Military bishop praises SOA
By JAMES HODGE and LINDA
COOPER Special to the National Catholic Reporter
Bishop Francis X. Roque was having dinner with officials at the
U.S. Armys School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Ga., when the news
came.
A joint congressional panel had narrowly voted to restore the
schools funding, which had been cut in July for the first time by the
House of Representatives.
The gathering couldnt have been more elated.
They were very pleased about it, Roque said of the
panels Sept. 24 vote. Their morale had been hurting. They were
being denied the funds by the House.
The next morning Roque, an auxiliary bishop with the U.S.
archdiocese for the Military Services in Washington, had breakfast with
officers at the school and made brief remarks that touched on human rights.
Then, he said, I thanked them for the school.
Four months earlier, he had written a spirited defense of the
institution in a Catholic weekly newspaper in his hometown, Providence, R.I.
The newspaper had run critical stories about the military academy, whose
graduates have included some of the worst human rights abusers in Latin
American history.
Roques public endorsement is a major coup for the army
school in its battle for support, not just in the Republican-controlled House,
but also in scores of newspapers that have called for its closure. The New
York Times, for one, has said the school was an institution so
clearly out of tune with American values and so stubbornly immune to reform
[that it] should be shut down without further delay.
The school, which has trained Latin American officers for more
than 50 years, has been almost universally condemned by religious groups and
leaders, including 142 U.S. Catholic bishops and 40 Latin American
prelates.
In two interviews with NCR, one before his recent visit to
the school and the other afterward, Roque gave the school his full support,
calling it a rather precious asset, even implying that Jesus
himself might back it.
The bishop said he felt very good about the institution before his
visit, and that feeling was reinforced many times over while he was
there. Christ would want what was good for people, he said.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance to the Army of
having a Catholic bishop so openly and enthusiastically endorsing a school
whose graduates have been linked to the assassinations of Catholic clergy, nuns
and lay people across Latin America. In El Salvador alone, school graduates
have been implicated in the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit
priests along with the rapes and murders of four U.S. churchwomen, not to
mention the massacre of 900 unarmed men, women and children in the village of
El Mozote.
The stance of the bishop, a retired Army colonel who served 22
years as a military chaplain, has provoked outrage among Catholic
activists.
It is atrocious that a Catholic bishop would side with those
who support a school that has led to so much violence, suffering and
death, said Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois, the leading critic of the school
who has been organizing vigils and demonstrations outside its gates for almost
a decade.
Jesuit Fr. Dan Berrigan, who has remained on the sidelines of the
issue in deference to younger leadership, fired off a letter to Roque,
promising to be at the schools gates in November when a massive
demonstration is expected on the 10th anniversary of the deaths of the
Salvadoran Jesuits.
Roque said he has not talked with any of the schools
critics, but he had a high-powered briefing from the schools
commandant, Col. Glenn Weidner, and has discussed the academy with Catholic
military friends, including Gens. Barry McCaffery and Paul Gorman, two former
heads of the Armys Southern Command, which oversees U.S. operations in
Latin America.
Neither McCaffrey nor Gorman would tolerate immoral activity
in schools under their command, the bishop said.
McCaffrey is now Clintons drug czar, who is pushing for a
quadrupling of aid to the Colombian military. Gorman worked closely with Oliver
North and once asked Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to withhold his
criticism of the Nicaraguan contras while the Reagan administration pushed for
more aid to the group that was trying to overthrow the Sandinista government in
Nicaragua.
The school has gone through all kinds of reviews and
inspections by boards and independent groups and has come out basically free of
any kind of blame, Roque said.
It has been a very constructive influence on the militaries
of Latin America, fostering democracy and human rights, he said. School
officials, he added, believe that Latin American militaries dont
rule well and they should back off and let civilians run their
countries.
Critics argue, however, that positive change has come about
despite the school, not because of it.
Nicknamed the School of Coups, the institution was
called the biggest base of destabilization in Latin America by a
former Panamanian president who demanded its removal from the Canal Zone. After
the Kennedy administration expanded the schools role and increased its
funding, Latin American militaries overthrew nine governments between 1961 and
1966. Since 1968, 10 school graduates have seized power in six Latin American
countries through violence and other undemocratic means.
One of those graduates, Bolivian Gen. Hugo Banzer, who came to
power in a coup in 1971 and who long sheltered Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie,
received the schools highest honor: enrollment in its Hall of Fame, with
his portrait hanging in the schools main hall.
Roque said that, I think with criticism, the school has done
away with this hall. It was taken down in 1995 -- several years after the
school claimed it was placing a new emphasis on human rights and only after it
came under heavy criticism from the media.
My understanding is that human rights are a part of every
course, Roque said. I cant go back in the history of the
school. I want to see it as it is now. The [officials] I know that are
connected with it are very trustworthy, and I think their morals are very
high.
He went on to say that he realizes there have been atrocities but
claimed that they cannot be blamed on the Army academy. He said many at the
school feel offended that theyve been accused of teaching
torture.
Yes, he said, he was aware that declassified Pentagon documents
indicated that the school, also dubbed the School of Assassins, used manuals up
until 1991 that encouraged such tactics as executions, extortion, physical
abuse, coercion and false imprisonment.
I read a lot about those intelligence manuals, Roque
said, and concluded that the school never taught them. They were never
really a part of instruction, just handouts. They were never taught.
Roque also said that the school has more than 60,000 graduates,
and it is probably not surprising that some of them didnt turn out
as good as the school would have liked.
He repeated the schools standard line that, of the 300 or so
graduates implicated in human rights abuses, there have been only about 20 who
have been tried and convicted. But he conceded that judges, prosecutors and
witnesses who have tried to bring the military to justice in Latin America have
often met an ill fate.
Bourgeois, who has spent more time in jail for school protests
than most graduates accused of atrocities, points out that nearly every
military has demanded blanket amnesties before agreeing to democratic
changes.
Roque also used the schools Unabomber analogy -- that no one
calls for Harvard to close just because Theodore Kaczynski went there.
Roque believes that the bishops who have called for the
schools closure dont have the whole picture. And while he
hasnt talked to any of the critics, secular or religious, he said he
would be willing to.
Bourgeois, who was a Navy officer in Vietnam before entering the
priesthood, said he would like to hear him out and try and understand how
a bishop could possibly support such a school. Id then like to try to
speak for the many church leaders and poor who have been silenced permanently
by its graduates.
Before his assassination was ordered by a school
graduate, he said, Archbishop Romero asked those with a voice to
speak for the voiceless. I would like to appeal to Bishop Roque to use his
voice for the poor rather than for the generals.
National Catholic Reporter, October 8,
1999
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