In Marxist theory,
society is divided into the bourgeois and the proletariat. The former are members of the
property-owning class, also known as capitalists. The latter term refers to the class
of workers, who do not possess capital
or property and must
sell their manual labor to survive.
It’s a bit ironic
that a man whose family name is Bourgeois has lived his life as a passionate
advocate for the proletariat and others who are part of the “underside of
history” (Gutiérrez).
I don’t remember hearing about Bourgeois before
2011, when I read Deena Guzder’s book, "Divine
Rebels: American Christian Activists for Social Justice" (2011). Guzder (b.
1984), a non-Christian human
rights journalist, writes very positively about Bourgeois and other Christian
activists.
Ever since reading
Guzder’s engaging chapter about Bourgeois, I have wanted to learn more about
him, so recently I read James Hodge and Linda Cooper’s “Disturbing the Peace”
(2004), a detailed and well-written book about Bourgeois.
Roy Bourgeois was
born in Louisiana in 1938. He was reared in a conservative working-class
family, and after graduating from college he spent four years in the U.S. Navy,
including a year in Vietnam where he was injured and received the Purple Heart.
His contact with a
Catholic priest who operated an orphanage in Vietnam was one factor that led
Bourgeois to enter seminary and, consequently, to be ordained as a Catholic
priest in 1972. But he certainly hasn’t been a stereotypical priest.
Freshly ordained,
Bourgeois began the work as a priest working with the poor in La Paz, Bolivia.
In 1975 he was deported from that country, accused of attempting to overthrow
dictator Hugo Banzer, who had come to power with the help of a U.S.-supported
coup d’état.
Bourgeois found out
later that Banzer had been trained by what came to be known as U.S. Army School
of the Americas (SOA), and whose official name since 2001 has been Western
Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
The precursor of the
SOA was begun in Panama in 1946. From 1961 until long after it was moved to Fort
Benning, Georgia, in 1984 SOA educated several Latin American dictators and generations
of their military supporters. During the 1980s the SOA included the uses of
torture in its curriculum.
Following the release
of the U.N.’s Commission on the Truth for El Salvador in 1993, Bourgeois became
increasingly opposed to the SOA, which he began to call the School of
Assassins.
The 203-page report
of the Truth Commission reported that 47 out of the 66 officers in El Salvador
who had committed major atrocities were graduates of SOA.
The report also identified
two of the three responsible for the assassination of Oscar Romero in 1980 as
SOA graduates. One of those was Roberto D’Aubuison, whom I mentioned in a
previous article about Romero (here).
SOA graduates were
also responsible for the December 1980 rape and murder of Bourgeois’s friend Ita
Ford and three other nuns in El Salvador.
Most of his work against
SOA for a decade is summarized in Hodge and Cooper’s book, whose subtitle is
“The Story of Father Roy Bourgeois and the Movement to Close the School of the
Americas.”
In 1990 Bourgeois
founded the SOA Watch, and it is still a very active organization. (Check out
their website here.)
He continues to be an active ally of the proletariat.
In recent years, Bourgeois
has been involved in the movement to ordain women as Catholic priests. For that
involvement his credentials as a priest were withdrawn by the Church in
2012—but that is a story for another time.
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