The Mission...Roy Bourgeois

Roy Bourgeois isn’t a celebrity, but this humble Catholic priest makes those at the Pentagon quake in fear.
Armed with words, he led the fight to shut down the highly controversial School of the Americas. For him it was personal. Several of his friends were murdered in the 1980s by El Salvadoran soldiers who were graduates of the school. In 1990, he formed SOA Watch with a mission to close it down forever.
Defenders of the school have always contended that the school couldn’t be held responsible for what their graduates do. Its intent was a good one—to teach military professionalism to soldiers working in South and Central America. But in 1998, news articles revealed that the school’s manuals, used from 1982 to 1991, advocated torture and execution. Graduates include many famous dictators, including Manuel Noriega.
Saddled with the nickname of School of Assassins and a terrible public image, the U.S. Army “closed” the school in 2001. But some say it was simply renamed to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Only about 700 Latin American soldiers attend to learn combat skills, but it costs taxpayers more than $10 million each year (Bourgeois contends it’s really twice that amount). The school now makes it a point to teach human rights.
But Bourgeois (pronounced Booj-wa) is far from convinced. SOA Watch is alive and well with five staffers in Washington D.C. It leads a peaceful protest at the school each November with coffins and crosses. Last November, nearly 20,000 people protested and the same number is expected again this year.
Bourgeois, also the producer of several documentaries, will speak in Traverse City next week (details below). Here’s what Bourgeois, 68, had to say in a phone interview last week. He has a “jambalaya” accent, picked up from his years of foreign travel.

NE: You served four years as a naval officer in Vietnam and received a Purple Heart. How did that experience shape you?
Bourgeois: I was a patriotic young man from the bayous of Louisiana, and I just believed in the lies of our leaders -- the noble cause to stop the spread of communism. I was turned around in my beliefs gradually by the violence, the death of a lot of kids, a couple of friends; it just didn’t make sense.
… Through a priest I met there, I learned about the Maryknoll order and how their lives revolved around peacemaking, healing, serving the poor, and that’s what I was looking for. I was trying to recapture my hope, this joy I had in my life before I went to Vietnam. So I entered the Maryknoll (Catholic) community.

NE:What happened next?
Bourgeois: Six years later, I was ordained a Catholic priest and sent to Bolivia, where I got educated by the poor. The majority of the people in Bolivia struggle for survival. They see their children die, many before the age of four or five.
I was happy working with the local people, but there was a dictator - Hugo Banzer, who came to power through a violent coup. The repression intensified and I formed a human rights group. I started to visit political prisoners, many who were being tortured, and I learned that my country was giving millions of dollars to the Bolivian military, although it was common knowledge they were using the tactics of torture.

NE: So I understand that you complained to members of Congress, returned to Bolivia, and got kicked out.
Bourgeois: That’s right. So then my attention turned to El Salvador. It was March of 1980 and Bishop Oscar Romero was assassinated. And then in December of that same year, four church women from our country were murdered -- two of them were Maryknoll sisters who were good friends of mine. They were raped and killed by the Salvadoran military.
We learned that 525 soldiers had gone to Fort Benning, Georgia (a military base) to begin training in combat at the School of Americas. So I went there with a couple of friends to protest. We dressed as high-ranking army officers. We got saluted, we went way up into the woods where the Salvadorans were housed. The three of us scaled this tall pine tree and waited. We had with us a powerful boom box with a tape player and the last sermon that Bishop Romero gave in the cathedral before he was assassinated. He had made a plea to the military to stop the killing. When the lights went out, we said, “Bishop Romero, this is for you, brother!” We turned on the tape, and his voice just boomed in the barracks.

NE: Did they arrest you?
Bourgeois: Yes, I went to prison for one and a half years. But what we learned is they could send us to prison, but they couldn’t silence us.

NE:You did a lot of media interviews?
Bourgeois: Yes, many, and I met with peace activists. But our military aid simply increased. The bloodshed continued. On Nov. 16, 1989, the military went after these Jesuit priests at their university in San Salvador. They were upset with the Jesuits because they were educating the world about the slaughter of innocents in el Salvador and the complicity of the United States. Our country was giving guns and training to those who were doing the killing. So they entered the Jesuit University after midnight, and at close range massacred these six Jesuits, most of them scholars. They also killed a young mother and her teenage daughter.
After the massacre we went to a cathedral, and it really helped to mobilize thousands of people in the Twin Cities. A group of us fasted on water, and at the closing of the fast on the 19th day, the governor was there; lots of leaders from the different communities. There were 3,000 who filled the cathedral. It was shortly thereafter that a congressional task force went to El Salvador to investigate the massacre.
They returned and said those responsible for the killing were trained at the School of the Americas. That’s when I decided to leave my work in Minnesota and come to Fort Benning. I moved into this little apartment, and this became our SOA Watch -- just down the road was the school where these soldiers had trained.
I started calling friends. We had 10 of us, who gathered at the main gate. We camped out. We had a 35-day water only fast. It’s the toughest thing I’ve ever been through. It was our first action to expose this issue.

NE: But why—with the reforms at the school—are you still making an issue
of this?
Bourgeois: When they changed the name, the Pentagon said we are putting the past behind us. They didn’t deny their graduates raped and killed the nuns, or murdered Bishop Oscar Romero, the Jesuits, and many other atrocities. Our organization and Amnesty International say there has to be acknowledgment of wrongdoing before there is reconciliation. To say we just want to move on, it doesn’t work that way. It would be similar to a serial killer in prison, saying, “Look, I changed my name, I’m a new person, and I never want to answer for my crimes.”

NE:You told me earlier that you’re taking a new approach, meeting with leaders of these countries and persuading them to essentially boycott the school.
Bourgeois: That’s right. If there are no students, there’s no school. Venezuela has pulled their troops. Uruguay and Argentina made a decision to withdraw their troops. Bolivia assured us they would withdraw gradually. … We also have a bill in Congress. And we educate. Most people know so little about other cultures and their history, and that ignorance is getting us in big trouble, especially in Iraq and the Middle East.

NE:What is it that you think people don’t know?
Bourgeois: Our foreign policy is rooted in economic interests. Our support in Latin America was to help protect corporations there. I went with a delegation to Iraq just before the invasion, and we met with many college students there. One said that if the principal export were broccoli, we‘d have no interest in Iraq.

NE: How did you feel on the fifth anniversary of 9/11?
Bourgeois: Very sad. President Bush easily exploited the fear from 9/11 as a reason to invade Iraq. These macho-talking politicians like Bush and Cheney say we have to be strong and stay the course, yet they’ve never been to war, nor will they go to this one, nor will their sons and daughters. If we’re going to follow the so-called wisdom of Bush, it’s death, and there’s no hope.

NE: But you have to agree that terrorists and Islamic extremists do exist. They must be dealt with.
Bourgeois: It’s true, there is this evil. The Taliban who kills kids, the extremists who believe they’re going to go to paradise as a martyr. It’s evil, it’s wrong, it’s ignorance. But I find no hope at all with this aggressiveness with Bush. The first practical thing we could do is to bring the troops home. And then we need to start talking about how we can build relationships.

NE: You’re a Catholic priest; how do you feel about the terrorists, as well as President Bush, saying that they listened to God before going to war?
Bourgeois: This man Jesus, he said to love our enemies, that the sword is not the way. But that’s too hard to understand. The Catholic bishops have never seen a war they couldn’t justify. In America, most bishops are very silent on Iraq. It’s a scandal.

NE: Won’t you get fired for saying this?
Bourgeois: I was scolded when I was in the Vatican and called for the ordination of women on a live radio station in Rome. But it takes a little more than that to get a priest fired.

NE: Have you ever been back to Vietnam?
Bourgeois: Yes, two years ago. I saw a capitalist society, everybody living in peace, and thought, why did 58,000 soldiers, not to mention over one million Vietnamese, die over this bogeyman of the spread of communism? There was no spread of communism. It was madness.

Father Bourgeois will speak twice on Thursday, September 21: at 4 p.m. at the Leland Public Library and at 7 p.m. at Northwestern Michigan College (Scholars Hall, Room 109). The event is free, no rsvp required. Mideast: Just Peace sponsored the event; several groups and churches are cosponsors. View On Our Website