THE VIGIL FOR FATHER CARNEY
Feb. 1, 1998
TO: Persons and organizations concerned about the disappeared of Honduras, especially FATHER JAMES (GUADALUPE) CARNEY, a U.S. citizen who "disappeared" in 1983 after entering Honduras as chaplain to a revolutionary group.
FROM: Joe Mulligan, SJ
Apdo 2419
Managua, Nicaragua
tel: (505) 278-6965
email: guvols@nicarao.org.ni
RE: Recent news articles and editorials about this issue.
Dear Friends,
The major part of this communique, after an introductory update, consists of the following articles:
WASHINGTON POST Editorial, Jan. 28, 1998
MIAMI HERALD Editorial, Jan. 22, 1998
"Body of disappeared U.S. priest may be exhumed in Honduras," by Paul Jeffrey, January 14 (ENI)
MIAMI HERALD Op-Ed, "The CIA Can Help Us Find His Body," by Joe Mulligan, Dec. 26, 1997.
Please cite or even provide these articles in your communications with public officials. And please write Letters to the Editor to these newspapers, commenting on these items and asking for more complete coverage and investigative journalism regarding this issue.
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UPDATE
In our last communique (Jan. 14) we noted that Senators Jesse Helms (NC), Carl Levin (MI), and Richard Shelby (AL) had expressed concern about the case of Fr. Carney, and we asked friends to thank these Senators for the actions they have taken and to urge them to intensify their efforts to uncover the truth in the Fr. Carney case.
You might also contact Representatives James P. McGovern (MA) and John Joseph Moakley (MA), who have expressed strong support for complete declassification of U.S. government documents concerning the disappeared of Honduras.
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FACT-FINDING MISSION TO HONDURAS
We have contacted these and other political leaders, inviting them to consider making a fact-finding visit to Honduras some time during the next three months. Please express to them your support for this suggestion. And if you would like to contact your U.S. Senators and/or Representative or other leaders about this, I would be glad to send you a sample letter.
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PUBLIC ACTIONS IN APRIL
In previous communiques we have also mentioned the possibility of another letter-writing campaign and public actions in April, in Honduras (where a follow-up committee has been formed) and in the U.S. and other countries.
If you have some suggestions as to what might be done in the U.S., please send them to EPICA (address below).
If you have some ideas as to possible actions in Tegucigalpa and perhaps other places in Central America, please send them to Matthew Eisen at CRISPAZ (address below).
It has been suggested, for instance, that as many North Americans as possible, as well as Hondurans, gather in front of the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa for a day or two in April to demand a serious commitment from Washington, DC, to solve this case.
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RESOURCE MATERIALS AND SPEAKERS' BUREAU
If you would like to schedule an educational event concerning the case of Fr. Carney, we may be able to help you with resource material and possibly with a speaker. Details were given in our previous communique. If you would like information, please contact me.
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FINANCIAL SUPPORT
Financial contributions to help the ongoing work in this struggle (The Vigil for Fr. Carney) may be sent to EPICA in Washington, to be shared 50-50 with COFADEH (Committee of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared in Honduras). Earmark your donation for The Vigil for Fr. Carney.
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Thanks again to all for all your work, support, and commitment!
"The Lord demands an accounting for the blood that is shed; the Lord hears the cry of the poor"--Psalm 9:12.
Sincerely,
Joe Mulligan, SJ
Addresses:
Matthew Eisen
CRISPAZ
Apdo 2944
Centro de Gobierno
San Salvador, El Salvador
tel/fax: (503) 226-0829
email: pazsal@netcomsa.com
EPICA
1470 Irving St. NW
Washington, DC 20010
tel: (202) 332-0292
fax: (202) 332-1184
email: epica@igc.apc.org
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ARTICLES AND EDITORIALS:
Washington Post Editorial, January 28, 1998
FOR THE BETTER part of 20 years, a handful of family members and human rights investigators have been trying to dig out information bearing on the "disappearance" of some 180 Hondurans, including an American-born priest, in the Central American wars of the 1980s. For some of the searchers, the somber quest is a matter of moral obligation to the now- presumed dead and for others a matter of high political urgency. Prominent among them is Leo Valladares, the official Honduran human rights commissioner. He sees the establishing of accountability for the disappeared as the foundation for building a rule of law and a democratic order in his country. He was in Washington for that purpose the other day.
Why in Washington? The emerging outlines of this affair indicate that the United States, in working with the Honduran military to support anti-Communist forces in El Salvador and Nicaragua, set up a special "Battalion 3-16" to "monitor and destroy . . . subversives" in Honduras. That is, the CIA allegedly had to do with a death squad whose victims were selected, judged and disposed of by an unreconstructed Central American military establishment operating beyond any leash of law. Among the victims was an American-born Jesuit priest, James Carney, who was reportedly dropped from a helicopter. His family has since been in the hunt for the bureaucratic trail of his death.
In Honduras the records are slim -- slimmer for the government's shredding of files. In the United States the sources are more abundant, and the access is relatively easier, but Mr. Valladares still finds the going tough. In a gesture of no little resonance, CIA Director George Tenet last week received the dogged Honduran human rights commissioner for nearly an hour. According to both the director and his guest, Mr. Tenet (in the third such release) made formerly classified materials available and promised his best further effort to review the release of other documents, including some relevant to the special battalion. Mr. Valladares has special hopes to break out the CIA inspector general's report of last September on the CIA-Honduran connection.
For the CIA it cannot be easy to open up material that may touch not only on intelligence sources and methods -- the standard ground for keeping secrets -- but on dark deeds as well. But the agency also needs to look at the larger picture. The United States went to the Central American wars to protect and build local democracies. That project did not stop when the wars were over. For Hondurans, learning of the uses and abuses of secret power committed by their armed forces is essential in order to come to terms with their past and to build a more democratic future.
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MIAMI HERALD Editorial, January 22, 1998
Let the truth speak
OF HONDURAS'S PAST
The U.S. government should declassify records that shed light on abuses of human rights.
Leo Valladares, National Commissioner for Human Rights in Honduras, has been searching for truth in an ugly past. Exploring the darkest capacities for man's inhumanity to man is, at best, an overwhelming task. The United States has made it more difficult by withholding records that might shed light on atrocities committed by the Honduran military in the 1980s.
"The transformation of Honduras into a more-democratic society lies in our people's spirit, ability, and the will to know and confront the terrible truth of a legacy of human rights violations," explains Mr. Valladares in his just released report In Search of Hidden Truths (http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive). The report details four years of "exceedingly frustrating" attempts to obtain relevant documents from U.S. State and Defense departments and the Central Intelligence Agency. Argentina, which trained Nicaraguan contras in Honduras, too, has turned over only "a slim file."
During the 1980s, Honduras served as a base for Nicaraguan contras in their U.S.-backed struggle against the Sandinista government. U.S. intelligence and military agencies worked closely with the Honduran military, as did agents from Argentina. In this period 184 people "disappeared" -- among them the Rev. James Carney, an American Catholic priest. For 14 years his family vainly has sought an accounting.
Of particular interest are documents relating to Battalion 316, a U.S.-trained Honduran intelligence group suspected of extrajudicial torture and disappearances. The CIA inspector general last year issued a report on this battalion, and President Clinton pledged that relevant CIA records would be declassified by the end of 1997. Mr. Valladares still awaits them. Shame on the U.S. government. Americans and Hondurans have the right to the truth.
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Body of disappeared U.S. priest may be exhumed in Honduras
By Paul Jeffrey
Tegucigalpa, Honduras, January 14 (ENI) - Honduran human rights activists hope to dig up the body of a U.S. priest who disappeared here more than 13 years ago.
Bertha Oliva, director of the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), told ENI that her group has received information that will allow it to locate the remains of James Carney, a priest who disappeared in September 1983 while accompanying a guerrilla column that entered Honduras from neighboring Nicaragua.
Oliva said three people have approached her group in recent weeks with new information about Carney's whereabouts.
All three contacted COFADEH following a 45-day fast late last year in front of the U.S. embassy here. That protest, conducted by three U.S. Catholics who demanded that the U.S. government release classified information regarding Carney's disappearance, generated renewed interest in the case throughout Honduras.
Oliva refused to name the new informants. She said that while they approached COFADEH independently of each other, they all agreed on the spot where Carney was buried.
Oliva declined to identify the location where Carney is allegedly buried, though she did admit that it was located in the eastern province of Olancho.
"We've got to be very careful how we manage the information about Father Carney," she told ENI. "There are a lot of military officers with desires to rise in the ranks who would be negatively affected by these revelations."
Oliva's concern for the safety of the informants appears well founded. In the last two years, several former low- ranking military officers have been killed in what appear to be incidents of common crime. Yet according to Ramon Custodio, president of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras, many of the dead were "living archives" who were assassinated to prevent them from revealing secrets from the government's "dirty war" during the eighties.
Oliva said that one of the new informants is a former soldier who participated in the capture and torture of Carney.
Oliva revealed that members of a Honduran army unit participating in "Operation Patuca"--a counterinsurgency operation designed to capture the guerrillas with whom Carney travelled--had been told that Carney was carrying US$50,000 in cash, and that members of the unit which captured him would be allowed to split the money among themselves.
"Yet following Carney's capture, the head of the patrol didn't keep his word," Oliva stated. "Some members of the patrol are still angry."
Oliva said the former soldier's testimony collaborates that of Florencio Caballero, a former member of the Honduran army's elite U.S.-trained counterintelligence unit, Battalion 3-16. Before his death in exile in Canada last year, Caballero had testified that he heard from associates that Carney had been thrown alive into the jungle from a military helicopter. Oliva said that at least one of the new informants reported Carney was tortured on the ground and then thrown alive from the helicopter, but that army troops then landed the aircraft to make sure the priest was dead. He was reportedly buried on that spot.
Oliva said the former soldier also revealed how his unit participated in raping and torturing women members of the guerrilla column before killing them. Oliva indicated that one of the new informants possesses a map that indicates the exact location where Carney was buried. It is reportedly beside a river, though Oliva refused to reveal which one.
Besides Carney, a Jesuit who submitted a resignation letter to the Society of Jesus on the eve of his departure into Honduras, Oliva said three other guerrillas are reported to be buried at the site. She said one is possibly Jose Maria Reyes Mata, the leader of the hapless guerrilla group, which was affiliated with the Central American Revolutionary Workers Party.
Oliva said COFADEH is continuing to investigate the information. When that is finished, Oliva said they will follow established legal procedures and contact the judge in whose jurisdiction the burial site is located. "But I doubt the judge will want to help us," Oliva said. "So we'll ask the Special Prosecutor for Human Rights to instruct the Department of Criminal Investigation to protect the area."
Such protection is necessary to prevent tampering with the evidence, Oliva explained.
Oliva also said COFADEH planned to contact Carney's family for medical information that would help identify the priest's remains. She said her group would invite foreign forensic specialists to Honduras to conduct the exhumation. Oliva has already had initial conversations about the matter with one of the persons who supervised the exhumation of Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Bolivia last year.
Oliva said she hoped the exhumation could get underway by April at the latest. "After that, the rain will make the area inaccessible until at least August," she said.
COFADEH has carried out the exhumation of three of the 184 persons that the Honduran government's national commissioner for human rights, Leo Valladares, claims were "disappeared" by government security forces during the 1980s. Carney is one of the 184.
Oliva is the widow of another of the 184 disappeared. Her husband, Tomas Nativi Galvez, a professor and union organizer, was kidnapped June 11, 1981, from the couple's home in Tegucigalpa. Oliva was beaten and knocked unconscious during the kidnapping.
COFADEH has also taken a leading role in demanding that military officials responsible for the disappearances be punished. Currently, 13 high-ranking Honduran military officers are fugitives, wanted by Honduran courts for human rights violations committed during the 1980s.
Oliva predicted the exhumation of Carney will "put to a test the political will of the new government" of President Carlos Flores, who takes office here on January 26. Human rights activists are worried that Flores will thwart their efforts to bring military officials to justice.
The Carney case plays a major role in a new report by Valladares to be released simultaneously in Washington and Tegucigalpa later this month. The 200- page report, "In Search of Hidden Truths," will criticize the Clinton administration for its "exceedingly frustrating" response to Valladares' request four years ago for U.S. documents on six disappeared persons, including Father Carney.
The U.S. government has released more than 3,000 pages of declassified documents related to the Carney case, but most have been heavily censored, and are characterized in the forthcoming Valladares report as "scant, fragmented, and vague."
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MIAMI HERALD, Dec. 26, 1997
"Viewpoints"
THE CIA CAN HELP US FIND HIS BODY
by
Joseph E. Mulligan, S.J.
On Oct. 30 Sister Jean Brenner, John Patrick Carney, and I went to the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras to discuss the case of the Rev. James "Padre Guadalupe" Carney, a Chicago native who worked with Honduran campesinos for 18 years and disappeared in 1983. He was chaplain to a revolutionary group at the time.
We wanted a serious response from the U.S. government to our demands for a review by top government officials of the heavily blacked-out documents concerning Carney that the CIA and the Pentagon had released to the Honduran government earlier this year. We also proposed that the United States offer the Honduran government the technical assistance necessary to find Carney's remains.
The day before (Oct. 29) we had talked with the ambassador in the morning and waited through the afternoon for Washington's response. We left the embassy after the ambassador assured us that we could return the next day.
However, upon our return, security officers told us that, according to the ambassador's orders, only Carney's brother could enter. We considered this a violation of the ambassador's promise and decided to remain and conduct a vigil. At 5:30 p.m. we were ordered to leave, picked up, and carried out of the building by U.S. Marines. We remained on the sidewalk another hour.
Since its 1983 beginning, the U.S. government has not taken this case seriously, though Carney was a U.S. citizen. The Reagan administration slammed the door shut on the family's efforts to find his body and learn the truth about his "disappearance."
A handwritten memo dated Aug. 19, 1985, which was declassified and released to the Honduran government in 1996 reported: "Fr. Carney case ... is dead. Front office does not want the case active.... We aren't telling that to the family."
The Clinton administration has opened the door slightly, declassifying State Department, CIA and Pentagon documents. Our hopes were dashed when these papers turned out to be heavily blacked out and thus practically useless to us or the Honduran government.
Among the points that we are asking the Clinton administration to examine are: On Aug. 29 the CIA released more than 300 pages of once-classified documents concerning Carney, four other disappeared persons, and one survivor of torture. Like the documents released in March, extraordinary amounts of material were excised.
Included, though, was a 1988 CIA report on its investigation of James LeMoyne's June 5, 1988 New York Times article, "Testifying to Torture." The CIA report noted: "In the New York Times article, Sgt. Caballero said he had interrogated an American priest. This reference probably to Father James Francis Carney..."
Florencio Caballero was a deserter from the Honduran army's Battalion 3-16; he lived in political exile in Toronto until his recent death. There is no indication in its report whether the CIA followed up on Caballero's important statement. It is strange, however, to mention a statement that is not followed up; perhaps the follow-up is in the excised sections.
We, Carney's friends and family, demand to know what investigation the U.S. government did make regarding Caballero's statement.
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The Rev. Joseph E. Mulligan, S.J., is from Detroit and based
in Nicaragua.
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END