourselves. Um, you know, I'm reminded,

(38:55):
like we can't let ourselves be human, like think about
altruism and stuff. You have to think about holding onto power.
And it does make me. Um, it reminds me reading
that of a quote from Yard Kipling's White Man's Burden. Um,
take up the white Man's burden. You dare not stoop
to less nor call too loud on freedom to cloak
your weariness. Like it's the same, the same pattern of thought, right,

(39:19):
Like where you can't you can't let yourself what's important
is maintaining this position of disparity and maintaining our position
of power. And you can't let whatever we we claim
to believe, you can't let that matter more to you
than continuing to dominate. Um, that's it's interesting to me.
You can draw it like it's the same kind of
thinking that you see in the British Empire too. It

(39:40):
just got transferred over to us when we took power.
So again, this is Kennan talking about Southeast Asia, but
it's you can generalize it to a lot of how
a lot of American leaders in the late forties are
thinking about Latin America. I want to read one more
quote from George Kennon's right up there before we before
we continue on, we should cease to talk about vague

(40:03):
and for the Far East unreal objectives such as human rights,
the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day
is not far off when we are going to have
to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are
than hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. Wow. I'm gonna

(40:23):
use a slogan from Don Draper and it's I have
a life and it goes in only one direction forward
And this whole like mentality of late forties, like needing
to not just like you have almost all of the power,
like that breakdown a fifty of the wealth to six
percent of the population ideology that like we have to

(40:47):
continue to build on that. But why would you? How
could you possibly need to build like that? Is the
most mind fucked thing ever. I can't imagine being like, oh,
I have fifty of everything, how do I get more?
Like yeah, and and and like the idea that like
we have to immediately discard our beliefs about democracy and

(41:07):
human rights in order to maintain the power that we
currently holdings more important than the power. Yeah, and again,
this isn't the period after which like kind of America,
Like I think a lot of people who looking at
the story, I think that like America's like idealism was
broken by Vietnam. This is nineteen forty eight, right, we
It wasn't like the Cold War wasn't even like really

(41:28):
up to what it would become like there was still
like World War two had just ended. Fascism have just
been beated, and immediately were like, well nothing matters more
than keeping all this money that we've got. Funck human rights.
That's the people in those influential folks in the State
Department are saying this ship. So again, Kennan was writing
about Southeast Asia there, but you really can generalize what
he's saying to what a lot of US State Department

(41:50):
and in sort of military thinkers in Latin America belief.
These people supported straight power, and they found themselves kind
of discarding unrealistic objectives like human rights because straight power
is they thought that they would have claimed that it's
more realistic. It's really that it's just easier. It's easier
to shoot people than to try to improve their material conditions, um,

(42:10):
even though improving their material conditions probably does cost lesson
as a general rule. So the school of the America's
became this thing that we're talking about today. The actual
focus of our article was what became these men's kind
of the lynchpin in their plan to do that in
Latin America. UM. And it's also sort of a It
acted as kind of a fulfillment of Woodrow Wilson's dream
the United States being able to act as a police

(42:32):
force for Latin America to ensure good what we would
consider good governance. So the US spens the first few
years after World War two kind of rebuilding Europe and
starting to sunk around in Asia, and there wasn't a
lot of military manpower to spare in Latin America. So
the decision was made to do something more subtle than
the Pentagon traditionally, did you know, rather than just like

(42:53):
sending in troops and like building bases. In nineteen forty six,
the Army established a new training school for foreign soldiers
in the Panama Canal zone, which is still under US
control right Panama. The Panama Canal is like owned by
the United States at this point, and it's it's not
its own independent thing. Our government is basically like it's
a little US outpost in Latin America. And so they

(43:15):
build a new school there to train officers from all
around Latin America. And they call it the Latin American
Training Center ground Division. And at this point Ground Division
is just kind of like what I'm going to call
the schools. This is what it's named before. It's called
the School of the America's. So in nineteen forty seven,
the United States had signed the Rio Treaty with twenty
different Latin American nations. Now, this was kind of an

(43:37):
expansion of a lot of the ideas that Wilson had
had back in nineteen twelve. It was a mutual defense
pact meant on paper to provide a unified hemispheric front
against like a foreign invasion. Um, this was all window dressing.
The real agenda of the treaty had nothing to do
with mutual defense for the hemisphere and everything to do
with the maintenance of US political dominance in the region

(43:58):
and control over raw material. And I'm gonna quote now
from a book, a really good book called The School
of the Americas by Leslie Gill. Quote, Well, the United
States dedicated itself to containing the global expansion of the
Soviet Union and persecuted domestic critics with varying degrees of intensity.
It assigned its Latin American allies the task of guarding
against the threat post by internal subversion. National Security Doctrine

(44:20):
n s D provided the broad rationale for fighting communists
by assigning the maintenance of internal order to Latin American
security forces and by delegating to the United States the
task of guarding the ramparts of the Western hemisphere from
external aggression. So you see what what's what's being done here,
This is being framed as like we need to protect
our hemisphere from like a Soviet invasion. What's really happening

(44:43):
is the US so because it doesn't have a lot
of troops to spare at the moment, is setting up,
arming and training Latin American national militaries to act as
internal security forces to keep communism out of Latin America.
That's what's being done here. We're building a continental police
force to enforce American political ideology on an entire continent.

(45:03):
When the school, like when the school opens, right, and
there's this because I'm trying to picture like the type
of person that goes into this, like I know, the
type of person who believes they can go into the
police force and change it and make it a force
in a space for good. Very normal soldiers at first,

(45:26):
so initially and this is like you hear a lot
of folks on the left on like Twitter and stuff
talk about the School of the Americas, and generally most
of what they talk about is stuff that happened kind
of later on when there was and we'll talk about
like all the torture classes and ship that happened, But
that wasn't how it started. It started as very normal
military training. It's first class was a bunch of Argentine

(45:46):
soldiers who were being taught to use US anti aircraft
guns that their nation had just been allowed to purchase.
So it was not there's nothing really shady there, right, Like,
they buy these advanced weapons from the US that are
primarily defensive in nature, and they need to be trained
in how to use them. Um so the actual classes,
the goal of the ground school at first, there's nothing
really you wouldn't call that shady, right, Like, that's a
reasonable thing to do if you believe selling arms as

(46:08):
reasonable as reasonable We're like, oh, yeah, you should train
them how to use the guns. Okay, that's fine. And
the most dangerous thing that's going on here is not
the actual curriculum of the school. It's what's happening around
that curriculum. But yeah, we'll we'll talk about that in
a little bit. I want to quote something Leslie gil
writes here about sort of what the defense industry is
starting to do in Latin America in this period. Quote,
defense manufacturers sought out new markets for their wears, and

(46:31):
Congress created generous military aid programs facilitating arms transfers not
only helped secure US access to raw materials and the
general cooperation of regional militaries. It also tied Latin American
militaries to the use unless the continued purchase of technology
produced in the United States. The Defense Establishment referred to
the ladder as standardizing Latin American militaries. Yeah, and the

(46:54):
Caribbean Defense Commander put up bluntly when he stated that
standardizing Latin American armies with US equipment further the quote
penetration of the United States and the military system of
any countries, so that such nation becomes dependent on us.
What's but you can standardize the equipment that they use,
and then you make them dependent on you. They can't

(47:15):
fight you, they can't rebel against you, they can't resist
you if they need your factories to produce the weaponry
that allows them to defend themselves from their neighbors. This
is devious as hell. Yes, it's extremely insidious, because now
we also know everything you have. We knows and can
advance our ship before we give you access to the

(47:36):
advanced ships. We're always one step ahead. Oh my god. Yeah,
there's a lot going on here. U s weapons were
again considered the most advanced on the planet at the time,
and Latin American militaries were very much comparatively technologically backwards
compared to the United States. In this period, a lot
of them had recently been at war with each other,
so there was really very reasonable fear of invasion, of
losing territory. It had just happened for a lot of them. Um.

(47:59):
So there says understanding that number one, you can defend yourself,
you can gain massive local advantages by buying US guns.
But it also on the U s side, it gives
us this permanent influence in national politics because the ammunition
that these weapons need, the parts that they need, the training,
their reliant on the United States for all of that.
But the thing that was truly insidious about the Ground

(48:19):
School had nothing to do with weaponry and everything to
do with what I would consider to be the deadliest
fantasy in human history, probably the American Dream. And that's
what we're going to talk about after we get back
from the real American dream, which is products and services. Yeah, right,
let's do it. Buy some things, buy some things products.

(48:50):
All right, we're back, and we're talking about the thing
that was most dangerous about the American School. And this
is the thing that everybody I see talking about this
ship on Twitter, like really does seem to miss which
is not that, Like they're not wrong about the torture
programs being awful and like everything else we're going to
talk about, but I don't see this being referenced and
something that strikes the hope of having a dollar and
a dream. Yeah, this is what and this is this

(49:12):
is really fascinating to me. So in the late nineteen
forties and fifties, right, the US winds up after the
war with all of the money in the fucking world,
and this leads to an unprecedented explosion in like the
rates of home ownership, vehicle ownership, employment, job security, regular people.
Suddenly we're gaining access to labor saving devices like washing
machines and dishwashers, luxury products like television. It was a

(49:34):
it was a heady period of time, and it it
was easy to kind of when you see regular working
people making these kinds of gains, it's easy for the
propaganda of like this is because there's something special and
beautiful about this, this dream America has what life can be.
It's very easy to sell that when you've got because
this is a period you do have to like obviously

(49:55):
the benefits in this period weren't evenly shared, but like
black people, you know, made a lot of like wealth
improvements and stuff in this too. Everybody did. It wasn't
evenly distributed. But you can look at damn near anybody
in the United States who's working class in like the
late forties, early fifties and be like, God, damn, there
might be something to this us, this American dream thing, um.

(50:16):
And the rest of the world isn't benefiting from that, right, Um.
But they're look, they're they're able to look in from
the outside and they're able to see what's happening in
the United States. And the soldiers who are being sent
from other Latin American countries to Panama to partake in
the ground school, because Panama is run by the United States,

(50:37):
they get to live in that world for a brief
period of time. These students, most of whom had come
from lower middle class families and very very poor nations,
are able to get a glimpse into the American way
of life. Um. They're they're they're getting paid money, they're
getting they're able to buy American products, and so they're there.
They kind of get get a taste of what American

(51:00):
are enjoying in the late forties and early fifties. So
in the in the Ground School starts to offer a
special training program for Argentine officers and enlisted men that
mixed technical training with what Leslie Gill calls cultural persuasion.
The U. S Army officials at the Ground School wanted
badly to make a good impression on the Argentines, who
would broadly lean towards the axis during the war. Because remember,

(51:21):
Germany had taught their army a lot, a bunch of stuff.
So as Argentina was one of the great powers of
Latin America, gaining their trust successfully, you know, and drawing
them into the bosom of US power was seen as
a really important thing to do. Um. It was a
critical step and kind of locking down the continent in
the whole hemisphere quote from leslie Guilt. They dwelled on
every aspect of the training program, they being the US trainers,

(51:43):
which they believed carried considerable symbolic weight for the United States.
One individual effused that it is no exaggeration to state
that the cooperation and the solidarity of the Western Hemisphere
nations depends to a great degree upon the impressions which
the Argentine personnel take back with them to their native country.
Army officers described the Argentines as extremely high type personnel

(52:05):
who are probably well qualified. They told everyone who interacted
with them to learn the customs of the Argentine Army
and to recognize the insignia used to designate particular ranks.
Most importantly, the officials advised course instructors from the fifty
six Anti Aircraft Artillery Group to instill among the trainees
faith in the weapons, and in this way to draw
a connection between the powerful weapons in the United States.

(52:27):
They asserted that if the Argentines had confidence in the weapons,
they would have confidence in the United States, and this
confidence would spread when the Argentines returned home and taught
others to use the guns. Building confidence in the United
States was a complex undertaking that involved much more than
impressive weaponry. The Argentine trainees held strong opinions about their
national and racial superiority visa the other Latin Americans, and

(52:51):
these views did not go unappreciated by their North American hosts.
So fortunately for this whole dream of getting Argentina on
the U S A side. If there's one thing you
could rely on US military planners in Night to know
how to do, it was how to be super fucking racist.
So officers at the Ground School wrote that it was essential,
in view of the nationalistic feelings of the Argentine and

(53:13):
their belief in certain racial theories, that they be made
to feel they enjoy equal privileges with American officers and
enlisted men. Like most places in the American Empire, the
Ground School and Panama was was pretty segregated. White American
soldiers ate better food, lived in better dorms, and enjoyed
higher standards of comfort than their Latin American students. Uh
So they start issuing the Argentine soldiers passes that distinguished

(53:35):
them from other Latin American students at the Ground School
and grant them privileges such as special food rights, exemption
from maintenance duties carried out by darker skinned Latin Americans.
And you know, obviously the US military and Panama has
kind of its own racial theories. Um. They believe that
like white suffered more from prolonged exposure to intense heat
and humidity than than other people's, were more susceptible to
certain diseases. Um, yeah, so I laugh because racism is

(54:02):
so easy, Like I get it, Like we we've I've
been talking a lot about racism. I write about you know,
black representation in media and this, Like it's so davidly
easy to see, like the comfort racism provides, Like my
skin is so fair? How can I possibly do the
labor this person is to look at their dark skin
and the side right off of it, this is where

(54:25):
you belong. And you know, the idea that we essentially
brainwashed people to believe that, like if we think about you,
the way that the way racism separates and divides makes
it nearly impossible to come together and have those conversations
that allow you as like a community to grow and develop.

(54:46):
So this idea of like, oh, make sure the lighter
skin like Latin Americans understand that they're better, so that
as a country they can never will always be unrest
in that space that is so sick. Yeah, it's really
fucked up. Um, And there's this, there's this, So what's
happening there is like white people kind of believed had

(55:06):
been like dark skinned people in Latin America and the
Canal Zone had been doing all the physical labor because
of this belief that like white people like they just
weren't weren't as suited to hard labor. And we we
add the Argentinean soldiers in like we treat them as
white people as part of a propaganda campaign to kind
of get the number one, to separate them from other
Latin Americans further, um, and to kind of get them

(55:28):
on our side. Um. So there's this kind of immediate
willingness to like start racially playing the people's of Latin
America against each other. Um. Now yeah, so this is
this is uh has a big impact on Argentinian soldiers,
and it provides them with a taste of the American
way of life, a sample of what it's like to
be a white American um. And this meshes well with

(55:49):
kind of the other tastes they were offered at the
ground school. Students were paid to attend, and as Panama
was under you as control, it's a place where they
could buy a lot of consumer goods. This included a
lot of labor saving devices and luxury products that would
have been unavailable back in these students home countries, things
like laundry machines and dishwashers and blenders in the late
forties and early fifties. A lot of this stuff was
was just kind of like magic to many of these

(56:11):
soldiers coming into the Canal Zone, and the fact that
they could buy this stuff. Now when we're being like
able to kind of participate in this this racially segregated
society on the top of it for a period of time,
not only does it reinforce the idea in their mind
that the US is this kind of all powerful utopia,
but it lets them feel like they're a part of it.
Um And yeah, so that's that's a big aspect of

(56:33):
what the American you know, at this point called the
ground school is trying to do with these solds. To
be fair, though, Robert, I still find washing machines and
dishwashers to be magical. I hate them, not a fan.
Not a fan. Well, I like washing machines, I don't
like dishwashers. So, uh, school instructors worked hard to keep

(56:53):
their students occupied constantly with very little unstructured downtime, and
this too was part of the grander strategy Leslie Gill
right quote. They did so for two reasons. First, they
hope to convey to the students a particular vision of U.
S citizens is industrious and successful. Second, they wanted to
keep students in the canal zone and out of Panama.
Officials worried that disorders created by students, such as public drunkenness,

(57:13):
expressions of immorality, or fights, would provoke the ire of
Panamanian authorities and cause of public relations difficulty for the
US military. The Commandant did not mince words when he
told a group of staff officers that in addition to
taking care of these people and making them welcome and
happy while here, they must be kept busy, organize their instructions,
make the schedule so that they do not have too
much free time, give them organized athletics that they will

(57:34):
stay in the zone and out of Panama. They are
here to learn the equipment and technique. They must carry
with them the impression that this is the way we
work and why we are a great nation. So again,
this is all there's there's there's this kind of basic
military training going on, but there's also this much deeper
cultural training and what what the United States is and
kind of us pushing like this is what your country

(57:55):
should be. Um. This reminds me a lot of the vow.
I don't know if you guys are Yeah, there's not
enough set about that. Yeah, you're very like yeah, the
brainwashing the way like a lot of the way they
treat them like children. This idea of like, oh no,
the devil and I don't mind, is the devil's workshop,
Like make sure they're they're kept busy, because who knows

(58:16):
what they'll get up to on their own devices. Like
that wasn't, at least from what I just heard. It
wasn't based off of like, oh, these are like young
kids who are getting rowdy, Let's give them something constructive
to do. It's like they might embarrass us, so let's
make sure they stay under our thumb. Like yeah, so
much of racism is infantilization of a people, and I
it's yeah, yeah, there's a lot going on here. So

(58:39):
for more than a decade, this kind of goes on,
and the ground school quietly trains hundreds and then eventually
thousands of soldiers from not just Argentina, but Guatemala, Chula
and a bunch of other countries in Latin America, and
these men walked away from their months. It was often
like a year long course in Panama with more than
just an expanded understanding of US weapon rate. They left
with deep and personal knowledge of the wonders of American culture,

(59:02):
American capitalism, the benefits that it could bring. And they
they walked away in a lot of cases, with an understanding,
a personal, brief and fleeting understanding of how good it
felt to be a winner in that society. So these
young ambitious men get this taste of America at its height,
and then they go home to their own nations, which

(59:23):
much must have felt like crude backwaters by comparison, there's
not a lot of luxury goods and appliances to buy.
People don't work in the same way like this capitalism
thing that has taken over the whole world now hadn't yet.
And it's this kind of like what what's one of
the things that a lot of Latin American cultures are
known for, you know, really really um putting a lot
of emphasis on this idea of like a siesta or whatever,

(59:45):
Like you don't always work all the time. There's like, culturally,
you build in periods of rest because it's healthy to
rest even in like the middle of the day. We
don't fucking do that in America. We drink coffee so
that you can work through you know, a sixteen hour shift. Right.
So these guys, these these young ambitious men, get a
taste of you know, American main manic work culture and

(01:00:06):
the kind of the kind of benefits that it can
bring in terms of like the things you get to
own when you partake in it and succeed. And then
they go home to these countries where like people don't
have the same attitude towards work and don't have access
to a lot of the same luxury goods and appliances,
and they draw connections between all this stuff, and they
start to they start to place blame on segments of

(01:00:27):
their society for why they don't get to enjoy the
same things they enjoyed, you know, in the Panama Zone,
including the fact that indigenous cultures in these regions valued
leisure and community over relentless capitalism um, and including the
fact that there were a lot of left wing movements
who were arguing that like things should be nationalized rather
than this kind of free for all Lasi fairship that

(01:00:47):
the US really wanted to push in all these Latin
American countries because it benefited larger and already established American corporations.
So not only you know, they're frustrated when they come back,
and they also have a ready group of people than
their own countries to blame for the fact that things
aren't the way they want them to be at home
now that they know how, you know, things are in

(01:01:08):
the United States. So a lot of these soldiers, you know,
they would finish their time in their respective militaries after
going to the ground school, and they go on and
do something else. But a significant number of them went
on to be career officers, and since training at the
ground school was prestigious, they often rose high in the
ranks of their national militaries. As the fifties rolled along,
there were a series of left wing revolutions in Latin America.

(01:01:29):
In nineteen fifty two, Bolivia had a left wing coup,
you know, kind of socialisty that brought in a new
government that was dead set on nationalizing every mine in
the country, which at that point we're basically owned by
a bunch of US based corporations. Then, of course there's
the Cuban Revolution of nineteen fifty nine, which brought that
bearded heart throb Castro, you know, into the hearts and
minds of everybody, um. And then kind of it seems

(01:01:53):
like in the early fifties, the left is on the
rise in Latin America. UM. And it was in the
eyes of a lot of these officers who have been
thoroughly if you know, you compared you compared it earlier
to a cult. They've been thoroughly enraptured by the cult
of the American way of life. It seems like these
these left wing movements are hell bent on stopping Latin
America from ever achieving that same dream. So the US

(01:02:17):
government gets caught off guard by all of these revolutions,
as it generally is, by everything that happens uh and
Latin America like they saw it as basically our property.
And suddenly, like the Russians are parking nuclear missiles in
Cuba seventy miles off the Florida coast. So US officials
kind of panic and they're afraid that they might start
to lose the whole region to this new wave of
left wing politicians. The prevailing kind of political wisdom at

(01:02:39):
the time was something called the Domino theory, which stated
the fall of one nation to communism would start this
like horrible chain reaction would doom the whole continent, because yeah, yeah,
and there's no way that people could be like, what
have we just had free healthcare and we didn't let
random foreign companies own everything in the country, And it's like, no,
that the only that only leads to identical things, to

(01:03:01):
Stalinism and Maoism. You could you couldn't just do that
and then keep just like whatever. It's a very frustrating
idea that people have. So the US, like Panics, as
these revolutions start to take hold and they start turning
to this network they have in Latin America of all
of these military officers who are dedicated pro US capitalists
just kind of waiting in the wings, furious at these

(01:03:23):
damn commies who are like pulling their people away from
the promised land of being able to buy washing machines.
So by the time the Cuban Revolution succeeded, nearly about
eight thousand students had graduated the ground school, and these
guys were a good start, But Washington realized that kind
of the revolutions sweeping Latin America were of such a
scope that they were gonna need a lot more than
eight thousand dudes to put a lid on all of this. Now,

(01:03:46):
President Kennedy is the guy who issued orders for the
Ground School to start training students in counter insurgency. US
Special Forces were sent to the Ground School and they
start teaching courses and traveling around to these countries too
and teaching people. And you the exact nature of the
counter terrorism courses that start getting counterinsurgency courses that start
getting taught after Kennedy gives the order. UM Professor Michael

(01:04:08):
McClintock describes them as the legitimization of state terrorism as
a means to confront the sinse subversion and insurgency. And
that's really what's. Yeah, the we start backing state terrorism
in order to stop left wing politics in Latin America.
That's what happens in this period. And that's again people
accusing me of like going after the right wing. That's JFK. Like,

(01:04:29):
let's just keep that all in mind. That that's sucking JFK.
Who does this, right? Um, So, in nineteen sixty three
they change the name of the Ground School to the
School of the America's that's when that that alteration happens,
and this new name kind of reflected its expanded role
as a tool in the hands of the US government.
So in nineteen sixty seven, just a couple of years later,
that's when che Guevara, who had kind of gotten his

(01:04:51):
start as acute like fighting with Castro, launches a guerrilla
campaign and Southeast Bolivia. Uh, and the School of the
America's you know, had started kind years before this a
is left wing sort of militancy, and Bolivia had grown
they started taking in more and more Bolivian students. Um.
And so it was US trained soldiers who captured she
Guavara shortly after his arrival in the country. Um. And

(01:05:13):
you know, once he was captured, the U s forces,
like who were kind of actually embedded there, actually wanted
him at least a lot most of the stories you'll here,
like wanted him to just kind of be taken into
custody because they thought that killing him would turn him
into a global martyr who had his face on a
bunch of T shirts and music festivals for decades. Um.
But the soldiers we'd trained were like, no, let's just

(01:05:34):
murder him. So they murder him, and yeah, now he's
he's on all sorts of T shirts. Um. Yeah, yeah, Well,
I mean I mean, and you know, I'm not a
big fan of schet, but it clearly like one of
the things that's funny to me is that you've got
some of the guys who were some of the US
guys who were in the field instructing these troops are

(01:05:56):
smart enough to recognize what's going to happen if, say,
gets executed, But the actual soldiers in charge, these Latin
American officers had learned so well from the United States
who was doing nothing in this period but creating martyrs,
that they like, they can't even listen to the direct
advice in the field because they've been inculcated in this
US style of thinking that that that yeah, they just

(01:06:16):
murder this guy. It's very funny. So yeah, by opening
up more slots in the school of the America's to
students of a different nation, the US was able to
kind of modulate like which countries got floods of these
motivated far right um military officers who were willing to
like take power and execute camp basically act as death

(01:06:38):
squads against leftists. So they do that in Bolivia, right,
which is a big part of like why ship what
she's doing there doesn't work as the US had already
flooded Bolivia with these trained and uh motivated um kind
of right wing idealogue soldiers. UM. And we do that
in every country that we start to see the left
wing take offense. So in nineteen in the nineteen sixties,

(01:06:59):
that chill lay in left wing starts to organize and
gain political power um, led by a charismatic socialist named
Salvador Allende UM and one of one of you know
for an understanding who a end was he was. He
was a big backer of better educational policy. He wanted
better education for like indigenous people, poor people in in
in Chile. He want a monster pay for this by

(01:07:20):
nationalizing a lot of the different resources in Chile because
like corrupt politicians prior to him had made these very
much illegal deals with US companies that basically gave them
all of Chile's resources for for nothing. UM. So he
was like, well, let's stop that ship. Let's use the
money from the resources that we have in our country
to make life better for our people. And a bunch

(01:07:41):
of Americans with financial interest in stealing Chile's resources are like, oh,
that doesn't seem like a good idea. UM. And so
in the early late fifties early sixties, the School of
America starts taking in more Chilean soldiers under the guys
that will train them how to be more effective soldiers.
And we'll also teach them about how salvadorai Ende and
everybody like him need be fucking murdered. Um. So yeah,

(01:08:03):
this again starts under the Kennedy administration. Um. But you know,
as as the whole Kennedy thing doesn't work out so well,
things actually do work out for a while for the
Chilean Left. Something happen. Yeah, Bernard Montgomery Sanders made a
couple of key decisions there. So as the as the
Chilean Left begins to win more victories, they start kind
of quietly inviting the U S starts quietly inviting more

(01:08:25):
and more Chilean soldiers into the School of the America's um,
and in fact, more Chilean soldiers trained at the School
of the Americas than soldiers from any other country during
the nineteen seventies. Between nineteen seventy and nineteen seventy five.
I have a quick question, are they like I know
that the job like when if you graduate from school,
you're more luckily to get a job. That's higher up
in the ranks, which probably means more money. But is

(01:08:47):
there other financial incentives from going to the school that
like allow these people to maintain their power like or
is there proper strictly come from their training. It gets
them better positions, which gives them con troll of more
and more men and higher numbers of their men are
also trained at these schools, and they don't get money
directly from that, but the fact that they're in this

(01:09:09):
position means that suddenly there's this opportunity to Hey, if
we take over, right, we have all the guns, we
have the millet, we are the military. If we take over, well,
then we can get all that money for ourselves and
we can personally start to enjoy the benefits of this
like this, this lucrative American life, Like we can get
rich like that. That can happen for us if we

(01:09:31):
take over the country. If we stop these resources from
being nationalized and going to all of the people, we
can just sell them, access to them to the United
States and get this ship for ourselves. This is happening
all over Latin America. That that's why all these people
get fucking rich. A lot of them do, like when
they when they do their coups is because like they
take over the country and then they get to sit
down with all these corporations who had backed the overthrows

(01:09:54):
of the governments in these nations and say like, hey,
we can keep this ship flowing to you, but like
daddy needs a little cut, and it's cheaper to you
than giving than the entire nation getting a cut, because
all you gotta do is help me and my buddies out.
But yes, there that's the financial incentive. And a lot
of these guys, by the way, the ones who are
really smart, wind up buying homes and property and immigrating

(01:10:14):
to the United States. There's a bunch of America, Like
they're a bunch of the School of the America's graduates,
help overthrow their governments, loot their own countries, and then
flee to the United States when things start to turn
against them politically. It happens all the fucking time up
to the present day. You know, we'll talk about Olivia
a little bit at the end um of this of
this series. So when Salvador and finally gets elected president

(01:10:38):
of Chile. You know, the whole sixties were pumping soldiers
who are you know, trained to be these right wing
idealogues into Chile, and the Chilean left is rising politically,
and I and finally gets elected president in nineteen seventy. Um,
and you know, now he's going to be in a
position to actually nationalize all these resources, help the Chilean
people and kind of funk over some big US corporations
that have financial interests in Chile. So as soon as

(01:11:00):
this happens, as soon as I gets elected, and in fact,
a little bit before he actually gets elected, talking the
White House turns to cooing him out of power. Um,
Henry Kissinger says, I don't see why we need to
stand by and watch a country go communist because of
the irresponsibility of its people. Because it's the seventies, so Nixon, Yeah, yeah,
Nixon's in charge now. Yeah. But again, same basic idea

(01:11:24):
under Nixon and JFK. And in fact, you look at
that quote from Henry Kissinger, we don't why would we
stand by and let a country go communist because it's
people are irresponsible. That's the same attitude that Woodrow Wilson professed,
you know, sixty years ago earlier. Too ignorant to run
your own country. Yeah, the most bad ship thing. I've
ever never understand that. Yeah, and of course Nixon expresses

(01:11:47):
and again we have this on tape. That's what we know.
Like Kissinger said that ship um, and Nixon is terrified
that the nation might become another Cuba, which, like, I
don't want to whitewash the bad things Castra did, but
Cuba also has some of the best disaster response in
the world and more doctors than basically any other country.
Like it's not exactly the nightmare story of Commune, but whatever. Um.

(01:12:08):
You know, every nation, because it's a nation, has bad
shipped to it too. But like I it's just so
crazy to me people looking at Cuba as this like
nightmare when it's like, well you want to look at
the grand scheme of every nation on the planet, They're
like not in the worst part of the places in
the world to be Yeah, I don't know whatever. Um. So,
under Nixon, the US backs ends far right opposition for

(01:12:32):
several years and it engages in a program of vicious
economic sabotage aimed at collapsing the Chilean economy. Uh and
thus you know, all support in the new president. So
the CIA starts reaching out to officers in the military
who were solid right wing anti communists. Uh. And one
of the men that they reach out to is a
general named Augusto Pinochet, um who I guess that name

(01:12:53):
is at least familiar to a lot of people. Uh. Now,
there's some debate as to whether or not Pinochet was
the main architect of the coup that followed, which he
claimed um or if he was just brought in at
the last minute as a bunch of other members of
the coup claim. And again, Pinochet's a liar, so I'm
not going to say what the actual truth is here.
But he gets involved at a certain point, and he
was not a graduate of the School of the America's.

(01:13:14):
But basically a hundred percent of the other officers who
were involved in the plot against Diende, including the guys
who started the plot, were all graduates of the School
of the America's. How did Pinochet like just get ahead
of all of them. He's real smart. He's a very
very very very cunning political operator, right, Like you just
have to give it to them sometimes, Like he was
good at what he did, which was become the dictator

(01:13:35):
of Chile. Yeah, it's kind of like, how did Stalin
wind up in power, because if you look at the
way things were kind of at the start of the
Bolshevik Revolution, he probably isn't the guy you would have
guessed would wind up with all of the power. But
he does. And it's a very complicated story as to how. Um,
but it boils down to he's real fucking smart dude
and hot. Well that is overblown, but he was very intelligent. Um.

(01:14:00):
Get a lot of acne scars that get that, get
photoshops out of skin shame him. I am gonna skin
shave the dictator of the Soviet Union. Yeah, I'm not.
I'm not. That's not the thing to and I actually
they were like small box cars. Um. So yeah. The
so all of these, basically all of the Chilean officers

(01:14:20):
who start this plot to overthrow all End and organize
the military against them are graduates of the School of
the Americas, and these men saw Allende, who sought to
improve public education and ensure Chile's resources were shared for
the benefit of its people, as a threat. I End
meant a future without shiny new American malls filled with
shiny new luxury goods that they could buy with the
bribes they received from the Western resource extraction companies that

(01:14:43):
wanted Chile's wealth um So. In September of nineteen seventy three,
a large group of Chilean officers, again basically all of
whom were graduates of the s o A launch a coup.
They surround the presidential palace and President i Ende is
found dead from a self inflicted gunshot wounds. Shortly thereafter,
there's the bait over whether or not he shot himself,
whether or not an AID shot him, if the military

(01:15:03):
killed him. We don't really need to get into that.
He's certainly murdered by this coup, Like whether or not
he pulled the trigger. He dies because there's a coup
against him. Um yeah. So General Pinochet winds up in
power and he would hold. He would stay in power
until nineteen nine. During his reign, Chilean soldiers continued to
train at the School of the America's. They learned fun
new counterinsurgency tactics to suppress the left, like throwing suspected

(01:15:27):
leftist militants out of helicopters. They learned how to torture,
and they practice their new skills on tens of thousands
of their fellow Chileans between twelve hundred and thirty two
hundred people were executed by Pinochet, more than eighty thousand
were interned, and again tens of thousands were tortured. Now,
Pinochet himself didn't, you know, attend the School of the America's,
but the head of his secret police, Manuel Contreres, did

(01:15:50):
graduate from the s o A. Another graduate of the
s o A was the deputy director of Pinochet's secret police,
and so also another graduate of the s o A
was the head of the Via Grimaldi, which was Pinochet's
notorious torture castle. He had a castle where you tortured people. Uh,
and the Via Grimaldi was was particularly famous for its
signature punishment, which was rape. Like that was like one

(01:16:11):
of the things that's notorious about this is like male
or female, you get sent here. One of the things
that happens, you're gonna get that you're gonna get really
really raped, um like either by individuals or by individuals
like using objects. And it's kind of it's to humiliate
the men. I guess it's to humiliate the women too.
But like this is like a lot pretty much every
torture prison that exists rape as a part of it.

(01:16:33):
But I'm wanna say it's just their guantanamo, but this
it's particularly a thing here that is so uh. It's
wild to me that in the desire for not just things,
not just the ability to buy, and not just the
American dream, but like prosperity and future and like growth

(01:16:56):
and development, we all, like we as human being is
always seem to take a step back to the dark age.
Is like build a castle with giant walls and like
assault people as a firm of development so that we
can all be better. Like where is the logic? Well,
you know, I think they had this building and it
was a good place for a prison, and they you know,

(01:17:17):
for whatever reason. One of the things you find studying
in the School of the Americas is that when people
are trained in how to punish leftists by the US military,
they wind up raping their prisoners all the fucking time. Um,
it's a huge thing for s O A graduate big rapists.
Graduates of the s O A huge fans of rape

(01:17:39):
as a method of violent political control. Are we just
seeing the same thing? And oh my god, there's a
country right now where there's a coup happening and they
just forced a guy to like assault himself with a bottle.
Oh yeah, yeah, I forget where that was. I think so, yeah,
that wouldn't have anything to do with the U. S.

(01:17:59):
Real because Belarus not um not a lot of ties
with the Belarusian Belarusian soldiers aren't being trained by the
US military. Like that's one you can't That's that's kind
of more rushes into things, but also like just kind
of bellary. How different are we from like I feel
like so much of our tactics are just very similar
in the same results. This this is the thing. And

(01:18:21):
again it's the thing when you start talking about like um,
you know, people will talk about will praise the things
that let's go back to Cuba, the things that Cuba
do is right, and someone will bring up like all
of the horrible human rights things that are real things
the Cuban government has done some fucked up ship like
a lot of like LGBT people, you know, what was
happening during the AIDS crisis. A lot of reasons to
criticize the Cuban government, But you try to find a

(01:18:42):
single thing the Cubans did that the United States isn't
also doing. In this period, two members of multiple foreign
nations into its own nation. Um Like, we've got we've
got no leg to stand on when it comes to
criticizing these people, just because you personally didn't get brought
taken into a rape castle and molested to death. Um Like,
we trained people in how to do that, and then

(01:19:03):
we were like, it's good that they're doing this. Let's
be their friends while they do it, because this is
what we want them to do because it gets us
copper like funk everybody. Um So, yeah, the Via Grimaldi
fucked up place. And I'm gonna quote from a report
in Amnesty International on it. Quote. They took us to
an interrogation room where they had a metal bunk bed.
There was another detainee on the top, and my partner

(01:19:25):
was tied to the side. They were interrogating all three
of us at the same time, taking turns to electrocute
us one after the other. The interrogation session lasted through
the night into the next morning. Jesus Christ. Yeah, Now,
in Via Grimaldi, detainees would be electrocuted, water boarded, They
had their heads forced into buckets of urine and excrement.
They were suffocated with bags. They were hanged by their
feets or their their feet or their hands and beaten.

(01:19:48):
Women obviously were raped, and for some detainees the punishment
was death. Um. The dark, cramped cells they were held
in was just like, yeah, that was that was that
was that was the world you lived at. Um. One
detainee later recalled, after an interrogation, you would be thrown
back in your cell. They would shut the door, and
then the first thing you would experience as someone coming closer.
They would hold you, help you lie down, take the

(01:20:10):
blindfold off, and put some water to your lips. The
electric shocks would make you stream with sweat and you'd
get extremely dehydrated, so very thirsty. And about forty hundred
people went to this place over the course of the
time Pinochet was in charge. A lot of them never
made it out. We'll never know how many died. They're
huge numbers of people are still missing. UM horrible. Yeah.
General Carlos Pratt's was one of the few members of

(01:20:32):
the Chilean military command who remained loyal to President i Ende.
For this, he and his wife were murdered by a
car bomb in nineteen seventy four in Buenos Aires. Before
his death, he mused on exactly how his former comrades
in the Chilean military had, in his kind of words,
confused Chilean national interest with the interest of the United States,
betraying their own people. Because again, because of these ideas

(01:20:54):
they buy into about like American the American way, like
this American dream they want for themselves, they send thousands
of their own people off to die. So this this general,
who is one of like the loyal to the people
of Chile generals, is kind of before his own murder,
musing on how this happened. And this quote from him,
I think is really really telling. As far as the

(01:21:18):
internal enemy is concerned, the opinion acquired by those who
have attended courses at the School of the Americas and
others organized by the Pentagon has been increasingly prevalent. Many
of these soldiers have responded to the stereotypes and thoughts
which were inculcated into them during these courses, and, believing
they were liberating the country from the internal enemy, have
committed a crime which can only be explained by their ingenuousness,

(01:21:39):
their ignorance, and their political shortsightedness. I used to tell
the President that we should send our officers to know
what it was like in the countries of Europe, Africa,
and Asia, so as not to copy or imitate their
armed forces, but so that they could widen their horizons
and understand that the world does not begin to end
in the Schools of the Pentagon. So this is kind
of his blame, you know that, this is him specifically

(01:21:59):
saying that, like the the the mindset, it's not the
specific training at the at the School of the America's
that has as much an impact on why these men
do the things they do as the mindset the inculcated
in them. It turns them into It turns them into
the same kind of right wing, uh extractionary monsters that
are currently government governing our own country and that have

(01:22:20):
for a while determined US public policy. It turns them
into little fucking Nixon's right. That's that's what's happening here now.
Another famed School of the America's graduate was Hugo Banzer.
He graduated from the s o A in nineteen fifty six.
He went home to Bolivia. He rose through the ranks,
and he became a general. In nineteen seventy one, he
seized total power during a violent coup. He immediately closed

(01:22:43):
universities and banned all political parties and activity. He jailed
labor leaders, arrested three thousand political opponents, and had more
than two hundred of them executed. Under Banzer's rule, the
basement of the Ministry of the Interior was turned into
a torture chamber, or more than two thousand prisoners were
held for his good work. Bands are to spot on
the Wall of Fame back at the School of the
America's now shiit, Yeah, it sucks. It's It's one thing

(01:23:08):
to go down there like mega school, brainwatch a bunch
of people, spread them across the entire continent and allow
them to take over. It is entirely another to be
like this is a prime example of the students were
trying to create. This is this guy did it. This
is what we want you to do. I mean, you
couldn't be more direct, You couldn't be more so. Now,
remember how I kind of started talking about the ground

(01:23:31):
school and like what it was trying to do to
the minds of soldiers by talking about these Argentine soldiers
who were like the first way into that school. Well,
one of the men in that first wave was a
young officer named Leopoldo Gaultieri, and he went on to
again become a general because it's great for your career
to go to the School of the America's UH, and
eventually he helped carry out a military coup that took

(01:23:51):
power in Argentina. In the late nineteen seventies, he became
the dictator of Argentina UH and as the dictator School
of the America's graduate gult Erry presided over more than
thirty thousand executions other countries alone. We have to stop
doing this ship right, stop messing with us other countries.

(01:24:12):
And I mean honestly, right now, most of you have
keep that up, like keep this coronavirus energy. Later, like
protect your citizens. That's nuts. It's fun. A lot of
stuff's fun. There's a lot I could say about this.
One of the things that so fucked is that like
we funk all these countries over and help them established dictatorships,
and because of how badly it goes, you get this

(01:24:33):
attitude that the U s should never do anything else ever,
so that when the people of these countries rise up
against their dictators UH, there's basically no nobody, there's no
you can't you can't make a political argument for helping them. Um,
because of how bad it works. Every time we like
it's this, and it just it compounds the heart. It's
just all fucked. Everything's fucked. Um. I wish a lot

(01:24:54):
of different and there's a lot of people. If I
could unborn people, there's a lot of people that would
make not have been born. Um. And most of them
are Americans. So over the decades that it was open,
the School of the America's is known to have graduated
at least eleven students who became dictators, which is a lot.
That's so many dictators for one school. Is there any

(01:25:14):
school competing with them for a number of dictor No, No,
there's not, Like, Um, it's that so many fucking dictators
from a single school. Yeah. I don't think anywhere has
that kind of pedigree. Um, not even fucking Harvard. So
the school. Yeah, many of the school's deadliest graduates weren't

(01:25:37):
always the ones who became world leaders. Though. More than anything,
School of America's men were the willing instruments of dictators,
the happy killers who made the right wing authoritarian wave
that crashed over Latin America in the seventies and eighties
possible el Salvador in general, Juan Zapato was a graduate.
He planned the assassination of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper,

(01:25:59):
and their teenaged honor. The crime of these Jesuits was
providing humanitarian aid to suffering left wing peasants. We'll talk
a lot more about Catholics and jesue being murdered in
the next episode, because they're a big part of in
Latin America. They get killed all the time by these
right wing death squads because like, say, what you all
about the Catholic Church in Latin America. A lot of
Catholic and Jesuit leaders are like, oh, there's all these

(01:26:21):
people starving to death, and like we should help them.
And those people are also left wing, so you've got
to murder those priests and stuff. It's this whole thing,
um all about Oscar Romero a bit, Yeah, um Jesuits, Yeah,
It's like it's I of the things the Catholic Church
has done, this is the best of them, is their
attempts to reduce the horrors happening in Latin America in

(01:26:44):
this period of time. Probably so uh Zapeta, against School
of the America's graduate, was involved in two hundred and
ten summary execution, sixty four tortures and a hundred and
ten illegal detentions during his career. US training certainly influenced
how he did what he did, but it's important to
remember that a very deliberate campaign of US propaganda influenced
why he did what he did. Leslie Gill, the author

(01:27:06):
of that book The School of the Americas that I
keep citing, interviewed a number of graduates of the school,
including a Bolivian colonel who told her about the El
Salvadoran soldiers he'd met there. And this guy is really interesting.
We'll hear from him in part two because he's very
critical of the School of the Americas and what he
learned there, but he also went like he has this experience,
he knows all these people who go there, so he's
able to talk from direct experience about how would influences

(01:27:29):
them as human beings and changes the way they think,
which is part of why this book, The School of
the Americas by Leslie Gill is such an incredible resource
that really, if you care about this, you should buy
and read. It's a very readable and and very detailed
breakdown of what happened there. Um so I'm going to
read a quote from this Bolivian colonel. He's talking again
about the El Salvadoran soldiers he met at the School

(01:27:51):
of the Americas. Those guys thought about three things. First,
they wanted to train themselves well. Second, they wanted to
buy pickup trucks and drive them back to El Salvador.
When I finished class at the end of the day
and went to the library, they would go out and
look for cheap pickups to buy. And third, they had
a lot of relatives. And this is during this is
after nine, this is the period where the School of
the America's has moved to the United States. And third,

(01:28:11):
they had a lot of relatives who they wanted to
see in the United States, especially Washington, and it was
not the first time that they've been to the United States.
They admired the United States and the same way as
the Bolivians who trained at the School of the America's.
So like this is um like like that. That's interesting
to me. These guys when they get trained at the
School of the Americas in the US, like the first
thing they want to go do is buy cheap pickups

(01:28:32):
and drive them back home. Against this thing, this continuous
thing from the nineteen forties of being an American, the
thing that I've been inculcated and is this idea of
like easy access to luxury goods. That's huge for these guys, um.
And they have family members who have moved here and
like become part of the culture. They're they're very much
in their head in a lot of ways, they're Americans,

(01:28:54):
and they're frustrated by the fact that other people in Bolivia,
most of their countrymen, don't want their country to be
more like the United States, and the only thing way
they can sort of it's the same thing you're seeing
now with all these right wing militias in the United
States who see folks on the left here who want
things that are different from them, and the only thing
they can think to do is kill them, because at

(01:29:14):
the end of the day, like that's the kind of
people that they are, and they have guns. Um, And
it's the same thing going on in Latin America. It
happens here, it happens there first, right, it happens there
first is part of an organized plan by the United States,
and it happens here sort of by this is just
the way things are going to go you have all
these people who believe the same thing, who here in
the United States to believe the same things as the

(01:29:36):
officers were training in Latin America about the American Dream,
and they also come to believe the same thing about
communists and Marxists and whatnot, making it impossible for them
to live that dream by stopping the heedless extraction of
resources and trying to build a more equitable society. And
both groups come to the same conclusion, these soldiers in
Latin America and these militia dudes in the United States,

(01:29:58):
which is murder everyone who disagrees with me and doesn't
want me to have a cool truck. There's like a
level of absolutism to the American dream, which is like
this idea of all or nothing, which is to me
so fraught with like, I don't want to live my
life on terms of like pass or fail, you know
what I mean, And then how that extends then to

(01:30:19):
us versus them, and then pass that to you either
live our way or die. I'm obsessed with this idea
of like, especially if when you start to look at
like the items that they obsess over, like not only
is there like a very strict uniform code, Like if
you've ever been in a protest with a ship tone
of undercover cops, you can pick them out so fast

(01:30:40):
they can't break that like uniform. Look. But then to
this idea of like trucks, like trucks being a symbol
not just of masculinity but of like freedom at the
expensive others? Is that the way you say that, like
this idea of like it's what is it about a
pickup truck that makes you feel so much more? Is
it the height? Is it the fact that you can

(01:31:01):
haul a lot of things. I don't understand boys in
their toys. I mean I I just bought I. I
have a large off roading vehicle and they're fun. I
wouldn't you know, uh, shoot babies to death and light
a church on fire to have access to an off
roading vehicle. But they do have a power to them. Um, yeah,

(01:31:24):
I don't know. Like, there's a lot there's a lot
to be said about what trucks mean within the context
of the American dream and within sort of the American
willingness to do violence both to the world, like to
the environment and to individuals around them. Like, there's actually
a lot I think that should be ethnographically studied about
how Americans view trucks. UM, but that is too much
of a topic for this We're near the end of

(01:31:45):
our episode and kind of before we close out, and
in part two, we're gonna talk a lot more about
you know, we're gonna talk about the Almosote massacre. We're
gonna talk about Oscar Romero. We're gonna talk about horrible
things that happened in Guatemala, and we're gonna talk about
kind of what happens in the United States when the
School of the America's moves there and how it operates
when it leaves Latin America, and and it's it's it's

(01:32:05):
operated off of Columbus, Ohio after n UM, so like Columboids.
That's what they call people from Columbus. Uh, we're talking
about your backyard next episode. Hey, bastard fans, best start
a renos whatever we call you. Just jumping in here
to let you know that I made a mistake. Uh,
I said Columbus, Ohio. There, it's actually Columbus, Georgia. Um.
The School of the Americas in the United States was

(01:32:27):
outside of Fort Bidding. I do apologize for the error.
I've never actually made a mistake before in my entire life,
so I you know, we we we regret uh this
being my first one. I want to cite a passage
from an article on the School of America's that I
found in the Thomas Jefferson Law Review that just kind
of runs through a horrific laundry list of the different
things graduates of the s o A did to give

(01:32:48):
you an understanding of just how widespread the destruction from
this school is. It's almost impossible to keep in your head.
So I'm gonna read that quote now. Pedro Pimentel Rios,
who an El Salvadoran soldier trained in the s o A,
participated in the Dos Aires massacre, which resulted in the
killing of two hundred and one people. Soldiers systematically murdered men,
women and children, bludgeoned villagers with a sledgehammer, threw them

(01:33:11):
down a well, and raped women and girls. Haitian colonel
Frank Romain directed the Saint Jean Bosco massacre. As Father
Jean bertrand Aristide was saying mass armed men broke into
the church, killing twelve parishioners and wounding at least twenty seven.
They then doused the church with gasoline and set it
on fire. Honduran general Romero Veasquez led the two thousand
nine military coup and Honduras that overthrew a democratically elected government.

(01:33:35):
Beasquez is the third sa A graduate to overthrow governments
in Honduras Nicaragua. During the Samosa dictatorship, more than four
thousand National Guard troops graduated from the the s o A.
Many of them became, contrast, responsible for the deaths of
thousands of Nicaraguan peasants. Between nineteen forty seven and nineteen
seventy nine, more soldiers from Nicaragua attended the school than
from any other country Peru. Telmo Hurtado directed the massacre

(01:33:58):
of sixty nine men, women and children and Echo Marca.
After separating the women and children from the men, his
unit raped them, ordered them into buildings, and then set
them on fire, where they burned alive. That's a tiny
it's five, maybe, of the of the crimes committed by
s o A graduates. Um, that's just one pair. I

(01:34:19):
could have picked a bunch of different ones. Just summarizing
the fucking nightmares that come out of this place. And
we're going to talk about a massacre that makes all
of those look tiny tomorrow the almazote mascor we're talking
about it on Thursday. I should say, um, not cool
stuff hard hard, It's hard to like process right right? Well,
I mean I think like I can won't you to

(01:34:40):
say something? And I'm like, oh, but no, that's happening
right now, Like how could you hate your fellow countrymen
so much that you burned them on non we we've
been stopping you from getting a truck. How dare you
stop the progress of all of us? I must progress
faster or even just the idea of like it's hard
for me to Okay, So I have two thoughts. One

(01:35:02):
is I've been so poor. I've almost been homeless before.
I understand looking at a life of ease and coveting
it and and being like that temptation of like what
would you like and really having to face the question
of like what would I do in order to have
access to those things? Right? Like it's I have like
some level of sympathy for the boys that went into

(01:35:23):
this school and we're inundated with opportunity, Like that's the
opportunity is a hell of a drug, Like, especially when
it's fed to you in such a sense of like,
if you work hard, it's going to be there for you.
All you have to do. It's all within you, right,
Like that that part of the American dream of like
it's already in there, you just have to tap into
it hard enough. Is what I think drive some people
right over the line, um, because you don't want to

(01:35:45):
be a thing that stops yourself. That should be the
easiest hurdle to overcome. And then I'm thinking about like
these men who returned to home, and like, there must
be such a level of like self hate to look
at people that look like you or have shared experiences
as you and then not just violently rape them, but

(01:36:06):
also burn them alive, women and children, and like it's just, yeah,
I commend you on your ability to continue to find
bastards after all these people. I truly wouldn't be like
I hate you for what you've done. I can't understand it.
And I'm mystified, Um, at the level of hate and
destruction we as human beings are able to cause. It's

(01:36:26):
just it's never ending. Yeah, it's it's it's amazing, and
it is one of those things like I'm not going
to pretend I don't see why part of what these
people find appealing because like I am, I am someone
who I don't think I'm I think as an adult,
i've ever been taken in by the American dream as
a an ideal, but I have been taken in by

(01:36:48):
like I grew up poor and or at least poor
by I don't know, kind of white people standards, right,
Like we weren't we weren't in the streets, but with
my parents were worried about like being bankrupt and stuff,
and like it was it was really like economic anxiety
is a huge part of my youth and it has
kind of it did propel me to focus on making money, right,

(01:37:11):
Like I I that has always been a huge thing
for me is being able to like live comfortably on
my own without any help from anybody. And that's not
a healthy part of my personality. Like it's it's not
a good thing that I that I did. It's a
thing that I did because of the way in which
I grew up in sort of an inability. I had

(01:37:32):
to kind of um like this constant fear that I
had to say before I could accomplish anything else, Like
I had to not be scared about finances before I
could do other things because of the it's not a
good thing, right, it's it's not a it's not a
good thing, but it's a I get how powerful the
thing is. I'm looking forward to hearing more about the

(01:37:54):
gentleman you were describing who went to the school but
didn't come out brainwashed. Yeah. It's a really interesting and guy, Yeah,
how did you? How were you like one of I
imagine very few people who were like no, this is
insane happening around us. There's some people who just kind
of have that ability, even within you know, training regiments

(01:38:15):
that are designed to I have a friend who was
um who was in you know we're talking about the
Marines and Marines, and like one of the things he'll
say about basic training is that like he kind of
immediately realized, like, oh, this is a game, and I
have to pretend to agree with and believe and react
in certain ways in order to succeed at it and
and and get through this part that like I know

(01:38:36):
what they're trying to do and how they're trying to
alter me, and I have to pretend like it's having
this effect so that I can get through this part
and and do the stuff I guess that I want
to do right like some some people just have. And
you get the feeling from this guy that he kind
of like goes to this school and he doesn't agree
with a lot of what's happening and he but he's
able to see what's happening to other people there. And

(01:38:57):
it's good you know that he went and did that
and brought back this experience so we're able to understand
it on a human level. Right, we need witnesses. Yes,
not bad that this guy brought that experience to us. Yes, yes, yes,
this is exactly what James Baldwin talks about, is being
a witness. It's a it's a legitimate role. Some people

(01:39:18):
frown upon it because you're literally like I think some
people view a witness is like just taking up space
and documenting the story. But by not participating and by
not stopping, you can better explain how things happened. And
it's it's just as important as our quote unquote heroes
who are are changing the world for the better. Like
it's it's where would we be without understanding how we

(01:39:40):
got here in the first place? Yeah, I mean, and
it is one of those things like one of the critiques.
I mean, obviously, like like Leslie Gill and her book,
like they didn't stop anything. You know, the School of
the America's was kind of already passed its period of
real influence, of major influence by the time, you know,
her book came out. But it's important that it be

(01:40:01):
documented that we understand this stuff because it if if
the information is allowed to get out to the people
it needs to, it can act in building our cultural
immunity to some of this stuff. And we have to
have we have to let it do that. We have to.
We can't we can't not learn these lessons, which is
why I think and you get the feeling one of

(01:40:24):
the this is really The School of the Americas is
such an amazing book to me because of the depth
Leslie gil goes into the number she talks to instructors
at the school and in from different errors, She talks
to people who went there, She talks to their victims,
like she she is really you can see motivated and
she is She's a person who had spent a lot
of time living in and around and like writing about

(01:40:45):
Latin America and Latin American issue. She's a very very
um competent um, you know, ethnographer, I guess you'd say, um,
but you get this feeling that it was there was
this kind of she understood how important it was for
the story of what this place did to people, how
it succeeded in its goal, in the consequences, how crucial
that is to get out to people, because I mean,

(01:41:07):
for one thing, it's happening in Oregon right now, like
we're seeing School of the America's ship starting just the
earliest stages, thankfully not the mass grave stages, but the
things that could lead to that if people aren't careful,
like it's it's happening here, So we should understand what
happened over there. Um that we did to these people,

(01:41:30):
you know that that we did in a lot of cases,
and and a lot of them did too, like you know,
not too. I don't want to, like you don't want to.
One of the problems sometimes with criticizing like the US
influence on places like this is like then you you
you don't criticize the fact that there's a lot of
you know, folks who live in those countries and come
from those countries who did a lot of fund up
ship too. But like we what happened over there, the

(01:41:51):
violence they committed in our name was part of a
plan that US leaders had and executed, and that's important
to know. So Joe out. We'll talk more later. Let's
start two. Is it coming? I look forward to it.
You want to plug anything? Uh, if you're intrigued by

(01:42:12):
any of the comments I made about black representation in
America and the horror story that that is. I am
recapping Lovecraft Country for the A V Club right now.
Uh is a doozy. There is a lot happening, especially
if I don't know when this will be released. But
if y'all have seen episode five, then you know what
goes down. Um, so yeah, check that out. Otherwise, you
can find me all over the internet at Joel Monique.

(01:42:35):
That's j O E L L E M O N
I q U E. Uh. Yeah, come chat with me
about the crazy bastards. You muys talk about always fascinated
by the show, and uh, you can't find me at
those same places online because I am not Joel Monique.
So that's the end of You can follow Robert on
Twitter and I right, okay, you can follow us on Twitter.

(01:42:55):
Scarab bastards thought we have a t public store. Uh,
don't do it. I don't know. I was trying to
explain to them where they couldn't find me because I
thought that would be useful to people. Yeah, but they
contact you. Post is important, all right, Well, thank you
everybody Twitter. Uh, don't be in a fire, um,

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: The Deadliest School in History