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Elders Jeffrey Brent Ball and Todd Ray Wilson, two American Missionaries of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) were killed in La Paz, Bolivia on May 24, 1989 by members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación-Zarate Willka terrorist group who associated them and the Church they represented with perceived American imperialist activities. Later, three Peruvians, Elders Manuel Hidalgo, Cristian Ugarte, and Oscar Zapata were killed in Peru for similar reasons on August 22, 1990, and March 6, 1991. Government officials of both the United States and Bolivia employed their resources in bringing the assassins to justice, and the accused assassins suffered deprivations to their persons and families, including the murder of a brother. The assassination of missionaries laboring in the field has been one of the rarest and yet most visible forms of persecution against the LDS Church. Some missionaries have been killed because of anti-Mormon hostility, some have been killed for political reasons, and some have simply been victims of random attacks. The LDS Church views these slain missionaries as martyrs. Their names "will be engraved forever in the history of this Church as those who lived as faithful servants of God and died as martyrs to His eternal work()." The circumstances surrounding the politically motivated assassinations of Jeffrey Ball and Todd Wilson affected people of many different groups. The general membership of the LDS Church was saddened by the deaths of these missionaries, the small Utah communities of Coalville and Wellington were especially shocked, and their families mourned. As one sister of Todd Wilson expressed over ten years later, "It is something you never forget."〔(【引用サイトリンク】website=http://www.boliviamission.org/cgi-bin/rmdb41.cgi?action=viewentry&alum_id=1220 )〕 Their fellow missionaries in Bolivia, as well as the people of Bolivia generally were also impacted. While this led to a few opportunities for missionaries in the region to share their message, as a result of these events, American missionaries were eventually temporarily removed from the region. Many American missionaries at the time finished their missions outside of Latin America, which provided many Latin American missionaries the opportunity to learn to develop church leadership skills, which the missionaries could later apply in their LDS wards and stakes. In the mid-1990s, the American missionaries who were the first to return and their native counterparts learned to readjust to different cultures without having had a continuous tradition of mixed cultures in the mission. ==Elders Ball and Wilson== Jeffrey Brent Ball was born December 8, 1968, the second of three children born to Alfred Brent Ball and Lois Joyce Bates Ball of Wanship, outside Coalville, Utah, who operated the Rafter-B Gas 'N Grub as a family business,.〔 Jeffrey was a stockily built athlete and an all-state American football player for three consecutive years, acting as the varsity team captain for two of those years. He was also active in student politics at North Summit High School in Coalville, where he served as student body vice president. His older sister, Wendy, described him as "a powerful authority who also had a caring soft side he tried to hide but couldn't." His desire to serve a mission was manifested by his selling his Jeep that he "dearly loved" to finance it.〔 He entered the Missionary Training Center (MTC) in June 1988, and served at the same time as his sister, who labored in the Guatemala Guatemala City North Mission. Their eighteen-year-old brother Greg was preparing to serve a mission as well.〔 Todd Ray Wilson was born May 5, 1969. While he came from a much larger family and was not involved in the same extracurricular activities as Jeffrey Ball, he shared a similar dedication to the ideal of missionary work. He was the seventh of ten children born to mine electrician Avril Gray Wilson and his wife Elaine Bunderson Wilson of Wellington, a small town about five miles southeast of Price, Utah. He had been an honor student at Carbon High School, and had begun attending the College of Eastern Utah, while working as the night manager at Wendy's Restaurant in Price. In order to save more money for his mission, he dropped his classes and continued to work late at night. He had "looked forward to his mission above all else."〔 Todd entered the MTC in July 1988. At the time of his death, his brother Brad was preparing to depart for his mission. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Assassinations of Jeffrey Brent Ball and Todd Ray Wilson」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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