Police Training and Imperial Ambition

Dale L. Johnson
Profesor Instituto Centroamericano de Estudios para el Desarrollo

Agosto del 2003

The Legislative Assembly of Costa Rica will soon be voting on whether or not to establish a North American sponsored police training program for Latin America in Costa Rica. The International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) that the United States wants Costa Rica to host has stated goals that are presented as worthy and unobjectionable. In programs such as the ILEA, stated goals conceal purposes that are far from benign. There is a dark side to this proposal. If established in this small, dignified, peaceful country without an Army it would likely seriously compromise the nation's valued traditions of neutrality and the pursuit of peace and constitute a threat to the peace and stability of the Latin American region.

The proposed Academy should first be placed in the current context of U.S. policy objectives. Under the Bush Administration the principal objective, openly stated and unequivocally obvious, is world domination by United States military, political, and corporate economic power.

Empires are only consolidated by coercion and force. This is no less so of the "New American Century" envisioned by the cabal of vultures surrounding President George W. Bush than the British and Roman empires of previous imperial eras. The war against Afghanistan, the assault on and occupation of Iraq, and the loud threats against Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba are the most recent manifestations of imperial bloodletting and bellicose coercion.

What is perhaps unique to the present period is the historically unparalleled audacity, at least since the era of German fascism, in which imperial ambition is unfolding. The regime of Saddam Hussein was portrayed as a Rogue State. This is a term conjured by North American propagandists to vilify governments that are non-compliant to imperial will, internally repressive, and externally aggressive. It is a fair term if applied in critical discourse on global power relations. In the North American construction of a New American Century the United States has become the Super Rogue State. The Super Rogue declares its right to use unilateral preemptive military means against whatever nation or political group deemed to present a challenge to imperial design. It uses economic and military aid to construct and fortify Client Rogues that pursue policies of official terrorism. The Super Rogue uses terrorist means to wage a War on Terrorism. The root causes of the terrorism of the desperate are totally ignored. Terrorists are to be exterminated, initiating an escalating chain of violence like that in Israel and Palestine. The Super Rogue does not work diplomatically to forge alliances with friendly nations. It expects European allies to be, like Great Britain, vassals in the imperial system. It bribes and coerces lesser states to follow its dictates. The Super Rogue works to dominate international institutions and when it does not get its way, seeks to undermine or to make these institutions irrelevant to its actions. The Super Rogue violates international law, established treaties, and human rights at will and with impunity and celebrates these violations as bringing freedom and democracy.

The construction of the Super Rogue State is a political project of extremist mummies like President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfield, and ideologues surrounding them, made possible by the events of September 11, 2001.
The Super Rogue aspires to military invincibility. Military spending is now at levels unsurpassed since the height of the Cold War; "smart" weaponry and huge stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological arms are in readiness; 13 new United States military bases are now in place in nine countries surrounding Afghanistan and Iraq and strengthened in other regions.

Yet, sheer military force will not suffice to consolidate and indefinitely maintain a global empire. The crudeness of the Iraq attack, the gross distortions and blatant lies invented to justify the Iraq action, the massive anti-war mobilizations of peoples in Europe, North America, and worldwide, the United States contempt for the United Nations and international law...are likely, at the very least, to place constraints on the unilateral exercise of military might.

Hopefully, the mummies behind the New American Century will suffer a deserved disgrace and the Bush Regime will be replaced by a government that assumes a more diplomatic posture. Unfortunately, such a political turn will not mean a renunciation of imperial ambition, for that is structural inherent to unipolar global corporate capitalism, only a change in appearance and direction. Business "think tanks" and establishment intellectuals will fashion a new project aimed at strengthening hegemony, and the emphasis will likely change from militaristic posturing to quiet construction of a repressive apparatus of global reach dressed in a rhetoric of global stability and democracy. A world-wide repressive apparatus that operates at the level of compliant, dependent nation-sates is far more effective for achieving imperial ends than horrific militarism or bellicose threats emanating from the hegemonic center. This is why for more than 50 years the United States has showered ruthless dictatorships with the weaponry of domestic repression and training in its effective use and buttressed these regimes with economic aid and political support. The most notable examples among scores are the Shah of Iran, Marcos in the Philippines, the South American military dictatorships of the seventies, and the brutal regimes of Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s. Nor is it likely that the flow of weaponry and support for the official terrorism of the Israeli state will lessen.

True, some dictatorships lost their U.S. prop. Panama was invaded when General Noriega stopped taking CIA money and made noises about settlement of the Central American conflicts and Saddam Hussein only became a rogue when he stopped fighting the Iranian mullahs and made a grab for Gulf oil. Client regimes with effective repressive capabilities are preferable to war and occupation. That is why, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the U.S. has covertly or more or less openly intervened to bring down the healed boot of reaction when nationalist or reform forces appear to be gaining strength: Greece in the post-war period, Iran and Guatemala in 1954, Vietnam in the 1960s, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua in the 1980s, Afghanistan when the Soviets intervened to prop up forward looking forces against the most retrograde elements that exist in today's world.

The U.S. also endeavors to sharpen the repressive apparatus in countries that can pass as formally democratic. Military assistance programs extend to most countries in the world. The continuation of this aid from 2003 onward has been declared by President Bush to be contingent on each country formally exempting U.S. citizens from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court for charges of war crimes or crimes against humanity. Would that all recipients refuse such immunity!

Given that U.S. political rulers and corporate elite have for more than a century considered the Latin American region to be a special sphere of influence, programs designed to strengthen the regional repressive apparatus have a long history.

During the 1960s the other side of President John Kennedy's Alliance For Progress was extensive aid and training programs to Latin American police and military forces. The emphasis in these assistance and training programs was "internal security" and "counter insurgency." The main purpose, amply accomplished, was to strengthen security forces to be able to effectively repress domestic protest of prevailing injustice and movements that challenged the status quo. In the 1970s, police forces participated in all the bloody military interventions of the period in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. During the 1980s United States assistance and training programs focused on Central America. The violent repression unleashed against all those social forces considered subversive in Guatemala and El Salvador is directly related to the strengthening of military, police, and para-military forces by the United States.

The Army School of the Americas (SOA)was the most infamous training program for Latin American officers. This program was transferred from the Panama Canal Zone to Fort Benning, Georgia, when the Panamanians gained control of the Canal. More than 60,000 Latin American security personnel were trained at this school. Many graduates were implicated in the worst human rights abuses in Latin America. In 1996, SOA manuals encompassing some 2,000 pages were made available to a shocked public. The Manuals contained sections on methods of assassination, torture, espionage, blackmail, infiltration of civic organizations, creating confusion between armed insurgents and legal opposition, neutralization of opponents, and extra-legal operations. Militant demonstrations by North American citizens against the training of torturers and murderers over many years have come close to forcing closure of this "School of Assassins," but so far only the name has been changed. (For analyses of the SOA see www.soaw.org )

Programs like the School of Assassins, since 2001 renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, have been recently extended to other regions of the World, although these are said to focus on police rather than military training. The first ILEA was established in Budapest Hungary in 1995. According to a report to the Congress by the Director of the FBI, by 1998 some 850 police from 23 countries had graduated from eight week courses at the Budapest Academy. ILEA´s were later formed in Thailand in 1999, Botswana in 2001, and the United States in 2001. There is very little public information about the operation of these Academies, except in FBI reports where the anti-terrorist theme is emphasized. The treaty document submitted to the Costa Rican Legislature states that training in Costa Rica would be similar to the other ILEA´s, such as in combating international terrorism and transnational crimes the U.S. considers related to terrorism, including drug and arms trafficking and money laundering. Cybernetic crimes and illegal immigration are also mentioned.

Over the years Costa Rica has been less scarred by programs of military assistance and training than other countries in Central America. The Nation only had its sovereignty compromised and its democracy subverted. Under extreme pressure from the United States to assist in the Contra War against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, while rejecting the creation of an Army, did succumb to the militarized police training programs promoted by the U.S. at the time.

U.S. sponsored police training programs had a presence in Costa Rica for decades preceding the Contra War. Between 1949 and 1967 nearly 2000 police officers were trained in military tactics and anti-communism at the U. S. Army School for the Americas in Panama. From the late 1960s until 1974 Costa Rican police received assistance and training through the Agency for International Development's Public Safety Program and many police were sent to Panama and to the International Police Academy in Washington. However, in 1974 the Congress of the U.S. banned training Latin American police forces because of their flagrant history of torture and "disappearances." Nevertheless, U.S. involvement with Costa Rican security forces greatly expanded during the 1980s. Washington was anxious to open a Southern Front in its Contra War against Nicaragua. The size of Costa Rican police forces increased 400%. Programs proliferated, money flowed, and reorganization and "professionalization" were instituted. With Embassy pressure and CIA guidance and money, new units of the police were organized. Such units as the Directorate of Intelligence and Security (DIS) and the Special Intervention Unit (UEI) became infamous for abuse of legitimate police functions. In the early 1980s the Organization for National Emergency (OPEN) was formed to train a large auxiliary police force in the use of M-16 rifles and other military weapons. Infiltrated by domestic right-wing para-military groups that aided the Contras and engaged in domestic espionage, OPEN's main activities were to put down demonstrations and attack strikers. President Arias and Security Minister Garrón suspended OPEN activity in 1987. In 1985 the U.S. constructed a camp at Murciélago run by the U.S. Green Berets to train an 800 man Civil Guard Lightening Battalion. Ostensibly to protect against Sandinista invasion, the Battalion only saw action in the repression of demonstrations by campesinos and peace activists and in evictions of squatters from the properties of wealthy landowners. *

* The analysis of U.S. training of Costa Rican police forces is based mainly on Martha Honey, Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s. University of Florida Press, 1994.

In the other Central American countries the U.S. intervened massively: with counterinsurgency programs; by turning a blind eye and lending a helping hand to the Death Squads; by massacres of villagers carried out by military forces armed by the North Americans; by arming, financing, and directing a terrorist force, the Contras, against a reformist government in Nicaragua.

History is one guide to contemporary purpose. U.S. Embassy spokesmen claim that ILEA will not be engaged in militaristic programs, mainly offering training in combating terrorism, drug and arms trafficking, money laundering, kidnapping, and child prostitution. The Latin American programs described above too were presented in ways that concealed their real purposes. Moreover, parallel to ILEA is a plan to create a consolidated Central American regional army promoted by Undersecretary of State Daniel Fisk, drawn up by President Flores of El Salvador and President Maduro of Honduras, and announced during the Central America/United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) negotiations.

The current "War on Terrorism" is being waged on every front and one front line is police training. The proposed International Law Enforcement Academy will be mainly a training ground in combating terrorism "by any means necessary," where terrorist is broadly defined as forces actively resisting United States policy ends. ILEA, at least as long as Bush and Associates are in power, surely will become a small part of a larger United States program to strengthen a world wide repressive apparatus subservient to the ends of that nation's unilateralist and bullying posture, its superpower arrogance, its preference for violent repression over diplomacy, its propensity to violate international norms of civilized society and principles of human rights, its resort to terrorist means to achieve policy ends, and its striving for the global hegemony of the corporate interests that guide United States policy. Should Bush fall, the means may be moderated but the ends are unlikely to fundamentally change. President Clinton started the ILEA program. The Democrats in the United States Congress will all applaud this treaty whose intent is to make the Latin American police forces an efficient, militarized repressive force at the service of Empire.

This is not an easy decision for Costa Rica, a small country dependent on an impatient and arrogant northern giant that expects compliance. Most of the political class and the prevailing business interests in the country now see their interests and future as tied up with global capitalism and U.S. hegemony. The social democratic and developmentalist ideology of the Partido de Liberación Nacional has largely given way to commitment to the neo-liberal ideology of global capital. The Foreign Minister and President Pacheco symbolically joined the Coalition of the Willing in the attack on Iraq, engendering dismay and widespread criticism. However, Foreign Minister Toval did flatly reject the United States demand that Costa Rica exempt U.S. citizens from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court or face suspension of military aid programs. Of course, military aid to armyless Costa Rica is limited mainly to Coast Guard functions. Costa Rica is currently negotiating with other Central American countries and the United States the Central American Free Trade Agreement and fears antagonizing their main trading partner. Nevertheless, there is a good deal of dignity in the Costa Rican political culture and the outcome of the treaty is uncertain. The best defense that Costa Rica has is not an army nor a police force trained to be a surrogate army, but moral integrity--a firm noncompliance to North American proposals based on its tradition of neutrality and the search for diplomatic and peaceful solutions to conflict.

Whether the Costa Rican Legislative Assembly will accept or reject this treaty is an open question. The two main political parties, the ruling Partido de Unidad Cristiana and the Partido de Liberación Nacional have endorsed the treaty, although some Deputies of Liberación Nacional and minor parties are raising questions about the necessity and cost of Costa Rican participation. There is preoccupation about the fact of complete United States control apart from facility maintenance functions, the diplomatic immunity granted all faculty and students that is normally extended only to Ambassadors, and the tax exoneration for everyone associated with the Academy. The Partido de Acción Ciudadana is solidly opposed for the right reasons and has been very effective in mobilizing opposition and in delaying a vote until the opposition of civil society, growing daily, gains greater momentum.*

* The current debate can be monitored at www.ACADEMIA_POLICIA_COSTARICA@gruposyahoo.com (use _ between words of address) and www.geocities.com/cppcr Messages of support from other parts of the world will be very useful, as will any information about the operation of ILEA, Hungary, Botswana, Thailand, and Arizona, U.S.A. Please send messages to these websites and to troporg@racsa.co.cr

Dale L. Johnson, a United States citizen by birth and resident of Costa Rica, is Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Central American Development Studies, San José, Costa Rica and consultant on projects of sustainable development and organic agriculture.