wfn.org | Advocacy for "Disappeared" - NCCCUSA Mission

[CAROL_FOUKE.parti@ecunet.org (CAROL FOUKE)]

National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA
Email: news@ncccusa.org  Web:  www.ncccusa.org

Contact: NCC News, 212-870-2227

100NCC9/14/99 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

TOP NCC DELEGATION VISIT  SEPT. 22-28 TO SUPPORT SEARCH FOR 
TRUTH ABOUT "DISAPPEARED" IN CHILE, URUGUAY AND ARGENTINA

 Sept. 14, 1999, NEW YORK CITY - Some 25 years after 
nearly 25,000 people were "disappeared" by repressive 
regimes in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, their families 
still ache to know what happened to their loved ones.  These 
families' human right remain unresolved, to find their dead 
and to give them a proper burial, or in some cases to find 
those "disappeared" who are still alive today - babies taken 
from their imprisoned parents and put up for adoption.. 

 September 22-28, a top-level delegation from the (U.S.) 
National Council of Churches (NCC) will travel to those 
three countries to support the families, human rights 
organizations and churches struggling together to find the 
truth and to encourage the political will to resolve this 
outstanding human and ethical problem.

 "During the repression, the National Council of 
Churches participated in supporting human rights, meeting 
refugees' needs, helping people who needed to leave their 
countries and intervening in many other ways," said the 
delegation's leader, the Rev. Dr. Joan B. Campbell, NCC 
General Secretary.  "Our support was - and remains - 
particularly important, given that the U.S. government 
supported those dictatorships in the 1970s.  We want to 
reiterate our unflagging support for the search for justice.

"Ever since Uruguay, Chile and Argentina returned to 
normal life, we've supported the return of exiles and the 
search for the truth," she said.  "But there is one point 
still not resolved by the three countries since their return 
to legality and that is the return of the bodies of the 
disappeared.  For their families, wounds inflicted 25 years 
ago remain open."

The four NCC representatives will be accompanied by the 
President of the Latin American Council of Churches, Dr. 
Walter Altmann, a Lutheran who is Professor of Systematic 
Theology in the Theological Seminary in Sao Leopoldo, 
Brazil.  Dr. Altmann's participation signals  "the strong 
support of this mission by the ecumenical movement in Latin 
America," Dr. Campbell said.

Presidential elections will take place in all three 
countries before year's end, and the group's itinerary - 
planned by churches and human rights groups in the host 
countries-- includes meetings with the leading candidates.  

"The churches in the three countries asked us to meet 
with the political candidates as those who will have in 
their hands the power to resolve the ethical and human 
rights problem of the disappearances," said the Rev. Oscar 
Bolioli, Director of the NCC's Latin America and the 
Caribbean Office, a delegation member.

"We want to give new impulse to the search for the 
disappeared," he said, "to mobilize the political will in 
Uruguay, with 60 `disappeared;' sustain the very advanced 
process in Argentina, with 20,000 `disappeared,' and support 
the process in Chile, with 4,000 `disappeared.'  We are 
supporting the right of those families to bury their 
relatives and to know what happened and why."

Besides Drs. Campbell and Altmann and the Rev. Bolioli, 
delegation members are:

-the Rev. Canon Patrick Mauney, Vice President and President 
Elect of the NCC's Church World Service and Witness Unit, 
and Director of Global and Anglican Relations of The 
Episcopal Church, and

-Dr. Rafael Malpica Padilla, President, NCC Committee on 
Latin America and the Caribbean, and Director for the Latin 
America and Caribbean Division, Department of Global 
Missions, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

 A detailed itinerary is available upon request for the 
delegation's more than 30 appointments in Uruguay Sept. 22-
23, Argentina Sept. 24-26 and Chile Sept. 27-28.

-end-
 -0-