The following is a chapter from The Book of Mev called A School/3.
In the fall of 1997, I had begun teaching as an adjunct in the theology department at St. Louis University. In late November, Pat Geier called to tell me about one of the most amazing activist experiences in her life: She and several Louisvillians had attended a commemoration of the murdered Salvadoran Jesuit intellectuals. The setting was Fort Benning, Georgia, the home of the U.S. Army School of the Americas.
Pat and I had been through a lot, long before Mev’s illness, during which Pat frequently came for long weekends to help out, hold my hand and rub Mev’s body, and make me laugh. We’d traveled together to the war zone in Nicaragua in 1984, committed civil disobedience in Congressional offices after the passage of more money for the contra terrorists in Nicaragua, and spent a month together traveling around Guatemala in 1986.
She mentioned that a couple thousand people had converged at the School of the Americas, which had trained the murderers of Oscar Romero, the Jesuit professors, and Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donovan, and Ita Ford, not to mention thousands of other victims throughout Latin America. Originally located in Panama, the SOA moved to Georgia in 1983. Pat and her friends had gathered there because the school trained Latin American officers and soldiers in counterinsurgency and commando tactics. Through assiduous research, activists had exposed the use of torture manuals by the school. Nevertheless, the Army denied the severity and extent of the “accomplishments” of its (in)famous graduates. Over several years, a movement grew to close down the school, sparked by the SOA Watch, led by Roy Bourgeois, whom Mev and I had heard in Berkeley in 1993. Bourgeois had spent a few years in jail for his acts of interfering with business as usual at the school; moreover, he, like so many of those gathered in 1997, believed that the whole direction of U.S. foreign policy had to change from one concerned with insuring stability for the local elites and U.S. corporations to one emphasizing what Subcommandante Marcos in Chiapas had claimed for the Zapatista movement: Democracy, Liberty, Justice.
Pat had been inspired by the solemnity of a mock funeral procession on that Sunday, when activists marched onto the base as they carried coffins and crosses with the names of those killed or disappeared by SOA graduates. She joined in this action to remind SOA officialdom that it was indeed death that was the result of their teaching: grannies and anarchists, nuns and doctors, punks and profs, Catholics and Buddhists, indigenous and unionists all joined together to remember and resist the normalcy that had allowed the school to operate so long without a fuss from ignorant citizens. Pat urged me: “You’ve got to come next year. The music, the speakers, the silence, the marching, the festivity, the spirit -- you’ve got to be a part of it.”
Evidently, many of those who went in 1997 told their own friends back home the same thing. In November of 1998 and the following three years -- along with some of the Arco Angels and friends with whom we recently formed a grass-roots collective -- the Center for Theology and Social Analysis, I traveled to Fort Benning, where I happily saw many of my St. Louis University and Webster University students. On the Sunday of commemoration, we were each handed a cross with the name of a victim, and we linked arms four across and marched onto the base. As we did so, the musicians chanted the names of the victims, and the assembly responded simply with “Presente!” “You are here with us!”
The naming of the victims, like the crossing onto the base, lasted hours. No one knew how many people would “risk arrest” but, as it turned out, thousands of people did so each year, stating with their bodies that we were willing to be processed by the authorities, receive ban and bar letters, or be detained. As it was, no one had expected such a large response, and the Army simply could not deal with so many trespassers.
Many people there had had some direct experience or contact with Latin Americans: We’d either traveled there or worked with refugees in our own cities. I could not help thinking of Mev so many times during the protest and vigil at the SOA. It was easy to do when I would see some young photographer crouching low to get a good shot of the crowd facing off with the police. And having had such a powerful experience burying Mev a few years earlier, I felt the chills, too, of the symbolic funeral march.
And I remembered the challenge Angie O’Gorman had issued to the hundreds of mourners gathered at the College Church the day we buried Mev: "Yes, our hearts are breaking, but the great grace of how God is with us in our pain is that the breaking need not be a breaking apart. It can be a breaking open: open to the poor whom Mev’s photographs allows us to see, open to the reality of injustice that creates and sustains such poverty, open to responding in relationship with those who are suffering. We will honor Mev best not by our grieving – although we will grieve for a long time to come – nor with tributes and awards, although she will receive many. We will honor Mev best by taking her life seriously and allowing her passion for justice and her commitment to the God who struggles with us to become our own."
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