Nicaragua in WHINSEC

Mike Allison notes that Daniel Ortega announced Nicaragua would no longer send soldiers to WHINSEC. He made fiery comments that would've been appropriate in the 1980s but make quite a lot less sense now. I also wondered why it took him three years in the job to suddenly come to this realization.

I've noted this before, but the WHINSEC debate suffers from an almost total lack of recent analysis. As the School of the Americas, there was concrete evidence of anti-Marxist indoctrination that bordered on hysteria and which gave clear signals to governments and militaries that human rights abuses were acceptable byproducts of an existential fight.

That's no longer the case, but even studies like Lesley Gill's tend to keep looking back rather than going in-depth on what the school does now. Indeed, having just lectured to Latin American military officers, I can tell you that some classes in U.S. schools involve having American scholars go in depth about the threats that the military can pose to democracy in the region. So what classes are soldiers taking there, and what are they being taught?

There could well be good reasons to close WHINSEC, but we need more than just what happened there decades ago.