wfn.org | CWS/NCCCUSA Supports Peace in Guatemala

[CAROL_FOUKE.parti@ecunet.org]

National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.
Contact: Wendy McDowell, NCC, 212-870-2227

NCC12/20/96                   FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CWS HELPS SECURE A SEASON OF PEACE IN GUATEMALA

 NEW YORK, December 20 ---- A Christmas story is
unfolding in Guatemala.  It tells of people who
survived more than three decades of a brutal but
often hidden civil war and it tells of churches in
the United States who never forgot them.  Together,
they worked for peace.

 As Christmas Day approaches, 27,000 children in
areas of Guatemala that suffered the most violence
are receiving toys, school kits, layettes, blankets
and other gifts lovingly assembled by congregations
throughout the U.S.  Gifts for 50,000 more children
and their families will be sent early in the new
year.

 "Congregations who put these gifts together are
engaging in active prayer," said the Rev. Dr. Rodney
I. Page, who directs Church World Service, the
National Council of Churches ministry through which
33 U.S. denominations carry out international
development projects, disaster relief and refugee
assistance.  "The hands that gathered and packed
these gifts have also been folded in prayer for
peace and justice in Guatemala and in other troubled
places," he said.

 The Christmas presents for Guatemalan children
are a tangible sign of the concern that led Church
World Service to support efforts toward the greatest
gift the people of Guatemala could receive--the
peace accord between government and guerrilla forces
that is set to be signed December 29 in Mexico City.
Over the past four years, CWS has co-hosted a series
of four major ecumenical meetings that eventually
came to involve representatives of the Guatemalan
government and its armed forces, the Guatemalan
National Revolutionary Unity (Spanish acronym: URNG)
and the country's civil sector.

 CWS has helped organize the meetings as part of
a group of four ecumenical organizations active in
Guatemala.  In addition to CWS, the organizations
are the Latin America Council of Churches (CLAI),
the World Council of Churches and Lutheran World
Federation.

 "As a church group, our role was to facilitate
the official negotiations, not to supplant them,"
says the Rev. Oscar Bolioli, the NCC’s director for
Latin America and the Caribbean, who returned
December 18 from a five-day visit to Guatemala.  "We
were able to bring the two sides together because we
were flexible.  We came without official
'instructions' and our agendas were intentionally
vague.  The agendas were really just an excuse to
create the atmosphere in which people who were
deeply divided by ideology could come to know each
other. That created real progress in the official
meetings."

 "It was at a meeting that we organized in
Washington, D.C. in the fall of 1993 that official
representatives of the combatants and the civil
sector first met face to face," Bolioli recalls.
“And it was at our meeting in September 1995 in San
Jose, Costa Rica, that the two sides publicly
embraced and said, "There is no way that we can back
away from the peace process; it must move forward.'"

 At critical times in the peace process, CWS
personnel followed negotiations on a daily basis and
were able to offer pastoral support to several key
players as they moved toward peace.

 While in Guatemala, Bolioli celebrated 20 years
of CWS work with Guatemalan partners, including the
Guatemalan Council of Churches (Spanish acronym:
CIDEG) and CONAVIGUA, an organization of 50,000
widows whose husbands were among the more than
100,000 people killed during the civil war.  The
widows are mostly from the Maya and other Indian
groups, as are approximately 80 percent of
Guatemala's population.

 Close links with the people, developed over the
past two decades, have placed CWS in a position to
push for greater indigenous participation in the
peace process.  Recently, for example, CWS arranged
for 400 Indian leaders from around the nation to
meet with the chief UN negotiator in the peace
process.  "He was visibly moved as for the first
time he had the chance to hear from the people for
whom he was negotiating," Bolioli reports.

 The participation of Indian organizations,
church groups, trade unions, the country's large
university at San Marcos and other groups in the
civil sector is a key to peace, according to
Bolioli.  He says, "For years they have been caught
between two groups of combatants and were themselves
fragmented.  We helped them meet each other and
supported the formation of a Civil Society Assembly.
We helped give them access to the international
community, which found that they had very
intelligent things to say.  They bring common sense
to what has been a bitter ideological debate--a
third opinion that helps to reach solutions."

 Bolioli says the anniversary celebration
afforded an opportunity to look ahead "to see how we
might accompany the people most at risk of revenge
killings."  He took up this question with government
leaders and personnel at the U.S. Embassy, as well
as with civil sector leaders.

 Emotions are high and people with many
different motives may take advantage in this time of
transition, Bolioli explained.  Demobilized
guerrilla forces will go to several temporary camps,
he said, removing them from the forest strongholds
from which they protected rural communities.  "There
is serious concern that the paramilitary groups that
carried out most of the killings of past years will
be reorganized under private leadership and wreak
revenge on these most vulnerable communities," he
said.  "People who were forced into positions as
government-paid informants are also at risk, as are
those guerrilla sympathizers who held positions of
responsibility in the government and who now face
former colleagues who feel betrayed."

 "We may be able to help by sending North
American volunteers as observers in the areas that
are the most vulnerable," Bolioli says.  "The
presence of these 'strangers' says that the churches
continue to watch and to care.  It can be a
deterrent to violence and it gives the people a
sense of security.  They know they are not alone."

 As peace is secured, there is much work to be
done.  CWS will focus on the reintegration of
members of the URNG to civilian life, Bolioli says.
He notes that the guerrillas came from rural areas,
but that after 15 to 20 years of soldiering they no
longer have the skills or the inclination to farm
the land.  While retraining may be provided as part
of the demobilization, opportunities to reenter the
work force are limited.  Churches can help with
small loans that enable the newly trained carpenter
buy tools or that help the new entrepreneur open a
fruit stand or other small business.

 CWS will work in these and other ways to solve
social and economic problems that were at the root
of decades of conflict.  "But life will not return
to normal until the people are literally able to
bury the dead--the bodies of the disappeared,"
Bolioli says.  "Some are saying, 'Let the past be
the past,' but others say, 'Reconciliation? Yes, but
after we know where is the body of my husband, where
is my son?'"  CWS is already in touch with
communities in the remote Nebaj area who say they
know where mass graves are located and who intend to
exhume the bodies.  "The churches must support the
people in their right to know where their relatives
are and to bury them properly," Bolioli comments.

 By the end of the year, CWS expects to launch a
substantial appeal for Guatemala.  Funds will
support efforts to accompany the peace process,
including teams of volunteers, material goods,
development programs and efforts to reintegrate
soldiers into normal life.

 Together with Guatemalan partners and the
backing of U.S. churches, CWS will help in all these
and other ways to secure the peace-- a peace that is
begun in this Christmas season and which may lead to
the rebirth of a people and a country.

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