In the beginning it was the cruel awakening of seeing friends die and strangers suffer in the jungles of Vietnam.

Then later in Bolivia it was watching people trying to survive poverty, working in sweatshops, being told their plight was the will of God.

And finally it was the murder of two friends, both women religious, killed in El Salvador by soldiers, some of whom had been trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga.

During a visit to Sacramento the first week of May, Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois left no doubt about what the sum total of those experiences had taught him.

“There is a mysterious grace working in our lives…a loving God trying to help us become more human,” he told students at Jesuit High School in Carmichael. “As people of conscience, we are called to be peacemakers in our world—healers, advocates of nonviolence.”

The priest, a recipient of the Purple Heart for service in Vietnam and a former missionary in Bolivia and El Salvador, is campaigning to close the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in Fort Benning, formerly known as the SOA.

Founded in Panama in 1946 and based at Fort Benning since 1984, the school has trained some 60,000 soldiers from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Father Bourgeois was drawn to work with the poor in El Salvador following the assassination in 1980 of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the murder of three U.S. nuns and a Catholic lay worker. He said he found there a microcosm of the political and social injustice prevalent throughout Latin America.

“Most of the land was in the hands of 14 families…workers’ children were dying young…and when the people spoke out, they were killed,” he said.

He discovered that many of the soldiers doing the killing were trained in counter insurgency techniques at the SOA.

“Who are the insurgents? They are the poor, those who work with the poor, the Jesuits, the church women, Archbishop Romero, human rights activists and health care workers,” he said.

Then in November 1989 came the murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in San Salvador. Investigations by the United Nations Truth Commission discovered three of the five soldiers responsible were trained at the SOA.

So began the priest’s crusade to close the military school by founding SOA Watch in 1990. To that end he travels internationally giving talks at universities, churches and schools regarding the impact of the military school’s training of officers on the poor of Latin America. Some of the SOA’s graduates have included officers accused of assassinations and human rights abuses.

The organization’s signature event is an annual mass protest at Fort Benning in November to commemorate the Jesuits murdered in San Salvador. Thousands of people turn out for the protest, about half of them students.

For the past three years, a delegation of students from Jesuit High School has joined with other Sacramento-area protesters to oppose the atrocities in Latin America. Joanne Castronovo, a teacher and director of community services at Jesuit, says there are common bonds linking students with the issues related to SOA-trained soldiers.

“Jesuit (High School) has a sister city in El Salvador, Jesuits were killed in San Salvador and this is a Jesuit high school,” she noted.

Senior Bill Biegler joined the six-member Jesuit High School delegation to Fort Benning this past November. Biegler, who has also traveled on a Jesuit-sponsored service trip with the Maryknoll fathers to Oaxaca, Mexico, has seen just enough of Third World poverty to know it’s worth opposing in any form.

“The people we are directly affecting with the (military school) are like people I worked with,” he said. “Thousands like them are being murdered and disappeared by their unjust governments through the military we’re training. It’s our duty to put our faith into action and close the school.”

By closing the military school at Fort Benning, Father Bourgeois said, a clear and powerful message will be sent “that the U.S. will no longer bless what they have been doing.”

He is encouraged that the poor of Latin America are also getting the message that God doesn’t want them to suffer.

“Today, as the poor gather in small faith communities to read Scripture…they are becoming empowered by their faith,” he said. “They are saying enough, we’re going to change this reality.”

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