c. 1999 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ Shortly after becoming a Catholic priest and missionary in 1972, the Rev. Roy Bourgeois shipped to La Paz, Bolivia, and took a room in a city slum to work with the poor. His quarters had no running water; light came from a single naked bulb.

Yet, he came to think himself fortunate: The bulb made him better off than many of the people he worked with.

The poor became his teachers, he said. And the way they lived and died _ too early and too often _ ignited first dismay, then growing anger at American foreign policy toward Latin America, which in Bourgeois’ stark language of right vs. wrong, he sketches as a record of cozying with armed bullies determined to keep the rich rich, and the poor poor.

Ten years ago and back in the United States, Bourgeois’ anger coalesced around a single target _ the School of the Americas, a U.S. Army-run facility that trains Latin American soldiers in counter-insurgency techniques amid the pines and manicured grounds at Fort Benning, Ga.

What happened there _ and some say still happens there _ Bourgeois believes,”is a crime and a sin.”And year-by-year Bourgeois, once a conservative, small-town Louisiana boy who volunteered for duty in Vietnam as a Naval officer, has mounted an ever-growing national campaign that has the school on the defensive.

Traveling constantly, meeting with grass-roots peace groups, college classes, newspaper editorial boards and members of Congress, Bourgeois and other critics have pushed their cause out of the margin of the peace movement closer to the mainstream of public life.

Recently, the Los Angeles Times joined the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times and the Miami Herald among newspapers calling on U.S. authorities to close the school.

Born in a heavily Catholic peace movement, demands to close the school have spread to the 2.5-million Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), which called for the school’s closure in 1994 and 1995, and the United Methodist Church’s Council of Bishops, which did the same last year.

Last fall 7,000 protesters assembled at the fort’s gates to call for the school’s closure, up from 2,000 the previous year. Bourgeois hopes to gather 10,000 this November, the 10th anniversary of the massacre in El Salvador of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter, allegedly at the hands of graduates of the School of the Americas.

After years of pushing the issue and six jail terms totaling almost four years for various acts of civil disobedience, Bourgeois believes he is close to getting the attention of Joe Sixpack.

Bourgeois’ specific denunciation of the school flows from a larger political context: His conviction, born of personal experience and validated in part by President Clinton’s apology to Guatemalans earlier this year, that since World War II, American anxiety to keep Latin America out of communist hands meant backing brutal anti-Communist dictators who made war on the poor communities most sympathetic to communist appeals.

A radical transformation that began when Bourgeois, the Naval officer, began working with orphans in Vietnam, accelerated as Bourgeois, the young Maryknoll missionary, lived among the poor in Bolivia, he told a group during a recent appearance at Loyola University.”We’re out there trying to reduce suffering; we’re not just baptizing babies,”he said in an interview later.”We baptize and bury, sure. But when we bury the dead, we’re asking, `Why are they dying?'” For five years Bourgeois worked with the poor, turning more and more attention to the political system that kept them poor. But he also became a target of the security forces.”They make it real clear. One day they come to you, look you straight in the eye and say, `Padre, we can no longer guarantee your safety,'”Bourgeois said.”And then you know they’re coming for you soon.” Bourgeois left Bolivia with tensions increasing in many Latin American hotspots. A decade of Salvadoran terror, for example, peaked in November 1989 when Salvadoran soldiers dragged the six Jesuit priests and two civilians out of their university residence and executed them in the middle of the night.

A congressional investigation by Rep. Joseph Moakley D.-Mass., identified most of the gunmen as graduates of the School of the Americas. Bourgeois, with the support of his order, launched a campaign early in the 1990s to get the school closed down.

He founded School of the Americas Watch, a tax-exempt advocacy group separate from but supported by his religious order, one of the most activist in the Catholic church. The advocacy group’s mission is explicitly political: Close the school.”These men with guns do a lot of damage,”said Bourgeois of the soldiers and security forces who have dominated much of Latin American life for decades.”They are an obstacle to our work.” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

In presentations, literature and videos produced by the Maryknolls and disseminated by his School of the Americas Watch, Bourgeois and other critics of the school hammer home a catalogue of embarrassing disclosures.

Among them:

_ Research that identifies School of the Americas alumni among soldiers named by United Nations and other human rights groups as perpetrators of some of the region’s worst atrocities, including the massacre of hundreds of civilians at the Salvadoran village of El Mozote in 1981.

_ A list of graduates that includes former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, now in prison for drug running; El Salvador’s former death-squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson and Bolivian strongman Hugo Banzer Suarez.

_ The Army’s own 1996 revelation that from 1982 until it was withdrawn in 1991, some training material advocated executions, torture, blackmail and other forms of coercion against enemies.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

In its defense, spokesmen for the school assert that Bourgeois misrepresents the school’s overall record, especially the small proportion of 60,000 alumni later implicated in human rights atrocities. And they disavow any relevant links between their U.S. training and those atrocities.

Generally, they say, the school has fulfilled its highest ideals: inculcated Latin American soldiers with democratic ideals that have taken root, however fragile, in Latin America.

Finally, many Bourgeois critics see him as a Marxist ideologue, not only outraged at a bloody litany of atrocities, but committed, they say, to popular upheaval in Latin America.

Nonetheless, Bourgeois appears to have the school on the defensive.

Each year the crowd massed outside the gates on the anniversary of the Jesuits’ deaths grows. Each year, a bill in the House of Representatives to kill the school comes closer to passage.

In 1993 it failed by 82 votes. Last year it failed by only 11.

Still, the school is in no immediate danger on Capitol Hill. The Senate has never considered the measure, and Bourgeois acknowledges his organization has not even begun to lobby that body intensively.

Long used to challenging big institutions Bourgeois, a vigorous 60 with muscled forearms and strong, blunt hands, rarely flashes anger. But he is direct in his judgments.

He is disappointed in the men Pope John Paul II has appointed as bishops and archbishops in Central America, and disappointed the pope has not supported more vigorously local people’s movements.

He said he is disappointed in U.S. bishops, who have not as a group called for closing the School of the Americas, but his words reveal more than mere disappointment. He characterizes most U.S. bishops as captives of personal ambition, timid and political in the worst sense of the word.”Many of our spiritual leaders have become corporate executives,”he said.”Many of our shepherds have become sheep _ government sheep.” For the moment, Bourgeois and colleagues are pointing toward the weekend of Nov. 20, when they hope to marshal the next big demonstration outside the gates of Fort Benning.

This year Bourgeois said he hopes for 10,000 outside the main gate and 5,000 trespassers.”We are going to keep coming until this school is shut down.”DEA END NOLAN