ONEONTA _ Human-rights activist Father Roy Bourgeois will speak about torture, ethics and the School of the Americas at 7 tonight in Hartwick College's Anderson Center for the Arts.
Bourgeois is the founder of the School of the Americas Watch, a group working peacefully to close the Army's former School of the Americas. The military training school for Latin American soldiers and police, which is situated at Fort Benning, Georgia, was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation about eight years ago.
Oneonta filmmaker Joseph Stillman, who has interviewed Bourgeois, said the Catholic priest ``is a hero, who has dedicated his life to this cause. I will be there to hear him.''
Stillman said Bourgeois has had little success convincing the U.S. government to shut down the facility, but has been visiting South American nations, convincing leaders there not to send their citizens to this school.
Critics of the school, whose alumni include former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, say it encourages torture.
Bourgeois was born in Lutcher, La., in 1938. He graduated from the University of Southwestern Louisiana with a Bachelor of Science degree in geology and served four years as a U.S. naval officer, receiving a Purple Heart for his service.
He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1972, and worked with the poor of Bolivia for five years before being arrested and forced to leave the country.
In 1980, Bourgeois became an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy after four American churchwomen, two of them his friends, were raped and killed by El Salvadoran soldiers. Since then, he has spent more than four years in U.S. federal prisons for nonviolent protests against the training of Latin American soldiers at Fort Benning.
In 1990, he founded the School of Americas Watch, an office that does research on the WHISC. The school continues to train hundreds of soldiers from Latin America in combat skills, according to the School of the Americas Watch.
Paddy Lane of Morris said she will be in the audience tonight.
``I think it's important to be there, especially with the coup they had in Honduras. I want to learn more about that,'' she said.
In June, the Honduran military ousted President Manuel Zelaya, and forced him into exile. News reports Thursday said Zelaya has taken refuge in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, and is seeking to have his administration reinstalled.
Bourgeois' talk is sponsored by the Hartwick College departments of sociology, political science, history, philosophy and religious studies, and Latin American and Caribbean studies.
The event is free and the public is invited to attend.
