Tim Kaine's "Communist Connection"

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 1980-1981 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.”

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The scandal that the Beast claims “may cause trouble” for Kaine is that he once met Fr. [James] Carney, 35 years ago.

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“There’s some serious questions here,” [the right wing] Catholic Vote’s spokesman told The Beast, speaking about the one meeting Kaine had with Carney.

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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.

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What is entirely absent from Catholic Vote’s [accusations] is the context of what was happening in Latin America during the 1980s — particularly to Catholics. Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador was assassinated by graduates of the U.S. Army School of the Americas as he performed mass. Catholic nuns and laywomen, including four from the U.S., were raped and murdered. Jesuit priests were executed by death squads. The U.S.-backed Honduran Army’s secret police unit, Battalion 316, committed systematic massacres — all while John Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. Negroponte was very close to 316’s commander, Gen. Gustavo Álvarez Martínez, and met with him frequently.

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And what became of Father Carney?

He was thrown from a helicopter in 1983.  A whistleblower who deserted Battalion 316 [...] asserted that “Álvarez Martínez gave the order for Carney’s execution in the presence of a CIA officer, known as ‘Mister Mike.’” The Los Angeles Times reported that Negroponte failed to report a “U.S.-backed operation that resulted in the execution of nine prisoners and the disappearance of an American priest.” The year Carney was murdered, Negroponte praised Gen. Álvarez Martínez’s “dedication to democracy.”

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[Hillary Clinton] engaged in the same kind of red baiting against Bernie Sanders over comments Sanders made about the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, who fought the Contra death squads passionately supported by Clinton’s endorser Negroponte.

Awkward.

  Jeremy Scahill

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.