Still fighting to close Army's school - Fr. Roy Bourgeois; School of the Americas, Fort Benning, GA

National Catholic Reporter, March 21, 1997 by Patty McCarty

Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois, a leader in the six-year fight to close the School of the Americas, points to editorials in major newspapers as signs that opposition to the school is growing.

Operated by the .S. Army at Fort Benning, Ga., the school trains military oficers for Latin American countries. Its graduates include some of the most brutal military leaders in Latin America, Bourgeois said.

Speaking in Kansas City, Mo., Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch, said the school teaches commando operations, counterinsurgency and interrogation techniques and psychological warfare.

As long as the Pentagon keeps the school open, "we have a tremendous opportunity to educate" about its evils, Bourgeois said. "It's a tremendous symbol -- bringing together all these soldiers on U.S. soil, taking our tax money to run it, and it's connected to all of these massacres and oppression in Latin America."

This year the school is training 1,500 soldiers from 16 Latin America countries. For officers trained at the school, the enemy is "who it's always been," Bourgeois said -- "the poor and those who work with them."

The Pentagon is fighting to keep the school, Bourgeois said. "It's about keeping the military entrenched, keeping it in power. If you control Latin America's military, you control that system and its people."

School of the Americas gradates have been implicated in major human and civil rights violations in Guatemala, Bolivia, Honduras, Haiti, Columbia and Peru, he said. In El Salvador, SOA graduates were involved in the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the rape and murder of four U.S. church women, the masacre of 900 civilians at El Mazote and the murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter.

Bourgeois predicted that policy makers will close the school when they see it as "bringing too much shame and moral outrage."

Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II, D-Mass., has introduced Bill H.R. 611 calling for the school's closing. Similar bills have been defeated.

Bourgeois urged his audience to encourage their pastors and bishops to speak out against the school. He called for letters to Congress and invited listeners to join a vigil and lobby action on the U.S. Capitol steps April 19-29.

"we who have a voice should speak for the voiceless," he said.

Bourgeois' talk at St. Peter's Parish in Kansas City was sponsored by the Office for Peace and Justice of the Kansas City-ST. Joseph diocese and by the Sisters of Mercy.

A navy veteran who served in Vietnam and former MAryknoll missioner in Bolivia, Bourgeois has served three prison sentences for trespassing at the fort to call attention to the school.

Bourgeois' organization, SOA Watch, based in Columbus, Ga., recently opened a Washington office.

Another development that fuels Bourgeois' hopes is the publication of School of Assassins (Orbis), a 112-page book by JAck Nelson-Pallmeyer that argues for closing the school.

"This is the book we've been waiting for!" Bourgeois said.