Georgetown University Welcomes Colombia's Ex-Pres. Uribe

Next
week on September 14th, thirteen friends and I will stand trial at the
Nevada State Courthouse along the Las Vegas strip. Our infraction?
Daring to walk on to Creech Air Force Base, headquartered in the Nevada
desert, last year on Holy Thursday. We entered the premises to
prayerfully call for an end to the U.S. drone fighter bombers.

Alas,
our call was rejected, and after a tense stand-off with soldiers at the
gate, the police arrived and arrested, handcuffed, chained, booked and
held us in the Las Vegas jail for the night. Then in March, the
government pressed charges against us, hoping to set an example of us
and stop others from protesting our "drones." So the struggle goes on.

Meantime,
while preparing for trial, I received news of the latest church
scandal, this brought on by the Jesuits themselves. Georgetown
University has offered the former president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, a
dictator with blood on his hands, a teaching post at its Walsh School
of Foreign Service as its "Distinguished Scholar in the Practice of
Global Leadership." He begins work tomorrow.

Apparently,
neither the university president nor the faculty nor the Jesuits have
been apprised that lawyers are working to bring charges against him at
the Hague for human rights violations. Indeed, GU, an ostensibly
Christian university, might just as well have invited Marcos, or Somoza
or Liberia's Charles Taylor to teach. Seems to me, inviting Uribe shows
how stone deaf GU is to the times. More, it is a complete betrayal of
the Gospel of Jesus. The Jesuit mission is summed up this way: "to
promote the faith that does justice." Hiring Uribe shows how much, here
in the U.S., the Jesuit mission has become bankrupt. At Georgetown, it's
"the faith that does injustice and makes war."

I
shouldn't be surprised. Georgetown in particular has a long history of
supporting U.S. warmaking. It has taken millions from the Pentagon,
trained thousands of young Catholics how to kill (in its ROTC program),
hired Henry Kissinger, welcomed the person who ordered the assassination
of Romero, and supported warmakers from the Shah of Iran to Ronald
Reagan.

My friends and I have a long history
too--of speaking out. When I lived and worked at GU in the early 1980s,
setting up the "D.C. Schools Project," ROTC drilled right under my
window in the Jesuit community, so I took my case to the university
president himself, then Tim Healy, and exchanged a few heated words with
him about GU's collaboration with the U.S. war machine--a discussion he
took none too kindly to. He responded by pulling strings to have me
dismissed from the Jesuits. (Providentially, I was spared.)

So
there's history between us, the university and I. Still, I'm shocked.
After years of campaigning to close the School of the Americas in Fort
Benning, Georgia, which these days predominantly trains Colombia's military
officers and soldiers who then participate with paramilitary death
squads in killing and torturing tens of thousands of poor people in the
last few years alone, I would expect the president, faculty, and Jesuits of Georgetown to know better.

"We
are looking forward to having President Uribe join our university
community," GU President John DeGioia said recently in a statement.
"Having such a distinguished world leader at Georgetown will further the
important work of students and faculty engaging in important global
issues."

Is this his idea of a world leader? With
so many heroes of peace and nonviolence to invite--from Archbishop Tutu
to Mairead Maguire, or leaders here at home such as Kathy Kelly and Jim
Wallis--I'm stunned that he can look forward to the arrival of one of the
world's most notorious mass murderers. Is this the kind of global
leadership Georgetown teaches?

"President Uribe
will bring a truly unique perspective to discussions of global affairs
at Georgetown," said Carol Lancaster, dean of the Walsh School of
Foreign Service. "We are thrilled that he has identified Georgetown as a
place where he will share his knowledge and interface with Washington,
and I know that our students at the School of Foreign Service will
benefit greatly from his presence."

Friends and I
have urged Georgetown's leaders to disinvite Uribe, and have also begun a
campaign to protest his presence. I personally asked Dean Lancaster on
the phone to do everything she can to prevent Uribe's arrival. To my
chagrin, most everyone I speak with at Georgetown seems to know little
about Colombia or Uribe, and refers to the State Department's respect
for him.

I say this without hyperbole--that should have been their first warning.

We
all need to learn about Uribe's 8-year tenure in Colombia, his
corruption, the human-rights violations he sponsored, the widespread
impunity--all with the backing of the Bush Administration. Human Rights
Watch recently issued an open letter listing some of the human rights
violations of the Uribe administration:

* More
than 4 million Colombians (out of a population of about 45 million) have
been forced to flee their homes, giving Colombia the second-largest
population of internally displaced persons in the world after Sudan.

*
More than 70 members of the Colombian Congress are under criminal
investigation or have been convicted for allegedly collaborating with
the paramilitaries. Nearly all these congresspersons are members of
President Uribe's coalition in Congress, and the Uribe administration
repeatedly undermined the investigations and discredited the Supreme
Court justices who started them.

* Colombia has the highest rate of killings of trade unionists in the world.

*
A clandestine gravesite of 2,000 non-identified bodies was recently
discovered directly beside a military base in La Macarena, in central
Colombia. When the news became public, Uribe flew to the Macarena and
said publicly that accusing the armed forces of human rights abuses was a
tactic used by the guerrilla. These comments put the lives of those
victims who spoke at the event in grave danger.

*
Starting in 2008, reports came out that the Colombian military was
luring poor young men from their homes with promises of employment, then
killing them and presenting them as combat casualties. The practice not
only served to stack battle statistics, but also financially benefited
the soldiers involved, as Uribe's government had, since 2005, awarded
monetary and vacation bonuses for each insurgent killed. Human rights
groups cite 3,000 or more "false positives."

Georgetown's
appointment of Uribe is "shameful," Jesuit theologian Jon Sobrino said
last week in El Salvador. "Uribe is a symbol of the worst that has
happened in the tragic conflict in Colombia. There is a great deal of
blood involved here, a very great deal. "

"Does
this appointment reflect the mission and the Catholic and Jesuit
identity of Georgetown?" Fr. Dean Brackley, a Jesuit professor at the
UCA in El Salvador, writes. "This will, literally, cause scandal. The
U.S. Congress has held up passage of the trade agreement with Colombia
because it is a place where the government, under Uribe, has
consistently failed to defend labor unionists from death squads. Uribe
is widely accused of having had direct links to the paramilitary groups
who have massacred countless innocents. Whether or not those charges are
true, he has irresponsibly and cruelly accused human rights activists
in Colombia of collusion with 'Communist terrorists,' endangering their
lives."

A few years ago, I traveled to Colombia to
see for myself. There I learned about the U.S.-backed war against the
poor waged by Uribe under the guise of a "war on drugs." I learned how
the repressive Colombian government, under the democratically elected
but dictatorial President Uribe, a drug benefactor and close friend of
George W. Bush, killed some ten thousand people a year, leaving 200,000
dead in the last twenty years. This war isn't about drugs but about
expropriating Colombia's rich land and natural resources, from the
indigenous people to the U.S. and multinational corporations.

In
Bogota, Colombia, I met one of the world's leading voices for human
rights, Fr. Javier Giraldo, a Jesuit priest whose institute has
documented all the killings and massacres in Colombia. For his efforts,
he's suffered countless death threats, especially under the Uribe
regime. Last week, my friend Fr. Giraldo wrote to me about the
situation, and I share his letter here, so we can all learn about
Colombia and the disgrace of Georgetown's hiring of Uribe:

"I
write to you with great concern regarding the fact that Georgetown, our
Jesuit University, has hired the outgoing president of Colombia, Alvaro
Uribe, as a professor. I am constantly receiving messages from
individuals and groups who have suffered enormously during his term as
president. They are protesting and questioning the mind-set of our
Society, or its lack of ethical judgment in making a decision of this
kind.

It is possible that decision makers at
Georgetown have received positive appraisals from Colombians in high
political or economic positions, but it is difficult to ignore, at
least, the intense moral disagreements aroused by his government and the
investigations and sanctions imposed by international organizations
that try to protect human dignity. The mere fact that, during his
political career, while he was governor of Antioquia Province
(1995-1997) he founded and protected so many paramilitary groups, known
euphemistically as "Convivir" ("Live Together"), who murdered and
"disappeared" thousands of people and displaced multitudes, committing
many other atrocities, that alone would imply a need for moral censure
before entrusting him with any responsibility in the future.

But
not only did he continue to sponsor those paramilitary groups, but he
defended them and he perfected them into a new pattern of legalized
para-militarism, including networks of informants, networks of
collaborators, and the new class of private security companies that
involve some millions of civilians in military activities related to the
internal armed conflict, while at the same time he was lying to the
international community with a phony demobilization of the
paramilitaries.

In addition, the scandalous
practice of "false positives" took place during his administration. The
practice consists in murdering civilians, usually farmers, and after
killing them, dressing them as combatants in order to justify their
deaths. That is the way he tried to demonstrate faked military victories
over the rebels and also to eliminate the activists in social movements
that work for justice.

The corruption during his
administration was more than scandalous, not just because of the
presence of drug traffickers in public positions but also because the
Congress and many government offices were occupied by criminals. Today
more than a hundred members of Congress are involved in criminal
proceedings, all of them President Uribe's closest supporters.

The
purchase of consciences in order to manipulate the judicial apparatus
was disgraceful. It ended up destroying, at the deepest level, the moral
conscience of the country. Another disgrace was the corrupt manner in
which the Ministers closest to him manipulated agricultural policy in
order to favor the very rich with public money, meanwhile impeding and
stigmatizing social projects. The corruption of his sons, who enriched
themselves by using the advantages of power, scandalized the whole
country at one time.

In addition, he used the
security agency that was directly under his control (the Department of
Administrative Security) to spy on the courts, on opposition
politicians, and on social and human rights movements, by means of
clandestine telephone tapping. The corrupt machinations he used to
obtain his re-election as President in 2006 were sordid in the extreme,
with the result that ministers and close collaborators have gone to
jail.

He manipulated the coordination between the
Army and the paramilitary groups that resulted in 14,000 extrajudicial
executions during his term of office. His strategies of impunity for
those who, through the government or the "para-government," committed
crimes against humanity will go down in history for their brazenness.

The
decision by the Jesuits at Georgetown to offer a professorship to
Alvaro Uribe is not only deeply offensive to those Colombians who still
maintain moral principles, but also places at high risk the ethical
development of the young people who attend our university in Washington.
Where are the ethics of the Society of Jesus?"

Javier's
closing question leaves me trembling. For years, many of us, including
Jesuits and Georgetown students, have protested the U.S. government's
training of tens of thousands of Colombian soldiers at Fort Benning's
"School of the Americas," derided by the more prophetic among us as the
"School of the Assassins." With the hiring of Colombia's former
president who commanded those death squads, now Georgetown itself has
become the "School of the Assassins." A kind of SOA Adjunct,
Mid-Atlantic.

I urge people everywhere to call or
write Georgetown University's president and protest Uribe's presence on
campus, and to push Georgetown to cut its ties with dictators, warmakers
and the Pentagon. For further information, visit the School of the
Americas website at www.soaw.org and the Colombia Support Network at www.colombiasupport.net.

As
I head to Las Vegas for trial, I grieve that our struggle to end war
and injustice is so often stymied by the church itself, and in this
case, my own religious order. But I'm heartened by the reaction of so
many people, and the organizing that has sprung up around this scandal. I
hope someday Georgetown University, and every Jesuit and Catholic
institution, will become a school of justice, nonviolence, and human
rights.