The Greyhound Editorial: On prayer, protest, and action
Issue date: 11/20/07 Section: Opinion
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The Greyhound would like to commend the group of students, staff, and Jesuits who weathered a 13-hour bus ride to Fort Benning, Ga., this weekend, where the 10th Annual Ignatian Family Teach-in and School of the Americas Protest took place. For those who are not familiar with the School of the Americas (SOA), now called the Western Hemisphere Institute For Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), SOA remains a controversial element of an all but unknown section of American history.
Protesters commemorate the anniversary of November 16, 1989, when 27 soldiers, 19 of whom graduated from the School of Americas, massacred six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter at the University of Central America. The UCA killings are sadly but one of many violent incidents and acts of terrorism attributed to graduates of SOA -- 500 out of 57,000 of whom have been implicated in human rights violations, according to this week's story. The significance of this weekend's protest is two-fold: first, Loyola student Geoff Browning was chosen to give the event's opening prayer, and second, twenty-nine students took the time and the effort, before their own Thanksgiving breaks, to acknowledge and protest a sad history of American abuses and failures in Latin America.
The kind of activism and concern demonstrated by these students sets the tone for what many of our peers should strive for: a sense of responsibility and a sense of the world around us. Unfortunately, these seem to be commodities both rare and dwindling. At the end of World War II, the U.S. set up the SOA as a means of spreading its influence into Latin American countries whose ties to traditional European powers had been all but cut by the devastating war. Since then these Latin American countries have become ever more important to U.S. economic and security interests. All the while, the U.S. has consistently ignored and taken advantage of these important partners and neigbhors.
Now, our country is again at a cross roads with our southern neighbors. The U.S. is finding itself in inevitable economic and cultural decline, and soon we will find that we must rely on our neighbors. Past U.S. dealings with Latin America have been marred with violence and disregard. Any future we hope to have must be concerned with a sense of history.
Protesters commemorate the anniversary of November 16, 1989, when 27 soldiers, 19 of whom graduated from the School of Americas, massacred six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter at the University of Central America. The UCA killings are sadly but one of many violent incidents and acts of terrorism attributed to graduates of SOA -- 500 out of 57,000 of whom have been implicated in human rights violations, according to this week's story. The significance of this weekend's protest is two-fold: first, Loyola student Geoff Browning was chosen to give the event's opening prayer, and second, twenty-nine students took the time and the effort, before their own Thanksgiving breaks, to acknowledge and protest a sad history of American abuses and failures in Latin America.
The kind of activism and concern demonstrated by these students sets the tone for what many of our peers should strive for: a sense of responsibility and a sense of the world around us. Unfortunately, these seem to be commodities both rare and dwindling. At the end of World War II, the U.S. set up the SOA as a means of spreading its influence into Latin American countries whose ties to traditional European powers had been all but cut by the devastating war. Since then these Latin American countries have become ever more important to U.S. economic and security interests. All the while, the U.S. has consistently ignored and taken advantage of these important partners and neigbhors.
Now, our country is again at a cross roads with our southern neighbors. The U.S. is finding itself in inevitable economic and cultural decline, and soon we will find that we must rely on our neighbors. Past U.S. dealings with Latin America have been marred with violence and disregard. Any future we hope to have must be concerned with a sense of history.
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Lee Rials
posted 11/27/07 @ 10:35 PM EST
As the public affairs officer for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, I wonder at those who make pronouncements about a place they have never seen or even inquired about beyond the activist site of the group that opposes it. (Continued…)
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