Requiem for a Missionary

A U.S. priest is slain as political violence increases

"Father, you're in extreme danger. You must get out immediately." When he got that warning from a parishioner in the village of Santiago Atitlan 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.

But Rother missed his village church near the banks of Lake Atitlan. 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 Atitlan, 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."

But 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 Garcia 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 the army's atrocities against innocent peasants.

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 Garcia 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 the small but growing leftist guerrilla movement. In addition, paramilitary rightist groups like the Secret Anti-Communist Army (E.S.A.) appear to do their murderous work with the tacit cooperation of the government. Amnesty International traces the headquarters for most of the right's secret operations to the Presidential Guard Annex of the National Palace.

While the leftist groups can be just as ruthless as the right, they kill fewer people and choose their targets more selectively. The rightists, on the other hand, are likely to gun down anyone they consider ideologically "suspicious," including priests, teachers, students, journalists, labor leaders and liberal politicians.

As a result of these brutal tactics, all potential opposition voices to President Lucas Garcia have been silenced, and political pluralism is dead. Though Garcia cannot legally succeed himself in next March's presidential election, there is little doubt that a like-minded rightist, such as General Anibal Guevara Rodriguez, the Defense Minister, will move into the palace in Guatemala City.

Despite this record of violence and political repression, the Reagan Administration has been seeking ways of improving ties with Guatemala and resuming the military support that had been cut off because of Jimmy Carter's human rights policies. As Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Stephen Bosworth put it, "The Administration is convinced of the need to try a new constructive policy approach to Guatemala. The policies of the past clearly failed."

Yet Guatemala confronts the Reagan Administration with one of its toughest foreign policy challenges: on one hand, the country is viewed as a victim of Cuban-sponsored insurgency, needing U.S. support; on the other, the government obviously violates human rights.

To try to bridge this gap, Ambassador-at-Large Vernon Walters visited Guatemala City last May. Walters reportedly held out the promise of increased military support, while indicating that the Administration hoped the government would restrict its terrorism. For Guatemala, the new policy has already paid off. In June Washington lifted the export ban on military Jeeps and trucks.

But President Lucas Garcia has not held up his end of the implicit deal. TIME has learned that the Presidential Palace sent out specific orders to curb the killing during Walters' visit in order to improve Guatemala's bargaining position. After Walters' departure, the death rate rose to a new high and is now averaging roughly 400 a month.

The 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."

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