 "Photo: Eric Ou/The Daily Texan")
Every November, Carlos Mauricio leaves his family in California to participate in his annual “Journey for Justice” under the Stop Impurity Project he founded with fellow torture survivors Frankie Flores, Pedro Antonio Cabeza and Amilcar Carrillo.
Invited by the UT Oxfam group, Mauricio spoke at UT on Tuesday night. Oxfam, which works for human rights and against world problems such as poverty, injustice and hunger, contacted Mauricio after they heard he would be passing through Austin on his annual drive.
“It’s something we felt would be interesting to the student body. You can’t affect change unless you know what is going on,” said Oxfam-UT President Lauren DeAnna.
Mauricio and fellow board members of the Stop Impurity Project, which works to promote awareness of torture and prevent future instances of torture, drive from California to Fort Benning, Ga. every November to participate in a vigil mourning the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests at the hands of Salvadoran soldiers.
Members of groups such as School of Americas Watch, a group Mauricio works with, stand outside the gates of the military base and protest the existence of the School of Americas, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, which they blame for the training of solders who murdered thousands of innocent civilians in Latin America, among them, the Jesuit priests.
“School of Americas Watch members have taken lists of graduates from [the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation] and compared it to human rights abuses and the names are identical,” said Hendrik Vofs, spokesman for School of Americas Watch.
“I do not believe the army is the correct institution to teach democracy,” Mauricio said.
Mauricio escaped to the United States in 1983, two months after spending two weeks at the hands of death squads in San Salvador, El Salvador. Mauricio was a professor of agricultural sciences at the University of El Salvador when he was arrested in his classroom by Salvadoran soldiers working under then Minister of Defense General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova.
At the time, El Salvador was experiencing a civil war as extremist left and right factions struggled for power. Mauricio said hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were raped, tortured, murdered and declared “disappeared” during the war.
In 2002, Mauricio won a trial against Generals Jose Guillermo Garcia and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, two former Ministers of Defense who served during the civil war, blaming them for the torture committed against him and two other plaintiffs.
“For me as a person who has been the victim of such an injustice, I want to talk about why people are tortured,” Mauricio said.
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