To a priest, Army school is the enemy
By Richard Jones INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
COLUMBUS, Ga. -- Squinting into the midday sun, the Rev. Ray Bourgeois -- Catholic missionary, Vietnam
veteran and, until recently, federal prison inmate
No. 83274-020 -- smiled wanly as he passed the homemade white crucifixes that had been hammered into earth outside his door, transforming his front lawn into an ad hoc graveyard for otherwise anonymous souls.
Jaime Carvajal, 25. Colombia.
Marcia Ramos, 40. El Salvador.
Israel Rodriguez Rubio. Honduras.
And on and on, eventually expected to number into the hundreds, each one representing a victim of human rights abuses in Central and South America; each one carried by demonstrators protesting the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, the 52-year-old training facility for Latin American soldiers here
that many, including Father Bourgeois, blame for promoting a campaign of torture and murder.
With a grassroots effort gone global, Father Bourgeois has led annual demonstrations outside Fort Benning
against the SOA, whose alumni include former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and Ernesto Baeza Michelsen, former head of a branch of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's police force.
SOA officials say that Father Bourgeois and other opponents of the school are exaggerating the scope
of the problem; that the misdeeds of a few former students should not taint the entire school. Furthermore, they argue that the school is essential to help promote emerging democracies in Latin America.
Critics -- some of whom have labeled the SOA "School of Assassins" -- maintain that teaching soldiers to indiscriminately kill and maim is the primary focus of the curriculum.
"You don't learn democracy down the barrel of a gun," said Father Bourgeois, who in September finished a
six-month sentence in federal prison for trespassing during last year's protest of the SOA.
Yesterday, about 2,000 people, including actor Martin Sheen, were briefly taken into custody during the protest. Unlike past demonstrations, people who defied orders and walked onto Fort Benning property, where the school has been housed since 1984, were not charged with trespassing. Instead, they were loaded onto buses, driven to a park about a mile away and released.
Even before this weekend's demonstration, the push
to close the SOA was given new momentum this fall after a bill that would have closed the school missed passage in Congress by a dozen votes.
Motivated by the intense scrutiny focused on the school in recent years, SOA officials have stepped
up an aggressive public relations campaign. School officials said they have made several changes, including toughening admissions policies.
"There's no doubt that we've had students who should have shown up on the radar screen and should not have had the benefit of U.S. Army training," said Col. Glenn R. Weidner, commandant of the school.
"We recognize that some graduates have let our program down," Weidner said. "We're promoting the right message [about the importance of human rights], but you can't guarantee that the guy who gets the right message here is going to take it outside."
Weidner said that in the 52-year history of the school, which opened in 1946 in Panama, more than 59,000 students had graduated. About 300 of them have been cited by human-rights observers.
"That's a very small percentage," Weidner said. "The vast majority of the 59,000 graduates who are out there are just doing their jobs."
Besides the tougher screening process, Weidner said, the Army also had begun more classes to teach soldiers about human rights.
"Window dressing," Father Bourgeois said. "This school is about men with guns. Period."
Father Bourgeois also sniffs at the suggestion that Latin American soldiers are getting a firsthand lesson in democracy by attending the school.
"If they were serious about teaching democracy, they would send these soldiers to American colleges and universities," said Father Bourgeois,
founder of the School of the Americas Watch, which is housed in his $175-a-month apartment not 50 yards from Fort Benning's main gate.
Father Bourgeois, 59, who volunteered for Navy service in Vietnam before becoming a priest, has been a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy since the early 1970s. A recipient of the Purple Heart during his service, Father Bourgeois later returned it to protest U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. He estimates that, all told, he's served about four years in prison for various causes.
He lives off a stipend from his Maryknoll order and donations to SOA Watch.
After working as a missionary in La Paz, Bolivia, Father Bourgeois began protesting the school in the 1980s and founded SOA Watch in 1989. Three Maryknoll nuns and a laywoman, including two of his close friends, had been raped and murdered in El Salvador in 1980. According to U.N. reports, SOA graduates were involved in the slayings and the resulting cover-up.
Using Freedom of Information Act requests to access military documents and hunger strikes to raise media awareness, Father Bourgeois began attracting a significant following. Interest
in the SOA increased even more when the Pentagon admitted in 1996 that some SOA manuals had, for example, suggested that torture be used as an interrogation tool.
Father Bourgeois' efforts attracted the attention of Linda Panetta, a Philadelphian who while studying at Cabrini College spent five months in Nicaragua and Guatemala researching human rights abuses.
There, she said, she saw "people . . . being snatched off the streets while playing soccer and never being heard from again, people arrested on trumped-up drug charges."
"What I found just really horrified me, and I realized the suffering I was witnessing in Central America had a focal point in the training at the school," she said.
Gerry Lee worked as a missionary in South America for 10 years, and the University City resident remembers hearing the same question repeatedly: "Why does your government do this to us?"
"Knowing that the U.S. government was supporting some of these oppressive regimes . . . it really makes you feel ashamed," he said.
©1998 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.