Priests Sentenced For Trespass Ex-Spokane Jesuit One Of 13 Who Protested Against School

Jesuit Brother Frederick O. Mercy, 61, formerly of Spokane, was among 13 protesters sentenced to federal prison for trespassing at Fort Benning during demonstrations against a school for Latin American soldiers.

The group included two Roman Catholic priests and two nuns. Mercy, who now lives in Portland, was sentenced to two months.

The Rev. William J. Bichsel, 67, of Tacoma was sentenced to four months.

The Nov. 16 protests commemorated the slayings of six priests and two women in El Salvador, allegedly by soldiers trained at the School of the Americas, which moved to Fort Benning from Panama in 1980.

The defendants admitted trespassing during 1994 and 1995 protests as part of a campaign to shut down the school, which they say trains soldiers who have participated in “death squads.”

Supporters say the school instills democratic ideals in military officers trained there.

Mercy, who participated in the 1994 protest, said Tuesday he will continue to protest at the school each year until it is shut down.

“If nobody stands up against evil, then it continues to flourish,” Mercy said in a telephone interview from the Jesuit provincial house in Portland. “That place is evil.”

Six Jesuits and their housekeeper and her daughter were killed at the Jesuit-run University of Central America in El Salvador on Nov. 16, 1989. The protests have been staged on the anniversaries of their deaths.

According to Mercy, a United Nations investigation found that a majority of the soldiers who killed the Jesuits were trained with U.S. tax dollars at the School of the Americas.

“That school is a sham and a shame of this country,” Mercy said. “Plus it’s a killing machine.”

U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II, D-Mass., who was one of several congressmen who attended the sentencing Monday, made public a letter he wrote to President Clinton asking that federal money for the school be lifted next year.

The Rev. Roy Bourgeois of Lutcher, La., a Maryknoll priest and founder of the School of the Americas Watch, was sentenced to the maximum six-month prison sentence for his third conviction before U.S. District Judge J. Robert Elliott.

Two others previously warned not to trespass on Fort Benning were sentenced to four months in prison, and the rest were sentenced to two months.

“The fact that a person has a lofty motive doesn’t excuse the criminal activity,” said Elliott. “You’re not being sentenced because you have good intentions, lofty motives … You’re being sentenced because you violated the law with intent to do so.”

Mercy said the judge was particularly rough on the protesters.

“He gave a 72-year-old nun two months in jail,” Mercy said.

Mercy has lived temporarily at Bea House, a Jesuit retirement center at Gonzaga University in recent years. A native of Yakima, he lived in Spokane from 1976 to 1980, when he studied counseling at Eastern Washington University.

He has been a member of the Jesuit community for 30 years.

Bourgeois organizes the annual protests.

, DataTimes