by Gerard Colby
Two months later, Cam was in the audience as Billy Graham made Chester Bitterman the focus of his sermon at Wycliffe’s Golden Jubilee Rally at Anaheim, California. “To serve Him is costly, as the Bittermans have found out and as those five brave young men killed by the Aucas found out,” Graham said.
But the rewards are overwhelming in this life and the life to come. It’s already been demonstrated time and time again that the death of those brave young men in Ecuador [in 1956] led to a whole new dimension of missions in other countries. And Chet Bitterman’s going home to glory I believe was planned in the providence of God to open up a new chapter in missions. To call up the young men and young women to say, “I’ll go and take his place so that Chet Bitterman will be multiplied hundreds and thousands of times over until his job is finished.…”
There are three thousand languages yet to go. Wycliffe can now absorb about five hundred new translators and back up personnel a year. This means that every one of these language groups can be touched and occupied within this decade of the eighties.…
I’m convinced that we’re approaching the last days. We must work before the night comes and we come back to our text … the Good News About the Kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world so that all nations will hear it, and then, and then, and then, the end will come!
I don’t see but one thing standing in the way of the coming of the Lord. Now I believe He could come tonight. But there’s one thing … that puzzles me in the signs: All nations must hear. And this is what Cameron Townsend has always believed.27
Years later, SIL leaders at the International Linguistics Center would try to play down the millennialism that drove Cam’s vision of SIL’s mission,28 but Cam himself was not confused. For him, the evidence of the Lord’s Will in this tragedy was in the 70 percent increase in SIL recruits during the next year, a 22 percent boost in contributions, and a sudden positive change in SIL’s fortunes throughout Latin America that more cynical observers might have attributed to the equally dramatic change taking place in Washington with the triumph of Fundamentalism’s candidate, Ronald Reagan.29
AT PEACE WITH THE LORD
Ronald Reagan’s election had been followed by a reprieve for SIL in Brazil. The military regime no longer thought SIL a threat to national security and opened negotiations for SIL to enter the uranium-rich northwestern Amazon. In Colombia’s Congress, Alejandro Carrion also argued for SIL to remain, claiming that SIL’s opponents were in league with the same Satanic forces directed by Moscow who had murdered Chester Bitterman.30 In civilian-restored Ecuador, two days after President Jaime Roldos ordered SIL’s branch to leave the country, he died in a plane crash.
The same fate hit Panama’s General Omar Torrijos. In July 1981, Torrijos expelled SIL’s branch on six days’ notice. Shortly afterward, his plane, too, fell from the sky. SIL remained. As elsewhere, the Lord’s hand was easier to see than that of the alleged real assassin: drug trafficker and then-CIA collaborator Manuel Noriega.
In Bolivia, General Ariel Coca eventually saved SIL from some difficulties under civilian President Lidea Guelier by arranging the bloody “cocaine coup” of 1980. Then he got SIL to accept his Education Ministry’s award in February 1981,31 just a few months before he was exposed as Bolivia’s major cocaine trafficker. Cocaine now brought $1.6 billion a year into Bolivia, three times the amount received for tin, the leading legal export. Meanwhile, Indian miners continued to die from silicosis. In the state-owned tin mines, miners with ten years underground had an estimated 40 percent chance of contracting lung cancer and an average life expectancy of fewer than forty years.32
As murderous “clearances” razed the Mayan highlands of Guatemala and as veterans of CIA’s CORDS program appeared in Guatemala and El Salvador (where the military and death squads would kill 50,000 people between 1981 and 198533 in a carnage rivaling the Pipil Indian massacres of Cam’s Tolo days), along with much of the CIA’s old secret air network from Southeast Asia, Cam Townsend continued to remain serene with the Lord. Not even his own deteriorating health seemed to affect him.
In August 1981, a month after observing his eighty-fifth birthday and the same month he had celebrated the Golden Jubilee of his translation of the Cakchiquel New Testament, Cam’s physician told him he had borderline leukemia.
He took the news in stride. In October, he flew to Lima. Five years had passed since SIL had weathered the final storm of the 1968 “Revolution” of young colonels led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado. Among the senior officers who had stood by SIL was Admiral Luis Vargas Caballero, the former navy minister who had been fired by Velasco in 1974. Vargas’s successor challenged the CIA’s influence, expelled a CIA officer, and was rewarded with terrorist attacks that were later confirmed as having come from Peru’s Naval Intelligence Service. All this came to a head in 1976 when Vargas and the other remaining Velasco ministers were purged in a coup directed by older admirals and generals, the same coup that saved SIL from expulsion. To meet the demands of American banks and the Washington-based International Monetary Fund, the new military regime cut government programs for peasants, workers, and Amazonian Indians; changed laws to remove obstacles to pillaging the Amazon; and curtailed Indian land rights. In 1979, while firing Indian bilingual teachers who joined the national teachers’ strike, the minister of education attended SIL’s ceremony announcing the completion of five New Testaments. This general’s presence was proof of whose side God was on.
That point may have been lost on the Indians who suffered most from the “economic reforms” of the post-Velasco years. The per capita protein intake in Peru had been halved since 1974, to less than 50 percent of the minimum standard set by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. A Catholic missionary testifying before a U.S. Senate committee in 1980 said that Peru’s infant mortality rate had climbed to over 80 percent, resulting in the deaths of at least 30,000 children who would not have died in 1974 under Velasco.34
But Cam was not in Peru to voice his concern. He was there because President Fernando Belaúnde, restored to office and still promising Peruvians escape from their international debts through the conquest of the Amazon, was giving him Peru’s Order of the Sun. It was the highest award Peru could bestow on a foreigner; not even Nelson Rockefeller had been so honored.
That same month, in the mountains of Cam’s beloved Cakchiquels, Guatemalan army columns arrived in full battle gear. General Benedicto Lucas had decided to move 5,000 troops into Chimaltenango, just west of Guatemala City, for a “final offensive” against Indian guerrillas. It was an offensive that, in fact, involved few confrontations with the guerrillas, but did achieve the systematic massacre of thousands of unarmed Indians, the Indian population having been targeted as the social base for the guerrillas. By 1986, a study by St. Anne’s Parish in Chimaltenango reported that 8,000 to 10,000 people had disappeared, most of them believed killed, leaving behind 3,000 orphans (1,000 of these children had lost both parents).35
By January 1982, the army’s offensive had pushed north into Quiché, home of the Ixil. The army’s elite shock troops, the kaibiles, struck by night and from the air, using U.S.-made helicopters and Special Forces advisers. On January 4, Guatemalan troops descended on the town of San Bartolo; gathered some 300 Indian men, women, and children; and began slaughtering them, community after community. Children’s throats were slit, men were crucified, and women were raped and cut open. The sheer horror was enough to send the countryside into a panic. But its impact on Sills commitment to silence was negligible.
Later that month, Cam attended Wycliffe’s board meeting. The reports were heartening. Chester Bitterman’s martyrdom had had an impact unlike anything seen since the Auca slayings. Wycliffe was now the largest independent mission in history, with more than 4,500 members working in 735 indigenous language groups. There were still thousands of language groups to be reached. Wycliffe had long ago quietly dropped the slogan, “Every tribe by ’85.”
In Guatemala,
however, there would be fewer Indians to reach. More than sixty massacres would take place in 1982. Villages targeted as “lost” to the Indian guerrillas were attacked without regard for the human rights of civilians. The army slaughters forced the dislocation of some 1 million out of the 4 million people who lived in the Mayan highlands, including 30,000 who fled across the border into the Lacondón jungle of Chiapas, Mexico, not far from SIL’s recently abandoned jungle training camp. For them, and for the many more thousands who wandered the mountains of Guatemala without food or shelter, there was no need for missionaries to predict an apocalypse. It had already come—in bullets, in napalm, in knives and clubs, in death from exposure.36
Far to the north, for reasons unrelated, Cam Townsend also came down with pneumonia. When physicians checked his blood, they found that the leukemia was devouring his immune system. His hemoglobin count was collapsing.
Unlike Nelson Rockefeller, Cam had no sudden bolt of the heart to eternity. He suffered for three more months, sometimes enduring four transfusions in a single day. He never complained, said a nurse. “Every time I came in he had a sweet smile.” Waiting for the Lord allowed him to remember the early years in Guatemala and the Golden Jubilee of the previous year and to see the line of triumphs that tied these two ends of his life together so neatly, as God’s Will.
In Guatemala, the Lord’s Will was being invoked by the country’s rulers against their own people. At 11 P.M. on February 15, while Cam slept in his hospital bed, the Guatemalan army appeared at the Ixil village of Santo Tomás Ixcán and began firing automatic weapons into its homes. Families who were not killed outright were dragged outside and shot. Their bodies were then carried into the village church. The killings continued for two more days. The church was set afire, and then the entire village.
To achieve this military victory, the army used linguistic differences, deploying Indian soldiers to areas where the tribal languages were alien to them. This strategy made it easier to dehumanize the enemy, which, as in Vietnam, quickly became the local population. Sometimes, however, the army needed to communicate with the Indians to carry out its “civic action” and relief projects in occupied territory. For this more specialized task, it turned to American missionaries, including SIL.37
In March 1982, the CIA-backed counterinsurgency officers seized Guatemala’s government. Romans 13:1 came back in the words of born-again General Ríos Montt, who declared himself “God’s choice.” That summer, Ríos Montt would order the army to transport SIL’s veteran translators, Ray and Helen Elliot, to Nebáj, a tropical mountain village in the Ixil Indian region of Quiché. The Elliots translated for four American dentists from Eureka, California’s, Gospel Outreach. Founded by James Degolyer, an ex-hippie who had roamed the drug-filled streets of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district for five years before being “saved” by Jesus,38 Gospel Outreach was Ríos Montt’s original evangelizer when the general’s political fortunes were at low tide. His 1974 presidential election had reportedly been stolen by fraud; having recently returned from a thinly veiled exile in an overseas embassy to duties without any specific assignment, Ríos Montt was a general without an army. But he did find Jesus in 1978 and a new constituency through Gospel Outreach’s American missionaries, who were dispensing private aid to victims of the disastrous 1976 earthquake. They helped found the general’s Christian Church of the Word and now provided scriptural verses to help the general rule; the church even provided two elders as official aides to the new president and coordinated evangelical relief efforts through its Foundation for the Support of Indian Peoples.
The irony of the foundation’s name was outranked only by the name of its fund-raising arm in the United States, which was endorsed by TV evangelist Pat Robertson: International Love Lift. Love was “the only solution” to the civil strife, Ríos Montt had explained to a New York Times reporter, amid animated praise for the $1 billion he said he was promised by Robertson’s organization (Robertson confirmed only his hope to give “comparable assistance” to the $350,000 he said his group raised for earthquake relief). Fundamentalist missionaries would soon help him build “model villages” for the peasants, based on “communitarianism,” a system of church-centered community ownership of property that vaguely would include private ownership of homes and land. International Love Lift was supposed to get it all off the ground, local church elders hoping to raise $20 million in the United States.39 (They ended up with only $1.5 million,40 despite the effort of Ríos Montt to take the advice of Reagan officials to improve his reputation abroad by emphasizing alleged abuses and killings by the Left.41)
According to American Fundamentalists who attended a special State Department briefing for them on the alleged communist threat to Guatemala, the Reagan administration hoped Love Lift’s proposed truck convoy of aid from Fundamentalist churches also “might be the vehicle that could get U.S. recognition for the Montt government.”42 During his first interview with the New York Times, Ríos Montt tried to evade questions on human rights. Atrocities had caused the Carter administration to suspend U.S. military aid in 1977 and were supposedly the cause of the Reagan administration’s hesitancy to recognize the coup, among whose participants was Sandoval Alarcón, the alleged godfather of the death squads who called his movement “the party of violence.”43 But the reporter persisted against Ríos Montt’s evasive tactics. What about reports of continued violations of human rights? “Yes,” the general finally conceded; then he added, “as in all parts of the world.” And what of local newspaper accounts of unarmed women and children being killed? “It is war,” he answered, “a permanent war.”44 A few months later, Ríos Montt would be even more candid with a group of politicians: “We declared a state of siege so we could kill legally.”45
Love was beginning to take on a strange look. Pat Robertson, who also attended another State Department briefing on Ríos Montt’s behalf with Reverend Jerry Falwell, was so inspired by the general’s counterinsurgency campaign that he had to share a quote from the Bible with fellow believers in the Word: “He who wields the sword does not wield it in vain.”46
In Cunén, a central market town in El Quiché province, the message of love was similar, if less poetic. An army officer explained the government’s “beans and bullets” program: “If you are with us, we’ll feed you; if not we’ll kill you.” A preacher in the Church of God intoned the Wycliffe version of Romans 13:1 to several hundred Indians summoned to a progovernment rally at the town’s soccer field: “He who resists the authorities is resisting the will of God.”47
About a dozen miles northwest, at Nebáj, Gospel Outreach’s American dentists were extracting teeth in the midst of the army’s “search and destroy” campaign against the predominantly Indian Guerrilla Army of the Poor. “The President of Guatemala’s people from the Iglesia del Verbo [the Church of the Word], and especially a missionary team of the Church, have been looking for a way in which help for the Ixil Area can be used as a base for doing more evangelical work there,” Wycliffe’s Ray Elliot wrote to supporters back home.
… By 6 P.M., the boys had already pulled out 100 teeth. By Thursday, they had increased that number to 900.… As a workplace we chose an open corridor in front of the municipal entryroom. There was an empty room at the end of the [corridor to] the municipal offices. Afterward, we discovered that this was a morgue.
Bodies of Indians, sometimes piled on top of each other, were kept there.…
Tuesday morning, we saw and heard an exchange of fire between a helicopter and men on the ground. This is the first time we had seen the war live and it impressed me.… Helen and the dentists saw the bodies arrive, and how they were thrown from the truck and dragged to the morgue. That afternoon they were carried again to a pick-up and then thrown along the roadside, which will serve as a cemetery in cases like this. Afterwards, someone threw water in the room and with a broom swept out the blood. We were glad to have made the decision to work in the corridor and not in that room.48
&nb
sp; Between 3,000 and 4,000 persons were killed in the Nebáj municipality; another 20,000 fled, leaving half the area’s towns and villages abandoned. Several thousand fled to the mountains, another 5,000 were packed into a single plantation designed to normally employ 350 workers.49 Traditional life had been shattered and replaced by the military regime’s AID-advised development plans, which were dominated by Guatemala City’s speculators and corporate agendas.
Within three months of Ríos Montt’s self-declaration as “God’s choice,” in June 1982, Amnesty International would issue a special report, Massive Extrajudicial Executions in Rural Areas Under the Government of General Efraín Ríos Montt. Its “partial listing of massacres,” totaling more than sixty, included one village where survivors witnessed soldiers beheading men, battering children’s heads against rocks, and raping women. More than 500 Indian people were killed in three villages in the departments of Quiché and Huehuetenango on March 23. In addition, 100 people were slaughtered in three villages in Alta Verapaz between March 24 and March 27; 250 people, in three villages in Chimaltenango the first two weeks of April; 100, in the village of Nangal alone in Quiché on April 5; 193, in Rio Negro on April 15; 54, in Macalbaj on April 18; and 100, in Josefinos on April 20.50
Machine guns, grenades, and machetes were used with sadistic abandon. Most of the victims were women and children.
