June 25, 2006 | E-mail: director@alcnoticias.org - Director: Fernando Oshige
Contenido
ARGENTINA: Bishop Etchegoyen affirms that World Cup hides painful reality of a good part of the planet [more] PERU: UPP legislator- M elect and Methodist leader said she will not disappoint her supporters [more] MEXICO: What is behind the political awakening of the Evangelicals? [more] CHILE: Bishop Helmut Frenz opposed to law that protects the names of human rights violators for 50 years [more] NICARAGUA: Cuban anti-disaster system is ?impressive? said Nicaraguan Evangelical delegate [more]
ARGENTINA
Bishop Etchegoyen affirms that World Cup hides painful reality of a good part of the planet
BUENOS AIRES, June 23 (ALC). The passion sparked by international soccer matches around the world hides the painful reality of much of the planet, said Bishop Aldo M. Etchegoyen, secretary general of the Council of Evangelical Methodist Churches of Latin America and the Caribbean (CIEMAL).
This game of stars should not stop humanity from ?seeing the other side of the coin, that of a world that needs changes, justice, dignity and love,? said the bishop.
?The world cup is a snapshot of the world situation, extreme wealth, extreme poverty, extreme waste and extreme sacrifice, a balance that shows us our incapacity to create dignified, equal living conditions for all individuals and communities,? said the Methodist leader.
Etchegoyen affirmed that the world is living through an unprecedented phenomenon of globalization as countries around the world avidly follow the World Cup games in Germany. Meanwhile, far from Germany millions of Asian workers have toiled to make the shoes, balls, shirts and other accessories for this event.
Without seeking to spoil the party, the Methodist Bishop referred to the ?cheap (cost) of this labor, barely a few cents per hour under difficult conditions, all to give life and movement to so much wealth tied up in this show that we are all watching.?
One doesn?t have to carry out complicated math equations to realize that the contracts and prizes of so many stars in the World Cup are equal to hours and hours of thousands of people, the gears in the huge production machinery, without taking into consideration the major earnings of the factories and companies that manage the world of soccer, he said.
The contrast can be seen in the million dollar contracts surrounding the World Cup, some $450 million for general expenses, $150 million for prizes, without considering advertising, transport and commerce.
Moreover the existence of luxurious ?houses of pleasure? in Germany to attend so many people is also painful. ?A sad spectacle of the use of thousands of women as things that are used and then discarded,? he said. [top]
PERU
UPP legislator- M elect and Methodist leader said she will not disappoint her supporters
LIMA, Jun 23 (ALC). Congress woman elect for Union for Peru (UPP) and Methodist lay leader Maria Sumire de Conde said she will not disappoint her voters and announced that she will dedicate the 15,000 soles (US$4,700) she will receive for installation expenses in Congress to support the work of peasant farmer communities in Cuzco.
The new congress representatives were elected on April 9 and will take office on July 28 for a five year term.
?I was proposed as a candidate for the Women?s Peasant Farmer Federation of Cuzco and I have reached Congress with the support of grassroots communities from the high provinces (Espinar, Canas and Canchas) in my department and I will not let those who supported me down,? she said, after indicating that she will seek to set up offices to facilitate communication between Congress and the communities).
Sumire is an experienced lawyer from Cuzco, who has provided legal advice for the Women?s Peasant Farmer Federation of Cuzco in its struggle for land and women?s organizations. She is a member of the Evangelical Methodist Church, a leader of the Association of Andean Women (AMA) and was one of the 1,000 women candidates for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.
She said that she will seek to legislate in favor of the development of poor communities from the southern Andes and the decentralization process in the country. Moreover, she will seek to monitor regional governments and to battle against corruption. [top]
MEXICO
What is behind the political awakening of the Evangelicals?
MEXICO CITY Jun. 22 (ALC). What has happened to Latin American Evangelicals that a decade ago they considered anything extra religious to be mundane and today they jostle to intervene in politics? According to Mennonite sociologist and a columnist with the influential daily La Jornada, Carlos Martinez Garcia, this political awakening responds to their growth and their considerable numeric weight in society.
But there are other reasons. According to Martinez, what is appearing ?are personal ambitions that seek partisan spaces with more possibilities to obtain prestige and/or material benefits.? He recalled that in several cases, politicians have been willing to negotiate support, erroneously believing that Protestant leaders have the power to influence the vote of the members of their Churches.
?Now we see a political activism in the ranks of Protestantism that, in some cases, reaches the same zeal and vitality that they show in their Evangelical campaigns,? said Martinez, a researcher with the Center for Protestantism Studies of Mexico.
He added that in the Mexican case, the three main presidential candidates, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Felipe Calderón and Roberto Madrazo have had to build bridges to the Evangelical community.
?The politicians know that in certain zones of the country, the south and southeast, the Evangelical Churches represent between 15 and 20 percent of the population,? notes the author who warned that the current position of the Evangelicals is not necessarily better than their prior political ingenuity.
He affirmed that different Evangelical leaders have not resisted the temptation to ?baptize? their respective candidate, trying to justify with religious language and even with so-called prophesies, their particular commitment to a specific presidential candidate. Martinez said this attitude is a type of ?pseudo Biblical blackmail? and said that similar to the political-electoral class ?in the interior of Evangelical leaderships, there is jostling for position and all types of jumps,? such as the case of Evangelical leaders who have change their party allegiance.
?It is unlike other countries on our continent, where the law permits confessional political parties, and therefore the Evangelicals have tried to channel their population weight at the polls, in Mexico the preferences are dispersed among several existing options,? he said.
The researcher in religious themes said that there are Evangelical leaders who dare to offer to the Evangelical vote to their political favorite. ?This offer is mere imaginative voluntarism, and a real desire for things to be the way they would like them to be, but they lack a solid, and quantifiable basis,? he said.
Another relevant data in the analysis of the author is that the majority and poorest groups within Protestantism are made up of Pentecostal Churches and the surveys indicated that the poor continue to favor leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. [top]
CHILE
Bishop Helmut Frenz opposed to law that protects the names of human rights violators for 50 years
SANTIAGO, Jun. 22 (ALC). Lutheran Pastor Helmut Frenz rejected the direction chosen by the Valech Report (National Commission on Political Prison and Torture) after the obligation to keep the names of human rights violators a secret for 50 years, under the Reparations Law.
?This temporary silence goes against transparency, truth and reconciliation, and it will not be possible to judge in the courts those responsible for hundreds of torture victims,? he told La Nacion.
On June 15 the Supreme Court upheld a decision to maintain in reserve the names of the presumed human rights violators who are in the report from the Political Prison and Torture Commission that Msgr. Sergio Valech presided.
The Chilean Reparations and Other Benefits law was passed in December 2004 by the former Ricardo Lagos government. Article 15 states that the Ministry of Interior will keep the antecedents, documents and testimony of the victims contained in the Valech report in its custody for a period of 50 years.
Frenz, who was bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Chile and a renowned human rights defendant during the dictatorship presented his book ?My Chilean life? where he narrated his experience between 1965 and 1975.
The 73-year-old pastor helped hundreds of people obtain political asylum during the military dictatorship and was a central piece in the process impelled in Spain against Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
His testimony was a central piece in the process that Spanish lawyer Joan Garces carried out against Pinochet. The pastor had participated, as a representative of the Pro Peace Committee, in a meeting with the former dictator, where he had admitted and fully justified the existence of torture in Chile.
He arrived in Concepción in 1965 and after the military coup he worked with other Churches to protect people whose rights had been violated. The dictatorship impeded his return to the country in 1975 but the Bishop continued to defend persecuted Chileans, for which has received awards in Germany and Chile.
?I am not sure if my book will help open or close wounds, this only God knows, but I tell how the Church became involved in the defense of human rights and the consequences this had,? said Frenz.
He said that an important part of his mission is to serve those who were and are the victims of violations. ?I am a theologian and not a historian and so I wrote a great deal from the heart and I hope this helps,? he said. [top]
NICARAGUA
Cuban anti-disaster system is ?impressive? said Nicaraguan Evangelical delegate
By Trinidad Vásquez
MANAGUA, Jun. 21 (ALC). Unlike other countries in the region, Cuba has a culture of disaster prevention that includes the entire population, according to oen of the Nicaraguan delegates who participated in the Seventh International Congress on Disasters carried out in Havana, Cuba from June 13 -16.
Jose Angel Rodríguez, representative of the Evangelical Pro Denominational Alliance Council of Churches (CEPAD) told ALC that Cuban disaster prevention is ?impressive? because it extends to all 11 million inhabitants.
Knowing about risks in Cuba is like knowing about food, an essential element for life, a reason that explains the culture of risk management in the country, in the face of a threat of hurricanes, tropical storms or droughts, said Rodríguez.
The meeting was attended by 400 delegates from Central America and the Caribbean, including the Nicaraguan ecumenical delegation that included Rodríguez and Carlos Cardenas for CEPAD, Carlos Hernandez of the Lutheran Church; Serigo Rivas of the Inter-Church Center for Social Theological Studies (CIETTS) and other members of the Joint Church Action (ACT).
?The first lesson we obtained from this event is that disasters are latent in any country in America,? said Carlos Cardenas. Therefore it is fundamental to do everything possible to construct a disaster prevention culture.
He said that in order to implement an anti-disaster system, the State?s participation in coordination with institutions from civil society is key and he said that in a dialogue with the Cuban Council of Churches it was agreed than an ACT delegation will be invited to two events on disasters to be held in Guatemala and Honduras.
The capacity to mobilize the anti disaster system to protect the population from the Alberto tropical storm, present in Cuban when the congress was to be inaugurated, was impressive. [top]
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