Mark Souder: “One thing that has not been pointed out enough is this training center is the only one where it teaches in Spanish. Our…”

“One thing that has not been pointed out enough is this training center is the only one where it teaches in Spanish. Our other courses around the country reach the other echelons of leadership. This has tried to take our message of training, as well as human rights training, down to the lower levels of the military, to spread it through newly-democratic countries in Spanish, with instructors from those countries to build that credibility. We also lost some message here as to why we have this school. In Colombia, yesterday's Los Angeles Times: Elvia Cortes had a bomb put around her neck and was told that it would explode the next day. It did. She is dead. The person who attempted to remove this bomb had his hands blown off and he bled to death in a helicopter. Because of our drug crisis and the amount of drugs we are purchasing in this country, we have threatened democracies throughout the world. We need to teach human rights, but we also need to work with those militaries and those democratic governments to do what they did in Guatemala, which is, graduates of the School of the Americas went after another graduate because the behavior he exhibited was intolerable to us. So I praise this school for the advances they have allowed throughout the world.”