“Why do you stand they were asked, and Why do you walk?
Because of the children, they said, and because of the heart, and because of the bread.
Because the cause is the heart’s beat and the children born and the risen bread.”
-Jesuit Father Dan Berrigan
For almost 20 years, Father Roy Bourgeois, a former Marine officer with service in Vietnam, a recipient of the purple heart and a Maryknoll priest since 1972, has been a presence outside the gates of the United States Army base at Fort Benning, Georgia. In 1990, he founded the School of the Americas’ Watch, an organization that works to document the human rights abuses perpetrated in Latin American countries by graduates of the School of the Americas, a school which has gone through many name changes.
In 1946, President Harry Truman established a military training school in Panama to protect American interests, economically and militarily. It was named The Latin American Ground School. In 1949, it was renamed the US Army Caribbean School and spread to more Central and Latin American countries. The change to the School of the Americas came in 1963 when it moved to Fort Benning, Georgia. At this point the school seemed to become more aggressive in its techniques of teaching counter-insurgency. The School of the Americas officially closed in December of 2000, re-opening in January 2001 as The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
Whatever name given, the United States Army sponsored school, paid by US tax dollars, is for the training of foreign military in the Latin and Central American countries. Since these countries have not been invaded during these years by foreign powers, their military is used within their own countries to quell civil disturbance or to discourage any uprisings. The history of human rights abuses by the governments of many of these countries is long and well documented by the United Nations. The military is the arm of the oppressors in many cases.
On November 16, 1989 six Jesuits and two women were brutally slain in El Salvador. Nineteen of the 27 soldiers involved in the murders were graduates of the School of the Americas. The 1983 Las Hojas Massacre in Central America, was laid at the foot of Col. Cid Diaz by the OAS Commission on Human Rights in 1992. The State Department put him on the list of human rights’ abusers; yet, he attended the School in 2003.
In 1996, the Pentagon admitted that seven classroom manuals which taught torture methods were used from 1982 to 1991. They said using them was a mistake, one which apparently has been repeated, with or without written manuals, in US military prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.
Within the past few years, some South and Central American countries have withdrawn from the School: Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay and Costa Rica. Repeated efforts to have Congress dismantle the school have failed by narrow margins. The work at every level of prayer, protest and lobbying continues.
More than 15,000 people, the majority of them young students, will gather again on November 16-18 to give voice to a cry for justice, a plea for peace. Thousands will gather on Saturday evening for Eucharist. Sunday morning the ranks will swell for the silent funeral procession of the reading of the names of the victims of soldiers trained on American soil. It is a collective prayer for the end of violence, one which has been repeated at the same site for 20 years.
Why keep at it? Because Jesus Christ rose from the death of violence to a new life of reconciliation for all people. Because Jesus Christ told us to love our enemies as well as our friends. Because Jesus Christ is being crucified again and again in the poor who have no voice. As followers of this Christ, we become his hands that reach out, his feet that march and his voice that speaks for the voiceless.
