Law Student Uses UC Education
In Search For Truth about Father's Death

Most students make their way to UC to pursue their dreams. Lisel Holdenried came to end a nightmare.

A first-year student in the College of Law, Holdenried hopes to use her legal education to uncover the full story behind the 1983 murder of her father Frank -- an American human rights activities who was working in war-torn Guatemala.

Lisel is certain the murder was carried out by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan army, which was locked in a brutal struggle to put down a leftist insurgency at the time of her father's death.

Frank Holdenried was found bludgeoned to death on a Caribbean beach. Local authorities ruled the case a robbery, even though none of his valuables were taken.

Lisel was barely a teen when her father died. As she grew into young adulthood, there was also a growing desire to find out what really happened. "When I was 23, I finally came to know I wanted to find out the circumstances behind my father's murder," says Lisel, who is now 29. That pursuit, and her desire to make a difference herself as a human rights advocate, brought her to UC after graduating last year from the University of California-San Diego.

After hearing about the reputation of the College of Law's Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights, Lisel wrote to the institute's director Bert Lockwood. He wrote back, and Lisel says she "realized this program and this director were going to provide the best educational and intellectual environment for me to really pursue my goals and grow and develop in many ways. This was the kind of total program I wanted."

In Cincinnati, she is ready to continue her pursuit of the truth. Earlier efforts to uncover information from U.S. government agencies ended in frustration. For example, she filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA, and the agency claimed it had no records pertaining to her father's death. "Think about it. It doesn't make any sense. They don't even have one communication saying that a U.S. citizen had been murdered in Livingston, Guatemala?" Lisel refused to take "no records" for an answer. She filed an appeal and is waiting for a response.

What Lisel knows
Frank Holdenried went to Guatemala in 1976 to work with the Jesuits after an earthquake devastated the country. Among the other relief workers there was Mother Teresa who would soon become his friend.

"When he began meeting street kids there, he decided that's where he needed to be. That would be his life's work," Lisel says of her father. He would eventually start his own organization, Helpers of the Poor, and began supporting the concept of local leadership in Guatemala. Those efforts did not make him very popular with the national government.

"I heard from my father's friends and other adults around at that time that clearly there was much more to this murder than just common crime. He was doing political work, writing to people at embassies - so much so that I have boxes of his correspondence. He wasn't an unknown, and that was a time of extreme Cold War-attitudes."

Lisel takes action
As a result of her growing interest in Guatemala and Central American affairs, Lisel joined a group called Coalition Missing which she now co-chairs. The group is made up of friends and family of U.S. citizens who were victims of state violence in Guatemala, as well as survivors of political violence. "We're a support group, but also we're pushing for U.S. accountability and partnership in promoting Guatemalan human rights."

Lisel spent the summer of 1999 working in Washington, D.C., where she interned with the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission. She also met people working on human rights issues around the world, "an experience that touched me deeply."

"About 15 of us had a meeting with a member of the National Security Council, where everyone got about two minutes to say their piece. It all came back to the same sort of thing where the U.S. government (was at fault). It wasn't a pleasant thing for the person who had to sit there and listen, but it drove home the point to me that there's a lot of work to be done here in the U.S., and that's where I want to be."