Disturbing the Peace: The Story of Father Roy Bourgeois and the Movement to Close the School of the Americas

Catholic New Times, Dec 18, 2005

Disturbing the Peace: The Story of Father Roy Bourgeois and the Movement to Close the School of the Americas by James Hodge and Linda Cooper, Maryknoll, N.Y. Orbis Books, 2004, 243 pp.

This is a marvelous, hopeful story of a Louisiana Cajun good old boy who went from being a typical flag- waving, unthinking dope to a serious gospel practitioner confronting his own country in its shocking betrayal of democratic principles in. Latin America.

After three years of college at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and a broken engagement, Roy Bourgeois shocked his family by entering the seminary. His first stab at priesthood failed to take and Bourgeois, restless and in search of adventure joined the military. In Vietnam, he was knocked off course by finding the face of God in the faces of war orphans. It was a French Canadian Redemptorist missionary, Lucien Olivier, who became his role model. By 1966, Bourgeois was still a "hawk" in a Maryknoll seminary, and despite the presence of the orphans, had yet to be converted to non-violence. As a seminarian, he tried to have Dan Berrigan barred from speaking. Ordained in 1972 and sent to Bolivia, Bourgeois became radicalized by the poor.

The rest of the book traces Bourgeois's dogged and persistent connection of the dots vis a vis U.S. policy in Latin America and its training of national armies to subvert domestic resistance. Neither vilification or jail deterred Bourgeois. As the resistance grew, a glaring international spotlight shone on the School of Americas (also called the School of Assassins, SOA) in Fort Benning, Ga. Again and again he showed how SOA grads did the dirty work for their colonial masters, the United States of America. Control and exploitation, not the professed "democracy," drove U.S. policy in country after country. Dictators backed by a fierce National Guard kept order, crashed dissent and "maintained stability." Some of the most notorious thugs in Latin America received their cruel training there: Rios Montt the butcher of Guatemala, Gustavo Alvarez Martinez (Honduras), Leopold Galtieri (Argentina) and the notorious Roberto D'Aubuisson, (El Salvador) the pathological killer of Oscar Romero. Working with brave Congress people like Joe Moakley and Joseph Kennedy, Bourgeois exposed the dirty little secret of U.S. foreign policy.

Today, despite the SOA changing its name, the policies continue and thousands of Americans and Canadians head south every November to say, "no," all because of a brave priest called Roy Bourgeois.