Word: rother
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Father, you're in extreme danger. You must get out immediately." When he got that warning from a parishioner in the village of Santiago Atitlán last January, the Rev. Stanley Rother had good reason to take it seriously: some 30 local villagers had already been kidnaped and murdered by right-wing death squads. Told that his own name was on a right-wing hit list, the red-bearded missionary reluctantly fled the village, where he had lived and worked for 13 years among the Cakchiquel Indians, and returned to his native Okarche, Okla...
...Rother missed his village church near the banks of Lake Atitlán. And he missed the Indians, whose dialect he knew so well that he sometimes spoke it at Mass. Last April, when friends in Guatemala told him that the explosive political atmosphere had quieted down, he decided to go back. He told his family: "If I have to die, I will die there. I want to be there with my people...
Last week, after attending a traditional Indian fiesta in Santiago Atitlán, Father Rother died among "his people." Nuns found him in his rectory, lying in a pool of blood. Witnesses said he had been shot twice, once in the left temple and once in the left cheekbone, by three men wearing ski masks. His body was covered with welts and bruises, suggesting that he had put up a struggle. A strapping "Oklahoma farm boy," in the words of a friend, he had said that no would-be abductors would ever take him alive...
...Rother was an unlikely target. In all his years among the Indians, he had scrupulously avoided controversy. Other American priests in the area considered him the most conservative of their group. Said the Rev. Ron Burke, who had worked with Rother in Guatemala: "He was the real low-key type, just doing his job. His real delight was upgrading the agricultural and health level of the people, training and teaching them...