Fr. Roy and three the political
prisoners at Barrillas, Guatemala

Today I received mail from a friend Fr. Roy Bourgeois, a friend who is a leader of SOA-Watch. Since Roy does not do email, text messages, tweets or anything digital so I anxiously open the personally address letter. What I found inside was “An Open Letter to Catholics” printed article and on the side of the page it said “The Boston Globe, Sunday, March 2, 2014.” I thought it was an editorial letter Roy wrote for Boston Globe. I wanted it in electronic form to send to mutual friends so I went to Boston Globe for March 2nd looking for it. I could not find it anywhere in the Globe and was ready to give up when I decided to search the title and author without using Boston Globe. I find a site called Campaign Outsider that had an article called: Dr. Ads: Why Fr. Roy Bourgeois Ran That Boston Globe Ad. I guess it was an a quarter page ad in the Sunday Boston Globe on March 2, 2014. When asked why he ran the ad, Roy’s response was “I just wanted to poke the beehive,and I have some friends there who wanted to contribute to a good cause.”

When we were in Guatemala with an SOA-Watch delegation recently we spoke to a group that had some political prisoners in a nearby prison. Roy asked if we could visit the prisoners. The response of the group was it was not visitor’s day but they would check. We went to the prison to find a large press group waiting for us. We entered the courtyard and Roy and other members in group who spoke Spanish spoke to the media. One of the prison guards asked Roy if we would like to visit the three political prisoners. Roy said yes and to all our surprise the three political prisoners were allowed to join us in the courtyard. One of them spoke eloquently why he was imprisoned and how he had been tortured. I was the designated photographer for our group and roamed around taking pictures of this hard-to-believe event.

Returning home a friend that I met at SOA-Watch gathering at Fort Benning wrote to me that she had saw me and Father Roy in the prison courtyard in a video on You Tube.

After our prison visit Roy told me that we should have brought “chains and locks”. I asked why and he said we could have chained ourselves to the prisoners and demanded their release. A staff member at SOA-Watch told me that Roy did similar actions on other delegations to Latin America. I had been on only one other SOA-Watch delegation before with Roy, one to Haiti. I thought about the trip and remembered we did join in a protest for human rights and jobs with some young adults in front of the Ministry of Labor.

Yes, Roy does “poke the beehive” over and over again.

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