Fill in blanks here for your favorite horror story (left or right wing).
But a bigger problem, at least in places where rule of law is ignored/gotten around by the powerful, is getting the news out to pre arranged groups.. the massacres of Rwanda were by gangs previously trained who went to work after a politician died in an accident.
Similarly, Mugabe's "green bombers"...(2007) terrorized people to stop the opposition from forming.
all of this overlaps with what I discussed in the previous post: When the church is seen as the opposition to a tyranny, the church is a target.
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StrategyPage reports on the chaos (a civil war that has killed a lot of people but ignored by the world) in the Congo: The Catholic bishops brokered a peace plan in December, but the president did not sign the agreement.
and now they report:
March 1, 2017: The Catholic Church in Congo is making certain diplomats and foreign journalists are aware of the increase in attacks on church property and employees. Particularly alarming was a February 18 arson attack on a seminary. On February 19 a “youth gang” attacked a church in Kinshasa. The Catholic Church mediated the agreement between the political opposition and the Kabila government that supposedly will lead to new elections and Joseph Kabila’s removal from the presidency. The attacks look like attempts by Kabila supporters to intimidate the church. In fact a senior church leader said the church is “being targeted deliberately, in order to sabotage her mission of peace and reconciliation.”
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related item: UK Guardian (2016) on Mexican priests killed by their drug cartels
Although many drug traffickers consider themselves devout Catholics, priests have reportedly been killed for denouncing criminality, or even for refusing to baptize the children of narcos...
Churchmen are not targeted “because they believe in Christ”, Mijangos y González said. “It’s because priests are an obstacle in the way of conquering local power.”
Before last week’s murders,----------------
Mexico’s Catholic Media Centre had tallied the killings of 28 priests since 2006, most of them in states where criminal groups are powerful, such Michoacán, Guerrero and Veracruz.
And a lot of clergy were killed in Colombia: 83 since 1984. by FARC, by the drug cartels who overlap FARC and I suspect some by right wing hit squads. And that doesn't include the Protestant clergy and laypeople massacred while attending mass.
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In Venezuela, tensions are high between the government and the church: This priest was killed last year for unknown reasons.
This small snippet in SP notes in Venezuela:
The pro-government gangs apparently have standing orders to attack any sign of public anti-government activity. This includes barging into churches during worship services and forcing the people to listen to a pro-government speech instead of what the priest was going to say about the problems most Venezuelans have to deal with.
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In the Philippines, the most obvious "rid me of the troublesome priest" was the murder of a priest who defended the rights of the indigenous against big business/local crooked politicians who wanted to steal their land (resulting in the destruction of the environment by mining) for profit.
and the murder of clergy by right wing hit squads because of their supposed links to left wing causes. HRW report 2011.
this Wikipedia article has a lot of the pre Duterte killings listed,
In other words, when you read about "extrajudicial killings", remember it did not start with Duterte.
and a lot of these things are not "ordered" but hinted at by the big shots (whose minions then arrange the hits). So the big shots can claim they weren't involved.
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