Honduras coup leaders schooled in Georgia
Monday, June 29th, 2009The two alleged top leaders of the weekend’s military coup in Honduras are graduates of the U.S. Army’s Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a.k.a. the School of the Americas at Fort Benning in Columbus.
General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, head of Honduras’ armed forces, attended the school in 1976 and again in 1986. General Luis Javier Prince Suazo, head of the country’s air force, attended the school for a month in 1996.
WHINSEC/School of the Americas was founded in 1963, ostensibly to help professionalize the militaries of U.S.-allied countries in Latin America. A September 21, 1996 article by the Washington Post’s Dana Priest revealed the school taught students how to torture, kidnap, extort and execute prisoners. Priest won a Pulitzer Prize ten years later for uncovering the Bush Administration’s gulag archipelago chain of secret CIA prisons.
