U.S. ARMY SECRETARY WANTS TO CHANGE SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS CURRICULUM

WASHINGTON--Seeking to undermine critics who call it a school
for dictators, Army Secretary Louis Caldera wants to change the
curriculum of the School of the Americas, the Pentagon's training
academy for Latin American military officers.

In an interview with The Herald, Caldera scoffed at efforts to close
the school, saying that in some circles the campaign has acquired
"cachet." He called activism against the School of the Americas "one
of those Internet issues" around which people rally "as an article of
faith."

Critics scored a victory when the House of Representatives voted on
July 30 to strip some of the school's funding. To snuff out the annual
funding challenges, Caldera said that his priority is to wage an
"uphill" battle to restore the cuts.

A joint House-Senate conference committee will decide the final budget
in the fall.

"Then we're going to step back and say, 'Do we need a different
approach -- to make structural changes that will help us put this kind
of issue behind us?"' said the West Point graduate and former
California assemblyman from Los Angeles.

The school, founded in 1946 and now located at Fort Benning, Ga., is
one of the most important institutions of the U.S. Southern Command,
and one of its most controversial.

Over five decades, it has trained more than 60,000 graduates from 22
countries in the region in an effort to instill American-style
professionalism in Latin American military forces. But a relative few
have gone on to become notorious human rights violators, such as the
late Roberto D'Aubuisson, a reputed death squad commander and
political leader in El Salvador.

Another alumnus is Gen. Manuel Noriega, the former strongman of Panama
who is now in prison in Miami-Dade County on a drug conviction.

As a result, critics call the school an academy for assassins and want
to cut or eliminate its funding altogether from the Pentagon budget, a
campaign that Secretary Caldera labeled as wrongheaded.

Closing the school, he said, "sends the wrong message to our friends
in Latin America. It will hurt our ability to execute our engagement
strategy" with other armies in the hemisphere.

So important is the school that Southcom commander-in-chief
Gen.

Charles Wilhelm has vowed to find an alternative way to train regional
partners if Congress decides to close it.

"The importance of the school is such that if it were disestablished
on a Monday we would be visibly engaged in its recreation on Tuesday,"
Wilhelm told the House Armed Services Committee Feb. 24.

Caldera said, "Someone has got to train them with professional
military ethi cs" about legitimate security issues, such as fighting
))narcotics(( trafficking and safeguarding their borders.

"To reject them rather than embrace them is just crazy," he
said.

The Harvard-trained lawyer accused both congressional and religious
community critics of being unwilling to accept the idea that the
school has reformed. Military officials acknowledge that some unsavory
literatu re slipped into the school's library during the days of the
Cold War, when the program was based in Panama and preoccupied with
containing the spread of communism from Cuba. But they say the
material has since been removed and atrocities linked to the school
ended long ago.

Besides, they say, human and civil rights lessons are now a core of
the curriculum. "I think the school will be funded' ' after a vigorous
campaign by the Pentagon and its congressional allies, said Caldera,
who was appointed to the top Army civilian post by President Clinton.
"But we'll have to work hard for that."

In all, 174 Democrats and 56 Republicans voted 230-197 to strip the
fiscal 2000 foreign operations spending bill of $1.5 million of the
$15 million budget -- the funds that pay most foreign students'
tuition, recruiting and transportation costs.

The cut has great symbolism.

It was the school's first congressional setback since the Rev. Roy
Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest, launched a campaign to close it after
graduates of the school were linked to the 1989 murders of six Jesuit
priests and two church women in El Salvador.

Activists have issued a call for large-scale civil disobedience at the
base's gates on Nov. 21. They pledge to amass 10,000 demonstrators for
the 10th anniversary of the church workers' slayings.

Suggesting the strategy he will use to reinstate funding in Congress,
Caldera said that once the school's 2000 funding package is secure,
one idea would be to rewrite the curriculum -- to emphasize
peacekeeping, mine deactivation and humanitarian assistance, "not
small unit infantry tactics and ranger school-type training."

Instead, "we could offer that training somewhere else."