wfn.org | Guatemalan Church Leaders Face Fear, Paranoia

[PCUSA NEWS <pcusa.news@ecunet.org>]

19-August-1999 
99268 
 
    Guatemalan Church Leaders Face Fear, Paranoia 
 
    Ministers are pressured to toe the political and religious line 
 
    by Alexa Smith 
 
LOUISVILLE, Ky. - When church leaders in Guatemala are threatened, beaten, 
kidnaped or killed, the list of suspects is often long - and sometimes, 
sadly, includes the names of churchgoers. 
 
    In Guatemala, anything out of the ordinary becomes fodder for 
conspiracy theorists, and it often seems that everyone is a conspiracy 
theorist. Sometimes the rumors are wrong and sometimes they're right, 
making it hard to understand what's really happening. 
 
    "The church isn't exempt from the world," noted the Rev. Gadiel Gomez, 
a soft-spoken, 30ish minister who once pastored a church on the outskirts 
of Guatemala City, "and the problems of the world influence the church." 
Gomez, a former moderator of the National Evangelical Presbyterian Church 
of Guatemala (NEPCG), knows how it feels to be beaten, run out of town, and 
warned that if he ever comes back worse is in store for him, his wife and 
their two children. 
 
    Since his congregation mirrored the political and ideological 
differences that plummeted Guatemala into the deadliest and longest-running 
civil war in Central America, Gomez believes that at least one of his 
assailants may have been closely related to his congregation. 
 
    Thirty-six years of civic violence has resulted in the deaths of more 
than 200,000 Guatemalans, most of them indigenous people murdered by 
military forces under the control of a series of right-wing dictators who 
routinely used torture and death squads to subdue them. 
 
    "There is so much violence," Gomez said recently during a telephone 
interview with the Presbyterian News Service. "People don't have recourse 
to resources to argue with reason or thought, and so they fall into 
violence." 
 
    Gomez, who now directs an extension program of the country's 
Presbyterian seminary, said pastors and other Christians who use biblical 
analogies to speak about the poverty and violence that are tearing 
Guatemala apart are just as much in harm's way as any politician. 
 
    Violence in Guatemala, however, is too often indiscriminate. 
 
    A trip through the capital, Guatemala City, is a study in economic 
disparity. Squatters live along the riverbanks in cardboard shanties; those 
who are less poor construct their lean-tos of discarded wood and aluminum. 
The affluent live in walled compounds surrounded by barbed wire and broken 
glass, and drive nice cars. The middle class is shrinking and everyone gets 
robbed. In the past six months, more than 6,000 robberies have been 
reported to the national police, and 240 people were murdered. Guatemalans 
read the statistics and mutter, "Those are just the ones that were 
reported." 
 
    "The randomness of the violence is real," said Dennis Smith, a longtime 
Presbyterian mission worker in Guatemala City who has grown accustomed to 
hearing nighttime gunfire and emergency vehicle sirens, even in his 
middle-class enclave in the city. "That's characteristic of a lot of places 
in the world. Look at the gated suburbs in the United States. But here you 
have to deal with `other-ness' of a kind that (people in other places) can 
block out. Here, there's not that luxury. The violence is in your face. You 
can't avoid it." 
 
    After years of turmoil, some Guatemalans see political conspiracies 
everywhere. Others shrug, blaming former guerrillas and soldiers who now 
use their military skills, such as killing and kidnaping, in much more 
lucrative criminal endeavors. Still other Guatemalans look out for people 
who are holding a grudge and plotting revenge. 
 
    Last month, when five armed men broke into the home of the Rev. Javier 
Cardona in the capital, speculation ran rampant. The incident provoked a 
letter from the NECPCG asking for investigations by the national police. 
The United Nations and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) backed the request. 
 
    Guatemalans wondered whether it was just another robbery or a warning 
to Cardona, who became the denomination's moderator in May.  Cardona is the 
third moderator in five years to experience harassment.  Two of his 
predecessors suffered outright physical harm. 
 
    "Many things are programmed actions; many are just coincidences," said 
the Rev. Roberto Lopez, the NCPCG's executive director. "Many are common 
acts of delinquency, but when common delinquency is rampant, more 
calculated elements take advantage," he continued, noting that Guatemala's 
political history is filled with the deaths of opponents of the government 
that have been falsely attributed to robberies, carjackings and accidents. 
 
    "Is this systematic intimidation of moderators? It might be yes, maybe 
no. But in five years, this is what we've seen." 
 
    Lopez also factors in "enemies in the church," noting that the 
denomination has suffered deep internal fissures and wrenching disputes. 
But he points out that Cardona does not suspect members of his 
congregation. (Cardona was unable to be reached for comment at press time.) 
 
    Though he suspects dissident church members in his own case, Gomez said 
he doubts that there's a larger conspiracy to harm Presbyterian moderators. 
But even if there were, he said, getting the justice system to do something 
about it would be a daunting challenge. His own case has been mired for 
several years in a court docket that seems permanently backlogged. 
 
    One of the former moderators, the Rev. Samuel Merida, was kidnaped four 
years ago and held for ransom by still-unknown assailants. Many suspect 
that the crime was the work of ideologically conservative Presbyterians who 
split off from the church during the war years. Others said it was a family 
squabble gone violently haywire.  It is also possible that Merida's highly 
visible social services for the poor got him into trouble with those who 
politically oppose such ministries. Merida was returned alive, but rattled. 
For about a year after the incident, he was so fearful that he had to have 
U.S. Presbyterian companions with him nearly 24 hours a day. 
 
    Such is the complexity surrounding the violence in Guatemala. 
 
    Four years ago, Presbyterian human rights worker Pascal Serech was shot 
and kiled in Chimaltenango. But it seems the case had more to do with his 
marital woes than with his political ones. During the trial, it came out 
that Serech's wife had had an affair with the local paramilitary commander 
- which made it easier for her to have her husband eliminated. 
 
     In a recent article in "The New Yorker," Guatemalan journalist 
Francisco Goldman wrote about the April 1998 murder of Catholic Bishop Juan 
Gerardi, which is almost universally believed to be politically motivated. 
Only a few days before his death, Gerardi's office had released a 
four-volume study called "Guatemala: Never Again," charging that the 
military, not the guerrillas, did more than 90 percent of the war's 
horrific killing. 
 
    But Goldman's article exposes a seamy side of the church that emerged 
in the investigation of the bishop's death: the alleged sexual practices of 
some clergy, rumors about trafficking in stolen icons, and gun-running. 
There is widespread suspicion that thugs couldn't have smashed Gerardi's 
head with a concrete block and escaped without some help from inside his 
parish house, coerced or not. 
 
    "Everyone is trying to survive," said Judith Castaneda of the Central 
America Evangelical Center for Pastoral Studies, an ecumenical Protestant 
organization. "Not just in their personal lives, but at the organizational 
level too." 
 
    Most affected have been the Presbyterian and Roman Catholic churches in 
Guatemala, because those are the churches that have been most critical of 
the country's conservative governments and thus have had to face pressures 
- ranging from verbal abuse to murder - not felt by others. Ideological 
tensions can be internal or can be foisted on the church from outside by 
elements in the society who exploit institutional weaknesses. 
 
    "There's been a lot of violence done in the name of God," said Gomez, 
noting that the worst of the wartime slaughter came during the terms of two 
presidents who claimed to be devoutly religious - one evangelical, one 
Catholic. 
 
    The dominant theology in Guatemala - whether evangelical Protestant or 
tradtional Catholic - is much more concerned about the soul and its fate in 
the next world than the body and its fate in this one. Gomez said that 
theological outlook was brought to Guatemala by northern missionaries. 
"They told us, `think only of heaven,'" he said. 
 
    "But here in Guatemala we need to think of other things as well," Gomez 
added, noting how violence permeates even the church. "They taught us very 
well to love God, but not very well to love our neighbor. That's why you 
see a country where the gospel is separated from the realities of the 
country. ... There is so much violence." 
 
    Smith said he doesn't think there was or is a conspiracy to harm 
Presbyterian moderators. He pointed out that a climate of generalized 
violence - random or otherwise -- breeds a kind of psychosis that imagines 
conspiracies everywhere. That attitude is abetted by the church, he said, 
because there are no pastoral or prophetic strategies to address such 
generalized violence. 
 
    It does seem clear, he said, that a conspiracy was involved in the 
killing of Manuel Saquic, a Presbyterian minister and human rights worker 
who refused to be silent about the murder of Serech. It is generally 
accepted in Guatemala that a paramilitary commander named Victor Roman - 
who hasn't been seen since he was charged with the crime - abducted Saquic, 
tortured and killed him and dumped his body in a cornfield. 
 
    Another Presbyterian minister, Lucio Martinez, was harassed literally 
to death when he tried to keep the Saquic case in the public eye and 
repeatedly demanded the arrest of Roman.  After death threats to Martinez, 
threats against his daughters and more than one year of accompaniment by 
U.S. Presbyterians, he died of a stroke that, most assume, was brought 
about by the stress. 
 
    Such strategic terrorism hasn't stopped. Rumor has it in Guatemala that 
concrete blocks like the one used to kill Gerardi have been anonymously 
delivered to other vocal human rights activists - a morbidly dramatic 
message that most relate to the conflict between the army and the church. 
 
    But the other kind of violence is relentless and it can strike anyone 
at anytime. "Drug dealers. Crime. Robbery. The whole kidnaping thing ... 
you can find all kinds of reasons and groups.  Everyone is afraid of 
violence in general," said Castaneda.  "It is the result of years of war. 
 
    "We've not known any other thing but violence."  

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