PROCESO
No. 1122
May 3, 1998

by Pascal Beltran del Rio

WASHINGTON, DC -- Mexico has become the principal provider of military personnel for the training programs offered by the U.S. Armed Forces.

As a result of the tightening of relations between the Pentagon and the Secretary of National Defense, which came about in a series of agreements announced in March of 1996, and in spite of the scandals regarding links with drug trafficking that have shaken the Army since last year, the majority of the students at U.S. military training centers are from the Mexican military.

The fight against drug trafficking, which has replaced the battle against Communism on the priotiy list of U.S. military authorities, is the focal point of this new cooperation, according to statements by both countries' governments. "As you know, there are historic sensibilities between the U.S. and Mexico, and the two armies have had very little contact," explains Lt. Col. Bill Darley of the Pentagon Press Corps.

"If this relationship exists now, it is because there is a situation of crisis and its purpose is to alleviate a mutual problem", he adds, in reference to drug trafficking.

According to Darley, all the instruction that Mexican soldiers receive in the US is focused on the fight against drugs.

Some weeks ago a controversy was touched off when The Washington Post reported that the antidrug tactics that the Pentagon teaches are "similar to the counterinsurgency methods that they used in the preparation of Latin American officers during the Cold War".

The official Mexican news agency Notimax rapidly cast doubt on this information. It reproduced statements by Secretary of State Madeline Albright in an address to Congress: "We are not involved in any counterinsurgency training and the Mexican government has not requested said training" quoted Notimex.

Another controversy arose when both The New York Times and The Washington Post reported in late December of last year that the Mexican military not only receives anti-drug training from its U.S. counterparts but also from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whose agents participate in the Anti-Drug Intelligence Center of the Army, also known as CIAN. This information was neither confirmed nor denied by the Mexican and U.S. governments.

According to official information from the U.S. government, the anti-drug training that the Pentagon has provided to the Mexican military since 1996 has reached 41.1 million dollars. To this sum, which comes from the Defense Department's budget, add three million dollars in aid already received by Mexico during the same time period, as part of the training and international military education program (IMET), whose financing is foreseen in the State Department's initial budget proposal. "The data regarding the number of Mexican military personnel that have received military training in the U.S. during the last two years is not completely clear. Some statistics have been published by the U.S. press; others have been compiled by the non-governmental organization, Latin America Working Group, and still others were provided to PROCESO by the Pentagon.

Section 10-04 of the Defense Department's budget finances the Pentagon's anti-drug training of Mexican soldiers. The report about this budget section from fiscal year 1997 (October of 1996 to September of 1997) indicates that in that time period training was provided to 829 Mexican soldiers.

Apart from this information, it is officially known that the IMET program (financed by the State Department) provided training to 221 persons in 1996 and to 192 in 1997; and, according to estimates, will provide training to 190 in 1998. In all, 603 Mexican soldiers will have received instruction from the IMET between 1996 and 1998."

A large part of the training offered by this program is provided at the School of the Americas, located at Fort Benning military base in the State of Georgia. This base has been strongly criticized for having had among its 60,000 graduates some who later showed themselves to be distinguished Latin American torturers, murderers and dictators. In the past, it was made public that an instructor at the school used a manual that taught torture.

Revelations like this one, and the collapse of the Socialist Block caused the School of the Americas to enter a crisis during the latter part of the last decade. Last September, the House of Representatives was about to approve a proposal that would have reduced the budget of the institution so much that it would have had to close its doors. The initiative was voted down by just seven votes.

Nevertheless, the School of the Americas (SOA) is experiencing a remodeling of its academic program. Among the anti-drug training courses, there are now human rights courses, among other subjects.

The number of students is even growing, according to a recent report by The Boston Globe. And among those that have contributed most to this growth are the Mexican military personnel. According to the Globe report, in 1994, 15 Mexicans attended the School of the Americas; last year 333 attended.

The non-governmental organization School of the Americas Watch (SOAW), which is fighting for the closure of teh school, informed that "at least 13 of the high-ranking military personnel involved in the conflict (in Chiapas) are graduates" of the School of the Americas, including General Juan Lopez Ortiz, who, according to certain versions, oversaw the offensive against the Zapatista rebels in Ocosingo in January of 1994, after which several people were found executed.

SOAW has also identified, as former students of the school, three of the officers mentioned in the Military Intelligence documents obtained by this weekly last year, in which they mention ties between drug traffickers and high-ranking Army officers (PROCESO 1082): Col. Augusto Moises Garcia Ochoa, Head of the Anti-Drug Intelligence Center, who, according to SOAW data published on the Internet, took a course on Jungle Operations in 1997; Lt. Col. Gerardo Rene Herrera Huizar, who testified against Col. Pablo Castellanos, was at the School of the Americas in 1980 to take a course on Patrol Operations; and General Fernan Perez Casanova, who received visits from Irma Lizzete Ibarra Navejat, the former beauty queen who was murdered last year in Guadalajara, studied counterinsurgency in 1962.

According to data from the Latin American Working Group and information appearing in the U.S. press, between 1996 and 1997 almost 500 Mexican offiers came to the School of the Americas.

And, by the end of this year, it is estimated that a total of 3,000 will have participated in training courses in the United States (the Pentagon handles an average number of 1,000 per year) since the tightening of relations between the military authorities of the two countries began.

The Mexican Green Berets

According to the New York times, of those 3,000 Mexican soldiers, "328 young officers will have completed special 12- and 13-week programs, which have the goal of creating a corps of anti-drug specialists. Those trainers, the paper said in an article published last December, are then sent to train units of special air forces (known as GAFE) which now are stationed in the headquarters of the 12 regions and 40 zones that make up the military geography of Mexico.

The 328 officers to which the Times refers are being trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the headquarters of the Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets, of the U.S. Army. A special anti-narcotics school operates at that same military installation. Eric Olson, an analyst with the non-governmental organization Washington Office on Latin America, which is dedicated to observing the development of military cooperation between Mexico and the U.S., affirms that within the current anti-narcotic training program there is a cloak or cover of disinformation which prevents finding out, among other things, the names of the Mexican officers that participate in the courses.

Olson says it is important to know these names because "one of the GAFE units, created with U.S. training, was apparently responsible for the events in Zapopan last year". The analyst is referring to the kidnapping of 18 young people, which occurred December 14, 1997 in the town of San Juan de Ocotlan in the above-mentioned municipality of Jalisco. During these events, a young man, Salvador Lopez Jimenez, lost his life. In early January, a military judge from Region 5 issued a verdict of formal prison against a chief, 11 officers and 15 soldiers belonging to the GAFE (Special Forces Air Transport Group) that operated in the area.

Joy Olson of the Latin American Working Group confirms: "Up until now we have not been able to find out the names of Mexican military personnel trained in the United States". (The organization is preparing a document about military cooperation between the United States and Latin America which has a chapter about Mexico. The document will be published soon.)

Lt. Col. Darley, of the Pentagon Press Corps, says that it is up to the Mexican government, not the United States, to decide whether to make public the names of the soldiers who have received training. But he remarks: "If I were in their position, I wouldn't do it, because it would make those soldiers targets of the criminal organizations they are trying to fight against".

Asked directly, Darley says that the Mexican military personnel receivetraining at 17 installations of the U.S. Armed Forces: Bolling Air Force Base, located outside Washington, D.C.; Randolph Air Force Base and Lackland Air Force Base in Texas; Fort Wachuca, Arizona; Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Bragg, North Carolina Fort Rucker and Fort McCullen, Alabama; Fort Eutis and Norfolk Navy Base, Virginia; Camp Pendleton, California; Pensacola Naval Base, Florida; Indian Town Gap, Pennsylvania; Rodman Naval Station, Panama, and other installations in the cities of Indianapolis, San Antonio and San Diego.

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Translated for Nuevo Amanecer Press by: William Burrow, Robyn Cutright, Nicole Bice, Heidi Brummer, Andrea Raabe, Lisa Bryfczynski, Beth Lichty, Dawn Brady, Shannon Brady, Beth Mollner, Silvia, and Susan Rascón, Lawrence University