Gary MacEoin and the Politics of Liberation

By Colman McCarthy

Gary MacEoin, a writer, author, editor and human rights activist who specialized in the politics and poverty of the Third World, especially Latin America, died of cardiac arrest in Leesburg, Va., July 9. He was 94.

In more than 25 books that were based mostly on old-fashioned legwork that took him into impoverished and remote villages from Mexico to Chile, Mr. MacEoin explored and explained the economic links between people of wealth and people of poverty. Seeing that Latin America was a beat largely overlooked by the North American media, Mr. MacEoin traveled the continent and produced a body of literature that spans more than four decades. The books include: “Latin America: the Eleventh Hour” (1962), “Revolution Next Door” (1971), “No Peaceful Way: the Chilean Struggle for Dignity” (1974), “Central America’s Options: Death or Life” (1988), “Sanctuary: A Resource Guide for Understanding and Participating in the Central American Refugees’ Struggle” (editor, 1985), “Unlikely Allies: the Christian-Socialist Convergence” (1990), “The People’s Church: Samuel Ruiz of Mexico and Why He Matters” (1996).

In the last book, Mr. MacEoin, then 87, portrayed Bishop Samuel Ruiz of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas as a priest who “had heard the cry of the people and had accepted his role as bishop to lead them in integral liberation.” The prelate, Mr. MacEoin wrote, “had done more than anyone else in the history of Chiapas to prepare its long oppressed people to assert their rights.”

As recently as three years ago, and after turning 90, Mr. MacEoin was reporting on Latin American issues, mostly for The National Catholic Reporter. Yesterday, its publisher, Tom Fox, recalled that he often phoned Mr. MacEoin at his San Antonio home with a story idea: “Well into his 90s, he would drop everything and run off to Mexico, Brazil, El Salvador or Cuba. There he would write still another story for the National Catholic Reporter while gathering material for yet another book. He was a personal inspiration, a blessing in my life. He had a stunningly clear mind, an enormous memory and even larger heart.”

Born June 12, 1909 in County Sligo, Ireland, Mr, MacEeoin studied for the priesthood but left the seminary a week before ordination. He later earned a doctorate in modern languages from the National University of Ireland. He spoke nine languages. From 1933 to 1944, he wrote and edited for Irish newspapers and magazines. Leaving Ireland in the mid-1940s to edit the Port-of-Spain Gazette in the West Indies, he came to New York in 1949 to be the director of Information for the Caribbean Commission. In 1963, he became a self-employed writer. He was published in The Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

When venturing on his own in 1963, the Second Vatican Council was underway. As a Catholic and former seminarian, Mr. MacEoin saw the event as a trove of information that needed to be analyzed and reported. A year after the council ended, he wrote “What Happened at Rome?” He argued that Catholicism had begun shifting from a church “of fixed and eternal truths” to being “the people of God on (a) journey.” Traveling through Latin America, he saw the sojourners. These included priests and nuns killed or tortured by U.S.-supported dictators, as well as “the radicalized priests who stay within the church structures (but), like the radical intellectuals and students, are placing all their bets on the peasants and the urban slum dwellers.”

When not writing, Mr. MacEoin taught and lectured. He was an adjunct professor at Columbia and Fordham universities, and over the years spoke at more than 50 universities. In one of his last speeches—at Goucher College in late 1998—he remarked that people “are insecure, uncertain of what tomorrow may bring. They look for a life raft to which to cling, whether it’s religion or consumerism. Earlier today here at Goucher, I dialogued with a class that is deeply concerned with the threats of consumerism to the survival not only of humans but of all animal and vegetable life. That is the point to which the century has brought us. That is the unfinished business now on the agenda of the next century.”

Prof. Betsy Cohn, Mr. MacEoin’s host at Goucher, said yesterday that “my students were in awe of the depths and breadth of Gary’s knowledge, plus the vitality given his years.”

He is survived by his son Donald of Leesburg. His wife Josephine died in 1986 grandchildren