Negroponte and the Guadalupe Connection

Dear Friends and Comrades:

I just noticed that John Negroponte is to be named the
first US Ambassador to the new and improved Iraq after
the June 30th transfer of power.

When I was a younger man, I spent a little while doing
some solidarity work with the Catholic Church in
Central America. Throughout my sojourns in various
works of the progressive wing of the Church in Central
America, a name of a gringo priest kept on coming up.
Rank and file lay folks, priests, and religious would
invoke his name with reverence and a note of sadness as
his premature departure from earth.

The name of this people’s saint was Fr. James
"Guadalupe" Carney. Lupe, as he was popularly known,
was a middle-class Midwesterner who had served in WWII
and like many young Catholics of that generation joined
a religious order upon his return to civilian life.
Lupe wanted to be a missionary so he joined the largest
missionary order in the world: the Society of Jesus or
the Jesuits. After the usual long and difficult
formation process that Jesuits go through, Jim Carney
was sent to central America and spent most of his llife
working amongst the peasants in the Olancho province of
Honduras.

His whole story is contained in his wonderful
autobiography entitled "To Be a Christain is To Be a
Revolutionary": a good read for convinced believers and
stiff-necked secularists alike. Eventually, Lupe was
thrown out of Honduras and wound up (where else in the
early 80’s) in Sandinista Nicaragua. He was formally
separated from the Jesuit order and volunteered to be a
chaplain of a gyuerilla band that entered Honduras
clandestinely from Nicaragua in 1983 --- much like the
US military, at this moment, is enacting its new
imperial designs in Iraq with various clergy of various
religions (all at the nice rank of Captain) in cahoots.
Of course, Lupe’s people’s army had a different vision
than our military apparatus.

To make a long story short: Lupe and his comrades were
captured and detained by the Honduran army and US
military intelligence working with the CIA. Some
witnesses say he was starved to death (sounds
implausible given the man’s skills of living off the
land picked up from his peasant congregants) or that he
was interrogated and summarily executed in the presence
of both Honduran and US intelligence officials (more
likely than not). But, who really knows the truth?

Well, I would venture to guess that our man at the U.N.
soon to be our man in Baghdad might know a wee bit
about the murder of a Catholic priest and many more
human rights workers and ordinary citizens of Homduras.

Yes, John Negroponte was US Ambassador to Honduras at
the time and knows where the bodies are literally
buried. Our man in Tegucigalpa in the 80’s makes a
fitting candidate for the debacle in Iraq. Once as
tragedy ... next as farce.

If we had a responsible press, maybe some intrepid
reporter would ask the Ambassador a question or two:
Who is Fr. James "Guadalupe" Carney and do you have any
knowledge about who killed him 1983? What did you know
and when did you know, Jonnie Boy? Moreover, what does
the US catholic Bishops’ conference think about someone
with possible ties to a murdered priest and all those
Catholic murdered peasants and workers as a candidate
to represent the US in Iraq?

Irony? Farce? Tragedy? All I know is that Lupe and his
companions are smiling somewhere in tha other place
encouraging progressive of all stripes to start asking
the right questions to the right people.

Edgar Rivera Colon is a writer and ethnographer who
lives in New York City and works around issues of men
of color and HIV/AIDS. He also lectures at John Jay
College of Criminal Justice in the Department of Puerto
Rican and Latin American Studies.