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03717159 Proquest Resource/One Full Text Left, right and center Buckley, Gail Lumet America [GAME] ISSN: 0002-7049 Jrnl Group: Commentary Vol: 178 Iss: 16 Date: May 9, 1998 p: 5 Type: Commentary Length: Medium (844 words) Illus: Photograph Photocopy available from UMI Article Clearinghouse (order no. 320.00). Restrictions may apply. School of the Americas-Fort Benning GA EI Salvador Military officers; Military training; Atrocities; Civil war; Religious persecution

Abstract: Over two-thirds of the more than 60 military officers cited for the worst atrocities in EI Salvador's civil war are graduates of the School of the Americas (SOA). Religious murders and persecutions by SOA graduates in EI Salvador and other Latin American countries are discussed. Article Text: LET US BESET the just one, because he is obnoxious to us; he sets himself against our doings, reproaches us for transgressions of the law and charges us with violations of our training. This Lenten reading seemed particularly apt this year, when it was announced that the killers of four American churchwomen in EI Salvador in 1981the Maryknoll sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Sister Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline, and the lay-- worker Jean Donovan-had finally admitted, 17 years after the event, that they acted on military orders. The 1993 United Nations Truth Commission for EI Salvador had already concluded that both the Salvadoran defense minister and the commander of the Salvadoran National Guard were involved. Yet both men, according to a New York Times Op-Ed piece by a member of the Truth Commission, Thomas Buergenthal, are currently living in Florida-as legal residents. According to Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer's School of Assassins, over two-thirds of the more than 60 officers cited for the worst atrocities in EI Salvador's civil war are graduates of the School of the Americas, which is located in the United States and funded by U.S. tax-payers. Among those officers are three of the five cited in the rape and murder of the churchwomen. First established in 1946 in the Panama Canal Zone as the Latin American Training Center-Ground Division, it became the U.S. Army School of the Americas (S.O.A.) in 1963, with Spanish as its official language. In October 1984, in compliance with terms of the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty, the school suspended operations, but reopened three months later at Fort Benning, Ga., as part of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). According to School of Assassins, two of the three officers cited in the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero are S.O.A. graduates. In his three years as archbishop, Romero experienced the violent deaths of six of his priests-and many more of his people. 'I am a shepherd who, with his people, has learned a beautiful and hard truth: Our Christian faith does not separate us from
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the world; rather, it immerses us in the world,' said Archbishop Romero less than two months before his death. Jesuits, in particular, have been targets in EI Salvador since at least 1977, the year Rutilio Grande, S.J., was assassinated. That same year a right-wing paramilitary group ordered all Jesuits to leave the country or face death. Of 26 officers cited in the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests and their companions, 19 were S.O.A. graduates. 'Can we hand weapons to butchers and remain unstained by the blood of their innocent victims?' asked Joseph A. O'Hare, S.J., preaching during a memorial Mass for the slain Salvadoran Jesuits. Religious murders and persecutions were not confined to EI Salvador. S.O.A. graduates in Peru, Argentina, Colombia and Honduras (where the former Jesuit priest James Carney-Padre Guadalupe disappeared in 1983) have either been linked to or convicted of murder. Some victims, like Sister Diana Ortiz, a U.S. Ursuline of Guatemala, lived to tell of her abduction, rape and unspeakable tortures. A civil court in the United States found the S.O.A.-trained Guatemalan defense minister responsible for her abduction in 1991. The Ortiz story is even more troubling because an American, presumably employed by the C.I.A., was also involved (although not as a torturer); and according to School of Assassins, State Department documents indicate that the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala initiated a 'smear campaign' against Ortiz. Despite the fact that in 1996 the Pentagon released Spanish-language training manuals on torture techniques (used at the S.O.A. until 1991) identifying 'religious workers, labor organizers, student groups and others in sympathy with the cause of the poor' as targets, religious critics of the S.O.A. have been viciously attacked by supporters of the school. In 1996, for example, The New York Post-- without mentioning the murdered religious-accused the jailed Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois (founder of Washington's S.O.A. Watch) of 'mourning Communism's collapse' and accused the Maryknoll order itself of being 'disheartened by the demise of Communism.' Father Bourgeois, a Vietnam veteran, was first jailed for entering Fort Benning disguised as a U.S. soldier, where he climbed a tree and installed a loudspeaker to broadcast Archbishop Romero's last homily-which caused major panic among the school's Salvadorans. 'We are living in the age of martyrs,' said the pastor of New York City's St. Ignatius Loyola Church in the wake of the Jesuit murders. We are not all called to give up our lives, our health or our personal dignity. We're not all called to be jailed for antiS.O.A. activities-as were, for example, Sister Claire O'Mara, O.S.U., 75; Bill Corrigan, 75, a World War II veteran; the Rev. Nick Cardell, 72, a former Unitarian minister; Dan and Doris Sage, 71 and 68 respectively; Sister Megan Rice, 67; the retired nurse Ann Tiffany, 62; Bill Bichsel, S.J., 69; and Joann Lingle, a mother of eight. But we can all support efforts to close the School of the Americas. And we can all (in the words of Father Bourgeois) try to 'speak for the voiceless.' GAIL LUMET BUCKLEY