Post-war Guatemala Faces Many Challenges

Presbyterian mission worker Dennis Smith has lived and worked in Guatemala for almost three decades. He’s witnessed a lot of the country’s unpleasant recent history and he’s not optimistic about the future.

“One of the frightening things about the current process of remilitarization is that the murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi [the coordinator of the Archbishop’s Office on Human Rights] worked. It silenced that sector of the Catholic Church that felt the society needed to go through a healing catharsis. That voice is no longer there. That is very important,” said Smith during an interview at his home in a middle-class neighborhood of the sprawling capital city.

Gerardi’s murder occurred in 1998, just two days after the bishop delivered the final report of his office’s “Recovery of Historical Memory” project, which detailed many of the human rights abuses committed during the civil war. It held the military, military commissioners and civil self-defense patrol forces responsible for more than 90 percent of war-related human rights violations.

“It was important that [Gerardi’s] murderers were jailed, but the healing process stopped,” added Smith.

[Since this article was written, a Guatemalan appeals court has annulled the guilty verdict of the four men convicted of murdering Gerardi. A new trial will be held, but since the first trial one judge and two prosecutors have left the country due to death threats.]

Religion is not playing a unified role in post-civil war Guatemala. The Catholic Church — the traditional power in all of Latin America — came out less than enthusiastically on the side of the revolutionaries. Conservative Pentecostal churches — the fastest growing churches in the country — have ties to former government forces which have been cited for most of the atrocities against the nation’s Mayan population.

There are at least 300 different denominations in the country; but approximately 200 have less than 1,000 members each, said Smith. “It’s a religious supermarket.”

“Most of the church institutions that were involved during the war years have skeletons in the closet,” said Smith. “And there’s been no mechanism since the Recovery of Historical Memory Project, to get them out and deal with them and have some kind of catharsis.”

Gerardi might have played a key role in reconciliation. “Although his personality was very different, Juan Gerardi might have been Guatemala’s Bishop Tutu,” said Smith.

Instead of taking a proactive role in the recovery, the Catholic Church has taken a more conservative approach. Smith noted the appointment of Rodolfo Quezada Toruño as archbishop, instead of Julio Cabrera Ovalle.

“Quezada Toruño was deeply involved in the peace process and represents the Catholic Church as a powerful cultural institution, the depository of what is good and great in Guatemalan culture,” he said. In comparison, Cabrera, until recently the Bishop of El Quiché, “is deeply rooted in Mayan culture and has put great energy into healing the wounds of war as opposed to saying it never happened.

“To have a guy like Cabrera to be named archbishop now would have made the current project of national amnesia quite uncomfortable,” said Smith.

Within the past year Cabrera was transferred from El Quiché, a heavily Mayan region, to Jalapa, a region with a mostly ladino population.

Another witness to the situation was Antonio Otzoy, a Mayan Presbyterian minister. Formerly an administrator for the Fraternity of Mayan presbyteries, a caucus within the Presbyterian Church of Guatemala, he recently completed a two-year writing project to identify the spiritual concepts of Mayan and non-Mayan communities.

Otzoy said Guatemalans in the hardest-hit rural areas “have not lost hope or the ability to smile. They continue to act and to think based on the presupposition that there is a better future ahead, that they have possibilities, that life can continue to be enjoyed moment to moment.”

They have not closed themselves off from reality, nor have they fallen into indifference, “because they cannot be indifferent.” Low incomes and sick children make that impossible, he said

“The product of Mother Earth is being sold for such a low price that it does not sustain the investment [in farming]. The cost of maintaining the Earth is so high. There’s always a sense of being out of balance.”

Rodolfo Stavenhagen, a United Nations representative for Indian peoples, recently accused the Guatemalan authorities of continuing to discriminate against the country’s Mayan population, which represents approximately 60 percent of its people. The BBC quoted him as saying that racism is commonplace “in the attitudes of authorities, the common prejudices associated with [the Mayans’] traditional clothing and other aspects of their culture and in the hostility and verbal abuse.”

Stavenhagen added that the Mayans were still being denied equal access to the country’s judicial and financial systems. The latter means that they cannot borrow money to buy better land and are often discriminated against by government officials in charge of distributing farm aid.

He warned that because of the continuation of such conditions, “the possibility of social conflicts will increase.”

And there is also the issue of those thousands killed, missing and displaced by the war.

“Many of us had to abandon our places of origin,” said Otzoy. “That means we lost key elements of our own identity related to the Earth, to our place of origin, and certainly lost part of our dignity. In many cases we began to feel that we were being treated as objects without value.”

Many Mayan families still don’t know what happened to their loved ones; whether they were killed or moved elsewhere. Considering the magnitude of the genocide, it seems a miracle that the Mayans still exist. Smith attributed it to an internal, spiritual power. “It’s why the Mayans are still here,” he said. “According to any human logic they should have disappeared a long time ago.”

Otzoy said Mayans don’t ignore their problems: “All of this is brought to the celebration. It presupposes having the capacity to receive pardon and to forgive, to reconcile oneself with the environment in which we are living and with those persons who have done us wrong and continue to do us wrong. It’s not that we’re masochists, that we feel the need to suffer to be able to celebrate or to worship, but we know that suffering is part of life . . . . At the end, what Jesus is proposing is fullness of life overcoming that suffering.”

Mission in Guatemala

With many PC(USA) presbyteries and congregations taking a “hands-on” approach to mission these days, Smith and other mission personnel are often called upon to coordinate mission groups from the United States. It’s a task that’s grown harder since April when the PC(USA) discharged Julia Ann Moffett, who coordinated Central American and Caribbean mission work for headquarters in Louisville.

“That leaves Maria Arroyo, a very competent desk person, for all of South America, with an additional batch of countries to attend to,” said Smith. “Worldwide Ministries Division is looking at ways to reorganize the work, but we can’t expect Louisville to do much ‘big picture’ work and strategizing on mission priorities with so few people attending to so much of the world.”

The situation has been further complicated with the retirement of Anne Sayre, a PC(USA) mission specialist who served five years in Guatemala with the Central American Evangelical Center for Pastoral Studies (CEDEPCA). Because of the PC(USA)’s budget woes, no one has been assigned to succeed her.

“We are scrambling to pick up the work she did coordinating mission delegations and immersion experiences,” said Smith, who is also assigned to CEDEPCA, a small ecumenical training center based in Guatemala City.

Coordinating mission trips is a time-consuming process for mission personnel, but one they generally appreciate.

“Making good use of volunteer help takes a lot of energy and a lot of expertise, because a lot of them have little previous experience in another culture,” said Smith. If a work project is well supervised “and they have true, effective contacts with local, solidly rooted institutions, then you can make good use of volunteer help.”

Because most Americans come to Guatemala with a desire “to fix something,” the mission workers “have to adapt our program of immersion experiences. It won’t count if they can’t build a wall or paint a school,” said Smith. “There was a time when I thought that [the desire for a visible result] was a negative thing. But a lot of folks just need to do something. They need to feel they can do something concrete. To say, ‘I did that.’”

But in Guatemala, a weeklong mission trip can only scratch the surface of the people’s needs.

“One of the things that we have as gringos is an enormous amount of goodwill, but we also have a mentality that we can go in and fix things,” he said. “And there’s a lot of times we just can’t. We’re talking about structural problems rooted in 400-500 years of history — you just can’t go in and fix it.”

Besides, as mission veterans often point out, their work is a two-way street. Said Smith, “CEDEPCA has long viewed, as have other mission workers in Guatemala, that the purpose of work groups and mission study tours is to evangelize people from the North.” They bring together “people with radically different options before them as far as personal security, access to some kind of retirement and levels of personal power. Many lives are changed by coming down and building relationships with persons from different circumstances.”

“I’ve seen folks come to understand that they are helpless to change the situation of the person they’re encountering — and to deal with that powerlessness,” said Smith. “It might be the first time that a lot of folks from the North have had to deal with powerlessness. And that is something that is so profoundly part of Jesus and of the church before Constantine. Something the church in the South has to offer the church in the North is how to cultivate faith and hope in circumstances of powerlessness. And that is an enormous gift that we’re being offered,” said Smith.

“It’s tough stuff and it’s a very important part of the global mission of the church now. I think we need to provide our people with more theological tools and more social tools to understand their experiences.”

As an example of this type of program, Smith cited the work of Presbyterian minister Lynn Connette of Charlottesville, Va., who produces Bible studies “so there can be a partnership between churches and presbyteries that is far more consciously about folks from the North learning about being powerless.”

“As a denomination we need to encourage people to have those experiences, to give them the tools to more effectively interpret it and bring it back to their communities in the states,” said Smith.

Connette serves as support staff for Joining Hands Against Hunger, a pilot project of the Presbyterian Hunger Program, that nurtures relationships between participating congregations and overseas communities. The countries (and presbyteries) involved are India (Sacramento), Peru (Giddings-Lovejoy), Bolivia (San Francisco), South Africa (Western Reserve), Lesotho (Cascades), Cameroon (Chicago), Israel-Palestine (Greater Atlanta) and Egypt (Des Moines). The Presbyterian Hunger Program provides $3,000 a year to each presbytery to help fund its participation.

“Each country network is at a different place, and so are the pres-byteries,” Connette recently told the Presbyterian News Service. “They’re all beginning with a study of the biblical foundations for social justice. A new addition — and a real stretch for many of them — is a study of economics: why countries are facing these hunger-related social issues.”

“This ministry is really important,” hunger program director Gary Cook told PNS, “because we’re trying to help with assessments of needs, networking and education, so partners in other countries can set their own agendas, rather than simply chasing the money we’re dangling out there.”

The driving desire of more churches and presbyteries to be directly involved in mission has also brought them directly in contact with local officials who may be corrupt. Smith said the problem is “how to support programs that are deeply rooted in the local context and administered by local people, but that are fully transparent and accountable. For a long time churches in the North felt that expecting accountability was paternalism. But not expecting accountability ended up encouraging corruption.”

“I don’t think it is bad mission practice or paternalism to expect mission counterparts to embrace established practices of accountability.”

Also, groups which come down and want to do their own project — especially one which has not been proposed by the local church or a validated mission program — only increase the chances that genuine paternalism will occur or that local officials will “get on the gravy train.”