Word: rother
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...Priests killers captured," proclaimed the front page headline in the Guatemala City daily Diario Impacto on Aug. 4. That was fast work. According to stories that appeared in all Guatemala's major newspapers, the national police had taken only seven days to solve the murder of Father Stanley Rother, 46, the red-bearded Oklahoma-born missionary who was found dead on the floor of his rectory last month in the mountain village of Santiago Atitlán. Three Indians from the area were arrested and charged with the killing, which authorities said was committed during a burglary...
...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...
...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...
...Rother was the ninth priest-and first American-to die this year in Guatemala's continuing political strife. According to a report by Amnesty International, an organization that keeps track of political repression around the world, there have been some 5,000 political murders in Guatemala since Lucas García became President in 1978. No precise statistical breakdown is available, but most outside observers agree that the right is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the killings. Much of the violence is the work of government security units, which are waging an all-out campaign to crush...
...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...