Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010

Special Reports

Cutting reeds on the shore of Lake Atitlan
July 23rd, 2008
By Rick DelVecchio

San Lucas Tolimán, Guatemala -- This is a country where it is considered OK to kill a bishop and intimidate, or eliminate, anyone who stands up for human rights. Working for justice in Guatemala, how do you handle that?

I asked that question of Father Greg Schaffer, a former Minnesotan and one of Guatemala’s best-known American missionary priests. I also got at the question in meetings with Bob Hentzen, who has a growing lay Catholic mission in Guatemala through his Christian Foundation for Children and Aging.

I touched on the subject indirectly in a quick exchange, through a translator, with a Mayan man, Andres Chigal, who survived his country’s 20-year civil war and now works with his brother, Torribio, on community development and justice projects in connection with Hentzen’s Guatemala group.

Finally, toward the end of my eight-day trip to Guatemala in May as a guest of a mission awareness trip sponsored by Hentzen’s organization, I came to know a young Maya, Luis Cocon, and learned how the new generation of Guatemalans responds to the question.

The answers were consistent, and surprisingly encouraging. What all four men said came down to this: the response to the historic indifference to human dignity that threatens to suffocate hope in Guatemala is a relational Christianity that links Guatemalans who have the will to change their situation with friends who give moral, financial and technical support to their efforts.

When relationships grow wide and deep, as they do in Father Schaffer and Hentzen’s long-standing missions to indigenous Guatemalans, the result is an alternate reality to the surrounding conditions of despair. A visitor may find that this reality can be not only hopeful but celebratory, not hedged by fear but bold in its modeling of the Gospel of Matthew in the midst of those who murder Gospel leaders and their followers.

The Gospel comes alive when a mother and father gather their three kids for a family portrait in their new concrete home built with missionary support, when a teenage boy recites a poem that moves his American sponsor to tears, when a single mom travels 10 hours with her son so they can meet the American woman who is sending him $30 a month, and when Father Schaffer walks the aisle shaking hands during the sign of the peace at Mass as toddlers jump out of the pews and run to his feet to be touched by him.

In a talk at his San Lucas Tolimàn mission church to Hentzen's mostly American group, Father Schaffer dramatized the impact of relational Christianity on the people of the rural community he has served for 45 years. They are people so beaten down by poverty that in their weaker moments they will say they are nothing but animals. And they mean it, he said. But relationship allows them see their humanity reflected back at them. Their self-esteem gains a foothold, and with it comes the will to do more with life than survive.

"The greatest gift you bring is your presence," said the 74-year-old missionary, a priest of the Diocese of New Ulm, Minn. "It's their society, they've got to change. All we can do is back them up, give them the infrastructure they need and they ask for so they can make those changes. But the first step is building self-esteem. Sure, it's a big step to bring about structural change. It's a huge step, but you can do it."

Father Schaffer made the work sound all but obligatory.

"You've been shown to be sons and daughters of God," he said. "Like it or not, you're it. That's the reality of life. We have to work with the creator in the continuation of creation. So that's a big job, yeah. I don't recall Jesus ever easing up when he asked the big jobs of anybody.

”Keep the vision out there. If you want to be great, you’ve got to serve.”

Father Schaffer said he handles the repression and poverty of Guatemala by accepting the reality of it and taking responsibility for changing the situation in small ways, such as opening schools, sponsoring American surgeons who perform major operations for local people twice a year, and giving young men job training so they do not lose hope in the face of shrinking opportunities for unskilled workers.

The work has helped to improve education levels and infant survival and made a start on the tougher problem of employment. In one recent project to attack gang affiliations, men were given a hammer and a rock and told to make gravel. Almost all graduated and moved on to the next level of their education.

”Just baby steps,” Father Schaffer said. “No big ones.”

Father Schaffer lived through the war years and admits suffering a year of intense anger over the death-squad murder in 1981 of his fellow American missionary, Father Stan Rother, the pastor in the Catholic parish in neighboring Santiago Atitlàn. He persevered as many other priests, Sisters and catechists were killed in the country, as Catholic parish leaders in Quiche had to flee for their lives and as the truth-telling Auxiliary Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera was bludgeoned to death in Guatemala City in 1998.

Although the war is over, the pattern continues. The bishop of San Marcos, Alvaro Ramazzini Imeri, a human- rights advocate, is under death threat in connection with a dispute between international mining interests and landless workers.

The underlying problem has been noted time and again by observers inside and outside the country: life in Guatemala is extremely cheap and perpetrators rarely pay a price, especially when the victim is a woman or a Maya.

Felicia Bartow of UC Hastings College of the Law’s Center for Gender and Refugee Studies blamed an “utter failure of investigatory processes....There’s just no impunity for those who commit violent crime.”

The culture of impunity mixes with the trauma of the civil war and the country’s role as a cocaine pipeline to create what Bartow called a “toxic brew.” The fallout includes a justice vacuum that spawns elevated rates of violence against human rights workers and women and a deadly vigilantism in the areas most bloodied during the war and most victimized by common murder today. Three suspected criminals were brutally lynched, burned and dragged in the western highlands during the May mission trip to the region. Local Catholic leaders and firefighters tried in vain to stop the incident, which was broadcast on radio.

In addition, poor nutrition, lack of kitchen smoke ventilation and untreated drinking water shorten life and spread lung disease and parasites. Having too many children contributes to uterine cancer. A 2005 University of Pennsylvania survey found that depression afflicts the people of Santiago, a town that lost more than 400 people during the war, where half the women cook their tortillas over open kitchen fires and where health and security concerns are widespread.

Guatemala has the worst schools on the continent. “It’s rough,” Hentzen said. “Brazil is the worst in terms of distribution of wealth. Guatemala is second. Guatemala is really hurting in terms of the quality of education. Now, we’re heading into real starvation, especially in the east, unless we get some real concrete interventions.”

Hentzen told his pilgrims from abroad that Guatemala is in a state of “economic hypothermia.”

 

”The economic hypothermia I’ve referred to is caused by basic human failures,” he said in an interview. “For some reason - I don’t like to hit it too hard with those perpetrators because they’re victims, too - in the countries where we are working, a certain small group has seized power of the economies. Therefore, a great majority of the people is trying to survive.”

Hentzen did not dwell on the causes, instead focusing on what his organization is doing to bring resources to Guatemala.

”We’re using the global scene to counteract this problem,” he said. “There are resources in certain parts of the world and there are many people of good will who are searching for more meaning in their lives. This enables them to take some kind of action.”

The civil war took the lives of 200,000 Maya. Many died in massacres, of which 16 were documented in Father Schaffer and Hentzen’s home department of Sololà and more than 400 combined in neighboring Chimaltenango and Quiche. Many men were killed, or disappeared, when they were pulled from their homes in army sweeps of suspected guerrillas.

Luis Cocon’s father, Julian, stayed one step ahead of the army by moving from house to house, sleeping in the woods and signing up to work on plantations where the owners would provide protection. He made his way to Los Angeles and now drives an ice cream truck.

”The army is really not a fear anymore,” Cocon, a translator for Hentzen’s CFCA, said in an e-mail. “Now the fear is common, everyday violence. How do we handle the lack of security and lack of civil and economic justice? I think movements like CFCA are a good start if we want to have any kind of justice. CFCA is at war, a peaceful war. CFCA fights by preaching the Word. It fights by giving the poor the opportunity to have an education, to have dignity and overall to have hope.

”The few in power will continue growing with their power. We need to educate our people and provide real opportunities for all of us. This is the only way we can pretend to change all the injustice in Guatemala.”

Under international and internal pressure, the government has begun to respond to the crisis. Last December it signed an agreement with the United Nations to create an independent International Commission Against Impunity. In April, Guatemala’s Congress passed a law cracking down on the targeting of women for rape and murder.

Andres Chigal is about to open a women’s center near San Lucas, in association with Hentzen’s group and Father Schaffer. He said it will be a place where women can learn job skills and the illiterate can learn to read. He said it is a response to the historic injustice toward women and the lack of funding for the country’s schools.

"Our country has hunger, our country has thirst," Chigal said. "But all this hunger and thirst is for social justice."