Darrin Wood’s book, “Alumnos del Tío Sam. Tratado de Libre Contrainsurgencia. “Campus México» de la Escuela de Asesinos (Students of Uncle Sam: Treaty of Free Counterinsurgency. “Campus Mexico” of the School of Assassins)(https://vocesenlucha.com/libro-alumnos-del-tio-sam-darrinwood) is an excellent analytical-informative tool to investigate a reality considered taboo by much of academia, the mainstream media and the political environment of contemporary Mexico and the “fourth transformation” quarter: the Mexican armed forces and their relationship with their U.S. counterparts, and, in particular, a highly controversial topic that refers to the training of its military personnel at the School of the Americas (SOA).
On September 26, 2001, in my capacity as a federal representative, I presented an opinion in the United Commissions of Government-Public Security and National Defense of the Congress of the Union, requesting an investigation into the actions denounced in the document “The Slippery Slope. US military intervention in the conflict in Chiapas,” written by Brian Wilson, a veteran of the Vietnam War, which denounced the direct intervention of bodies of the armed forces of his country in that conflict.
This proposal was rejected as inappropriate, among other arguments, because: “In the history of bilateral relations between Mexico and the United States of America, our country has never accepted the presence of any U.S. military mission in our territory.”
However, my presentation provoked an unusual invitation to a meeting of deputies and senators with the then Secretary of National Defense, General Enrique Cervantes Aguirre, at his facilities in Military Camp 1, in which, with various arguments, the Secretary General emphatically denied that Mexican military personnel were trained by U.S. military personnel.
Wood’s work is a well-founded and documented refutation of these claims by General Cervantes. Wood proves that, since March 1998, the then U.S. Secretary of Defense confirmed the presence of a U.S. military instructor in Mexican territory, and offered specific data on the reasons why this U.S. training center (SOA) had been known, without any rhetoric whatsoever, as the School of Assassins.
Founded in 1946, in Panama, and installed in Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984, as a result of the signing of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, this training center has a tenebrous history of military training of confessed criminals, such as the assassins of Bishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, among other coup plotters, and with the participation of its graduates in counterinsurgency campaigns throughout Latin America, among them, the one that began on January 1, 1994, on the occasion of the rebellion of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN).
Wood’s revelations about the courses of this unique school: counterinsurgency, counterintelligence, military intelligence, irregular warfare, jungle operations, from the 1960s to 2000, and the number of Mexican graduates, are very important to fully understand the characteristics of the conflict in Chiapas since the 1994 rebellion, and for a balance of this political-military confrontation 31 years after it began.
Also, the text helps to understand the current process of militarization-militarism (uniformed people), and the territorial recolonization that makes up the militarized-criminal accumulation, which carries inherent infinite forms of violence against people and society, which directly and particularly attacks women, with the rising practice of femicides. But, also, against population groups exposed by the criminal economy, such as children, adolescents, migrants and workers in the countryside and in the city.
A topic of special importance that Wood exposes is the phenomenon of paramilitarism and its use in the counterinsurgency strategies of U.S. imperialism. Cases are presented, such as that of General Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro, who received military training in the United States and became involved in the so-called dirty war, among other high-ranking officers who studied in that country.
By the way, on April 23, two days after the 110th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Veracruz, the full Senate approved the ruling by which “the Federal Executive is authorized to allow the entry of U.S. Army military personnel into Mexican territory, in order for them to participate in the training activity known as Joint Combined Exercise Training”. Foreign sorrow.
We invite you to read this important work by Darrin Wood, which undoubtedly contributes to the strengthening of the critical thinking which the Mayan Zapatistas repeatedly call for.
Original text by Gilberto López y Rivas published in La Jornada on May 30th, 2025.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.