The type of instruction the U.S. Army provided to Latin American officers attending its School of the Americas says a great deal about how the Cold War was waged in this hemisphere. But there is a lot more to be said and known.

Last month, the Pentagon released excerpts from the school's training manuals that recommended the use of murder, torture, extortion and "truth serum" and the terrorizing of families to control informants and enemies.

More than 60,000 military officers, policemen and intelligence personnel received training at the school, originally in Panama, now at Ft. Benning, Ga., since its founding in 1946.

The manuals were in use through 1991 and revised in 1992 when the objectionable instructions came to light. Last month, without explanation, the Pentagon released to the press the text of 21 questionable instructions that had been excised.

Presumably, the rest of the 1,000 pages of the six textbooks are considered acceptable. But a copy of an exam used by the school and obtained in 1994 by the Mexico City daily La Jornada leaves ample room for doubt. One question read as follows: "Suppose a battalion commander gives the order to 'deal with the prisoners'; should you: a) obey the order and execute the prisoners; b) disobey the order since its meaning is unclear; c) ask the battalion commander exactly what he meant; d) obey the order and subsequently denounce it at a higher echelon." The correct answer is none of the above, according to a spokesman for the school, but that option was not available to students.

The real issue, though, is how the United States won the Cold War in Latin America. For years, leftists and others critical of the United States behavior in Latin America charged Washington with nearly every misdeed under the sun. Destabilization, subversion, torture, intervention, and manipulation through propaganda and disinformation were trotted out as evidence of the intrinsic evil of the Colossus of the North. Its defenders, in both the southern and the northern halves of the hemisphere, retorted that the accusations were false, a figment of left-wing conspiracy theories. Or they argued that you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs: Defeating the Soviet Union and international communism in this hemisphere meant having some strange and unpleasant bedfellows, as well as having to resort to some of the unsavory tactics of the enemy. Whatever the case, it was virtually impossible to ascertain exactly what was going on, since those who knew would not talk and those who talked mostly did not know.

But the Cold War is over, the archives in Moscow and Berlin and Prague have been opened, and it is certainly time to begin the process of opening them in Washington. The main cases are obvious: the CIA-sponsored overthrow of the government of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954; the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose, directed at the government of Fidel Castro during the 1960s; the military coup in Brazil against President Joao Goulart in 1964; the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965; the destabilization and overthrow of the government of President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970-73; the dirty wars and military coups in Argentina and Uruguay in the early and mid-1970s; the counterinsurgency wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s; the bailouts of authoritarian PRI governments in Mexico in 1976, 1982, 1988 and 1995.

In some of these cases, investigations have already been held, but the executive branch has always resisted, and much of the documentation and possible testimony has not even been collected or is still classified. The CIA, through the Center for the Study of Intelligence, had pledged to make available last year all documents pertaining to Guatemala in 1954 and to the Bay of Pigs; we are still waiting. Requests made of the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act regarding the life, travels and death of Che Guevara, for example, have been met with blanket, categorical and unappealable rejections.

There really is no valid reason for the past to remain veiled. Some instances of U.S. misdeeds undoubtedly will be confirmed by full disclosure and careful scrutiny; others obviously will be disproved. There are hardly any "sources" left to protect -- from whom? -- nor are there battles yet to be won (Cuba, perhaps, excepted). But other than the perverse pleasure of denying its critics some degree of satisfaction, it is difficult to imagine what rationale the current government of the United States has for hiding.

SOURCE: This excerpt was derived from the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition, 8 October, 1996, and is reprinted here in the national interest of the American people. Jorge Castaneda is a political scientist and writer in Mexico City.