WORLD - Catholic-related current events - Brief Article

National Catholic Reporter, July 2, 1999 by Matt Kantz

Mynor Melgar, legal adviser to the Archdiocesan Human Rights Office, told reporters that the exhumation would "clarify some of the doubts" about the unidentified man's possible participation in the murder of Gerardi.

Lawyers for the church believe that the dead man, whose mutilated body was found a month after the April 26, 1998 killing of Gerardi, could have been killed by his fellow conspirators to the murder.

Tissue samples from the body were to be sent June 17 to Bogota, Colombia, for DNA tests. Investigators are trying to find a DNA match for bloodstains found at the scene of the crime.

Tortured bodies round at convent in Guatemala

Investigators found 12 tortured bodies in a clandestine graveyard at a Catholic convent in northern Guatemala June 14, and officials said there could be thousands more.

Dutch anthropologists began digging June 14 at the site of the convent in Sacapulas, 60 miles north of Guatemala City, and quickly found 12 bodies, according to Maria Gilberto Alessio, the local justice of the peace.

Maria Luisa Escruseria, a nun of the Peace and Resurrection order that now occupies the convent, also confirmed the discovery.

"There could be some 300 people buried in this convent, but there will have to be new excavations in the patio and the rear of the convent," Alessio said.

The 12 were apparently tortured and killed during the 36-year civil war that ended in 1996. The church in Guatemala and other independent investigators have blamed the army for most of the estimated 200,000 deaths during the war.

Cuban Protestants hold massive outdoor celebration

As President Fidel Castro looked on from a front-row seat, tens of thousands of Cuban Protestants held an unprecedented outdoor celebration in Havana June 20 in another sign of the Cuban government's growing religious tolerance.

The rally was held in the same Havana plaza where an estimated 500,000 people gathered for the final Mass of Pope John Paul's 1998 visit to Cuba. The Cuban Evangelical Celebration at the Plaza of the Revolution was billed by organizers as the largest Protestant event of its kind ever in a Caribbean nation.

At the rally, the Rev. Joan Brown Camp bell, secretary-general of the U.S. National Council of Churches, urged those in attendance to pardon the United States for its ongoing economic embargo against Cuba. The council has long called for an end to the embargo.

"It is on behalf of Jesus the liberator that we work against this embargo," Campbell said. "We ask you to forgive the suffering that has come to you by the actions of the United States."

Sunday's event was jointly organized by Cuba's 49 Protestant denominations, which claim an active membership of about 250,000.

Former Mexican officer says government in murder

Senior Mexican officials participated in a plot to murder Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo in 1993, according to secret testimony by a former military officer.

The Mexico City newspaper El Universal said a former Mexican military officer, Marco Enrique Torres Garcia, told Mexican investigators in Chicago May 21 that the assassination of Posadas was ordered to protect Mexico's president at the time, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and his brother, Raul. Torres said the cardinal had information implicating the Salinas brothers in drug trafficking and corruption.