A survivor of government-inflicted torture in El Salvador visited the UA yesterday to speak out against the use of violence against civilians by militaries around the world.
Carlos Mauricio, a former professor at the University of El Salvador, spoke to about 20 people in the Social Justice Leadership Center. He detailed his time as a prisoner and his fight to bring justice to those who were also wronged.
Mauricio was abducted from his university in June 1983. He was taken to the National Police headquarters, where he was beaten, tortured and interrogated for about two weeks.
He said the police accused him of being a guerilla insurgent because of his association with people involved in the guerilla movement.
Mauricio said he was handcuffed, blindfolded, beaten and denied food, water, sleep and use of bathroom facilities. He said, at one point, he and other prisoners were hidden from the Red Cross by their captors.
In July 2002, he and two other torture survivors sued two of the military generals who were in charge at the time of his abduction. A jury awarded them $54.6 million in damages. The case set a precedent for other torture survivors who want compensation for their pain, Mauricio said.
Mauricio traveled through Tucson as a part of a School of Americas Watch caravan. SOA Watch is a group that speaks out against the School of the Americas, a U.S. Army training facility for Latin American soldiers, in Fort Benning, Ga.
The group's ultimate goal is to shut the school down. Soldiers in the school, recently renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, train in "counterinsurgency techniques," such as sniper training, military intelligence and interrogation techniques, according to the SOA Watch Web site.
Mauricio said many of these soldiers then return to their countries and use these techniques to commit atrocities against civilians.
The caravan will journey throughout the southern United States, eventually ending up in Fort Benning for a protest at the SOA. Last year, 10,000 people were present at the protest, Mauricio said.
"You have to ask, who are the insurgents?" he said. "The students, the workers, the peasants, the people. They say we are the insurgents."
Mauricio founded the Stop Impunity Project to prosecute Latin American military generals who move to the United States after they retire.
"We believe one way to fight torture is to fight impunity," Mauricio said. "We need to bring the perpetrators to tribunal or else there is no reconciliation."
The Stop Impunity Project also works with SOA Watch to change U.S. foreign policy, especially pertaining to Latin America.
Mauricio said he recognizes American soldiers in Iraq are now using many of the same torture tactics used on him by soldiers in 1983 in El Salvador.
"I believe the people in Iraq have the right to fight against occupation," he said. "I believe they will prevail."
Jerami Garcia, a public management sophomore and Social Justice Leadership Center employee, said she worked with the SOA Watch caravan to bring Mauricio to campus.
"I wanted the student population to hear him speak because I think people should know what's going on with SOA," she said.
Kenneth Kennon is a retired pastor who lives in Tucson. He was imprisoned for six months for protesting SOA.
"I'm only one of 200 very peaceful people who have been put into federal prison" because of such protests, he said.
Kennon said that students should be concerned with what people like Mauricio have to say because the School of the Americas is not something that is widely known.
"Torture is not an American value and should not be a part of our policy," he said. "It's not an academic issue to me. It has to do with human pain."