What Would Ellacuria Say?

Thousands will gather this weekend at the gates of Fort Benning to demand the closure of the U. S. Army’s School of the Americas (recently renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). The protest calls attention to the school’s role in the training of military personnel from throughout Latin America since the mid-1940s, many of whom have been implicated over the years in crimes of torture and assassination, like the slaying of six Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter, at the Jesuit’s University of Central America in San Salvador in 1989.  On Jesuit campuses across the country this week, faculty and students have marked the fifteenth anniversary of that grim event. Two teachers, Mark Chmiel and Andrew Wimmer, offered these reflections to their students at Saint Louis University.

What Would Ellacuria Say?
Mark Chmiel & Andrew Wimmer
November 17, 2004

A few years before his death at the hands of Salvadoran death squads, Ignacio Ellacuria, one of the six slain Jesuits we commemorate on campus this week, delivered the commencement address at Santa Clara University. He told his listeners that the Jesuit’s University of Central America in San Salvador had been bombed ten times. “We have been blocked and raided by military groups and threatened with the termination of all aid. Dozens of students and teachers have had to flee the country in exile; one of our students was shot to death by police who entered the campus.”

What were the faculty and students at the UCA doing to incur the wrath of the Salvadoran elite?  And how had they become so threatening that they had to be eliminated by the state terrorists who ruled that blood-soaked land?

“Precisely because a university is inescapably a social force,” Ellacuria argued, “it must transform and enlighten the society in which it lives.” But he cautioned that “there is no abstract and consistent answer” about how to do that.  “We must constantly look at our own peculiar historical reality.” In El Salvador, for them, it meant putting the prestige and resources of the UCA at the service of the poorest strata of that society and publicly working to dismantle a political and economic system that delivered the country’s land and wealth into the hands of just a dozen families.  Shortly before his death, Ellacuria lamented that we in the West “have organized our lives around inhuman values… The system rests on a few using the majority of the resources, while the majority can’t even cover their basic necessities. It is crucial to define a system of values and a norm of living that takes into account every human being.”

It will be a tragedy if we reduce our remembrance of the slain Salvadoran Jesuits to a pious tendency to put them on pedestals. Catholic radical Dorothy Day was never pleased when people referred to her as a saint, as she figured it was a way for people to get themselves off the hook, sidestepping their own responsibility for critical thinking and decisive action.

So, if Ellacuria were alive today and teaching here, what irritating questions might he be asking us about the “peculiar historical reality” of Saint Louis and our own University?  We imagine that the inhuman value of “destroying cities in order to save them”—part of our legacy from Vietnam, now being lived out again in Iraq—would be weighing heavy on his heart.  For this week’s criminal and inhuman siege of Falluja has been made possible in no small part by the work in St. Louis at Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems division.

A Boeing press release on Thursday boasted that its ScanEagle, a “long-endurance fully autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle,” had just surpassed 1,000 flight hours during operations in Iraq.  “Since late summer when ScanEagle was first deployed in theater with the First Marine Expeditionary Force it has provided critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information to tactical commanders. Feedback regarding ScanEagle’s operational effectiveness and clear, detailed imagery has been extremely positive from all echelons of The Marine Corps.”

But to understand what that means in human terms, turn to an interview that appeared Sunday with Billal Hussein, an AP photographer and native of Falluja.  “Destruction was everywhere. I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them. There was no medicine, water, no electricity nor food for days.  U.S. soldiers began to open fire on the houses, so I decided that it was very dangerous to stay in my house,” he said.  Panicking, he seized on a plan to escape across the Euphrates River. “I wasn’t really thinking,” he said. “Suddenly, I just had to get out. I didn’t think there was any other choice. I decided to swim … but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.” He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead in front of him.  “I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim.”

Dare we make a Saint Louis University connection? We as teachers must help our students understand the system in which they are being summoned to serve as professionals and technicians, often with handsome salaries and considerable prestige. A system that, as George Kennan observed decades ago, is structured to “maintain the disparity” in favor of the few Americans who have much of the wealth, “while the majority can’t even cover their basic necessities.” A system that future history books may deem the supreme inhuman value.

If Ellacuria were alive, we suspect he’d be helping his own students (and any others willing and open to learn) by engaging the curriculum of the real world of domination and nurturing the pedagogy of the imagination that refuses to be made complicit.  Such a course of study would be where knowledge disrupts lives:  the lives of ease and comfort, the lives of averting our eyes and of consuming thoughtlessly, the lives of only valuing American life and ignoring our many dead victims abroad.

Back in 1982 Ellacuria concluded his Santa Clara address with a sober admonition:  “If the University had not suffered, we would not have performed our duty. In a world where injustice reigns, a university that fights for justice must necessarily be persecuted.”

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Mark J. Chmiel and Andrew Wimmer teach in
the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University.

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