In 1981, Ronald Reagan signaled Guatemala’s right-wing regime to escalate its death-squad operations, a decision that led to the murder of American priest Stanley Rother, now a candidate for sainthood, writes Nicolas J S Davies.
By Nicolas J S Davies
While Time magazine has named Donald Trump its “person of the year” for 2016, the Roman Catholic Church has honored a very different American by nominating Father Stanley Rother for sainthood.
Father Stanley was a parish priest in Santiago Atitlan in Guatemala, from 1968 until a U.S.-backed death squad assassinated him in 1981. The inspiring life and tragic death of Father Stanley offer a counterpoint to the soulless, materialistic life of Donald Trump, and a life-affirming example of how an American can meet our country’s international brutality head-on in his own life and respond with grace, humanity and extraordinary courage.
Father Stanley Rother.
Stanley is the first person born in the United States that the Catholic Church has recognized as a martyr. That he was killed by forces that his own government trained and supported, and that they killed him for the very qualities that make him a saint in the eyes of the Church, should spur Americans to reflect on the untenable moral position of our country in the world.
Father Stanley arrived in Guatemala 14 years after the CIA overthrew its democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. After the coup, U.S.-backed military governments reversed Arbenz’s modest land reforms and reinforced an economic and political power structure in which the descendants of 10 colonial families still own nearly all the productive land in Guatemala and rule over millions of poor indigenous people who they provide with only the barest minimum of healthcare, education and other public services.
A failed uprising by left-wing junior military officers at Guatemala’s national military academy in 1960 marked the beginning of 36 years of civil war, in which at least 200,000 people were killed. A U.N.-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission identified 93 percent of the dead and disappeared as victims of the U.S.-backed Guatemalan army,…