Thursday, October 17, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
THREE-MONTH SENTENCE: Friar reports to prison camp
Rev. Louis Vitale, a longtime social activist, jailed
By KEITH ROGERS
REVIEW-JOURNAL
Louis Vitale, a Franciscan friar and longtime social activist in Southern Nevada, turned himself in to the Nellis Federal Prison Camp on Wednesday, vowing to "wage peace" while he serves a three-month sentence for trespassing last year at Fort Benning, Ga.
"We are about to wage war," Vitale, 70, said in an interview before he was taken by colleagues first to the Nellis main gate and then to another entrance at the base that leads to the prison camp.
"How do we wage a world of peace?" he asked.
"Father Louie," as he is known at the Nevada Desert Experience, a faith-based anti-nuclear group he co-founded, and at St. Boniface Church in San Francisco, where he moved in 1992 after two stints in Las Vegas, was among 1,700 protesters arrested near an Army school were Latin American soldiers are trained.
He was one of 29 sentenced to serve in federal prisons for entering the military reservation, where he prayed outside the former School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. He and other peace activists claim torture is taught at the training camp and its graduates, they say, are linked to the Nov. 16, 1989, killings in El Salvador of six Jesuit priests and others in Central America.
The throng of demonstrators who staged a funeral procession at Fort Benning included actor Martin Sheen, who, like Vitale, is a familiar face at protests at the Nevada Test Site.
Vitale, an Air Force officer from 1954 to 1957, said he decided to participate in the Fort Benning protest because, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President Bush urged Americans to fight terrorism wherever it exists in the world.
Based on his experience with human rights delegations in the 1980s in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, Vitale said he believes the training at the Fort Benning institute amounts to terrorism.
"This is terrorism where soldiers are trained to pull people out of houses and slaughter them. ... How are you going to be champions of defending the world against terrorism?" he asked. "You've got to start at home."
