Area Students Join Protest in Memory of Slain Priests

Ten years ago, sometime before dawn Nov. 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests were awakened, ordered to lie face-down and murdered in El Salvador along with their housekeeper and her 15-year-old daughter. The assassinations became one of the most notorious human rights crimes committed during the country’s 12-year civil war, which claimed more than 75,000 lives.

Since the morning the eight bodies were found on the campus of the University of Central America, Nov. 16 has emerged as a day of protest and commemoration in El Salvador, where thousands gather for a candlelight procession, and in Southern California, where more than 250,000 Salvadorans came to escape the war.

Like Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was killed in 1980, the eight people have become martyrs in the minds of many in El Salvador.

In the United States, a tiny movement to commemorate the murdered priests, which began with a Maryknoll priest and a few followers, has evolved into a widespread annual protest aimed at shutting down the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Ga., where 19 of the 26 officers who were implicated in the killings had trained. Graduates of the school have been implicated in atrocities in Guatemala and elsewhere in the region.

This week, rallies, demonstrations and prayer vigils aimed at the school are scheduled across California; this weekend organizers expect more than 10,000 people to converge on Ft. Benning.

The school enrolls about 800 students each year, with students from 18 of the 21 countries of Latin America. It began in Panama in 1946 and moved to Georgia in 1984 and teaches entirely in Spanish.

Supporters of the U.S. Army training school consider the blame leveled at it for atrocities to be illogical. The school is a necessary foreign policy instrument in the fight against drugs that tries to raise the level of human rights awareness in Latin American armies, they argue.

“The school does not condone violence. I challenge anyone making these allegations to show us evidence that is happening,” said Nicholas Britto, the school’s public affairs officer.

But the grass-roots movement to shut down the school has continued to grow.

Father Bob Welch, a professor of political science at Loyola Marymount University who plans to accompany a group of students to the Ft. Benning protest, said that of the 60,000 graduates of the school, about 600 have been linked to some of the worst human rights atrocities in Latin America.

“When you examine what they do, they are not promoting democracy or human rights,” he said.

The movement against the school has had some impact in Congress. In July, the House of Representatives voted to cut $2 million from the school’s budget, although the money was restored later.

Tuesday, students at Loyola Marymount marked their participation in the week’s events by staging a reenactment of the killing on their campus lawn. Other activities aimed at the School of the Americas are planned later this week elsewhere in California, including a planned demonstration Friday in front of the Federal Building in Santa Ana.

At Loyola Marymount, “we wanted to show the students that this happened on a Jesuit campus just like ours,” said Diana Pena, 19, a sophomore who helped organize the reenactment. “We’re trying to make people aware that these people died because they were taking a stand against oppression.”

Carlos Vaquerano, who is executive director of the Salvadoran American Leadership and Education Fund in Los Angeles, lost three brothers in the war.

“It’s hard to remember this day. It was a painful war for all of us who lost family and friends,” he said. “We’re here to commemorate these men. It is because of people like the Jesuits that we have peace.”