Silver, Sword, and Stone

by Marie Arana

  These days, in Brazil, where a quarter of the population live in abject poverty and an evangelical preacher can fly from town to town in a private jet worth $45 million, stark economic differences only seem to inspire. Hundreds of thousands of aggravated, unemployed Brazilians stream to evangelical temples to learn how they can pray their way to financial paradise. Edir Macedo, a Brazilian preacher suspected by some of money laundering and charlatanism, nevertheless commands a major newspaper, a number of music companies, a television news station, and a personal fortune worth about $1 billion. A searing critic of the Vatican, he congratulates his ex-Catholic followers for leaving behind a crippling mentality. He assures them that they, too, can be as rich as he is, if only they follow the evangelical example. And they do. On one sunlit morning in Natal, Sandra Abdalla answered her doorbell to find two men applying for construction work in her house. Their pitch was direct: They were clean, they told her—God-fearing, upstanding members of Edir Macedo’s Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. They didn’t drink, steal, or raise hell. The senhora could count on them to be at her door every morning at seven, and—unlike the Catholic competition—she could trust them around her whisky, her silver, and, by all means, her daughter.

  Other, less financially driven evangelicals have taken a more modest route. Willing to venture where Catholic priests will not go, they have penetrated deep into the Lacandón jungle, high into the snowcapped Andes. They don’t simply pass through, greeting villagers on quick, proselytizing missions. They live with them, eat what they eat, work by their sides, collect water from the same rivers, bathe their children in the same gullies. They don’t call Pentecostalism a religion but “a way.” They don’t occupy church grounds, but modest shacks. One icy dawn, as Leonor Gonzáles left her hut in the hyaline heights of La Rinconada to sift through the rock spill from the mines, she saw a makeshift sign nailed precariously on a nearby door. When she asked her daughter Senna what it said, she was told it was an invitation: “Come in, friend. We are Leaving Footprints. We are the Assemblies of God.” The hut, like Leonor’s, was built of stone.

  BLOWS LIKE THE WRATH OF GOD

  There are blows in life, so hard . . . I don’t know! Blows like the wrath of God, as if all at once the undertow of all that had ever been suffered rushed in to swamp the soul . . . I don’t know!

  —César Vallejo, “The Black Heralds”

  Xavier Albó was not immune to the passions of liberation priests, nor was he unaware of the radical challenges they suggested. Like many of his fellow priests in Latin America—the overwhelming majority from Spain—he had grown up among devout Catholics who, caught in the vicissitudes of the Spanish Civil War, had followed the Church and saluted Generalísimo Franco. Their swing now to the Left seemed a natural enough human response to the error of choosing a side that had exterminated almost half a million. Not least, Xavier and his cohort had contemplated history, studied the conquest, seen the ways that, for all the Church’s efforts to appear apolitical, it had seldom been so. It had never been far removed from the sword and throne. From the moment its priests had set foot in Latin America, it had been the religion of domination, of faraway kings, of tyrants and despots and corridors of power. It had built mighty institutions; it had been trusted, obeyed, respected. But it had not attended to the miners, the peons, the bricklayers—the poor, persecuted, and despised. How had the Church strayed so far from Christ’s example?

  He was more than fifty before he looked around and realized that he had been living and working on a continent beset by violence since the day he had arrived, a downy-cheeked, seventeen-year-old boy. His dream had always been to immerse himself in this new land: to learn, to understand the Guaraní, the Aymara, the Quechua, the Afro-Latins—the great proliferation of cultures that were buried deep in the larger American identity. This was not a sentimental or comfortable aspiration. In the half century he had spent in South America, he had seen what championing the poor could do to a man. He had lost fellow priests to executions, skirmishes, revenge killings; he had prayed over their mutilated corpses, he had hazarded forays into the most remote jungles to meet with liberation priests alongside their gun-toting comrades. He had never been lured to aggression, but he could understand it. Perhaps it was because, as a student of anthropology, he had been trained to see the world through other eyes, to refrain from passing judgment. Certainly, he had never sought to protect himself from the harsher aspects of the Latin American reality. But for all his curiosity, for all his desire to plumb the heart of his adopted homeland, he had not been dealt the worst. He had been spared the sword.

  Not Vicente Cañas, a Jesuit friend who had immersed himself so thoroughly in the indigenous cultures of Brazil and Paraguay that he had shed his robe, pierced his face, and joined the tribe of the Enawenê-Nawê. Working tirelessly to protect the tribal land from mining companies and land-razing ranchers, Cañas had been singled out as a target by Paraguay’s cutthroat dictator, Alfredo Stroessner, who dismissed him as “that silly little priest”—an irritant, a pest, a mote in the churning universe of graft—who only got in the way. Cast out of Paraguay for his work with the Guaraní, Cañas then made his home in a cabin in Brazil six hours downriver by canoe from the Enawenê-Nawê, where he could conduct spiritual retreats and visit that tribe regularly, helping them plant, fend off aggressors, care for the sick. Cañas was found by his hut one fine morning, gutted and sprawled on the blood-soaked dirt, his skull crushed, his genitals cut off, his few worldly possessions destroyed. When Brazilian judges tried to get to the bottom of the crime, the police—paid off by rich, land-hungry fazendeiros—absconded with the priest’s smashed cranium, the prima facie evidence, and no one was held accountable. His skull was eventually found in an abandoned box in a remote bus station in Minas Gerais.

  Not spared, too, was João Bosco Burnier, his Jesuit colleague in a diamond mining town, who was pistol-whipped and shot point-blank in the neck with a bala dundum—an exploding bullet—when he tried to save two indigenous women from being torn apart by wild boars. A group of bored soldiers had tied down the women and were goading the animals to disembowel them alive, before the gory enterprise was interrupted by Brother João. The women were saved, but the Jesuit was not. It took more than twenty years for the military to admit that the women were a lure; the meddlesome priest had been their target all along.

  And so it went throughout the hemisphere. One after another, activist missionary priests continued to be targets of the military, of foreign corporations, of rich owners of haciendas, of testosterone-driven caudillos. Their more conservative brothers gravitated to cities, to centers of privilege as they had done since time immemorial—safe and sound, working in prestigious schools and universities, attending to congregations of the rich and upwardly mobile. Once in a while, as priests were wont to do, they wandered onto dangerous ground.

  WORD OF GOD

  It is their natural right to be recognized as a culture distinct from the Western culture, a culture in which they live their own faith.

  —Bishop Samuel Ruíz, Chiapas

  One of the more fearless was the Mexican bishop of Chiapas, Samuel Ruiz, whose work on behalf of the poor eventually blossomed into full-blown rebellion: the Zapatista uprising of 1994. It began when the Church sent catechists to serve a population boom in the Lacandón jungle. Before 1950, the Lacandón had relatively few inhabitants, but when the government began to urge landowners in to establish cattle ranches instead of farms, hundreds of thousands of peons laboring in Chiapas’s agricultural fields were dismissed en masse. An escape to the forest seemed the only option, and the Indians—evicted, homeless, angry—flooded into the jungle, with catechists and revolutionaries in tow.

  Bishop Ruiz, immediately sympathetic to their plight, took it upon himself to shepherd this newly displaced population. He determined to protect them from exploitation and, to that effort, installed a new category of spiritual worker: the tuhuneles, the lay deacons, eight thousand strong, who, unli
ke catechists, could preach as well as offer sacraments of baptism, communion, and marriage. This new breed corresponded to a centuries-old aspiration among the Indians: the ability to elect their own leaders, promote their own priests, grow their own religion. Ruíz and his fellow priests called this more muscular effort of proselytization “the Word of God.” Eventually Ruiz found himself building an entire empire in Chiapas, attracting gun-toting militants—brigadistas—who joined forces with deacons to organize honey farmers and coffee growers, raising political consciousnesses, demanding human rights. As time went on and Ruiz’s friend Bishop Óscar Romero was gunned down in El Salvador, the villages of Chiapas began to fear the encroaching military terror that sped uncontrolled through Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala in the 1980s (as it did throughout Latin America in those years). The Church’s deacons, seeking stronger champions and defenders, eventually turned to an even more radical group: the Frente de Liberación Nacional (FLN), which had tucked itself into the Lacandón jungle in 1983, transformed itself into the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), and readied itself for all-out war against the Mexican state. So it was that Bishop Ruiz, who had become prophet, priest, and king to the downtrodden people of Chiapas, came face-to-face with Subcomandante Marcos.

  It was a fractious confrontation. The declared terrorist and guerrillero Subcomandante Marcos, a charismatic figure in his black ski mask and pipe, commanded the Lacandón as whimsically and erratically as Robin Hood had commanded Sherwood Forest. Outraged and radicalized by the government’s bloody 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of students in Mexico City, which claimed 350 lives, Marcos had slipped into the jungle several years later, joined forces with remnants of the FLN, and created an army that would bedevil the Mexican authorities for twenty years. Trained by Cuban guerrillas and a passionate apostle of Che Guevara, Marcos was sharp tongued, fierce, unequivocal—the absolute opposite of the sweet-faced tatic (father), the soft-spoken bishop with the gentle eyes.

  And yet Marcos and Ruiz concurred on much: They were both sure that their new peasant movement was a return to roots, a vindication of the conquest’s depredations, a resurgence of the most ancient of all pasts, Indian Mexico. They understood that if oppression was their target, theirs was inherently a political battle; and where there was political division, violence was never far behind. They also concurred in the Marxist view: that the underdevelopment of the Third World was a direct product of the avaricious development of the First. Foreign ventures undertaken by rich countries had promised much in the Americas and, indeed, had brought fitful progress, but the overall effect had been subjugation, and those who bore the brunt were always the lower classes, the darker races, the poor.

  That much was agreed upon between the guerrilla and the priest. But whereas Bishop Ruiz was convinced that his “Word of God”—a Marxist interpretation of the gospel—and his tuhuneles and catechists were in themselves a redemptive force and liberating army, Subcomandante Marcos adamantly did not. Although the guerrilla’s writings had an unmistakable biblical tone, damning the depravities Indians were too often prey to (prostitution, alcoholism, machismo, domestic violence), and although all the Zapatistas quickly adopted biblical names (Moisés, Josué, David, Daniel), Marcos was no believer in God. “God and his Word aren’t worth a damn,” he was often heard to say as he spurred his horse through the forest green, a semiautomatic strapped to his side, a pipe jutting from his trademark balaclava.

  Eventually Marcos would draw a line with Bishop Ruiz: “Here there will be no Word of God,” he announced to the denizens of the Lacandón jungle. “Here there will be no government of the republic, here there is only going to be the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.” Little did he know that Bishop Ruiz had already crossed that line. To marshal God’s word, Ruiz had created a radical organization known as Root (slo¯p in Tzeltal Mayan), a clandestine group whose charge was to prepare for a possible armed rebellion between the people of Chiapas and the shock troops of the republic. It had been meant as a back-up defense guard, but when Subcomandante Marcos swept into far corners of the Lacandón, recruiting terrorists for his Zapatista Army, there was already a core of armed peasants more than ready to sign up. They had been groomed for it by the tatic’s catechists. Bishop Ruiz shook his head and lamented, “These people [the Zapatistas] have arrived to mount a saddled horse.” The Church had planted a seed, and the people of Mexico would now reap a bitter harvest. The Zapatista uprising erupted with full force on New Year’s Day 1994, in a killing spree that left more than 150 dead. Three years later, even after peace talks had begun, the carnage would continue. Paramilitaries would invade churches and gun down whole congregations. Forty thousand government troops would descend on that forest paradise to suppress the rebels. Indians would sell their livestock to buy arms. “The truth is that for the indigenous,” the tatic said sadly after weeks of rampant bloodshed, “there is no way out but that of the gun.”

  * * *

  Ruiz was beset from all sides for his role in the bloody uprising: the Vatican tried to muzzle him; political enemies tried to assassinate him; the Mexican government waged a no-holds-barred campaign to discredit his name. Dubbed the “Red Bishop” by adversaries, Ruiz had become emblematic of the controversial role liberation theologists were playing in Latin America’s ongoing crises. From the 1960s well into the twenty-first century—from the bizarre, self-inflicted genocide of Peru’s Shining Path, to Brazil’s scarring vendetta against its leftist rebels, to Guatemala’s systematic purge of nearly a quarter million of its people—the Church was seen as siding with insurgents, goading the meek to think they might inherit the earth. The aftershocks continued to reverberate throughout the hemisphere for decades to come. Indeed, since 2006, Mexico has made the fury in Chiapas look trivial. Its drug wars have generated catastrophic human losses that dwarf the Zapatista uprising. In the last ten years, more than two hundred thousand Mexicans have died as a result of the illegal drug trade. There is a reason why Protestant missionaries are doing so well recruiting souls south of the Rio Grande: Mexico is the most dangerous country in Latin America for Catholic priests and nuns. Drug lords make a point to attend Catholic church services, carry and distribute Bibles, justify their violence as “divine justice” or orders from the Lord. Sometimes a priest just gets in the way.

  As fate would have it, Xavier Albó was visiting Ruiz during the peace talks that took place in Chiapas in the late 1990s. Calling on him in the bright-yellow stucco cathedral that was the tatic’s domain, he congratulated the bishop on his work with the indigenous but gently inserted his own thoughts about nonviolence. It was not the first they had met, and Ruíz remembered the Jesuit as the Bolivian who, like him, had dedicated his life to the disenfranchised of this increasingly fraying New World. Xavier glanced around to take in the scene of those historic mediations. It was jarring to see, but it was certainly nothing he didn’t recognize—a norm for anyone who had cared to look in the past five hundred years: behind one cordon were the Indians, awaiting judgment. Behind another, dressed in white, members of the international peace groups that supported them. Behind the third, the military and police, with guns and grenades at the ready.

  WHERE THE SPIRIT RESIDES

  “Religion” suggests something structured, doctrinal, rigid. For us, it is more deep inside. Not a cult, not a building, not a bible.

  —David Choquehuanca, chancellor of Bolivia, 2017

  Why would an appraisal of the current state of Latin American faith include religions that are no longer practiced—religions that are mere vestiges of civilizations annihilated five hundred years ago? Perhaps because the fire has never quite been extinguished; because the rubble of conquest still holds abiding power over the land.

  The native populations of the Americas—virtually stamped out in North America—have survived to different degrees in Latin America. Killed off or driven to near extinction in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil, the First People are still vibrantly present elsewher
e, if not as pure indigenous stock then in the veins of the region’s largely mixed-race population. Whereas the English and French rarely mixed with their colonial vassals in North America, Africa, and India, the Spanish and Portuguese conjugated freely with the colored races of Latin America, producing a vast racial fusion. With that diversity came a virulent, institutionalized racism, ruthlessly observed. As soon as Spain was able to impose some semblance of control over its colonies, it moved to enforce a strict separation of races. At the very top were the Spanish; immediately below, their American-born white offspring; below that, a torrent of admixtures: the mestizos, sambos, mulattos, quadroons, octoroons, moriscos, coyotes, chamisos, gíbaros, and so on, each shade of skin color recorded meticulously by the Church in official birth registries. For each hue in that broad spectrum of racial identity, there were concrete socioeconomic ramifications. If a newborn looked Indian and was duly recorded as such, he would grow up subject to the Spanish tribute; if he were unable to pay, he was forced to meet his debt through hard labor. Chained, herded in gangs, separated from families, stripped of all humanity, Indians were likely to be sent great distances to satisfy Spain’s demands. Today those colonial hardships may be gone, but the racism endures.