By Paul Jeffrey

Tegucigalpa (CNS) - Three agents from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation are helping Guatemalan police investigate the May 5 slaying of Charity Sister Barbara Ann Ford.

The agents arrived in Guatemala City on Monday, May 14. According to Kay Mayfield, a spokesperson for the U.S. embassy in the Guatemalan capital, the three will be in the country until at least sometime next week.

“They are assisting with the investigation at the request of the Guatemalan Public Ministry, helping with the forensic side and reviewing evidence,” Mayfield told CNS.

Mayfield said other security personnel from the embassy were also assisting in the investigation, but she refused to reveal details.

Ford, a U.S. citizen, died of a single gunshot when two well-dressed men stole her pickup truck in a busy section of the capital. The police were quick to label her killing as an act of common delinquency, but human rights activists and church leaders have suggested she was killed for political reasons.

Mayfield acknowledged there were “all kinds of theories” about why Ford was killed, yet said she couldn’t “speculate on the motives of those who killed her.”

On May 7, police arrested three suspects in the killing but released them after a short time, saying that a gun the men were carrying was of a different caliber than the weapon used to kill Ford. No other arrests have been made.

Alejandro Muñoz, the Public Ministry prosecutor in charge of the investigation, refused to comment on the case to CNS. Yet Interior Minister Byron Barrientos told reporters on May 14 that investigators had identified two known car thieves and that police were looking for them in connection with the murder. He said a witness had been found who allegedly saw Ford resist the theft of her church-owned pickup truck.

Barrientos and other high-ranking government officials have from the beginning insisted that the crime has no political implications. Barrientos said the FBI agents “would have to be magicians” to prove otherwise.

The killing is also being investigated by the U.N. observer mission in Guatemala as well as by the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala City.

A nurse and expert on the mental health of war survivors, Ford, 62, had worked in the province of El Quiche for the last decade. She ran the diocese’s mental health program, and had assisted with preparation of the church’s landmark 1998 report, “Guatemala, Never Again!”, which blamed the government for 9 out of every ten deaths in the 36-year long war that ended in 1996. More than 200,000 people, mostly indigenous Maya, were killed or disappeared during the conflict. At the time of her death, Ford was collaborating with church-sponsored teams exhuming the graves of massacre victims in the diocese.

In a May 11 communique, the Guatemalan Catholic bishops conference declared Ford’s death was a sign of the “anti-culture of death that undermines fundamental human dignity.” The bishops said the killing also demonstrated “the incapacity of the authorities in charge of security and the application of justice.”

On May 12, friends and coworkers of Ford gathered at the spot where she was killed to pray for her and other victims of violence, according to Maria Garcia, editor of the Catholic journal Voces del Tiempo. Garcia said the service included both Catholic and Mayan spiritual rites.

The bishop of El Quiche, Julio Cabrera, said he was pleased the FBI had joined the investigation. “It’s very important to carry out a careful and thorough investigation, because the interior ministry has insisted since the beginning that her killing was an act of common crime. So it’s necessary to push even harder to get to the bottom of this, to see if there were other motives,” Cabrera told CNS.

Cabrera said the mental health work of the diocese would continue unabated in the work of the nun’s murder. “Barbara did a good job of preparing others to do the work in the communities. The work of the church will go on,” he said.

Cabrera acknowledged that her killing has had a “negative impact” on some diocesan workers. “There are a lot of people who are discouraged and more afraid than ever after her killing,” the bishop said. “We need to encourage them to continue working for the reign of God and helping the poor who were the victims of the violence here.”

Ford’s murder is the latest of several cases in Guatemala where the international community is watching closely to ensure that justice is properly applied. According to Ronalth Ochaeta, a human rights activist who is now Guatemala’s ambassador to the Organization of American States in Washington, the government of President Alfonso Portillo has to make progress in the investigation or risk incurring the displeasure of members of the U.S. Congress who might cut off aid to Guatemala. “You’ve got to remember that the Sisters of Charity is a pressure group with a lot of weight, and the archbishop of New York is a man with a lot of political clout,” Ochaeta said.

Barb Bocek, a Guatemala specialist for Amnesty International USA, said it is conceivable that Ford’s killing was a car theft gone bad, as the government is claiming. Yet Bocek, who knew Ford, told CNS that the nun was “a very practical and sensible, as well as sensitive and intelligent woman. She wasn’t a fool. There is no way she would have refused to give up the diocese's car to armed men, nor would she have put up any kind of a struggle or resistance. For someone who had worked ten years in Guatemala and had seen growing political violence in the country, the notion that she resisted armed assailants is ludicrous. It would be laughable were not the fact of her death so terribly sad.”

Bocek downplayed the interior ministry’s claim that a witness had seen Ford allegedly resist a car theft.

“The fact that witnesses were found, shortly after her death, willing to testify that she resisted means only that groundwork is already being laid to explain her killing as another senseless tragedy of Guatemala's post-war violence,” Bocek said.