Dear Editor,

After everything which has been written and talked about after I wrote “The Altar Boy,” I am sitting here in the middle of the night and asking myself the same question Nelson Peebles was asking you, after you wrote your blistering comments about the article and me. Who is the victim and who is the perpetrator?

Now after the input of David Ruiz, the priest is portrayed as a saint and the prisoner as an animal. Both you and I now know that the truth looks very different. To me, the “victim” is the perpetrator and the “perpetrator” is the victim and the people around the “perpetrator” have become victims too because they are imprisoned by the truth.

To me, you sound so much like a tortured soul who feels so much pain and guilt because the truth has not been told and it is all on your shoulders and for so many years!

Do you still feel that you have to protect the priest? You know that the truth will come out anyway now! Why don’t you talk about all this pain you felt for all these years and liberate yourself and your family? The times and the people have changed since 1961. Are you afraid the people of Benque will still judge you like they would then? To them, I only can say what my Mennonite granny loved to quote: “He, who is without sin, throwest the first stone!” What about the Christian love, and compassion?

You were young, and in love and war anything can happen! For all these years and tears you have been a victim so who is to judge you! Your brother – Papieto, Papaito or Edgar has been in jail for 41 years and we still have not legally cleared for what. The court papers will clear up the question but if it is for the murder of Fr. Sontag, why has he been kept in jail for so long? What I understand is that attempts have been made by people who cared to create a space for him outside the prison; to transit him into life outside prison, but these were halted by authorities with a Church background. Only over my dead body, one of them expressed, would Papaito get out of prison to get to a place with a little more care and mental health treatment. So it is not only that people cannot take care of him: they don’t want to. How unforgiving! Murderers normally get to get out of jail after 18 years. Who is paying the prison authorities to keep him in jail? All the people I talk to can’t or do not want to believe that it is the family who pays for that; to keep him in jail.

With Love

Chriss Roggema, Cocoplum Caye Caulker