Two Guatemalan bishops called for prayer and government action in the wake of the brutal slaying of 27 workers on a farm owned by an alleged drug kingpin in Peten Department in the country’s north. Most of the victims—men, women and several minors—were beheaded with machetes. Bishop Mario Fiandri of Peten, in a pastoral letter on May 18, called for an exhaustive investigation of the crime and described the massacre as the “ultimate barbaric expression of a generalized situation of violence and insecurity.” Many of the victims were from the area around Los Amates in the neighboring Izabal Department. They had traveled to Peten in search of work, said Izabal’s Bishop Gabriel Penate Rodríguez. “The victims are poor farmers who went to Peten to try to earn a living on the large farms there. They went seeking life and found death—a cruel death, committed with a brutality and barbarity that has no name,” Bishop Penate wrote in a statement issued on May 20.
Bishops Respond to Guatemala Massacre
Show Comments (
)
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
The latest from america
Around the affluent world, new hostility, resentment and anxiety has been directed at immigrant populations that are emerging as preferred scapegoats for all manner of political and socio-economic shortcomings.
“Each day is becoming more difficult, but we do not surrender,” Father Igor Boyko, 48, the rector of the Greek Catholic seminary in Lviv, told Gerard O’Connell. “To surrender means we are finished.”
Many have questioned how so many Latinos could support a candidate like DonaldTrump, who promised restrictive immigration policies. “And the answer is that, of course, Latinos are complicated people.”
Catholic voters were a crucial part of Donald J. Trump’s re-election as president. But did misogyny and a resistance to women in power cause Catholic voters to disregard the common good?