Posted by: Kim_Hamilton on 01/08/2013 11:22 PM
Updated by: Kim_Hamilton on 01/08/2013 11:23 PM
Expires: 01/01/2018 12:00 AM
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Motherlode Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Planned
Sonora, CA...The Motherlode Martin Luther King Jr. Committee is sponsoring the visit to Sonora by Father Roy Bourgeois, a Catholic Maryknoll missionary priest active in social justice issues. Bourgeois, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, will be the keynote speaker at 2pm, January 20th at the Sonora High School Auditorium during the 18th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday celebration. The free celebration and reception will also include music and student awards. ....
Bourgeois for decades has focused his activism on non-violent actions aimed at stopping U.S. support for Latin American death squads and repressive regimes. He has worked in particular to expose and dismantle the School of the Americas, which trains foreign soldiers, many of whom have been implicated in the kidnapping and murder of thousands of civilians and labor activists.
He began his career as a priest in 1972 working with the poor in Bolivia. When he stood up against the injustices he saw, he was jailed, tortured and deported.
In Central America, he worked against U.S. policies that included arming the insurgent Contras in Nicaragua, and arming and training the militaries of repressive regimes in El Salvador and Guatamala.
Those regimes sponsored the infamous “death squads” responsible for killing thousands of peasants and workers in the late 1970’2 and 1980’s.
Bourgeois, who was awarded the Purple Heart in Vietnam, was inspired by his experience in the war to join the Catholic priesthood and the Maryknoll Missionaries, who work with the poor overseas.
In 1980, his friend, Ita Ford, an American Maryknoll nun, was raped and murdered in El Salvador along with three other American churchwomen. The killers were trained at Fort Benning, Ga.
Graduates of the School of the Americas were also linked to the 1980 assasination in San Salvador of Archbishop Oscar Romero, and the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter.
He founded the School of the Americas Watch in 1990, to expose the atrocities committed by the U.S. trained School of the Americas graduates. Each November, thousands of school critics hold non-violent demonstrations outside Fort Benning’s gates. They carry coffins, banners and crosses with the names of people murdered by the school’s graduates.
In 1995, Bourgeois produced and Academy Award nominated documentary, “School of the Assassins”, narrated by Susan Sarandon. He received Pax Christi’s Teacher of Peace Award, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and has testified before the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
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