Today thousands of peacemakers will gather in Columbus,
GA outside the gates of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation at Fort Benning. With “Cooperation” on the end of this title, this “institute”
sounds positively civilized.
But the history of this agency is anything but
civilized. This
is simply a new name for an actual terrorist organization once named the School
of the Americas. Often referred to as the School of the Assassins in Latin
America, the School has trained members of the military and paramilitary all
over Latin America in methods of terrorism designed to combat popular uprisings
in Central and South America since 1946.
Under
the rubric of anti-communism, students, clergy, unions, media and farmers have
been targeted for kidnappings, torture, murder and mutilation. Like ISIS, the
mutilated bodies were often left in high visibility locations such as highways and
garbage dumps where they could send very clear messages to the population at
large: Do not challenge the regime. We will crush you.
Your Tax Money at Work
Today’s
commemoration has particular significance. It is the 25th
anniversary of the murder of six Jesuit professors at the University of Central
America in San Salvador along with their housekeeper and her daughter. These
brutal murders were carried out by the Atlacatl Battalion, a self-described
counter-insurgency military unit trained, armed and largely directed by the US
Army’s School of the Americas then headquartered in Panama.
The Battalion was responsible for a high profile act of
genocide in the northeastern village of Mozote in which the more than 700
residents were rounded up, tortured, raped, killed, their mutilated bodies hung from
trees and burned in the rubble of their village.
The very clear goal of all
these highly public acts of brutality was obvious: to terrorize the population
and frighten the people into submission. It was a brutal terrorism taught these
Latin American soldiers by agents trained in America and paid for with American
taxpayers’ money.
ISIS has got nothing on us.
I visited this place of
death on a peaceful university campus during my first trip to El Salvador in
1993. It was a very difficult time to be in that country, then under a cease
fire monitored by the UN with no accord yet in place to prevent a resumption of
the bloody civil war that had been raging there for 13 years. Through the aegis
of the Episcopal Diocese of El Salvador and the World Council of Churches, our
small group of seminarians was able to serve as international monitors of the
cease fire for the week we were there.
The civil war was predominately
funded and largely directed by the American military and the CIA. The uprising
of campesinos who had taken over many less than fully productive farms owned by
Salvador’s famed Fourteen Families had brought the US into this conflict. Our
government sought to protect American business interests in Salvador and to
prevent the successful Sandinista leftist revolution in Nicaragua from
spreading to its neighbor to the north. Under the rubric of fighting communism -
whether it actually was present or not - the US became embroiled in wars up and
down Central America and generated some of the more brutal acts of terrorism
known to humanity.
We Were Not the Good Guys…
One memory of that visit occurred
at the base community of campesinos who had overtaken a large cattle farm in
the country. The leader of the community said to us, “You may think we live
like animals because we live in cattle stalls. But this is the first roof I’ve
ever had over my head in 30 years.” About this time a group of children with
distended bellies came up to our group and the leader continued, “We have had
two children die in our community in the last week from hunger. The oldest one
was 10. He was my son.”
That visit also included meeting
victims of napalm dropped from US helicopters onto villages. One of the
survivors bore horrendous scarring from his encounter with death which rained
from the skies. As we spoke with him, the charred barren hillsides around the
base community in which he and other burn victims lived still bore witness to
that deadly encounter years after its occurrence. In some places the landscape
was charred right down to the stone.
Napalm is a terrible thing.
When we asked the man how he
had managed to survive, he quickly responded, “It was the Cuban doctors who
helped us.” Suddenly I found myself reeling from cognitive dissonance. A child
of the Cuban missile crisis in Florida, Castro’s Cuba represented all that was
evil in my childhood. The reality I encountered that day in the countryside of
El Salvador was a complete reversal of roles. Here it was America who was the
author of evil. And it was Castro’s Cuba whose policies were life giving.
As I watch the waves of
children coming to our border from El Salvador, I do not have to wonder what
would prompt their desperate parents to send them on such dangerous journeys in
the hopes of new lives. I’ve seen where they come from. And I know what
happened there. At a very basic level, these children are coming to reclaim the
lives that were stolen from them.
This is what happens when you use your
brains….
The afternoon we visited the university was the occasion
of the third anniversary of the massacre at UCA. We got there early enough to
see the actual site of the killing which was now a museum. The victims were taken
from their dormitory at UCA into a rose garden and shot point blank. To make
their point, their assassins used their rifle butts to beat the brains out of
the heads of some of the professors. Their point was pretty clear:
This
is what happens when you use your brains to challenge the regime.
These killings occurred nine years after Archbishop Oscar
Romero was gunned down at the altar of a convent in the middle of mass. Romero
had long predicted his death: “If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran
people. If the threats come to be fulfilled, from this moment I offer my blood
to God.” Romero was also prone to cite
Tertullian’s maxim that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” I
have stood in that very spot and felt the palpable chill of death.
There was never a shortage of martyrs in El Salvador.
Latin Americans tend to be
pretty graphic with their depiction of horror and somewhat literal in their
appropriation of religious symbols. When the bodies of the Jesuits were
discovered, some of the people scraped the brains beaten from their heads into
glass jars and saved them. They are currently on display in the museum, a sight
which prompted me to go running from the museum to the rose garden where they
had died to vomit between sobs.
The chapel at UCA contains a
set of unbelievably graphic scenes of tortured campesinos that serves as the
Stations of the Cross. They are powerful in their witness to the terror
systematically generated in El Salvador during the civil war to coerce the
populace into control. They are also powerful voices of protest against this
brutality and insisting that this violence end.
That evening we attended an
outdoor mass on the UCA campus. Under the gaze of the ubiquitous military
guards with their automatic weapons, we entered into what was an incredibly
joyful rite of remembrance, resistance and hope for reconciliation. It was my
first encounter with the Misa Campesina, the
liberationist eucharist that arose out of the struggles of Central America. It
closed with a rousing hymn:
Cuando el pobre
crea en el pobre When the poor believe in themselves
Ya podremos cantar
libertad Then we will sing liberty
Cuando el pobre
crea en el pobre When the poor believe in themselves
Construiremos la
fraternidad We will build a brotherhood.
This would be the first of
two trips to El Salvador. The second I would serve as an international election
monitor for the 1994 election in the country. I would watch illiterate peasants
standing in the tropical sun for hours to dip their thumbs into purple ink and
mark their ballots under the photos of the candidates. It provided a stark
contrast to the recent shameful elections in America where about a third of the
electorate bothered to show up, our worst participation rate since the Great
Depression.
An Obligation to Bear Witness
My time in El Salvador
changed me forever. I no longer had the luxury of naïveté in looking at my
country’s foreign policy through the lens of generosity. I had seen too much. I
also came away with a decided admiration for the tenacity, the generosity and
the hopefulness of the poor despite the unbearable hardships they bear daily just to
survive and the demonization they endure which threatens to take away their remaining
dignity.
I promised myself that I
would return to America to tell what I had seen and experienced there. Sadly, I
cannot be present in Columbus this day. I have a funeral of a long time friend
to attend. But a candle burns before my Guadalupe shrine this morning and my
prayers ascend to heaven along with a curl of frankincense smoke in memory of
the many martyrs of El Salvador. My heart and my spirit are with the protesters
who stand at the gates of the sanitized School of the Assassins this day even as my body is not. And I join them in solidarity as they make their demands:
No more terrorism! No more war! Not in my name and not
with my tax money!
Today I give thanks for the
lives of true martyrs, those who died fighting for human dignity, those who
understood that the right to life is broader, deeper and much more involved than
the shallow politics of abortion. As a follower in the Way of Jesus, I give
thanks for those who recognize that the good news of Jesus means nothing so
long as it remains silent in the face of ongoing degradation and demonization
of the little ones that Jesus loved.
The poster for the third
anniversary commemoration I brought back from El Salvador contains a quote from
Salvadoreño writer Rafael Rodriguez Diaz. Speaking on behalf of the martyred
Jesuits, he believes they would stand in the face of death again and say:
We want to say for the record that if we were given new
life to decide again what to do, they would again find us dying for this town
and its people.
Martyrs of El Salvador!
¡Presente!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry
Scott Coverston, J.D., M.Div., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
Osceola Campus, University of Central Florida, Kissimmee
If the unexamined
life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious
or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of
value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1 comment:
It is a shame that the United States of America supports and promulgates such terrorism.
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