To look into the eyes of Gustavo Parajon is to see compassion and integrity. A Baptist pastor and medical doctor, Parajon is president of the Evangelical Committee for Aid and Development (CEPAD). Representing 46 denominations, CEPAD is Nicaragua's largest evangelical organization and one of the world's most effective and trusted relief and development agencies.
Parajon's eyes have seen too much suffering--too many deaths of fellow church workers and medical personnel, too many friends lost in brutal attacks by the U.S.-sponsored contras. Over the four years of our friendship, Parajon has occasionally remarked that he would like simply to be able to focus on his ministry and medical work; but Nicaragua's situation has forced him into other roles.
Gustavo Parajon, perhaps more than any other Nicaraguan Christian, has been called upon to interpret the situation in his country to the literally thousands of U.S. Christians who have gone to Nicaragua in an effort to understand what is happening there. He has also served as a mediator in some of his country's most intense conflicts. He is widely trusted and respected in Nicaragua--by church people, government leaders, even many people who would disagree with him politically--because he is a man of honesty and integrity, a man of God. Over the years U.S. Christians too have come to know Gustavo Parajon as a person who can be trusted.
That is why an attack on Parajon by the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), launched more than three years ago, is so appalling. In December 1983 the IRD published a briefing paper consisting of an interview with Miguel Bolanos Hunter, a defector from Nicaragua's state security. In that interview Bolanos called Parajon "a loyal Sandinista" and accused him of being a government informant, recording CEPAD's meetings and reporting "everything that CEPAD talked about" to state security. Bolanos also charged that CEPAD "was like a government commission," channeling money into Sandinista programs.
A few months later, the IRD launched a petition campaign urging North American Christians to withdraw financial and organizational assistance to "church and educational organizations which support [the Nicaraguan] government." In its September 1984 newsletter, the IRD stated that "hundreds of thousands of our church dollars are going to organizations that support those who are persecuting Christianity in Nicaragua." CEPAD was at the top of its list of such organizations.
THESE FALSE AND slanderous accusations were protested in Sojourners and elsewhere (see "In Defense of CEPAD," November 1984), and a public apology from the IRD to Gustavo Parajon was called for. Instead, in January 1985, the IRD published an interview with Kate Rafferty of Open Doors, an organization that claims to specialize in "establishing contact with and supporting Christians who are...persecuted because of their faith."
Rafferty alleged that CEPAD's claim to represent Nicaragua's evangelicals is false and that the truer representative is the National Council of Evangelical Pastors (CNPEN). She further charged that CEPAD withholds relief money from pastors who do not support the Sandinistas; that "CEPAD diverts funds, which American Christians probably assume are used for humanitarian purposes, to political work for the regime"; that CEPAD has donated 11 four-wheel-drive vehicles to the Sandinista police; and that CEPAD counsels young people seeking conscientious objector status that "it is their duty to serve in the Sandinista army." The introduction to the interview implied that this information had been supplied by CNPEN members.
A letter to the IRD dated March 14, 1985, from Guillermo Osorno, secretary of CNPEN, requested that the next IRD bulletin state prominently that the statements contained in the interview were not official CNPEN statements and that Rafferty "has no legal right to make such statements without realizing the great harm which they are causing us." Further, CNPEN wanted it made clear that it has no ties to the IRD. The IRD refused to publish the letter or its facts, claiming it had been written "under duress."
In subsequent independent testimony, six CNPEN pastors in Nicaragua all stated that they had felt "used" by the IRD, and one said that Rafferty had come "under false pretenses."
Among the many people who were disturbed by Rafferty's allegations was Vernon Grounds, president of Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA). He proposed a joint fact-finding tour of ESA and IRD members to Nicaragua. IRD tentatively agreed, then backed out of the trip (see "IRD Backs Out of Trip to Nicaragua," August/September 1985).
ON MARCH 12, 1986, Gustavo Parajon addressed a breakfast meeting sponsored by ESA in Washington, D.C. He raised the issue of the false accusations against him with IRD members in attendance and requested an opportunity to address the charges in an IRD publication. That afternoon Parajon and ESA Executive Director Bill Kallio met with IRD board of directors member David Jessup and IRD staff members Diane Knippers and Alan Wisdom, among others. A tape of that meeting confirms that Jessup and Knippers offered, among other options, to publish an IRD interview with Parajon.
A year later, no interview or other public response to Parajon's request has appeared. According to Bill Kallio, he met again with Knippers and Wisdom on March 24 on Parajon's behalf and at that meeting the IRD rescinded its offer to publish an interview.
In October, when Parajon was again in Washington, he and Diane Knippers inadvertently met at a public gathering. Parajon reported that Knippers seemed "uncomfortable" to see him, and when he asked her why nothing had been done to address his grievances, she replied, "Oh, but we haven't written anything negative about you for months."
I contacted Knippers in January 1987. She said nothing had been done because the IRD had been waiting since the March 12 meeting for Parajon to get back to them. When I mentioned that Kallio had met with IRD staff members on March 24, she said she was unaware of that meeting but that she could check with other IRD staff members. I reminded her that Kallio had met with herself and Alan Wisdom. Then she said that she guessed she did remember it, but she thought that Kallio was merely presenting his own opinion of what should be done.
When asked about the October encounter with Parajon, she admitted that Parajon had raised the issue again, but said she "wasn't sure Dr. Parajon really wanted to do anything." The same day David Jessup told me he did not recall making the interview offer and thought that the IRD had already published something in response to Parajon.
The following day Kent Hill, executive director of the IRD, invited me to meet with him and Knippers at the IRD office. Hill, who was not with the IRD through any of the events surrounding the Parajon controversy, was anxious to view the situation as a "misunderstanding" which had occurred between Kallio and Knippers in the March 24 meeting.
Hill assured me that he would write to Gustavo Parajon and "reassert the IRD's willingness to do an interview." He stated clearly, however, that there would be no public apology, that there was "nothing to retract," and that the IRD had found "no evidence to counter" its allegations.
Bill Kallio said of the IRD's position, "They [ the IRD ] do not want to undo any damage they may have caused. They refuse to look at the evidence. They have had numerous opportunities to get the facts, to speak with Gustavo Parajon, to find out the truth. There is just not an organizational will to do it. There wasn't a 'misunderstanding' at any time."
THE LACK OF BOTH Christian and journalistic integrity in the IRD's treatment of Parajon is appalling. In a phone conversation, Diane Knippers said of the information the IRD published about Parajon, "I don't know if it's true, and I don't know how to find out."
The IRD also made a disturbing initial effort to refuse responsibility for the allegations it published. On the tape of the March 12 meeting, David Jessup made several assertions that the information only "represents the opinions of the individuals who were interviewed" and that "the accusations were not made by us but by another individual."
Perhaps the most astonishing statements on the tape are found in Knippers' first response to Parajon. Referring to the Bolanos Hunter interview in which Parajon was accused of being an informant and CEPAD a channel for money to the Sandinista government, Knippers said to Parajon that she was "a bit surprised" at the strength of his reaction to it. She continued, "It wouldn't have occurred to me that that report would have offended you or bothered you."
The campaign against Gustavo Parajon was followed in October 1986 by an IRD statement and press release accusing Witness for Peace, the nonviolent witness of U.S. Christians in Nicaragua's war zones, of practicing a "profound form of deception and abuse--the appropriation of Christian witness to advance its political defense of the Sandinista government."
That such attacks can be part of the IRD's mode of operation is clear to at least one member of the IRD board. Formerly a member of the IRD board of directors, Richard Lovelace, a professor and church historian at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, now serves on the IRD's advisory board. When the IRD assault on Gustavo Parajon was launched, Lovelace registered his grave concern.
In a January 7,1987 letter to Witness for Peace, which he made available to Sojourners, Lovelace stated his concern about the "accusatory tone of many IRD utterances," calling the IRD manner of operating "an approach which risks repeating the errors of the McCarthy era." He wrote, "I have been grieved to find some of my Christian friends attacking other Christians with all the heat and vigor of prosecuting attorneys, apparently on the basis of misinformation--or even disinformation."
The letter states Lovelace's intent to travel to Nicaragua in the summer (Ed Robb, chair of the IRD board of directors, has verbally agreed to join him) to try to determine the truth. If the trip confirms that the IRD "has passed on serious misinformation" about Gustavo Parajon, CEPAD, and Witness for Peace, Lovelace wrote, he will do all that he can to "motivate the IRD to undo the damage by explicit apologies" and by "enabling the accused persons and groups to state their real character and convictions." He concludes, "If this cannot be achieved, it is my intention to resign from the Advisory Board of the Institute on Religion and Democracy."
ON JANUARY 12, Kent Hill sent a letter to Gustavo Parajon, offering an IRD interview. We will be watching carefully to see if the interview, and Robb's trip to Nicaragua, materialize. But at this point, without a public apology or retraction, it is clearly a case of too little too late.
It is scandalous that an organization claiming to care about victims in Nicaragua would create a victim of its own. One wonders why the IRD chose to attack a man with as much credibility and integrity as Gustavo Parajon. The answer is that Parajon was chosen precisely because of his reputation.
Recent revelations from Washington confirm that U.S. foreign policy depends on the selling of falsehood. A man like Gustavo Parajon, who has shown a steady stream of U.S. visitors a picture of Nicaragua entirely unlike the propaganda emanating from the Reagan administration and its friends, is a threat to the policy of falsehood. Because he is so well respected, Gustavo Parajon is more dangerous to the IRD and the White House than anyone who might actually fit their accusations. For the lies to stand up, people like Gustavo Parajon must be discredited.
In defense of the IRD's actions, David Jessup said to Parajon in the March 12 meeting, "I don't consider that what the IRD has done in this instance is a departure from democratic procedures" or the "usual operating procedures" of organizations like the IRD. Perhaps the problem is that the IRD considers a campaign of falsehood and accusation part of "democratic procedures." It doesn't fit my definition. But we have certainly seen evidence that it is usual operating procedure at the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Gustavo Parajon's rejoinder to the IRD's defense is to the point: "Such actions serve neither religion nor democracy."
Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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