The first strike against Liberation Theology by the U.S., Chomsky relates, took place in its very cradle – Brazil. Thus, in 1964, the U.S. sponsored the toppling of democratically-elected Brazilian President João Goulart, setting up a military dictatorship which would rule until 1985 and which, through continued U.S. military assistance, violently attack Liberation priests, religious and base communities, thereby extracting the new radical theological movement by its roots. The U.S. would continue to engage in active, military operations to wipe out Liberation Theology, leaving a slew of murdered priests, brothers and sisters, and even the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, in its wake. All told, well over 100 religious were murdered in Latin America between 1964 and 1985, and the bloodshed did not stop there. As Chomsky emphasizes, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which marked the official end to the Cold War, the U.S. continued its onslaught against the Liberation Church, most famously through its support of the military slaying of 6 Jesuit Priests, along with their housekeeper and her daughter, in November of 1989. As we know from the 1993 UN Truth Commission report, the intellectual authors of the killings of these Jesuits was Col. Inocente Orlando Montano Morales and Colonel Rene Emilio Ponce – fellow 1970 graduates of the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) in Fort Benning, Georgia. And, this stands to reason, for as Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer notes in his book, School for Assassins (Orbis Books, 1999), in 75% of the training exercises at the SOA, the priest or other religious figure (usually played by a U.S. army chaplain) end up either killed or wounded.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 06:16:33 +0000
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