by Gerard Colby
Wycliffe Associates’ “500 Club” was designed to offer the richer members a way out of service through cash; $500 or more each year was all it took to get a special certificate of membership. Some gave much more. Texas’s corporate leaders were prominent in helping Cam build Sills International Linguistics Center near Dallas; the Linguistics Center’s board meeting was one of those special occasions where a Rockefeller business partner like Trammel Crow could rub shoulders with an ultrarightist like Nelson Bunker Hunt. But they were the old core of supporters. The real power in Wycliffe Associates was its thousands of newer members, spreading the influence of SIL across the country, and the influence of Wycliffe Associates in Cam’s organization.
Promoting and leading this base of support into politics was McAteer’s forte. During the Carter administration, his name began to appear among New Right circles in Washington, D.C., connected with North Carolina’s Senator Jesse Helms. It was McAteer who brought Jerry Falwell into this crowd, helping Falwell build the Moral Majority. Then, in 1979, McAteer organized the Religious Roundtable. Well funded, McAteer pulled together many of the Fundamentalists leaders of the nation to back the candidacy of Ronald Reagan.
Cam was one of those who followed McAteer into the founding meeting of the Religious Roundtable. If he had any reservations about where this would lead SIL and how it would play in Latin America (where Reagan’s name was anathema because of his condemnation of Carter’s Panama Canal treaty), Cam’s base of support in the homeland and his top financial backers left him little choice. He was, at the end of his career, trapped by the Far Right Fundamentalist base on which he had built Wycliffe’s success at home.
Cam explained his political metamorphosis as nonideological, the result of a service to God and Indian that led him into a different set of circumstances. He never recognized that his success abroad was the result of more earthly powers, not the least of whom was Nelson Rockefeller.
In 1980, while Ronald Reagan was riding fear and anger to the White House, Cam celebrated the dedication of SIL’s new translation of the Cakchiquel New Testament in Guatemala. Cam’s old translation, done fifty years before, had proved inadequate. Many of the Indians had found his celebrated psychophonemic translation too general to be understood by Indians speaking different Cakchiquel dialects. SIL accompanied its release with a new edition of Tolo: The Volcano’s Son, Cam’s tale of how Guatemalan Indians almost succumbed to the temptation of Russian-inspired Indian revolutions raging across the border in El Salvador. Only now, perhaps in deference to Cam’s ambition to have SIL enter the Soviet Caucasus, the Russian was simply called a “foreigner.”
In the Guatemalan hills that had launched his career, Cam could see the results of the Lord’s Will. If they were not all he had hoped for, there was at least a great harvest of souls. If he was disturbed that many of these souls had been dispatched to their Maker by murder or that many of these murders now included Cakchiquel Protestants, he did not say, at least publicly. The seizure of Indian lands along highways leading to recent mineral and oil strikes had politicized the Christian highlanders. Most of these evangelized Maya tribes were the same Indians who had all but ignored the fall of Arbenz in 1954 and had shown little interest in the ladino guerrillas who had been hunted down by the army and the Green Berets in the 1960s. Now, however, they were learning firsthand about the army and its U.S. military and CIA advisers. In May 1978, more than 600 Kekchí Indians who were protesting eviction from the Polochi Valley were fired upon by the army in Panzós, Alta Verapaz, a new oil-exploration district about 125 miles north of Guatemala City.11 The Panzós massacre of some 100 men, women, and children was a turning point; word raced through the highlands, radicalizing whole villages. Indians of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor entered Nebáj in El Quiché department on a Sunday market day in January 1979 and made speeches to some 3,000 Indian campesinos. The army responded with a brutal occupation.
In January 1980, a delegation of twenty-seven Ixil Indians and clerical supporters from villages in Quiché took their protest over seized lands and mounting army repression to the Spanish Embassy after they had been turned away from the Congress, the Presidential Palace, and the U.S. Embassy. Oil had been struck by France’s Elf Aquitaine at Rubelsanto, north of the Ixil villages, in 1972. Since then, four other companies had moved in: Shenandoah Oil (which had Elliot Roosevelt, Jr., the late president’s son, as a director); Texaco; Saga Petroleum, a Norwegian partner with Shenandoah in exploring off the coast of Ireland; and Elf’s partner, Basic Resources International, on whose board sat Rockefeller associate Robert W. Purcell, director and past chairman of Nelson’s International Basic Economy Corporation and a director of Rockefeller Center.* Big money was at stake. In 1977, Basic Resources and Shenandoah announced plans to link the Rubelsanto oil field and the Atlantic coast of Guatemala with a $30 million, twelve-inch pipeline capable of carrying 50,000 barrels of oil a day.12
The Ixils of northern Quiché had never been passive about injustice from outsiders. They had twice revolted against the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico and had supported the revolution that overthrew him. When the Arbenz government, in turn, was overthrown by the CIA, the Ixils suffered persecution for having participated in land reform. Five hundred were sent into exile in the jungles of Petén; others were murdered or jailed.13 In the ensuing decade, colonization projects promoted by the military regime—some involving Nelson Rockefeller’s AIA as consultants to the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Institute of Agricultural Services,14 others organized as cooperatives by Catholic Action and American Maryknoll priests—began to move into northern Huehuetenango and northern Quiche.
The Ixil watched these developments carefully. For decades, they had resisted efforts by ladino landlords and the military to force them off their lands. In 1971, they revolted, and the regime had to send in troops. For the Ixils, it was a losing battle against a land-tenure system that absorbed the most fertile Ixil lands into large plantations for cash crops for export. This system consistently reduced the size of the Indians’ small farms to below subsistence level and forced the Indians to work on the plantations for an average wage of $1.50 a day. Tied to the price fluctuations of the coffee markets of New York and London, this system left 80 to 90 percent of the Indian population illiterate and 75 percent of their children under the age of five malnourished. Life expectancy for non-Indians was sixty years; for Indians, forty-four years, tying neighboring Honduras, another banana republic, for the shortest life span in Central America.15
The Ixils’ one fallback was their ancestral lands in the jungles of northern Quiche. Then in 1972 came the worst news yet: Oil had been struck in northern Quiche. A highway was cut into the region, which sent land values soaring. The pressure on both the Ixil and the Indian settlers in the northern colonies increased, as high ranking military officers laid claim to the jungle lands, displaying deeds granted earlier by the regime.16
These were the conditions that had prompted several Ixil villages to send a delegation to Guatemala City in 1980 and, ultimately, to peacefully occupy the Spanish Embassy when no one would hear their grievances.
Before anyone thought to ask why the Indians were there, and despite the Spanish ambassador’s explicit request that the embassy’s extraterritorial rights be respected by Guatemala’s military regime, the building was promptly surrounded by troops and firebombed, killing almost everyone, including the embassy staff, inside. The one Indian survivor was subsequently kidnapped from his hospital bed; his mangled body was found a few days later on the university campus as a warning to students.
Guatemala’s Indians and SIL (1980)
Sources: Wycliffe Bible Translators, “Wycliffe Bible Translators in Central America” (1976); Summer Institute of Linguistics, Bibliography of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Volume One: 1935–1975 (Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1979) and Volume Two: 1976–1982 (Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1985); International Petroleum Encyclopedia, 1983 (Tuls
a, Okla.: PennWell Publishing Company, 1983); “Lenguas Indígenas de Guatemala” (map), Instituto Geográfico Nacional, Guatemala, 1975; Beatriz Manz, Refugees of a Hidden War: The Aftermath of Counterinsurgency in Guatemala.
Spain immediately broke off relations with Guatemala. But by 1982, relations were back on track as Basic Resources International brought Spain’s national oil company, Hispanoil, into plans to develop its 500,000-acre concession. The concession in the Ixil ancestral territory now had two producing oil fields and the 50,000-barrel-a-day pipeline to Puerto Barrios, United Fruit’s old shipping terminal on the Caribbean coast.
Meanwhile, Guatemala was developing a reputation as a killing ground. Since the CIA’s 1954 coup, the number of Guatemalans who were murdered and tortured to death by CIA-advised security forces, Green Beret-trained army troops, and night-stalking death squads had reached an estimated 80,000.17 Indians who made up the Guerrilla Army of the Poor were expelling SIL translators and engaging the regime’s troops in open battles that inspired evangelical conversions on an unprecedented scale. “It was during the guerrilla activity of the early 1980s that it really turned around,” an SILer later explained. “So many people were killed. There was so much upheaval.* Their old [Mayan] way wasn’t working.”18 Guatemala’s official National Indian Institute kept peace with the military by ignoring the massacres in the hills; not one article on the atrocities appeared in its bulletin, although one did appear in 1982 honoring Cam, ironically, as an eminent “humanist.”19
That year Cam’s legacy to Guatemalan Protestantism also took a bloody turn. General Efraín Ríos Montt, converted after the 1976 earthquake to the Church of the Word by Gospel Outreach missionaries from California, seized power one month after the guerrilla groups politically united. Assassinations of the regime’s political opponents in the cities by death squads and six months of Indian holocaust were creating a terrible image abroad of an army that had turned against its own people while mobilizing much of the population into the ranks of the revolution. Ríos Montt initiated a new approach to the war that actually looked quite old to the CIA counterinsurgency experts who were advising him. The new strategy involved a scaling down of violence in the cities, where reporters could confirm an improved climate, while in the countryside a grimmer drama was taking place behind the veil of military quarantine and censorship: the forced removal of Indian populations to strategic hamlets, an involuntary civilian militia, and “free-fire” zones for the army in supposedly evacuated areas. More than 400 Indian villages were destroyed or damaged,20 and some 500,000 to 1 million people were uprooted. Thousands were forced into barbed-wired reindoctrination camps that were commanded by army interrogators and served by SIL translators and Christian aid agencies, or put on deadly forced marches to the border. As the holocaust rolled northward, some 70,000 Indians fled into Mexico, worrying the Mexican government that Indian unrest would spread. Ríos Montt took to the airwaves amid the slaughter, preaching sermons to the nation, a born-again Christian dictator rapidly descending into what many believed was madness. In December, the general slipped quietly into Honduras (where the CIA was arming displaced Miskito Indians for attacks on the Sandinista government in Nicaragua) for a discreet rendezvous with President Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was near the end of a hemispheric tour that included a gaffe that astonished his Brazilian hosts (he invited the junta’s president, with great flourish, to “join me in a toast to the people of Bolivia”), sharp criticism from Colombia’s president over the U.S.-backed Contra war in Nicaragua, rioting in Bogotá, U.S. concessions in Brasília (dropping objections to Brazil’s export subsidies, easing U.S. sugar quotas, a $1.2 billion loan to help the regime’s austerity measures, and hints at renewed military ties and resumed sales of nuclear fuel to Brazil), and his own proclamations of El Salvador’s “progress” in human rights (at least enough to warrant continued U.S. military aid). He had no problem granting Ríos Montt’s simple request for a meeting. It would give his dictatorship a badly needed boost among Guatemala City’s elite, who were nervous about the general’s Fundamentalist evangelical fervor (“God gives power to whomever he wants, and he gave it to me.”) and his demagogic raving that the country’s battered, terrorized Indian majority “should be its rulers, not its slaves.”21
Cam never publicly questioned his translators’ presence behind army lines in Guatemala, any more than he questioned Ronald Reagan’s leadership. Typically, Cam never seemed to doubt his own innocence when others, caught in the ambiguities of his Hail, Caesar policy, died in the inevitable crossfire, even when the victims were four American churchwomen who were murdered by an army death squad in El Salvador, and even when the victims included an SIL translator in Colombia.
THE FRUITS OF MARTYRDOM
Chester Bitterman had wanted nothing more in life than to serve the Lord by translating the Word for people who had never read the Bible. A native of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Bitterman was attracted to the dynamism of the Wycliffe Bible Translators. “Like his colleagues, Chester Bitterman left the United States as a missionary of the Wycliffe Bible Translators,” commented anthropologist David Stoll, “but arrived in the field as something else, a scientific investigator of the Summer Institute of Linguistics.”22 Carrying this dual identity, Bitterman was trapped in the perception of SIL as something duplicitous, even clandestine.
Bitterman was only twenty-eight in 1981, a graduate of Billy Graham’s alma mater, South Carolina’s Columbia Bible College, and son-in-law of SIL’s flight manager in Colombia. His post was among the 120 Carijona Indians of southern Colombia’s Caquetá region, an area known to harbor both guerrillas and Indians whom the CIA used to hunt the guerrillas; in fact, in 1976, a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent was expelled for allegedly being a CIA officer who clandestinely trained Indians in Caquetá for just such a purpose.23 During the year and a half Bitterman had tried to gain Colombian approval for his tribal work, SIL was again under intense scrutiny. In 1978, Cam had to intervene personally with President Julio Turbay Ayala to prevent SIL’s expulsion. By 1980, marijuana and coca planters and armed rebels so frightened SIL’s Lomalinda base that President Turbay sent in troops to protect it. Rumors still abounded that the Yankee translators were informers for the police, if not for the CIA station in the Bogotá embassy.*
On January 19, 1981, SIL’s Bogotá residence, which had already been bombed in the summer of 1976, had unexpected visitors. Seven armed men burst in, looking for branch director Alvaro Wheeler. Learning he was not there, they seized instead the young translator. Chester Bitterman, suffering from a gall bladder ailment, had unluckily left the Carijona Indians to go to Bogotá for medical treatment.
The kidnappers sent a message to President Reagan: SIL must leave Colombia immediately; if not, the hostage would be executed.
The Reagan administration did not negotiate with hostage takers; that was what Reagan had said about Iran and Beirut. It was policy.
The kidnappers said they were M-19 guerrillas, the movement launched after the miraculous April 19, 1970, reelection of the incumbent National Front. The congressional opposition had called for SIL’s expulsion. Was it not reasonable to believe that M-19 had decided on more drastic measures?
The leaders of M-19 denied it. They had everything to lose by this attack on unarmed missionaries. Only recently, Cromos, a magazine that had run the stories on the investigations of SIL, had released a poll that placed two M-19 leaders as the first and second in national popularity. President Turbay was tenth. Now, buoyed by the outcry over Bitterman’s kidnapping, Turbay charged M-19 fighters with having been trained in Cuba. Such charges of outside intervention increased his standing among Colombian nationalists, disarmed his opposition, and pleased the Kissinger task force charged with combating the specter of “Castro terrorism.” M-19 desperately blamed another faction. That faction also denied it. When the two groups conferred on February 14, they concluded that they had been set up. They blamed the intelligence service of the milit
ary, which had recently come under criticism by the OAS for torture and murder. Perhaps the real architect, said the groups, was the CIA. But no one in SIL bought it. The CIA did not abuse Americans’ rights, much less deliberately put Americans in mortal danger; the CIA existed to protect American lives.
The Reagan administration continued to refuse to negotiate. SIL refused to consider withdrawal; it had plans to enter fifteen more tribes and to stay until 1995.
On March 7, Bitterman’s body was found wrapped in an M-19 flag in a parked van. He had been shot through the heart. M-19 denied responsibility and condemned the murder. President Turbay condemned M-19 again and ordered the army to arrest 100 of his critics who he believed were M-19 supporters, including an official of the Council of Latin American Churches.
In Washington, Secretary of State Alexander Haig expressed shock and anger: Military aid was needed and counterinsurgency operations would be stepped up, killing more than 30,000 persons by the end of the decade.24 The violence and public outcry would force the National Front to offer M-19 an amnesty. M-19, which had a more flexible strategy than Che Guevara’s focus on the path of the guerrilla, accepted and entered the electoral arena, but at a high price: the assassination of their presidential candidate. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Bitterman’s family buried their son. His mother had already expressed her belief that Chet had been destined by the Lord to minister to M-19.25 Chet’s widow found comfort in the same conclusion: “I know this was God’s ministry for Chet. He was chosen!”26
