IN the early hours of November 16, 1989, a housekeeper named Lucía Cerna was startled awake by a violent commotion outside her window.

"I heard shooting, shooting at lamps, and walls, and windows," she later recalled. "I heard doors kicked, and things being thrown."

16 Crowds of people protest against The US Army School of the Americas Credit: AP:Associated Press

16 Actor Martin Sheen even had his face spattered with mock blood to protest the school Credit: AP:Associated Press

Her house was close to El Salvador’s Central American University, where - as Lucia listened in horror - six sleeping Jesuit priests who were working with the impoverished were murdered.

Their cook Elba Ramos and her sixteen-year-old daughter Celina were also found slaughtered.

The massacre, undertaken by El Salvadora soldiers at the height of the country’s civil war, sent shockwaves across the world – but what few knew at the time was that most of those soldiers were graduates of a secretive US military training school.

It was called The US Army School of the Americas, but for those who knew of its work, it was known by another label: the school for assassins.

16 Sixteen-year-old Celina Ramos was killed by Salvadoran soldiers in a massacre by troops linked to the school

16 A total of six priests as well as Celina's mum, cook Elba Ramos, were also killed

'Lessons in torture, blackmail and massacres'

On paper, it was merely a combat training institution aiding Latin American military regimes to police domestic uprisings.

But, as told on Netflix's Narcos: Mexico, it was actually a clandestine program that taught cooperative governments how to control civilian populations through torture, extortion, blackmail and massacres.

"If you go through any human rights reports about any country in Latin America then pretty much anyone who is named as an assassin, a dictator or torturer is likely to have passed through the school," Lesley Gill, an academic and author of The School for the Americas, tells Sun Online.

Its ‘graduates’ included General Leopoldo Galtieri, who led the military junta in Argentina during the country’s ‘Dirty War’ that saw 30,000 people "disappear".

Panama's drug-dealing dictator Manuel Noriega, and Roberto D'Aubuisson, who organized many of El Salvador's death squads, are also notorious alumni.

16 Protesters display crosses with the names of Latin American countries where the School of Americas allegedly operated Credit: AP:Associated Press

16 Portrait of a Salvadoran Army unit at a military base Credit: Getty Images - Getty

16 Author Lesley Gill has lifted the lid on the school in her book Credit: YouTube

Terrified of communism

The School of the Americas first started in Panama in the wake of the Second World War. Its stated aims were improving ties with Latin American military regimes.

In reality, Gill explains, it already had an agenda.

"It wanted to protect the Western hemisphere from the perceived threat of communism, although it had a very wide definition for communism," she says.

"Basically, it was any critic of the status quo."

It became a centre for training Latin American regimes to act as, effectively, a domestic police force

At first though, the organisation attracted very little interest, but that all changed after the Cuban communist revolution in the 1950s.

"Suddenly all this money from the US went into military training - and that’s when the SOA really came into its own," says Gill.

"It became a centre for training Latin American regimes to act as, effectively, a domestic police force."

Over the decades soldiers and high-ranking military officials from Columbia and Bolivia attended the school, while in the seventies civil-war ravaged South American countries like El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala were also sending trainees there.

"It depended on where the hotspots were and relations between the government of the regime and the US at any given time," says Gill.

16 Soldiers training in Salvador in 1984 Credit: Rex Features

16 People look at photographs of the murdered Jesuit priests on the 15th anniversary of their death Credit: AP:Associated Press

Death squad general

The school's dark influence has been linked to countless atrocities.

In 1981, the El Salvadoran army wiped out the village of El Mozote, killing 800 civilians — raping, torturing, and beating them in the process.

It was cited as a war crime by the UN, but according to journalist Abby Martin, of the 12 officers mentioned in its report, 10 were SOA graduates.

Gill recalls interviewing a retired Columbian general who had been implicated in a number of human rights violations and who had attended a special year-long officers course at the SOA.

"He was a very shady character who been accused of torturing a woman who subsequently disappeared," she says.

"Lots of people remembered him from the time when there was this emergence of death squads.

16 Men line up in the Fourth Division at Fort Benning Credit: AP:Associated Press

The rise of communism in the '50s and '60s In 1953, Cuba remained under the military dictatorship of President Fulgencio Batista. While Batista was extremely unpopular with the Cuban people, he had close political ties with the US. In a push for revolution, Fidel Castro organised an armed revolt against Batista in July of that year - now known as the start of The Cuban Revolution. However, an initial attempt to take over a military garrison failed and he was jailed. When he was released two years later he went to Mexico with his brother Raul and met up with famed revolutionary Ché Guevara. Fidel then returned to Cuba and successfully led an uprising against Bastia, who was ousted on December 31, 1958. Cuba was then transformed into a communist state and the free press and elections were banned. Human rights abuses have characterised the regime. Castro was keen to remove the hold that US business has over Cuba's economy at the time, and started a program of nationalisation - but it only served to drive a wedge between the US and Cuba at the time. In 1962, he invited Russian nuclear missiles to be based on Cuba, just 90 miles from the hated US. Worldwide tensions soared as President John F Kennedy imposed a naval blockade of Cuba until Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev took back the nukes after a 13-day stand-off. A long lasting trade embargo followed and the economy became stagnant. By 1964 Castro was holding 15,000 political prisoners and hundreds of thousands of Cubans had fled. Cuba and the United States maintained a difficult relationship well into the first decade of the 21st century.

"He didn’t admit to anything but he talked about how he had to hit the communists hard - although the people he was calling communists were peasant organisations protesting the loss of their lands or trade unions pushing for better wages.

"But in his eyes everyone who didn’t keep their mouths shut was a communist."

'Who’s Who of terrible human rights abusers'

By 1984 the SOA had been relocated to Fort Benning near Columbus in Georgia, already the site of a huge military base.

Yet the exact nature of its work remained largely unknown to the wider world, until a small group of American priests working in South America took to the streets.

Roy Bourgeois, the group's spokesperson, had heard rumours that there was a US military base where Latin American soldiers were being taught to infiltrate civilian organisations and torture dissidents.

Locating the headquarters, he came across a firing range where troops were firing at targets - and he was reminded of the slaughtered Jesuit priests.

"The silhouettes were torn apart," Bourgeois said. "As I listened to the gunfire, I thought about how few Americans know what's going on here. I realised this is where I belonged."

He set up a protest group called SOA Watch, and by the nineties members of the group put in a freedom of information request to the American Government about the nature of the SOA’s work and its graduates.

16 Roy Bourgeois, foreground centre, carries a cross as he leads the annual demonstration against the Army School of the Americas Credit: AP:Associated Press

16 Demonstrators raise signs and crosses to honour alleged victims of human rights abuses in Latin America during a demonstration at Fort Benning Credit: AP:Associated Press

"And what we got was this list of students which read like a Who’s Who of the most terrible human rights abusers in the hemisphere," says Gill.

Meanwhile the SOA’s training manuals proved that US taxpayer money had been used to teach Latin American state forces how to torture and repress civilian populations.

"It pretty much laid out the things that people were being taught," says Gill.

"They talked about blackmail, coercion of relatives, neutralising subjects and disappearing people - all these illegal and inappropriate means."

The documents stunned the American public, with calls for it to be closed immediately.

Famous faces like actor Martin Sheen joined protests in the street, where outraged civilians held crosses and doused themselves in fake blood.

16 Panama's drug-dealing dictator, Manuel Noriega was linked Credit: Corbis - Getty

16 Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega salutes troops Credit: EPA

16 Roberto D'Aubuisson (centre), and other candidates form his ultra-right ARENA party

"Of course, the government denied it. They maintained the School of the Americas was nothing more than an education facility, and that it couldn’t be responsible for those officers who may have attended the school briefly and then gone on to commit human rights abuses," says Gill.



Smoke and mirrors

The damage had been done: amid ongoing protests the school was closed in 2001 and replaced instead by an organisation called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation run by the Defence Department rather than the Army.

Yet the move did little to quell the concerns of human rights campaigners, who say it’s merely a case of smoke and mirrors.

"It’s like taking a bottle of poison and labelling it penicillin," as Roy Bourgeois put it. "It’s still deadly."

16 A crowd protesting a Fort Benning military school for Latin American soldiers Credit: AP:Associated Press

more in news HIDDEN PAIN We lost our loved ones to England's male suicide 'capital' - we need change NOW WAR ZONES Barber shop murders to female assassin... the real Top Boys of London DIRTY DAVE Inside MP's wife's memoir that claims Cameron wanted 'to give her one in a bush' Exclusive 'I CAN'T BREATHE' My helpless mum was shot by cops - her terrified plea echoed George Floyd GRIM TALLY How Dennis Nilsen's victims were strangled, drowned and left to rot in drains Comment LEO MCKINSTRY Shameful BBC can find millions for stars as the axe comes down on pensioners

Gill agrees that in reality little has changed: while today WHINSEC maintains that it simply sharpens the military skills of soldiers from participating countries, it continues to train Latin American security officers — including immigration officials policing the US borders with South America.

She says that while the attention of the world may have been drawn once more to the work of the SOA, it is far from the only military training academy with a question mark over its methods.

"It’s worth bearing in mind that the School for the Americas was just one node in a network of training schools," she adds.

"It’s seen as a uniquely eventful place – but it was just one place in this vast network of military training possibilities."