A Nun's Story: From Reconciliation to Murder in Guatemala
By Mary Jo McConahay, Pacific News Service, May 8, 2001

Deeply and murderously divided for more than 35 years, Guatemala has been trying to find a way to heal itself. But a signed peace agreement does not mean an end to the violence. The violent death of New York Sister Barbara Ann Ford shines the light again on Guatemala. PNS Editor Mary Jo McConahay lived in Central America for more than a decade.

A grisly photo of a woman lying face up, blood visible on her left cheek and ear, appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Guatemala City last week.

The victim, a 62-year-old New York native, was Sister Barbara Ann Ford. Her murder on a busy street is reported as another example of the country's "spiraling crime rate," a crime "surrounded by mystery."

Ford was a Sister of Charity, and their New York office said Ford died in "an apparent robbery attempt." After the shooting, two young men drove off in her four-door pickup, but soon abandoned it with the motor running.

Police report no leads, but within hours, local rights groups were speaking of a "political assassination." Ford was well known for her work with the Maya Indians, collecting information that led to discovery of mass graves of civilian victims of the civil war that lasted from 1960 to l996.

"Information is scarce, we're just waiting for the facts," said Sr. Doris Smith at the order's mother house in the Bronx. "We may never know the truth," said another Bronx sister.

Ford went to live in Guatemala. In l978, after a series of devastating earthquakes killed some 40,000, Ford arrived in Solola -- a picturesque town, set on the edge of a jewel-blue lake surrounded by volcanoes -- and then on to hardscrabble villages.

A registered nurse, her passion was bringing them water -- for drinking, washing, and growing food.

"If water was accessible at a high level nearby it was easier, but if a pump was needed, we had to have more time and raise more money, but Bobbie never shied away," recalls Sr. Sheila Brosnan, who worked with Ford in the l980s.

One doctor who visited Ford in the 1990s said her tenacity was that of "a bulldog."

"Bobbie found village women who were already working as midwives and got them more training -- it was an incredibly impressive program," said Dr. Davida Coady of Berkeley, CA, who helped get Ford a truck, "because she was getting out to places where no one else was going."

This was during the civil war, which lasted 36 years and in which more than 200,000 -- most of them unarmed Maya Indians at the hands of an unbridled army -- died or "disappeared," according to a l998 UN-sponsored Truth Commission report.

Priests and lay Catholic leaders were killed. Nuns hid children who had escaped massacres, and ministered to spiritual and physical needs, especially in rural areas.

"Fear is there, but it doesn't dominate," said Brosnan.

Coady recalls that Ford once asked her to postpone a visit "because she didn't want to call any attention to herself at the moment -- I know she was scared."

Indeed, Ford -- described as tenacious, soft-spoken, never exhibiting anger -- was tall and wore pants instead of a skirt, but was in most ways like countless nuns who labored under the incredible stress of the war.

Sometimes they were key to keeping a local community whole.

"People, especially women, are more willing to talk -- about domestic violence or state repression -- to a nun than to a neighbor," says Prof. Beatriz Manz of the University of California, Berkeley, who has documented the Guatemalan refugees and "disappeared" since the l970s.

Barbara Ann Ford seemed to have a gift for bringing comfort into a world of chaos. Even before peace accords were signed in 1996, she put the gift to work as part of the mammoth Church effort called the Recuperation of Historical Memory.

About l995, Bishop Juan Gerardi -- forced to close the diocese of Quiche and flee for his own life by the killings of priests in the 1980s -- called upon pastoral teams countrywide to gather testimony from victims and survivors of the violence.

Now Gerardi wanted to record voices that might be lost to history, to recognize the suffering of ordinary Guatemalans and promote reconciliation.

In Quiche, Ford encountered villagers wasting from insomnia, depression, alcoholism and disorders stemming from the years of terror and repressed memories. She took on the task.

Here is a visitor's description of a typical scene in 1995.

"There were a dozen or so people in the back of a church, a kind of safe feeling, with Sister Barbara sitting on a bench with a widow on one side of her, and on the other side, the patroller working for the army who had killed the widow's husband.

"They are all neighbors. Sister Barbara often went a long time without saying anything, just a presence. The widow said how difficult life was and the patroller confessed and by the end the killer and the widow were both crying, and you had a feeling something important had happened."

Thousands of detailed testimonies gathered in more than a dozen languages from all corners of the country resulted in a four-volume report called "Nunca Mas," Never Again, which documents a brutal war against unarmed civilians in the name of counterinsurgency, some 95 percent of the violence by the government military.

Bishop Gerardi presented them to the world in 1998, in the cathedral in Guatemala City. Less than 48 hours later, an assassin attacked him with a concrete block, smashed his skull repeatedly and left him dead in a pool of blood.

This week, Barbara Ann Ford's body lay in the same cathedral awaiting a funeral mass to be said by Bishop Julio Cabrera. Her casket traveled one last time to Quiche for a wake. and back, and will eventually be flown to New York, accompanied by the President of the Sisters of Charity.

Guatemala is already tense -- the trial of the men accused of murdering the Gerardi is entering its last phases, and former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, now President of the Congress, is fighting impeachment.

The day before Ford's murder, gunmen kidnapped prominent rights activist Aura Elena Farfan, driving her around town for a couple of hours, holding a pistol to her head for two hours and asking questions, then releasing her.

And there is that spiraling crime rate. But in the Bronx, the Sisters are unwilling to speculate. "We're taking these days to attend to Bobbie," said Sister Sheila.