Christian Brothers went to Uruguay to educate children of the elite

I READ Donal Lenihan’s feature ‘Holding out for a hero’ (October 19) about the plane that came down in the Andes in October 1972 with a Uruguayan rugby team on board.

It says that “all were Catholic”. What a strange comment. Would it have made any difference if they had been any other religion?

And it says “Uruguay had descended from a relatively prosperous Latin American country into an increasingly disaffected society with dangerous urban terror groups” when the Irish Christian Brothers went to Montevideo in 1955 to open the school from which the rugby team came.

That is not true: Uruguay is still a “relatively prosperous Latin American country” and that means — now and before — that about 10% of its population is filthy rich and the rest live in different and descending degrees of filthy poverty and indigence. It is also incorrect to say the Christian Brothers went to Montevideo because “Catholic parents became alarmed by the increasingly atheistic and anarchist tendencies among teachers in Uruguayan schools”.

Actually, these “Catholic parents” were “alarmed” because they feared they would lose their privileges and stop being the elite they had always been. But they had nothing to worry about.

The Uruguayan military — like others all over Latin America — soon got rid of the “increasingly atheistic and anarchist” teachers. They also got rid of everyone else with those tendencies from El Salvador to Patagonia.

And the Catholic Church blessed the elite’s military and weapons while congregations like the Christian Brothers educated the elite’s children with one proviso: no corporal punishment. Meantime the military was looking after the great unwashed by murdering as many of them as it could. The justification was dirty wars against “dangerous urban terror groups”. If these urban terrorists were so dangerous, why did they lose from Patagonia to El Salvador?

As for the Christian Brothers, wasn’t it sadly ironic that a congregation founded to educate the poor of Ireland went to Uruguay and Argentina to educate rich minorities and ignore poor majorities.

Latin America’s great survivors are not the people who were on that plane — they are its millions of dirt poor.

Donal Lenihan should have learned a little history.

Miceál Mac Oireachtaigh

Olavarria 3452

Florida 1602

Buenos Aires

Argentina