The Salt Lake Tribune reports that a 52-year-old Mormon tourist was slain in Guatemala yesterday when five men armed with automatic weapons accosted the tour bus on which he was riding. Summary: The passengers, all adults from Utah and Idaho, were on a tour of Book of Mormon sites in Central America and were heading from the mountain city of Quetzaltenango to the Mexican border when their bus was attacked by five men . . . . [T]he gunmen crashed their pickup into the front of the tour bus about 3 p.m. and forced it off the road. . . . [A]ll 13 passengers were pulled from the bus and taken about 200 yards into the jungle, where they were tied up and put face-first on the ground. They remained on the ground for between 45 minutes and 1 hour while men stole jewelry and money but did not take passports. The Deseret News also reports the story here, noting the group was traveling in western Guatemala with an Orem-based Book of Mormon group. My deepest sympathy to the families affected by this tragedy, of course. A superficial Mormon reaction to this story might be that the jungle is teeming with modern-day Gadianton robbers, what the rest of the world would term criminals or terrorists. They are a threat to Mormon tourists and missionaries in many third-world countries. The threat seems to be increasing--recall the recent story of an LDS couple slain by an intruder in their home in Brazil, reported here by the Deseret News. A deeper question that merits reflection is whether Mormons feel a certain false sense of security, thinking that their status as Book of Mormon tourists or as Mormon missionaries somehow protects them from harm, whether from crime, accident, or disease. It obviously doesn't. I have attended missionary funerals. I had a missionary companion on a bicycle do a head-on collision with a van that was traveling the opposite direction (he recovered nicely, fortunately). I saw a missionary go paranoid psycho while serving. Tourists, of course, can fend for themselves, and are quite free to avoid travel in unsafe areas or exposure to other risks. It's the missionaries I worry about. See here and here for other recent stories on missionary deaths. Again, my deepest sympathy to the families.
Missionaries aren't really adults, or at least they are not allowed to act like adults. They go wherever they are told to go and don't ask questions. Question-asking is simply not tolerated in the LDS Missionary Corps any more than it is in the US Army. Yours is not to question why. This often puts LDS missionaries in areas where they are at some physical risk, whether from thugs with guns, kamikaze drivers, or endemic disease. Places you or I would know better than to go, but LDS missionaries go there because they are told to. I am disturbed that the Church makes no effort to disclose either information regarding risks to which missionaries are exposed or the policies it has (or doesn't have) in place to limit the actions of gung-ho Mission Presidents who think missionary safety is taken care of by God and His angels rather than mere human caution and prudence. In the hyper-faithful culture of LDS missions, some might even see concern for personal safety as an expression of doubt. Fine--put your own kid at risk, not mine.
My impression is that the dissemination of information from the COB occurs on a strict need-to-know basis, and that in their opinion we don't need to know anything about the risks faced by missionaries, statistics about missionaries who die or are injured while serving (you know they keep them), or policies that govern missionary safety. Well, I personally feel an increasing need to know, and I doubt I am the only one. If anyone is aware of official or unofficial information regarding missionary risks or formal safety policies, please email me a copy or a link.
9:47:23 AM 
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