Death threats against Padre Fausto

Padre Fausto greeting people outside la Iglesia San Martín

Padre Fausto Milla is the 83 year old priest who usually presides at Sunday Masses in the Saint Martín de Porres chapel up from my house in Santa Rosa.

His homilies are often a combination of a deep piety and a radical social analysis. For example, a few weeks ago he meditated on the Lord’s Prayer as part of the prayer of the faithful. At other times I am heard him strongly attack “savage capitalism” and the presence of the US in Honduras.

He is also a very affectionate man, a sort of grandfather figure who loves the children who come up and hug him.

He has long been active in support of the poor and has been an active member of the Resistance. He was named a member of the Comisión de Verdad, the True Commission set up by the resistance to investigate the situation in the country related to the 2009 coup.

Tuesday, June 28, he gave a press conference in Tegucigalpa revealing that he has received death threats, that he and an assistant have been followed by a car, and that several unknown men visited his health center in Corquín, looked over everything and asked about his itinerary.

Andrés Pavón, the president of the non-governmental Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras (CODEH, Comité para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos en Honduras), had revealed that there was a plan to assasinate him because of his visits to the properties of Miguel Facussé in Zacate Grande.

Padre Fausto takes seriously these efforts to silence his voice in defense of the poor but won’t stop. In today’s  El Tiempo  he is quoted:

God has give me life and he has liberated me from hundreds of worse events that those in the decade of the 1980s. I am well trained so that intimidation and the snuffing out of my person cannot be accomplished.

For more on this and other threats to the True Commission there is this article in Spanish in Defensores en Linea and this article in today's Tiempo.

You can read more about Padre Fausto in this entry in my blog and in this translation of an article about him.

Rebel Girl in her blog has a translation of an article about a speech of his.

UPDATE: A translation of the Defensores en Linea article can be found here.