Word: guatemalan
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...Guatemalan President Fernando Romeo Lucas García, the arrests were timely and convenient. Father Rother's murder, widely believed to be the work of a pro-government rightist hit squad, had been a major embarrassment for Lucas Garcia's regime. The killing occurred just as the Reagan Administration was considering a resumption of the military aid that was cut off during the Carter years because of Guatemala's deplorable human rights record. The prompt arrests, however, seemed to vindicate the government's system of justice and disprove charges that its security forces may have been...
TIME has learned, though, that the arrests were a frame-up to placate the U.S. According to "official sources" cited by Guatemalan newspapers, the police were led to the killers' trail largely by the testimony of one witness: Sister Ana Maria Gonzales Arias, a Mexican nun working as a missionary in Santiago Atitlán. Sister Gonzales was said to have told officials that she saw "various armed men" wearing hoods enter the church, where they were discovered by Father Rother apparently while they were "seeking to rob the church's money...
...Rother and his congregation, like many Guatemalan villagers, were caught in the middle of the undeclared civil war that since 1978 has pitted the security forces of President Fernando Romeo Lucas García against leftist guerrilla groups operating in the highlands. Both the army and the guerrillas had taken over the village during the past year. Apparently suspected of sympathizing with the leftists, a number of Rother's parishioners were murdered while the village was under army control. Rother may have sealed his fate by writing a letter, which was reportedly circulated in the U.S. last January, describing...
...success of Washington's "quiet diplomacy" approach may now be further jeopardized by the Rother incident. Describing Rother as "a good and dedicated man," the State Department last week denounced "such senseless and wasteful violence" and called on the Guatemalan government for a full investigation. Said one Administration official, with more than a touch of bureaucratic understatement: "There will be a problem if the government was somehow culpable...
DIED. Alfred Jensen, 77, Guatemalan-born painter whose lushly colored, checkerboard-patterned paintings were inspired by abstruse mathematical theories and the architecture of ancient civilizations; of cancer; in Livingston...