By Tito Drago
MADRID, Dec 16 1998 (IPS)

A U.S. priest and former army lieutenant testified here Tuesday before Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, supplying him with evidence and documents for the case against ex-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, currently in London fighting against his extradition to Spain to answer charges of crimes against humanity.

Roy Bourgeois, a Vietnam War veteran who joined the Maryknoll Order in 1971, told Garzon he saw tortured Chilean and Argentinian political prisoners in jails in Bolivia, while he was a missionary there from 1972 to 1977 and that the detainees were later handed over to the Pinochet dictatorship and that of Jorge Videla in Argentina.

Bourgeois also provided Garzon with a partial list of Latin American military officers who graduated from the School of Americas, a U.S. officer training school.

From the list – which included 1,031 Argentinians, 4,394 Bolivians, 2,805 Chileans, 9,679 Colombians, 6,776 Salvadorans, 1,676 Guatemalans, 4,693 Nicaraguans, 4,235 Panamanians and 3,997 Peruvians – he identified officers who had had a heavy hand in the repression to which civilians in their countries were subjected.

The case against Pinochet in Spain “is a sacred moment in the struggle for democracy and freedom,” Bourgeois told IPS here after testifying. He added, however, that the Pinochet dictatorship “would have been impossible without the participation of the U.S. government, without its weapons, without its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), without its advisers and without its money”.

In this regard, he explained, the School of the Americas, set up in 1946 in Panama and transferred to Miami in 1984, played a key role. The bad thing, he said, “is that it is still functioning and its courses have not changed at all since they see counter-insurgency as the most important thing, with manuals that show how to infiltrate trade unions and other civil society associations.”

In 1996, the Pentagon released details of seven training manuals used in the military school which, Bourgeois said, “recommend interrogation techniques that include torture, blackmail and capturing relatives of people being interrogated”.

Between 900 and 2,000 Latin American soldiers are receiving training at the institution, which Bourgeois dubbed a “school of assassins”. Nowadays, the official argument is that they are being trained to defend democracy, he added. “If that were the case,” he countered, “they should give people scholarships to study law, economics, sociology or other disciplines that can help them understand how democracy works”.

You cannot defend democracy by grabbing a weapon and studying counter-insurgency manuals, he pointed out.

Another argument being used to justify the training of regional military officials at the School of the Americas, Bourgeois added, was the fight against drugs but, he argued, officers of Latin American armed forces have not proved especially effective in this regard.

Taking Bolivia as an example, Bourgeois said high-ranking military officers there live in huge mansions with many servants and luxury cars. “How can you explain that other than through their involvement in the drug trade?” he said, adding “not all of them, but quite a few”.

Luis Espinar, a Spanish Jesuit priest, was murdered in 1978 in Bolivia precisely because he was investigating the military’s involvement in drug trafficking, added the U.S. priest.

Bourgeois said he felt compelled to denounce the School of the Americas, Pinochet and other ex-dictators because, “as Msgr Romero used to say, we who are able to speak must do so for those who have no voice”. Msgr. Oscar Romero was an archbishop assassinated in El Salvador, where Bourgeois worked as a missionary in 1981.

There was another compelling reason, he said: “We (Americans) have to ask forgiveness because, instead of siding with the poor, as the Church says, we sided with the rich, the powerful, the military dictators”.

For a long time, people in the United States kept silent on the human rights violations or even accepted them because the danger of communism was always brandished before their eyes, “but now that that fear cannot be aroused, we are able to speak out”, he added.

In speaking out, “we can ask for the school of assassins, the school of dictators, to be closed,” added Bourgeois, “and we feel moved in this sacred moment now being lived in Spain and Britain through the trial of Pinochet.”

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