Spectator's Journal/Clerical Materialism in Mexico's Southeast
Martinez, Mary Ball
job might be done with his aged character, Artur Sammler. In a recent story by Elizabeth Hardwick, "On the Eve," the Bellovian world of New York's upper Broadway and its fashionable upper...
...At Chalchihuit~n on the night of March 23, 1983 ten members of the P~rezLopez family, aged 9 to 80, were dragged from their beds, chopped to pieces, and their dismembered bodies left to burn in their farm buildings...
...But in the long term, he believed, art operates more profoundly if less directly "on our moral sensibilities...
...In the Excelsior article Miss Michelena reports coming upon a fascinating bit of paper, a telephone bill of the priest in charge of the little parish church in Simojovel...
...Heading the PMT, the Mexican Workers Party, is the civil engineer Jos~ Alvarez Icaza, prominent in far-left Catholic circles since the days of the Second Vatican Council...
...Were there guerrillas in the region...
...Library Journal "The Camp of the Saints is the Brave New World of the 70's . . . . " Germaine Bree " . . . a cautionary tale . . . . " New York Times Book Review "Raspail expresses his anger in vivid, cutting scenes...
...Stoppard himself may or may not have succeeded in altering his audience's perceptions through the love story that lies at the heart of his play...
...The outlawed Guatemalan Left has attempted to terrorize them into becoming Marxists and the 35 priests of San Crist6bal aim at the same goal, calling it "pastoral awakening...
...The Mexican government has offered them bilingual instruction, recreation centers, and concrete village halls...
...One of us is probably kicking his father, a policeman...
...In a recent story by Elizabeth Hardwick, "On the Eve," the Bellovian world of New York's upper Broadway and its fashionable upper Madison Avenue are viewed through the eyes of a neoconservative intellectual...
...Perhaps it was the Vatican connection that put His Excellency on guard when I asked him how many Guatemalan refugees were encamped along the nearby frontier...
...however, nearly half the people of Mexico's southeastern mountains and virtually all the people of Guatemala's contiguous northwestern mountains are descendants of the ancient Mayas...
...Things are bad down there right now although it takes a good deal of patient inquiry to find out just what is wrong...
...Trouble doesn't show on the surface in the graceful 450-year-old town of San Crist~bal de las Casas where one walks across the central plaza to the sound of Beethoven piano sonatas wired from the trees...
...That a similar situation could occur in Mexico is out of the question...
...But questionable involvement in the untidy problem of Central American refugees is only one aspect of the destabilizing efforts of the diocesan equ~pe at San Crlstobal...
...Invasion means devastation...
...As I read I began to smile...
...While the majority of Mexicans claim some mixture of Spanish and Indian blood, mestizo life since earliest colonial times has followed the mainstream of the West leaving only small, isolated enclaves of truly indigenous communities...
...But by Mary Ball Marti'nez later a young priest, one of several who have been denied a post in the diocese for refusing to preach Marxism, told me there are no seminarians, none at all...
...The country is too big, its society too complex, and its history too marked by anti-clericalism...
...For half a century anthropologists have fussed over these people, looking into and noting down every aspect of their lives...
...For her, if Henry stands for Stoppard, and Stoppard's politics are right of center, then the play is ipso facto "shallowly reactionary in its art and its politics...
...They cut off the man's head, rip up the belly of the woman, stuff the head inside the belly and sew it up...
...Now day by day, week by week, confidence grows...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL CLERICAL MATERIALISM IN MEXICO'S SOUTHEAST There is an alarming amount of violence and lawlessness in Mexico right now but not where it shows...
...For all its pain Mexico has not slipped into disorder...
...One wonders what can have caused Stoppard's creative failure in the very realm of ideas where he has always been strongest...
...Two minor political parties, the PSUM (actually the Mexican Communist Party) and the PMT are hard at work, often directing aroused consciousness to its logical goal of total violence...
...What might be called their Land Policy bears more directly on the troubles of Mexico's southeast--"southeast," not "far south" because of the sharp turn toward the Atlantic of land along the Gulf of Mexico, a curve which makes San Crist6bal and even Guatemala City nearer to New York than is Los Angeles...
...Just as I chink what Anthony Lewis writes in the New York Times is: "It's common practice for Guatemalan soldiers to throw infants in the air to catch them on their bayonets...
...A balding, chain-smoking man in his forties Father Xavier said that, thanks to Adveniat, he had spent a few years at a German university and that he now forms part of Bishop Ruiz's team of 35 priests who have learned to preach in the native dialects and are dedicated to raising the consciousness of the Indians...
...It seems that every village has at its disposal considerable extensions of what is known as "communal land," a surprising amount of which is yet to be cultivated...
...Her office offers a bulletin full of horror fiction about Guatemala along with medical bulletins from the refugee camps put out by bogus doctors...
...Who was feeding them...
...If the owners are lucky and the mob's consciousness has not been raised to the machete-wielding level, they can flee to safety in the towns while their houses burn to the ground, their cattle run wild, and their crops are left to rot...
...That these holdings are not extensive latifundos can be seen from the case, a typical one, of the relatively small township of Simojovel some 50 miles north of San Crist~bal where, during the winter of 1982 and spring of 1983, no fewer than forty flourishing small farms were invaded...
...I would also spend long hours with village families, listening to their accounts of fright and flight and hear their expressions of gratitude for all the government and the army were doing for them...
...While the townfolk are apt to perceive only the disruptive activities of their bishop and his staff, other elements must be taken into account as well...
...You think this is Communist propaganda, don't you...
...a haunting book . . . . " William F. Buckley " . . . o n e o f the most chilling books of this generation . . . . " James J. Kilpatrick "This is an apocalyptic novel, a philosophical dissection of the erosion of Western civilization...
...But in August 1981 when the crisis hit, few thought the calm would last a month...
...Stoppard, in the interview that placed Auden's remark on private derangement and public postures at the center of The Real Thing, said that "in the short term" journalistic work can help change the world...
...While by and large these outside pressures have only served to make the indigenous communities more withdrawn, partial success must be credited Bishop Ruiz and his men with their envigorating slogan, "the land belongs to the Indians...
...Ruiz at a Vatican press conference back in the mid1970s...
...Certainly The Real Thing seems calculated to demonstrate that he rejects the lack of caring that critics of neoconservatism invariably associate with its opinions...
...Nearly all of the charges were for calls made to two numbers in downtown Managua, Nicaragua...
...Though hardly friendly to her character, Hardwick gives him an active intellect and treats him with authorial sympathy...
...What Stoppard seems not to have anticipated, though, is that a critic like Erika Munk would show no interest whatsoever in subtle repositionings, whether of the right or center...
...The region has everything--fertile soil, an abundance of water, and wide, relatively unpopulated spaces waiting to be developed...
...Virginia residents add 20r per copy sales tax...
...Most suspect, even then, were Archbishop Romero of San Salvador and Bishop Ruiz of San Crist6bal de las Casas...
...Another is worried that his image is getting a bit too right-of-center...
...Total amount due for one month: 69,200 pesos or about 485 dollars...
...Later I would wish I had left the interview until the end of my visit...
...This land indeed belongs to the Indians but this is not the land that interests either the ecclesiastical or the political agitators who urge the seizure of farms already under cultivation...
...Another recommended contact, one Father Eugenio, turned out to be in jail on a charge of smuggling arms to Central America...
...Don't you believe that's what they do...
...Repayment of the crushing foreign debt is somehow being managed...
...In The Real Thing Henry similarly hopes to put words together well enough to "nudge the world a little...
...Nor do outrages in Mexico's far southeast pose any direct problem to the United States...
...In contrast, Stoppard seems bent on humiliating Henry, who is given woefully inadequate political attitudes that serve only to discredit his position...
...And finally, there are times when this region, so far from central authority, takes on the flavor of America's Old West...
...Fears must have been quieted because the flow of marks for Marx went on and continues today...
...It was the second movement of the "Appassionata" that held me for cloudless minutes as I crossed over to the cathedral and an appointment with Bishop Samuel Ruiz Florez...
...Catholics abroad were being generous, he said, particularly with regard to his present work of contacting the Central American refugees...
...or hear outbursts like, "The Bishop is responsible for all the trouble in this state...
...When I couldn't manage a serious expression he became angry...
...Then there is a young East German woman, connected with Berkeley's Boycott-Tourism-to-Guatemala committee, who runs a caf~ in San Crist6bal which is also a briefing center for journalists interested in the refugee story...
...Xavier hurriedly recovered the paper, "What do you find that's funny...
...I had questions aplenty but after an unusually difficult hour I understood that Msgr...
...I know what you think...
...I saw that the paper dealt exclusively with reported cruelties practiced by Guatemalan officers and men on their own peasants...
...The calm won't last, some say...
...Foreign tourists are as welcome and as pleased as ever and the country's president can still face crowds with notably fewer bodyguards than the average chief executive...
...and even, "They're going to get him one of these days, they're going to kill him the way they killed Romero in El Salvador...
...Writing in Mexico City's Excelsior, columnist Margarita Michelena notes: "Whereas Simojovel was producing tobacco, coffee, beans, and corn in abundance there is now scarcely corn to make tortillas for the few folk who remain...
...Like Nicaragua's minister of culture, Trappist monk Ernesto Cardenal, Alvarez Icaza is involved in the Christians for Peace Movement with headquarters in Prague, Czechoslovakia...
...Was the Church involved...
...Certain Latin American bishops had been invited to Rome to talk with the heads of the West German charity organizations, Adveniat and Misere, in order to convince them that money donated by the faithful of Germany was not being used (as it certainly was) to promote leftist causes...
...The UN...
...Xavier--"progressive" Latin American clergy dislike being called "Father"--invited me into his office and explained that the reason why the school appeared to be empty was that the students were living and working with the Indians in the villages...
...From nearly every point of view the country appears to be holding on in a remarkable way...
...What are our real motivations...
...Local elections in several key states passed off without incident...
...Given its proximity to an extended frontier even more difficult to patrol than the one along the Rio Grande, the little colonial city can be seen as a transfer point for subversion up and down the Americas...
...Sometimes they are not so lucky...
...At Acala last summer rival mayoral candidates, SeSores Vidal and Grijales, managed to shoot each other dead...
...The State of Chiapas, sprawling over cool mountains, hot brushland, and jungle along the 600-mile line where North America ends, is so far from major population centers and so cut off from the capital as to seem another country...
...His alter ego, Henry, may possibly offer a clue when, just before pronouncing on public postures and private derangements, he speaks of the current "desire to be taken for properly motivated members of the caring society...
...Successive Guatemalan administrations, including the present one, have tried to entice them into becoming enterprising farmers with gifts of land, tools, and seed...
...I had not yet been to Central America when I talked with Father Xavier...
...I had met Msgr...
...he asks...
...And what Argentina's 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marqu~z asserts: "Guatemalan military cut the hearts out of their victims, drink their blood and eat their livers...
...Harper's Bookletter " . . . one of the major works of our time . . . . " Jeffrey Hart The Camp of the Sabots by Jean Raspail $5.00 per copy, postpaid Please send me copies of The Camp of the Saints at $5.00 per copy, postpaid...
...I enclose $ Name Address City, State, Zip The Institute for Western Values Post Office Box 11463 _9 Alexandria, Virginia 22312 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 29...
...Someone suggested I talk with the supervisor of the seminary...
...He showed me a proof he was correcting, a bulletin to be given out to the press in Spanish and then go overseas in German translation...
...If not, who was invading farmland and murdering the owners...
...Chiapas, however, is Mexico's future, its only possible Next Frontier...
...All this invaded land is left to be manipulated by who knows what powers behind the scenes while diocesan authorities move on to the next step in their much vaunted 'change of structures.' " M a r x i s t Nicaragua is run by "progressive" Catholic priests, except for Cuban-trained layman Daniel Ortega...
...But for an occasional anthropologist and a back-packing American or European student, few foreigners visit the Mary Ball Marffnez is a free-lance writer based in Europe...
...But his shallow treatment and ultimate dismissal of politics hardly nudges anyone in a meaningful direc: tion...
...Today except in the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas not many of these pockets remain...
...However there is one area, little noticed abroad or even by the rest of Mexico, which is nearly as ebullient as parts of Central America...
...Only after many talks with Chiapanecos of different social levels would I come to know the extent of bitterness against this man, learn of his escape from a street demonstration when the crowd shouted, "Go to Russia...
...Will Immigration Mean the End of the Western World...
...Latin American peasants are said to be kept landless by the greed of absentee owners of vast estates...
...The passing scene, with its androgynous dress styles, and the titles in a bookstore window, confirm for this intellectual his political conversion from liberalism...
...Having devoted himself to publicizing the depradations of East European Communism in a country, England, where the political center among intellectuals lies even further to the left than it does in the United States, Stoppard may well have had some worries about his image...
...region, Mexicans never, unless their business demands it...
...Life among them is not very different from what it was when the Spaniards arrived in the early 1500s...
...Devaluation is neatly programmed at a fraction of one American cent per day...
...But on the scene in Chiapas one hears a different story...
...Ruiz was not going to provide the answers...
...Of course I did...
...Chiapas is Indian country...
...Later I would spend several days with young officers of the Guatemalan Army at an outpost deep in mountains they had rescued from the guerrillas and I would find them wonderfully solicitous of the Indian peasants they were helping rebuild an existence after the terror...
...What goes on in San Crist6bal de las Casas is important in another way...
...Imports above basic necessities have been stopped...
...As for sporadic farleft uprisings, the all powerful political party, the PRI, has quite simply erased them whenever they reached nuisance level...
...Several Mexico City dailies maintain stringers in Tuxtla-Guti~rrez, the state capital, but their often sensational reports are invariably reduced to a paragraph or two on an inside page...
Vol. 17 • April 1984 • No. 4
