The Pentagon has revealed that seven of the Colombian ex-soldiers accused of helping kill Haitian President Jovenel Moise received training from the US while in Colombian military service, including at an elite US Army program whose alumni are infamous for carrying out coups across Latin America.
“Thus far, we’ve identified seven individuals who were former members of the Colombian military that had received some sort of ... U.S. funded and provided education and training,” US Department of Defense spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Thursday.
The training included military leadership and professional development training, emergency medical training, helicopter maintenance, and seminars on counter-narcotics and counterterrorism tactics, according to an anonymous US official who spoke with Voice of America.
Kirby stressed that they “got nothing certainly related, at all, or that one could extrapolate, as leading to or encouraging of what happened in Haiti.”
However, Pentagon officials told Voice of America that some also took courses at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) at Fort Benning, Georgia. The institute is better known by its former name, the US Army School of the Americas.
