Phill Little, Ladysmith, BC

It has been a few years since I last visited Honduras, what with the covid crisis and then some family matters, not to say too much about just getting older. Of the three, the last one weighs more on me but who listens to these complaints?

There is a window of opportunity which I feel I must accept, and I do so with happy anticipation. It is five years since my last trip but truthfully not a day goes by without some time thinking about Honduras, or more specifically the people down there whom I truly admire and care for.

Among them surely “Padre Melo”, my close Jesuit brother and dear friend, is foremost in my thoughts and concerns. He suffers from a family autoimmune syndrome and the main symptom of which is painful rheumatoid arthritis. Nevertheless, typing on his keypad with only two swollen fingers he wrote two books during the covid period and edited a first volume of his collected essays. He did that while maintaining his position as director of the radio station and the human rights center (ERIC). After 20 years with that burden the Jesuit order replaced him with a scholar much like Melo, Fr. German Rosa sj, and have kept Melo on staff with ERIC as researcher and writer.

In early 2022 Honduras saw a new beginning with the installation of Xiomara Castro, the first woman President of the Republic. Xiomara is the wife of the ousted President Mel Zelaya who was overthrown in 2009 by Hillary Clinton and a cabal of Honduran military drug dealers. (Two of them including the former dictator are now jailed in the USA for drug trafficing offenses now that their political usefulness is gone.)
This new beginning brought a reprieve in the life of Melo and other human rights workers, but that was short lived as new government officials rushed to fill the void left by previous corrupt politicians and the interests of foreign investors began to influence their decisions. So in early 2023 there was again a campaign of slander and threats directed towards Melo, his associates and other human rights lawyers and researchers.

I will be in Honduras for a short visit of one month. At the center of this visit I will participate in a very public day of awareness and celebration to mark the 40th Anniversary of the assassination of Father James Carney, sj, known as “Padre Guadalupe”. On September 16, 1983 Padre Guadalupe “disappeared”, joining the many hundreds in Honduras who have disappeared. One testimony from a former Honduran military officer of an infamous Battalion-16 has said that after torture, Padre Guadalupe and others were taken aboard a helicopter and thrown alive over the jungle area of the Patuca River. No remains were ever found but the American embassy a few years later gave his family some of his personal items that he was carrying with him at the time. There is no doubt that the decision to assassinate Padre Guadalupe came from the American ambassador John Negroponte.

There is much online if you wish to learn more about Padre Guadalupe, but in short it is obvious that he was not “disappeared” for officiating at too many baptisms or lengthy prayer meetings. In Honduras, Padre Guadalupe was sent to work in the north where two American banana corporations ruled as supreme. United and Standard later morphed into Chiquita and much of the bananas in Canada come from Honduras or other Central American countries. Padre Guadalupe was trained as a missionary but he was not prepared for the hardships and misery he witnessed that was inflicted on the poor “campesinos”. He became their voice and advocate. He renounced his American citizenship and took on Honduran identity. He was a friend of Melo’s father who was a campesino leader and who was the president of a farmer’s cooperative when he too was murdered. Melo’s father, Pedro, once said to the little boy “If you want to be a priest, be like Guadalupe or forget it!”. Melo as a student in Nicaragua knew Guadalupe who was exiled and he was entrusted with Guadalupe’s handwritten memoirs now published in English as To Be a Revolutionary. Then Guadalupe returned clandestinely to Honduras as chaplain to a small revolutionary unit aiming to promote an uprising against the military dictatorship. Obviously that did not go well.

Padre Guadalupe has not been forgotten. A village in the Aguan valley bears his name – “Guadalupe Carney”. He stands out as one of those foreign missionaries who got close to the people, close enough as Pope Francis would say “to smell like the sheep”. That obviously upset the people in power, yes in the church too! Guadalupe is one of hundreds of priests and church workers assassinated because of their closeness to the people and what has been defined as their “preferential option”.

I have known about Padre Guadalupe since first meeting Melo and then through him I met some of Guadalupe’s family, Joe and Eileen Connolly, who came to Canada looking for leads into Guadalupe’s disappearance. Canada had accepted as ‘refugees’ former Honduran death squad members and from one of them the details of the helicopter incident was revealed.

I am sure I will have a few stories to share when I get back.