In 1980, Bolivia’s military seized power in what became known as the “Cocaine Coup.” The regime’s enforcer was a School or the Americas graduate. His torture adviser was Klaus Barbie — the Nazi “Butcher of Lyon” — whom US intelligence had quietly smuggled to South America decades earlier.
For over fifty years, the United States operated a training school in Latin America that produced 80,000 graduates. Among them: presidents, dictators, torturers, and death squad leaders. The school’s name was the School of the Americas — its curriculum was counterinsurgency, interrogation, and “neutralisation.”
The SOA helped unleash death and suffering across South and Central America. Although many would rather brush this story under the rug, few would really dispute its barbaric reality.
This series of short films asks: but what if the catastrophes of history were not mistakes at all?