Tim Kaine, John Negroponte, and the Priest Who Was Thrown From a Helicopter
Tim Kaine, John Negroponte, and the Priest Who Was Thrown From a Helicopter
Jeremy Scahill
Oct. 4 2016, 7:20 p.m.
A story published this week by the Daily Beast about the nine months Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine spent working as a volunteer in a Jesuit community in Honduras in 1980 and 1981 has been making the conservative rounds. The Beast’s tabloid headline is a cheap exercise in red-baiting: “Tim Kaine’s Time with a Marxist Priest.”
That priest, Fr. James Carney, was indeed a revolutionary and, as a practitioner of liberation theology in Latin America during a period marked by populist movements fighting against death squads and murderous regimes backed by the U.S., an avid student of Marxist theory.
After years spent among the poor and oppressed in Latin America, Carney renounced his U.S. citizenship and joined the armed guerrilla struggle against U.S.-backed death squads and governments. He also left the Jesuits because, he explained, the order would not condone his involvement in an armed struggle. Whatever one thinks of that decision, Carney sacrificed his privilege and status to join the people he was ministering to as a priest. In the eyes of the Reagan administration, that made him a terrorist. In the eyes of the peasants and revolutionaries Carney joined in struggle, he was a hero. (For a look at the roots of Jesuits joining indigenous struggle in Latin America, check out the film “The Mission.”)
The scandal that the Beast claims “may cause trouble” for Kaine is that he once met Fr. Carney, 35 years ago. The right-wing group Catholic Vote has done its best Joe McCarthy imitation on the issue. “That Kaine made the effort to seek out and spend time with Carney is troubling,” according to a memo published by the group with the headline “Tim Kaine’s Radical Roots in Honduras.” It claimed that “the Soviets created liberation theology to undermine the Church and advance the Soviet cause against the United States. In Honduras, the phony Marxist-tinged theology was planted to manipulate poor Catholics, instigate terrorism, and stir up a violent revolution in Honduras — then the key ally of the United States opposing Communism in the region.”
More:
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/04/tim-kaine-john-negroponte-and-the-priest-who-was-thrown-from-a-helicopter/
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September 26, 2003
Priest of the poor
By Tom Fox, NCR publisher
Since he was reported missing in the summer of 1983, the death of Jesuit Fr. James Carney in Honduras has been the subject of intense investigations by his family, by human rights investigators, by Catholic leaders and by the poor people he served in Honduras.
Born in Chicago, Carney had begun work as a Jesuit missionary in the country in 1961. For the next 18 years he worked, slept and ate with the poor rural parishioners with whom he lived. Among them he was known as "Padre Guadalupe." He was 58 at the time of his disappearance.
When members of Carney's family went to Honduras soon after their brother disappeared, they knew that Carney, who had re-entered Honduras that summer as the chaplain to 96 revolutionaries, had put himself in danger. They were prepared to discover that the priest had died in a military action.
Honduras government officials told them they believed that Carney died of exposure while crossing the mountains bordering Nicaragua and Honduras.
However, the family soon heard second- and third-hand accounts that Carney had been captured by the Honduran military. Some said that the priest had been interrogated, tortured and executed by Battalion 316, a CIA-trained Honduran force known to have been responsible for the deaths of dozens of Honduran activists. Still others said that U.S. government officials knew of Carney's capture and had failed to intervene to save his life.
More:
http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/todaystake/tt092603.htm
= new reply since forum marked as read
even more highly of Kaine. US policy in Central America - especially in the 1980s - was thoroughly shameful.
As for Negroponte: 
And yes, I know that Negroponte endorsed Hillary. He's not stupid. But he is anathema to me. 
sadistic monsters. But neither is insane despite the evilness.
