Cuaderno Latinoamericano reader Matt Rousso asked me the following question: "What is the name of the priest who was disappeared in Guatemala during the massacres and why was he disappeared?"
Well, I must say that, in spite of extensive research, I remained stumped. However, what I can report is that repression of Church officials in Guatemala who have been involved either in the civil conflict or in the peace processes is not a novelty.
For example, Bishop Juan Gerardi, who compiled a report chronicling the vast human rights abuses of the Guatemalan government over the duration of Guatemala's long-standing civil conflict, was bludgeoned to death (perhaps by a fellow priest) not long after his report was published.
Information on Bishop Gerardi's murder can be found in this BBC News report. And a quick Google search of "Bishop Juan Gerardi" will list lots of other reports and commentaries on this tragic event.
Nevertheless, my best efforts could not produce the name of the priest who "disappeared" in Guatemala during the periods of the massacres, and so I will ask my friend Matt Rousso to be so kind as to inform us.
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A Mysterious Dissapearance
Maryknoll priest Fr. Bill Woods was active for 18 years in the agrarian reform struggle centered in a rural area known as Quiché, Guatemala where he had helped poor peasants establish a thriving farming cooperative on previously unoccupied land. [In a May, 1979 Mother Jones article, "The Strange Death of Bill Woods," Ron Chernow writes that this region was referred to in Guatemala as "The Zone of the Generals" because generals favored by the dictatorship planned to parcel it out amongst themselves in order to monopolize the mineral and oil drilling rights. The article goes on to say that for a decade, Father Woods had piloted a small Cessna to travel from Guatemala City to Quiché. With 2,000 flight hours to his credit, he had used the plane to gradually resettle approximately 10,000 peasants from tiny hillside plots to the jungle cooperative over a period of six years.]
In 1976 Fr. Bill Woods invited Dr. Michael Okada, along with a U.S. journalist and two U.S. doctors to join him on a flight to Ixcan to visit the cooperative on a cloudless November day. At just after 11 a.m., the plane crashed into a mountainside in a remote part of the jungle. All the passengers were killed. Within less than an hour, the Guatemalan military was at the scene of this remote crash, and by the time the official investigation began, the plane had been moved from the crash site, pulled down off the mountain, with key engine parts that normally would have been intact, reported missing by the investigative team.
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