| 20-year search for priest may be
over
By GILL DONOVAN
The search for the remains of a U.S.-born priest who died in
Honduras 19 years ago while serving as chaplain to a group of revolutionaries
may have come to an end.
Family members of the priest told NCR they are hopeful that
if remains found Jan. 28 are positively identified, Fr. James Carney will be
laid to rest. However, they said, the search for justice for Carney and some
185 others who disappeared in Honduras in the early ’80s will
continue.
Since he was reported missing in the summer of 1983, the death of
Carney has been the subject of intense investigations by his family, by human
rights investigators, by Catholic leaders, and by the poor people he served in
Honduras.
Born in Chicago, Carney had begun work as a Jesuit missionary in
the country in 1961. For the next 18 years he worked, slept and ate with the
poor rural parishioners with whom he lived. Among them he was known as
“Padre Guadalupe.” He was 58 at the time of his disappearance.
Honduran forensic specialists completed tests on the remains. The
Honduran Public Ministry’s head of forensics, Dr. Amilcar Rodas, told
Catholic News Service in mid-February that the test results would be revealed
“within a week or perhaps more.”
In late January, the Honduras attorney general’s office had
said it is “almost positive” the remains are Carney’s.
Carney’s oldest sister, Virginia Smith, told NCR,
“I am not getting my hopes up too much because we’ve heard these
reports before.” However, she said, “This one sounds most
credible,” because the remains were found in the jungle near the
Nicaraguan border in the Patuca region, northeast of Tegucigalpa, the capital
of Honduras.
“Our investigation showed that he was thrown from a
helicopter over the jungle in that area,” she said.
Jesuit Fr. Joseph Mulligan, a friend of Carney’s who
ministers now in Managua, Nicaragua, and has been involved in the
investigations into Carney’s death, told Catholic News Service, “If
the bones are really those of Fr. Carney, then his relatives, the Jesuits, the
thousands of people who knew and loved him, and the human rights community will
have a joyful celebration of his life as we bury his remains in the Honduran
land, which he loved.”
Joseph Connolly, husband to Carney’s sister, Eileen, who died
two years ago, said that Mulligan told him that the remains of six people had
been found in the region. The set of remains thought to be Carney’s was
significantly larger than the others and contained teeth with metal
fillings.
Investigation hindered
Ricardo Castro, Honduras’ environmental crimes prosecutor in
the Patuca region, told Catholic News Service that the remains were located
after he received information from witnesses to the last moments of
Carney’s life. Some of the witnesses were former Honduran military
personnel. Castro declined to name the witnesses, saying their identities
needed to be protected.
He said that his investigation had been hindered by lack of
cooperation from U.S. personnel, particularly from the CIA, who turned over
records to the investigation only after blacking out classified sections about
the priest’s death.
Smith told NCR the greatest barrier to her family’s
investigation, ongoing since Carney’s disappearance, has been getting
information from the U.S. and Honduran governments. She said both governments
had been “stonewalling” the investigation ever since her brother
disappeared.
The family’s numerous requests of the U.S. government for
information about the priest’s disappearance have produced thousands of
pages of government documents related to the case. Most of the information in
them, however, was blacked in the name of national security.
In 1983, the year Carney disappeared, the Reagan administration
was spending millions in military assistance to Honduras. The country, which
Reagan once called, “an oasis of peace in the violent and volcanic region
of Central America,” was being used as a staging area for U.S.-backed
contra troops headed into neighboring Nicaragua to oppose its Sandinista
government. Other troops, with U.S. support, entered neighboring El Salvador to
defend that country’s ruling government in its civil war.
When members of Carney’s family came to Honduras soon after
their brother disappeared, they knew that Carney, who had entered Honduras that
summer as the chaplain to 96 revolutionaries, had put himself in danger. They
were prepared to discover that the priest had died in a military action.
Honduras government officials told them they believed that Carney
died of exposure while crossing the mountains bordering Nicaragua and
Honduras.
However, the family soon heard second- and third-hand accounts
that Carney had been captured by the Honduran military. Some said that the
priest had been interrogated, tortured and executed by Battalion 316, a
CIA-trained Honduran force known to have been responsible for the deaths of
dozens of Honduran activists. Still others said that U.S. government officials
knew of Carney’s capture and had failed to intervene to save his life.
According to Connolly, the most reliable account that the
priest’s family has yet received came from Florencio Caballero, who
deserted from Battalion 316 and first told his story to Americas Watch in 1986,
and later, when he was living as a refugee in Canada, to members of
Carney’s family.
Execution ordered
Caballero told them that Carney was executed by order of the
battalion’s commander, Gen. Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, who
along with several other members of 316 had received training in
counterintelligence from U.S. forces at the School of the Americas, which was
then based in Panama. Caballero, who said he too had been trained by U.S.
military in interrogation, said Álverez Martínez gave the order
for Carney’s execution in the presence of a CIA officer, known as
“Mister Mike” at El Aguacate base, where Nicaraguan contra soldiers
were trained.
Though Caballero said he was not present when Álvarez
ordered Carney executed, he said he later heard that Carney was interrogated
and tortured, and that Carney forgave his torturers and made the sign of the
cross before them.
According to Caballero, Carney’s death occurred in a similar
fashion to many of the other captives: After interrogation, the priest was
taken up in a helicopter and thrown down into the jungle of Honduras’
Patuca region. Caballero died in July 1997. According to Connolly, he probably
took his own life.
A fuller account of Cabelloro’s testimony about Battalion 316
appears in a report released in 1998 and now available online titled, “In
Search of Hidden Truths,” by Leo Valladares, the Honduran
government’s human rights commissioner, and Susan Peacock, a National
Security Archive Research Fellow. The report was paid for in large part by a
grant from the MacArthur Foundation. A fuller account of Caballero’s story
appeared in NCR, Jan. 24, 1997.
‘Uncaring’ official
John Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985,
has maintained over the years that he knew nothing about the circumstances
behind Carney’s death or of the activities of Battalion 316. Smith said
she suspects Negroponte of being the most “duplicitous” and calls him
the most “uncaring” official the Carney family dealt with in its
investigation.
Negroponte now serves as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He
is alleged to have played a leading role in Reagan’s effort to arm and
train Nicaraguan contras in Honduras in the mid-1980s.
An Aug. 10, 2001, NCR report said Honduran newspapers have
written hundreds of stories about the abuses carried out by Honduras’
government in the ’80s. It quotes a 2001 Los Angeles Times report
that said Negroponte quashed reports of abuse by the country’s military,
“including one U.S.-backed operation that resulted in the execution of
nine prisoners and the disappearance of an American priest,” Fr. James
Carney. The report further said the battalion was trained by U.S. forces.
While no evidence has been produced to link Negroponte to
Battalion 316, José Miguel Vivanco, executive director for Human Rights
Watch Americas Division, has referred to him as “the ostrich ambassador:
He never saw anything wrong. He never heard about any serious human rights
violations. It was like he was living on a different planet.”
Honduran military officials have returned Carney’s stole,
chalice and a Bible he had been using to members of his family, but they have
continued to say they don’t know where his remains are.
Born the third of seven children to a devout and conservative
Catholic family, Carney was educated in Catholic institutions. After serving in
the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II, he decided become a Jesuit.
Explaining that, as he wrote in a 1971 letter, “To love Christ really is
to live as he did,” Carney decided he wanted to be a missionary.
His autobiography, titled To Be a Revolutionary, was
published in 1985. In it he said he saw his role as revolutionary as being the
same as that of the early Christians. “The difference between the
Christian revolutionary and any other honest revolutionary is that the
Christian is the one who should understand God’s plan for the world, where
the revolution and the world is going and [who] respect[s] the Spirit of God in
all men and women.” At the request of Carney’s family, the paperback
version of the book bears a longer title, “To Be a Christian Is …
To Be a Revolutionary,” a quote from Carney.
In the book, Carney describes his ministry to some of the poorest
people in the hemisphere, most of whom made no more than 75 cents a day, who
lived in one-room makeshift houses. He explains why he came to oppose the
country’s political system, in which multinational corporations made
profits through cheap labor and land.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Carney was in the forefront of the
Small Christian Community movement, in which small groups of lay people meet to
pray and talk about living the gospel’s call for justice. He was a
proponent of liberation theology. His work, Connolly said, was at the
grass-roots level of that movement, “not just theoretical stuff in a
classroom.” He said that for a time Carney served as national chaplain for
some 80,000 campesinos in Honduras.
In his ministry, Carney saw poor people evicted from their small
properties. When he became a leader in the effort to unionize them and bring
about land reforms, he began receiving death threats.
In 1974, Carney renounced his U.S. citizenship in a gesture of
solidarity with his poor parishioners, to become a citizen of Honduras. In
1979, a year after Carney had accused CIA officials of buying an election for a
campesino union, the Honduran government rescinded his citizenship and expelled
him for his efforts to organize poor people.
‘The most basic need’
A 1987 BBC documentary by David Jessel about the circumstances
behind the priest’s disappearance included footage of Carney speaking to
an ABC news reporter in 1979 about his justice work not long before he was
expelled.
“The most basic need that a man has to fulfill is food,”
Carney said. “And of course when [the Sula Valley] that could, they say,
produce enough food for all Central America, is producing vegetable oil for
Castle & Cook Company, I mean that’s a terrible crime, it’s a
sin. And that’s why we Christians nowadays in Latin America want to change
that. We rebel against that. Even if they call us communists, even if they kill
us, we have to try to do something about it. We hope to try to wake our people
up.”
Jessel also interviewed Elliot Abrams for the documentary. Now,
working in the Bush administration as senior director of the National Security
Council’s office for democracy, human rights and international operations,
he was serving as Reagan’s assistant secretary for Inter-American Affairs
when interviewed. While providing no new information about the priest’s
disappearance, Abrams said that such American churchmen as Carney were
“completely misled and bewildered by the events of Central America.”
He said, “That’s tragic because people who believe in God should have
nothing to do with communist guerillas. When they win, religion and religious
freedom are destroyed. … We know what happens to freedom and freedom of
religion in communist countries.”
In 1991, Abrams’ involvement in the Iran-contra scandal led
to a guilty plea for withholding information from Congress. Days before the end
of his administration, the first President Bush pardoned Abrams.
In October 1998, after repeated requests from activists, the CIA
declassified its inspector general’s 1995 report on the agency’s
involvement in Honduras during the 1980s.
The inspector general’s report was written by order of John
Deutch, then CIA director, after the Baltimore Sun published an
award-winning series on the CIA’s links to Battalion 316. Though many
sections of the report were blacked out in the name of national security, some
revelations about the agency’s knowledge of Battalion 316 were
revealed.
The report said, “The Honduran military committed hundreds of
human rights abuses since 1980, many of which were politically motivated and
officially sanctioned.” It linked the abuses to death squad activities and
said “reporting inadequacies” by CIA officials in Honduras prevented
CIA headquarters from “understanding the scope of human rights abuses in
Honduras.”
It concluded that some CIA notifications to Congress had been
inaccurate.
During the 1980s, over $1 billion in U.S. aid went to the Honduras
military.
After his expulsion from Honduras, Carney was assigned to minister
to a parish in bordering Nicaragua, which had overthrown its own dictator,
Anastasio Somoza.
In Nicaragua, Carney met a group of 96 Honduran refugees who hoped
to return to Honduras as revolutionaries and bring about land reform.
Carney decided to return with them as their chaplain. Connolly
said that Carney, though he considered himself a pacifist, reasoned the rebels
deserved and needed a chaplain, just as other military forces have
chaplains.
Before joining the group, Carney left the Jesuit order, “so
that fellow Jesuits wouldn’t be implicated and hurt” by his
involvement. Eventually, Connolly said, Carney “did intend to go
back” to the Jesuits, whom he regarded as “the best group of men he
could possibly belong to in the world.”
The small group of rebels were easily defeated by the Honduran
military. Some of the men were captured and imprisoned. The fates of others
remain a mystery.
Nearly 20 years after Carney’s death, he is considered a hero
to people in Honduras, many of whom have remained active in the search to learn
how he died.
In September 1996, some 4,000 people took part in a march in
Tocoa, calling on the Honduras and U.S. governments to reveal the details they
have kept hidden about Carney’s death. A cultural center in Tocoa was
named after Carney in 1989.
Connolly said that in September, Carney’s book will be
published in Honduras to mark the 20th anniversary of the priest’s
death.
Questioning the ambassador
Among U.S. Catholic leaders who have taken an active role in the
investigation is Detroit Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, who in 1997 went to
Honduras to question the country’s U.S. ambassador at the time, James
Creagan. Carney’s brother, Patrick, Carney’s cousin, Jean Brenner, a
Sister of St. Agnes, and Carney’s friend, Fr. Joseph Mulligan, accompanied
Gumbleton. The bishop expressed incredulity when Creagan told him that
“only irrelevancies” had been blacked out in various government
reports about the priest’s disappearance.
When Creagan provided them with no useful information, Gumbleton,
Patrick Carney, Brenner and Mulligan took part in a fast at the U.S. embassy to
protest the decision of the U.S. government to withhold documents about the
priest’s disappearance (NCR, Nov. 14, 1997).
Connolly said he hopes that if forensics tests prove the remains
to be Carney’s, the priest can be buried in the Jesuit cemetery in
Honduras. “And I think they will,” he said. Carney, he said, was a
great man. “Heroes should have a place to be honored.”
He and Smith said that if the remains are positively identified as
Carney’s, they and other family members intend to return once more to
Honduras for a memorial Mass.
“I’m 83 years old and I’d have to go down in a
wheel-chair but if it’s at all possible I’m planning on doing
it,” Smith said. “But that’s a long way off yet.
“He is our brother and it’s been 20 years. We’ve
never given up and we never will give up. And the investigation has been
ongoing. It has never stopped. And we intend to keep it open until justice is
done.
“It goes beyond finding the remains,” she said. “We
want justice in this case, not only for ourselves but for all the other
families who have disappeared down there, who have lost loved ones. And I think
the people responsible for their deaths should be held accountable.”
Gill Donovan is a staff writer for NCR. His e-mail
address is gdonovan@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, March 21,
2003
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