Ten years ago this week, a Salvadoran death squad burst into the Jesuit University in San Salvador, dragged six Jesuit priests and two school employees from their beds, murdered them and mutilated their bodies.
As Leo J. O'Donovan, S.J., the president of Georgetown University, notes in an article that appears on the opposite page, several of the assassins were trained by the United States Army.
Indeed, it is not at all irresponsible to suggest that the United States government was directly responsible for the murders.
How can that be?
How could the United States possibly have been responsible for the brutal murders of Catholic priests? How can the United States bear the blame for the acts of shadowy death squads bent on silencing religions advocacy on behalf of the poor?
No mystery. Ronald Reagan and George Bush supported the Salvadoran government and its military -- the spawning ground for those death squads. That support extended to the training of Salvadoran officers who eventually murdered those who dared to question the Salvadoran government's corrupt and murderous practices.
That training took place at the U.S. School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA. For decades that "school" has served as a primary place of preparation for murderers, assassins, rapists and thugs who have terrorized much of the Western Hemisphere. Today, the school trains the butchers who are killing progressive political activists in Colombia -- including elected officials in Dane County's sister community of Apartado. The School of the Americas is the single darkest blot on the soil of the United States. It is a bloody stain on this country's landscape, and the stain grows with each day that it is allowed to carry out its mission of training the forces that oppress and kill the people of Latin America.
This weekend thousands of political will converge on Fort Benning to demand the closing of what has commonly come to be known as "The School of the Assassins". Many of those present will be Wisconsinites, including Democratic State Rep. Mark Pocan of Madison, Cecilia Zarate-Laun of the Madison-based Colombia Support Network and a contingent from Edgewood College.
Pocan's presence at Fort Benning this weekend will be particularly significant. There are not many elected officials who are willing to travel cross country on a bus to challenge the wrongdoing of the federal government. There are even fewer who are willing, as Pocan has been, to travel to El Salvador, Colombia, and other regions where he has directly witnessed the damage done by the 60,000 "graduates" of the School of the Assassins.
"Every day the School of the Americas remains open, it brings shame to the United States and terror to Colombia," Pocan has said. "There is no justification for keeping this training ground for terrorists operating with U.S. taxpayer dollars."
Pocan is right. And in making the trip to Fort Benning, along with other Madison area activists, he is representing Wisconsin well. Indeed, he is bringing to his electoral service the genuine moral commitment that too few officials exhibit.
The same goes for Cecilia Zarate-Laun, whose long and sometimes lonely battle to shift U.S. policy towards Colombia will be a prime focus of the activism at Fort Benning this weekend. For years, Zarate-Laun has warned that Colombia could be the next Vietnam. Now, as U.S. military advisors on the ground in Colombia work with School of the Americas-trained forces, and as the Congress authorizes hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to that troubled country, the dark machinations of the Pentagon and the State Department are becoming all too clear.
One protest in Georgia will not cleanse the U.S. foreign policy establishment of its cynicism, its preposterous assumptions and its dangerous tendency to meddle where it doesn't not belong. But the voices raised at Fort Benning could well force Congress and the American people to wake up to the fact that the School of the Americas produces nothing less than genocide.