Consuming Passions: The School of the Americas and Imperial Sexuality  

Reflecting on the U.S. Army's School of the Americas (SOA), retired Bolivian Major Jorge Sánchez recalls that in Panama, the “brothels complemented other aspects of military life. The North Americans were there, and everyone was equal...(The brothels were) where the Bolivian military man had international contact.” The SOA, or the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation (WINSEC) as the military now likes to call it, is a notorious army training school where the United States has instructed Latin American security forces since the dawn of the cold war. Although best known for the widespread human rights atrocities perpetrated by hundreds of its graduates, the SOA, which relocated to Ft. Benning, Georgia in 1984, has always been more than a combat training facility. It is a place where the Army incorporates Latin American security forces into an imperial military apparatus under the tutelage of the United States. The opportunity to participate in a lively sex life is part of this process.

The SOA-WINSEC exposes thousands of foreign soldiers from impoverished Latin American countries to a transnational world of power, privilege, and pleasure that tantalizes them with a dizzying dance of commodities. The conspicuous consumption of commodities, including the objectified bodies of young women, is one of the activities that students participate in with enormous enthusiasm. The energetic acquisition of goods and the exotic experiences associated with foreign travel, as well as the prestige and military skills acquired at the SOA, help soldiers consolidate their connections to a global vision of comfort and prosperity that the Army advertises as “the American Way of Life” without a trace of hesitation. All of this facilitates the efforts of the United States to win the cooperation of Latin American militaries and build ties between them and U.S. servicemen.

Major Sánchez remembers his early education in the Bolivian military academy, where instructors recently returned from stints at the SOA regaled trainees with tales of their sexual exploits in Panama. “They usually moved quickly from accounts of their professional experiences to anecdotes about North American comfort, the prostitutes and how much they cost,” says Sanchez.

By spinning these tales, return SOA alumni cultivated images of themselves as manly men. Like their counterparts in other armies of the Americas, many believed that access to the sexual services of local women was a basic right. They described Panama as a place where soldiers could indulge their sexual fantasies and escape into illusions of men-as-men. Single male cadets had disposable income that was unencumbered by alternative claims that would shape its use at home, and this money made them feel powerful and potent. “They went to the brothels that had Black women,” explained Sánchez. “The Bolivians were fascinated with Black women. There were none in Bolivia and to make love with a Black woman was supposedly an unforgettable experience—very exotic.”

Poverty pushed many poor women into prostitution, where they sold sexual services to SOA trainees—the local level enforcers of the social and political relationships that sustained capitalism in Latin America. Poor women’s sexual labor earned profits for the pimps, procurers, and traffickers who reaped the most substantial financial rewards from the sex trade. By leveraging their economic power against that of Black women sex workers, male cadets effectively violated the human rights of these women who were left to face increasingly unviable subsistence economies, unemployment, and growing financial insecurity. Black women became commodities that could be consumed at will, as though they were just another item of the capitalist global economy.

The aura of almost mystic transcendentalism that surrounded soldiers' accounts of sexual encounters with Black women emerged from a belief that you could do things with foreigners—especially members of subordinate racial groups—that you could not do at home. Part of the appeal of going abroad was the opportunity to enact sexist and racist stereotypes away from the constraints of their own society, and the allure of exotic sexual encounters—the ultimate human experience—made a trip to the SOA all the more attractive. Army officials understood these desires, and the careful management they required, as the military struggled to incorporate the Latin Americans into the United States' vision of imperial rule.

Sex and the Imperial Military

The bustling market for sex created by the concentration of an overwhelmingly male military in the Panama Canal Zone presented the Army brass with a conundrum. On one hand, U.S. officials were concerned with maintaining soldiers' morale, and they believed that men needed sexual access to women to maintain good health. On the other hand, they worried about the spread of venereal diseases and feared that “expressions of immorality” might provoke the ire of Panamanian authorities and create public relations problems for the U.S. military. They also struggled mightily to present an image of the U.S. military and U.S. citizens as hard working, upstanding and industrious. Communicating such a vision to Latin American trainees was important, according to a former commandant of the Latin American Ground School—a precursor to the SOA—, because “They must carry with them the impression that this is the way we work and that is why we are a great nation.”

Not surprisingly, these competing agendas generated a great deal of ambiguity among military officials in Panama. As early as the 1940s, for example, the Army prohibited all personnel—U.S. and Latin American—from entering any establishment in Panama defined as a house of prostitution, and they cited the Army's 1946 “Repression of Prostitution Act” to emphasize their concern for the morals, health, and welfare of service personnel. Yet at the same time, they distributed an orientation booklet to a group of visiting Argentinean trainees that listed—on seven, single-spaced, typed pages—the names of every brothel and strip joint in Panama City, Colón, and “outlying areas” of other Central American republics. In Colón, for example, the Army forbade visits to addresses No. 12184, No. 11185, No. 11190, and No. 2019 on 12th Street. Similarly, on East 17th Street in Panama City “Matilde's Place and house of prostitution under her place at No. 10” were off limits.

The booklet—intended for a much broader audience than just the Argentines—reflected the Army's obsession with detail and its intimate knowledge of the seamier side of life in Panama. By laying out a road map to the local sex industry, it sent a mixed message to the newly arrived Argentines, a message that simultaneously told them where to go and warned them to stay away. To dispel some of the confusion and to avoid any embarrassment for the trainees, U.S. officials notified the Canal Zone police of the Argentine trainees' “exceptional status,” and they made overtures to the Panamanian police to obtain their cooperation in “affording the Argentine personnel every courtesy and consideration.” Although it is uncertain how the Argentines evaluated their experiences, U.S. officials were clearly eager to accommodate them. They needed the trainees to take home a positive image of the United States, because, in the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. government wanted to “capture” the Argentine military, which had leaned toward the Axis during the war.

Guns, Cameras and “Progress”

When Major Sánchez finally had the chance to train at the SOA in the 1980s, the School had moved to Ft. Benning, where, he said, “the prostitutes spoke English, so it was more difficult than in Panama where everyone spoke Spanish.” Yet the massage parlors, seedy bars, and strip joints that lined Victory Drive, a multi-lane highway that separated Ft. Benning from Columbus, Georgia's impoverished south side, told a different story. There were also clubs and discos on the post, where, the major indicated, a discreet officer could acquire the sexual services of local women.

Accommodating the sexual demands of trainees—albeit with a certain ambivalence— was only part of the U.S. military's strategy to secure the allegiance of Latin American militaries. Trainees were dazzled by the commodity-filled lives of the white middle class—the “typical Americans” of military imagery. The vigorous acquisition of commodities from the pawn shops of Columbus's south side to the city's upscale Peach Tree Mall was one of the national pastimes that SOA trainees most enjoyed. Almost without exception, the soldiers also made pilgrimages to Disney's Magic Kingdom before returning to Latin America, where, in the eyes of their class peers, the experiences located them among the prosperous citizens of the modern world. One Columbus pawnshop owner, who describes herself as a “military brat,” says that “the boys” from the School of the Americas buy guns and cameras.

Guns and cameras are manifestations of advanced “modern” states, and these consumer goods constitute valuable trophies for U.S.-returned SOA students who have made a successful penetration into the American Dream. They are part of the miraculous power of technology, which is an important measure of the perceived worth of societies, their relative power, and the value of individuals within them. Guns—especially the latest models from the United States—symbolize male potency, and they convey real power to the men who wield them. They are indeed the most important tools in a global struggle to produce and accumulate commodities. Guns—and technology, more broadly—give their bearers an indisputable advantage in military conflicts that constantly occur between the self-proclaimed bearers of “modernity” and those allegedly “backward” people whose resources are appropriated in the name of “progress.” Cameras are likewise the fruits of modernity, part of a wide range of techno-gadgetry that includes televisions, computers, video recorders and so forth; these things make life more enjoyable, and they are simultaneously key symbols of a “modern,” middle-class life that many SOA students and their families seek to maintain.

Even though these commodities are more available in Latin America today than at any time in the past, they are not necessarily more accessible to the Latin American middle class. Neoliberal economic restructuring has exacted a heavy toll on the lower echelons of the middle class from which most army officers originate. State downsizing has reduced an important source of middle-class jobs, and unemployment, inflation and wage freezes have eroded its purchasing power. The symbols of modernity are at once closer and further away, and members of the armed forces are not immune to the economic turmoil.

It should come as no surprise that when the perks associated with life in the United States and in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone were combined with the sense of professional entitlement instilled at the SOA, many alumni could chart new paths of social mobility and viewed themselves as separate from, and frequently superior to, civilians in their home countries. The emergence of exclusive military neighborhoods in some places reinforced their detachment. The monopoly that the armed forces claimed over the legitimate use of violence then enabled them to protect the interests of the United States and its local allies in the dominant classes and to destroy the organizations of ordinary people—peasants, students, workers, religious groups — who challenged the basis of privilege during the long years of the cold war and its aftermath.

The SOA graduated over 60,000 students since its founding in the Panama Canal Zone, and it facilitated the rise and consolidation of a caste-like group of militaries and police forces beholden to the United States. It did so not only by arming and training them but by opening a modern world of consumption, sexual pleasure, and social mobility to loyal Latin American soldiers. The result was the internationalization of state-sponsored violence, as well as the aggravation of forms of racism, sexual exploitation and class exclusion locally.

* Lesley Gill teaches Anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. and specializes in political violence, Latin America, and global economic restructuring. She is the author of The School of America: Military Training, Political Violence and Impunity in the Americas, Duke University Press (forthcoming, 2004).