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At the church of Chajul the Guatemalan government wanted
to make a point. The soldiers had went to the baroque altar
with it's mansized figurines. Two of them they dressed in
army fatigues. Tere they stand in olive green, a reminder
that not only God is watching over the faithful, but the army
as well. Here in the highlands of Western Guatemala the army claims a god-like status. To this day they still root out the indigenous culture, like midieval missionaries. Officially the civil war agaist the guerrilla and the indigenous population went on for over 40 years now. The indigenous leaders talk about "500 years of genocide". The destruction of indigenous culture started with Columbus' arrival. It never ended. The war against the decendents of the Maya indios is fought on several levels. The military strategy is based on a scorched earth tactic, equal to the US approach in Vietnam. Villages, fields and live stock are destroyed to supposedly cut the civilian base of the guerrilla. The cultural war is waged against every aspect of indigenous life. Mayan indios, traditionally living in villages scattered over large pieces of land, are resettled in model villages. Here they have to live together in European town structures. A life almost opposed to their own. Human rights activists compared these model villages more than once to concentration camps. A new trend is to resettle them around factories and maquiladoras, where they constitute the low wage base for assembling and simple manufacturing work, mostly for companies from overseas. The most brutal part of the conflict is the clash of religious beliefs. Fundamentalist evangelism is the governemnt's creed. The indigenous' belief in Nahual, the sacred animal, is considered superstition. The Catholic churches¹ liberation theology is prosecuted as subversive. The army monitors everything. Every move of the population is watched and controlled. All over the country one encounters the infamous civil patrols. The army organized these paramiltary vigilante groups, creating a vast network of informers and enforcers. It was in the town of San Miguel in Quiché, where we encountered them first. A pickup truck filled with rifle wielding peasants sped by. We followed. Another patrol passed us. They all stopped at one street corner. Farmers flocked around the military officer in civilian clothing who checked names on a list. Another officer gave out old rifles from World War II, with numbers painted on their butts. "What are you fighting for?", I asked. "We fight for the people, for peace and for God." said a farmer dressed in rubber boots and an old windbreaker. Every member of the patrol seemed to be evangelical Christian, reciting pseudo- biblical rethoric. "We fight the guerrillas who want to take away our faith", another one said. The most basic form of American evangelical demagoguery. Peasants had told me how the Civil Patrols would use these guns to impose their personal will over the villagers. How the Patrulleros became small time dictators and everybody else a suspect - Catholics and believers of traditional religions in particular. The Patrulleros would kill anybody who stood up against them. There is a larger strategy behind this control, the religious dogmatism and the underlying religious struggle in the Guatemalan Civil War. The fight for the soul of the people of Guatemala began with the CIA backed military coup of 1954. It was ever since then that the governmen claimed to act in the name of God. A similar tactic has been used by numerous US supported military dictators throughout Latin America. General Pinochet had justified his 1973 coup in Chile with statements by clerics of the Methodist Pentecostal Church. "The uprising of the Armed Forces was a response from God to the prayers of all believers who saw Marxism as the most powerful expression of evil and darkness." Somoza also used evangelical preachings to legitimize persecution of the godless Communists, as did the dictators of El Salvador. But nowhere had the evangelical crusade been so successful and turned so brutal as in Guatmala of the 1980s. Here the evangelical crusaders didn't just fight against the threat of social secularism, but they still claimed to conquer and civilize the savage indio. It was in March of 1982 when General Efrain Rios Montt took power. While he only held the office of president until the August of 1983, his crusade against the guerillas took on genocidal proportions. Even thorughout this period he remained a preacher of the Iglésia Evangelica El Verbo, the Guatemalan mission of the evangelical network Gospel Outreach in California. His education as a preacher made him talk in parables. "The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea", he said as he described his counterinsurgency tactics. "If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea." What sounded like pious words from a holy man was in fact the rational for one of the most brutal civil wars in the history of Latin America. The Guatemalan army destroyed 400 villages, killed tens of thousands of civilians, comitted countless crimes of torture and rape. The underlying racism towards the indigenous 85 percent of the population had a strange twist to it. Since almost no Guatemalan was of pure white or Latino blood, the ruling class defined itself by religion. Consequently it became possible for indigenous people to be accepted into dominant society by shunning their traditions, converting to evangelical beliefs and wearing western clothes. I met one of these converts on my first trip. Some American friends and I had arrived in the town of Antigua. That same night a dance was held and our hosts wanted to go. Everybody was excited, except cousin Miguel, a Quiché indian from the West. He was considered an outcast from his indio family. Wearing a starch white shirt, garbadine pants and loafers he looked like a minor executive of an US corporation. "I am not supposed to go to a dance";, he said. "My beliefs forbid me to indulge." He had converted to evangelism five years before, when a minister had baptised him in a mass ceremony at Lake Atitlan. Now he wanted to "make it", study law and move to the capital. Hard work, his ministers told him, would be the only way. But he went anyway, only to sit in a corner, sipping soda, while we drank Gallo beer and danced to the Merengue band all night long. The next day he felt very guilty and studied extra hard. It is the essence of the evangelical belief to blame all evils in this world on laziness and sin. In North America this stems back to the Calvinist work ethics of the Founding Fathers. In Latin America it has become a vicious tool to euphemize poverty and injustice. But as if the people were relieved to deny the horrific realities of their country, Guatemalans embrace evangelical theology more than any other people. Today there are over two million evangelical Christians in Guatemala, a whole 35 percent of the population. 10,500 churches are spread throughout the country. The Church of God alone has been planting a new church every five days for the past fifteen years. When former US presidential candidate and TV evangelist Pat Robertson broadcast in Guatemala, 60 percent of all TV owning households watched, surpassing even the record breaking Soccer World Cup. The big blitz might be over. After the end of the Cold War, the evangelists drive to fight the godless Communists and leftists Catholics has slowed down. Nonetheless, the Guatemalan 1994 elections turned tragic. An election boycott by the civil opposition and a climate of corruption and crime brought evangelical preacher Rios Montt back. This time he didn't need a military coup to gain power. His party won the majority in parliament. General Rios Montt didn't gain the dictatorial powers of president. He doesn';t even hold a powerful office. But through his party majority in congress he weilds the kind of legitimate power that will be accepted by all Western observers, no matter what his objectives are. In Chajul believers still come to the Catholic church. Undisturbed by the Centurions in army fatigues, they kneel down at the altar, murmuring their prayers. They light candles and incense as offerings to God, Jesus and Nahual, the sacred animal and keeper of the dead. Back in the capital General Rios Montt has raised the scepter of an evangelical reign again. So they pray that it will be God who guards the living and not Nahual, leading the dead to the other world. 
Story from "Dispatch from the Combat Zone", |
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