Lesley Gill has produced an unfortunately dilute book on a fascinating subject. The School of the Americas is a polemic of sorts that suffers from many things; not least of which is that its author doesn’t understand her role. The book has some highlights, and reasons to read it, but I would say you are better off reading a bunch of smaller articles that are only tangentially related to the School of the Americas than this book. The following paragraphs I will dig into exactitudes but the final paragraph will sum it all up and offer a recommendation on the book.
Gill never actually understands that it is her role to be a counterpoint to the US Military’s propaganda, to provide a cogent, well-researched and nigh-perfect narrative to the public. This book is full of half-truths and she will occasionally make extremely important points with absolutely no citation. She will also, and this is just time-wasting, state something a few pages before she uses evidence to back it up. Which is just making me read something twice, when once is quite enough. Authors like Christopher Hitchens can get away with this because of three reasons; (1)cachet, (2)the points they attend to are more philosophical than factual and (3) they tend to actually write so well as to deaden your more discerning self into believing their every pen-flick. Lesley Gill, however; would have done better if someone had more cautiously gone through her work.
For every group there are buzzwords, words that make individuals of that group cringe. One of those words for 21st century leftists is “neoliberalism,” for better or for worse this is true. Lesley Gill first has no real understanding of economics and secondly no understanding of precisely what “neoliberalism” means. In attempting to breakdown the role of the US Military’s role influence within Latin America in the US’s huge cultural-economic-military hegemony an understanding of economics, while not being a prerequisite is not a bad start. So, for instance, the US is state-capitalist while attempting to impose neoliberalism. That is, the US govt helps American corporations while attempting to make other nations not help their own. Gill has no understanding of this, although she occasionally gives evidence from others on this point.
Some of the ethnographic information that Gill lays down is actually interesting, and occasionally she will also drop down the type of perfect quote one hopes to see.
Would I recommend this book to a friend? No. Simply put; this book could lose 60 pages and it wouldn’t lose any information, cogency etc.. That is without even attending to some of the basic factual and structural problems previously mentioned. If you are doing a report on the School of the Americas this is not a bad place to start but be forewarned: it’s citations will be more helpful than the writing itself. ( )

Lesley Gill's The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas focuses on the role of the School of the Americas—a United States Army school that emphasizes inter-American cooperation and training—in molding and transforming Latin American militaries into extensions of United States power and policy. Gill contends that the School of the Americas trained Latin American militaries in such a way that it is at least partially responsible for the bloody counterinsurgencies, torture, and disappearances that have characterized many Latin American countries during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras.
According to Gill, the School played an integral role in modernizing Latin American militaries; in exchange, these militaries adhered to United States policies and desires concerning anti-communism, stability, and pro-American capitalism. The governments that these militaries served did not necessarily have to be democratic or even vaguely liberal. If these American supported governments and militaries do not respect human rights or due process of law, it does not threaten continued American support. Stability and defense of United States' interests trumps the maintenance of democracy.
Gill examines the relationship between American and Latin American governments and militaries through the lens of the School of the Americas, claiming that this "allows us to explore the creation of coercive, highly unequal relationships between members of the armies of the Americas and to consider how, under the tutelage of the United States, beliefs about professionalism, human rights, just wars, and subversion are crafted" (10-11). This narrow focus is important because "state security forces were responsible for the vast majority of massacres, murders, disappearances, and extrajudicial executions that characterized the twentieth-century Latin American 'dirty war,' when many countries suffered under the boot of military dictatorships" (11). For Gill, there is a clear connection between the training offered at the School of the Americas and the brutal tactics employed by these military forces. Gill attempts to demonstrate this connection by analyzing the courses offered by the School as well as interviewing various graduates from Bolivia, Colombia, and Honduras (17). These graduates discussed the opportunities offered by the School—access to American consumer culture, training, and the development of professional relationships with United States and other Latin American military officers (it "shaped militaries from across the Americas into proxy forces under U.S. control and bought their cooperation by providing trainees with opportunities to participate in a cosmopolitan, modern world and to bask in the refracted glow of empire;" and ensured dominance by "increasing collusions" between militaries [20]). The United States co-opted these militaries to ensure that they would continue to serve U.S. interests, even if to do so required oppressing their own people.
Gill's methodology is informed by her academic training as an anthropologist; The School of the Americas is grounded in interviews performed in four countries as well as a broad sampling of government and non-governmental organization reports and publications and secondary sources. While her methodology, as well as her usage of first-person narrative, in many parts of the book reveal her scholarship as not fully meeting the standards employed by historians, it rarely distracts the reader from her arguments.
It is apparent from the work itself, her usage of some leftist sources, and her reputation as a scholar-activist that her thesis, research, and book were less the result of impartial scholarly inquiry than finding evidence to defend her own preconceived notion of the School of the Americas as a training ground for assassins, torturers, and terrorists. Gill seems to assume that Latin American military officers were blank slates that the United States filled with nefarious plans for bloodthirsty repression. Her description of the role of the United States in the evolution of Latin American militaries is also somewhat unsatisfying. Her portrayal of United States policy is overwhelmingly monolithic; reading in between the lines one can almost conspiratorially blame a nameless "they" for the corruption of Latin American innocence.
Gill fails to convince the reader that a direct link can be made between the atrocities committed by certain individuals and those same individuals attendance at the School of the Americas. While the School may indeed share some of the blame for those infamous violent acts, to attribute sole blame on the School is to transform the responsible Latin American security officials responsible into American-controlled puppets. This perverse transformation denies them of their power and responsibility as independent actors on the historical stage. This subjectivity mars an otherwise cohesive, intelligent analysis.
Gill attempts to place her work within the larger context of Latin American history and Cold War American history. Fortunately she succeeds in this endeavor; only rarely is the reader confused as to how her analysis fits into the larger picture. It is unfortunate that Gill's presence in the work prevents it from being the impartial analysis that is needed on this important subject. ( )