Every fall for the last four years, students at Sacred Heart High School have traveled to Fort Benning, Georgia, with thousands of others to protest and call for the closing of its "School of the Americas."
The school, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, has reportedly trained more than 70,000 military and police officers from Latin America and the United States since 1946 in torture, executions and other forms of coercion.
On January 9, the Maryknoll priest who first fasted and prayed at Fort Benning's front gate with friends in 1990, came to the all-girls' high school in Lincoln Heights.
"Our County's at war once again; our world is filled with a lot of violence, hunger, suffering," Father Roy Bourgeois told the late-morning Wednesday assembly of students. Draped across the auditorium's stage was a white sheet with black letters proclaiming, "Abriendo las Memorias" (Healing the Wounds).
"There's a school down in Georgia that we're hearing more about that trains these soldiers and members of the police from Latin America, Central America who have brought much suffering to their people. A question that we have to ask is, 'What are we to do?' But a more specific question is. 'What are we to do as people of faith?'
"I don't know how we can be people of faith without being a peacemaker, a healer without struggling for justice," he added with a slight southern drawl. "But I've got to be honest. It took me a long time to come to that."
The priest was born in 1938 and raised in the small town of Lutcher, Louisiana, where he said people didn't see themselves as peacemakers. He studied geology at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, dreaming of becoming rich in the oil fields. But with the Vietnam War raging, he felt it was his Catholic and patriotic duty to defend his country.
Awarded Purple Heart
So he joined the Navy and became an officer, serving first aboard a ship and then at a naval station in Europe before volunteering for Vietnam, where he was wounded and received the Purple Heart. "I lost my hope in Vietnam," he said, lowering his voice. "That's what war does - it kills hope."
But because death was so close, he also started taking his faith more seriously and began to really pray. "And what I learned was this," he recalled. "Our God does not bless war. Our God does not bless killing. Our God does not bless violence or discrimination or poverty."
When the young officer was discharged from the service, knowing only that he wanted to be a peacemaker, he entered the Maryknoll community, was ordained in 1972 and sent to Bolivia to do missionary work in a barrio on the outskirts of La Paz. He said the poor became his teachers, opening his eyes not only to their daily struggle, but also to the United States' foreign policy of shoring up dictators like General Hugo Banzar Suarez in Bolivia and other Latin American nations.
After five years in Bolivia, Father Bourgeois was arrested and deported for organizing the poor and documenting human rights abuses. It was around this time that Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated and four churchwomen were raped and murdered in El Salvador. Personally knowing the slain Maryknoll nuns, Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Father Bourgeois traveled to the war-torn country and saw first-hand the brutality of the U.S.-backed military towards their own people.
When he returned home, he couldn't "shut up" about the atrocities. Then he heard about the school at Fort Benning that had trained those responsible for these killings and others. So he and two friends went to Georgia, snuck onto the Army base, climbed a tall pine tree and with a boom box blasted the barracks where Salvadoran soldier students were being housed.
That got him 18 months in a federal prison.
After serving his sentence, Father Bourgeois returned to Fort Benning with a group of friends, renting an apartment right outside the main gate. Soon others wanted to join them, and SOA Watch was born in 1990 to inform the public, media and Congress about the classified school. That year, the annual protest began at the base, growing to more than 25,000 people last November.
Nonviolence, an eye-opener
Students at Sacred Heart High School seemed genuinely moved by Father Bourgeois' words. For nearly 40 minutes, they sat mostly motionless, eyes and ears fixed on the priest.
He was preceded by five of their classmates (Sarah Acosta, Valerie Medina, Ambar Lopez, Analissa Mejia and Elizabeth Acosta) who had traveled to Fort Benning and spoke of their experience, plus Tiel Rainelli, a 25-year-old community organizer from South Los Angeles, who had crossed the line at the Army base in November and faces prison time for her act of civil disobedience.
"What Father Roy said is actually very spiritual," said Chryseis Herrera, an 18-year-old senior, after the two-hour assembly. "Doing nonviolence is an eye-opener. Because the way I understand it, throughout history there's been violence to get your way. But nonviolence is pretty new. So it's very moving to see others like Gandhi and Martin Luther King - and Father Roy - as persons who want to go about changing one issue at a time through nonviolence."
Sophomore Tiffany Marquez said she was inspired after listening to the Maryknoll priest. "I really want to go to Fort Benning, and I would definitely cross the line," she said. "I think about that one quote that 'God doesn't bless war and killing.' I believe in that, too."
Another sophomore, Yessenia Rivas, said Father Bourgeois' words hit home because her mom was from El Salvador and had told her about seeing dead bodies in the street during the country's bloody civil war. Her mother also volunteered to stay with the body of Archbishop Romero in the cathedral during his wake.
"I have my own favorite quote from Father Roy," the 15-year-old declared. "It's the one about Army officials telling us that they're teaching democracy in the School of the Americas. But how do you teach democracy through the barrel of a gun?"
Torture as foreign policy
In a brief interview after his address, Father Bourgeois told The Tidings the major lesson from the U.S. Army's School of the Americas has been that torture isn't an aberration of U.S. policy. It was - and still is - U.S. policy.
He pointed out that Rep. Joseph Kennedy and the Washington Post in September 1996 had acquired manuals used in SOA courses advocating blackmail, torture, executions and other forms of coercion against insurgents. And even after the newspaper ran its front-page story, the government issued no apologies or acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Instead, officials went into damage-control mode, declaring there were only a few references to torture - and, besides, these brutal techniques weren't used anymore.
"It was like withdrawing faulty tires from GM trucks or something," the priest, who has spent more than four years in prison for acts of civil disobedience, observed. "They downplayed it. They didn't really acknowledge the seriousness of it."
When the degrading photos of naked prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq hit the news in early 2004, Father Bourgeois said reporters called him to ask if he thought this was an isolated event or part of a pattern of abuse and torture. It made him think of his own experience in Vietnam, hearing helicopter crews bragging about interrogating prisoners while hovering over the Mekong Delta. If one didn't answer a question fast enough, he would be thrown out to encourage the next prisoner to talk.
"Now you're reading about waterboarding in Iraq," he said. "It's not an aberration. It's not an isolated incident. It has been a component, a part of our foreign policy for many, many years and in many countries.
"Some people are shocked by this," he added. "But, of course, they're not going to advertise this on TV." |