Observance of Gallego's disappearance becomes an indigenous protest

Decades after his disappearance, people pay homage to the memory of Father Héctor Gallego
by Eric Jackson

Father Gallego has been dead now for longer than he had lived. On June 9, 1971, uniformed agents of the dictatorship led by Omar Torrijos came and took the 33-year-old Colombian parish priest of Santa Fe, Veraguas away in a military jeep. Except by his killers and their accomplices, he was never again seen, dead or alive.

Besides the deliberate cruelty that a forced disappearance inflicts upon the victim's family and friends, a major aspect of the crime is that no charges are brought, no reason is given, no judicial proceedings are held.

So what happened to Father Gallego, and why? The most common versions are that he was thrown from a helicopter into the Pacific Ocean in a place where the current would carry the body out to sea, and that this was done because he had founded a farmers' cooperative, La Esperanza de los Campesinos, that offered business competition to one of General Torrijos's relatives. But we really don't know. Three men were charged with Gallego's death. Two were tried, convicted and sent to prison, while the third has been a fugitive for many years. One of those convicted, the feared commander of the DENI secret police, Nivaldo Madriñán, recently died of kidney failure while serving his sentence under house arrest. None of the three men charged has ever spoken about Gallego's fate or why he suffered it.

There are many Panamanian Catholics who believe that Gallego should be canonized as a saint, but church rules make that impossible when no body is located.

On this past June 9, as on every June 9, the disappeared priest's family and friends, along with the Catholic clergy, gathered at the church in Santa Fe, across the street from one of the several Cooperativa Esperanza de los Campesinos stores. (Father Gallego's co-op has thrived and become by far the town's largest economic enterprise, a conglomerate that runs a number of businesses.)

This year, the usual crowd was joined by construction workers who came from around the country by bus.

More astoundingly, dozens of Ngobe and Bugle villagers walked down from their homes in the comarca, some of them having walked for four days, fording streams, traversing jungle-covered mountain slopes and crossing snake-infested tall grass to get to Santa Fe. They came to pay homage to Father Gallego, who died before many of them were born, but also to identify him as the patron saint of their resistance to hydroelectric dams and strip mines that threaten the existence of their communities.

Given the swing voting nature of the Ngobe - Bugle Comarca, the increased indigenous turnout at the Gallego memorial service, over which Bishop Óscar Brown presided, was another sign of political trouble for the ruling Democratic Revolutionary Party, which was founded by the president's father, General Torrijos.

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