Fighting to close the School of the Americas: Unintended consequences of successful activism

ABSTRACT

This article examines the structural and institutional changes that have occurred since the controversial United States School of the Americas (SOA) closed and its successor, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), opened in 2001. Placing these changes within a constructivist framework, the article uses the school as a case study to argue that human rights norm diffusion has both increased the amount of human rights in the curriculum and put the school in a much stronger institutional position than it had been. Human rights activists had successfully prompted change, but did not achieve their goal of closing the school. This article contributes to the literature by demonstrating how ideas about human rights can have important and lasting effects, but not always in ways that are either predictable or desirable for the political activists who spark them.

Notes on contributor

Gregory Weeks is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He studies Latin American Politics, US-Latin American relations, and Latino immigration. His most recent book is Understanding Latin American Politics (Perason, 2014).

Notes

1. The literature is almost endless. For a good overview, see Weeks (2015).

2. See the Just the Facts website, which provides data on US security policy toward Latin America. It is jointly organized by the Center for International Policy, The Latin America Working Group Education Fund, and the Washington Office on Latin America, all highly respected nongovernmental organizations. http://justf.org/All_US_Institutions. WHINSEC is the second largest, behind the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies.

3. See School of the Americas Watch, http://www.soaw.org/.

4. From the SOAW website: http://www.soaw.org/about-us.

5. Ibid.

6. For a full text of the law, see US House of Representatives, October 30, 2000, especially pp. 226–227.

7. This is not to be confused with the Leahy Provision of the 1997 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, which required vetting for US antinarcotics aid to Latin American troops.

8. For the full text, see US House of Representatives, November 6, 2000.

9. For a criticism of the vetting process as being too porous, see Miller (2012).

10. See, for example, a 2010 cable from the Dominican Republic (Wikileaks n.d.).

11. For a positive view, see Blakeley (2006); for a negative view, see McCoy (2005).

12. Examples abound. For legal rationale, see Cohn (2012) and Quigley (2005).

13. See http://www.soaw.org/about-the-soawhinsec/history.

14. For the full text of the bill, see House of Representatives, 112th Congress, H.R. 3368, November 4, 2011.

15. For full text, see U.S. House of Representatives 2001 op. cit.

16. Numbers provided by Joe Leuer, WHINSEC, May 16, 2013.

17. Western Hemisphere Institute for Cooperation, 2015.

18. Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, 2002–2003: 11.

19. Numbers provided by Joe Leuer, WHINSEC, May 15, 2013.

20. See US Department of Defense (2009).