No roadblocks to death

...press coverage at the time tended to accent the hostile recep- tion given the pope the preceding day in Nicaragua...

...These murders are being committed in the rural area and are genocide...

...Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores...

...All of this followed on the heels of targeted assassinations of unionists and Christian Democrat Party (DCG) activists...

...Though the Lucas Garcia era (1978-1982) was the most dangerous, only small improvements have come to the pro- vince...

...Those few published paragraphs in U.S...

...These Indians make up about half the nation's seven million inhabitants...

...Less than one in five Guatemalans has access to safe water systems...

...On May 27, 1982, Guatemala's Catholic bishops finally broke from their traditionally cautious posture, publishing a scathing front-page condemnation of the army...

...With profound sorrow we have learned and verified the suffering of our people by these massacres...

...Not only were no valid convic- tions ever obtained in any of these cases, few were even charged...

...Yet their anguish remains curi- ously remote from attention by the North American media, which are quite able to record each attempt by Polish au-thorities to remove crucifixes from state schools...

...As with Father Ramirez, all of the routine roadblocks of this garrison state intercepted no one...

...In the highlands of Guatemala, peasants burned their Bibles and certificates of graduation from church courses, fearing army soldiers would kill them for ties to what authorities claimed was the "subversive" church...

...While no priests were killed during his reign (thirteen had died between 1978 and 1982), army power was used consistently to weaken the influence of Roman Catholicism in the rural areas...

...military aid and economic support...

...F~i,.ic~ , i I( ' "Not bad...

...Yet the repressed Central American church people are not indifferent to the threat to free religion which totalitarian Communism may someday pose in their nations...

...Pope John Paul II, visiting Guatemala in the spring of 1983, sternly and publicly warned General Rios Montt to desist his violence against the indigenous peoples...

...A purge of El Verbo- linked officials swiftly followed the August 1983 seizure Of power by General Vielman's colleagues in the general staff of the armed forces and the installation of their leader and now chief of state, General Mejia...

...It stated that Guatemala's political violence results from injus- tice among Guatemalans, and not from imported "subver- sion...

...Protestant pastors also were menaced...

...Commonweal: 364...

...With the bishop for the area, Juan Gerardi, prevented from returning to his people after taking evidence of govern- ment repression to Rome in 1981, church work increasingly fell to the catechists...

...Is only Communist persecution of the church newsworthy...

...By 1983, General Rios Montt's own brother, Bishop Mario Enrique Rios Montt, publicly charged that the army's actions threatened to transform the already acute political crisis into an even more serious, full-scale religious war...

...Sehora Morales had worked at San Carlos University's eco- nomics department for twenty-seven years, but pleas from university officials came to naught...

...Over two hundred leaders of that mod- erate Catholic reform party fell in just the final eighteen months of Lucas Garcia's rule...

...Over one million Guatemalans are displaced persons, either refugees in Hon- duras, Mexico, and the U.S., or internal refugees within Guatemala...

...and Father Pedro Aguilar (May 1981...

...How can we rest assured that it is a "moderate" government that will receive our aid, when the same government has yet to try anyone in three separate incidents of army abductions of our own U.S.A.I.D...

...On April 30, 1984, Guatemalan army troops (called "Kaibiles") attacked the refugee camp at El Chupad- ero, Chiapas (Mexico), killing six and dispersing the many wounded...

...But his abductors had somehow been allowed to pass all the roadblocks, dumping the priest's cadaver in downtown Guatemala City...

...Guerrilla bands were dispersed...

...The Rt...

...The actual state of political and religious life in Guatemala has so thoroughly denigrated basic human fights that church and state may be expected to remain at loggerheads for the foreseeable future...

...In what sense can "improvements" be said to be occurring...

...The souring of Catholic-Protestant ecclesiastical relations formed only a small part of the strain in Catholic relations with General Rios Montt's ruling army...

...Never in our national history has it come to such grave extremes...

...To discourage any other religious presence, catechists were killed by the hundreds...

...The quick re- sponse took the form of abductions of Catholic activists and catechists in areas never signficantly affected by guerrillas, areas like Chiquimula and Escuintla...

...The Guatemala City daily El Impacto reported in November 1983, that five nuns had been attacked and beaten at the Pacific port of San Josd...

...In January 1984, Americas Watch published a comprehen- sive review of conditions under Mejia, dubbing the overall situation to be one of a "nation of prisoners...

...Over half of all adults, and more than three-fourths of all indigenous peoples, are illiter- ate...

...In some respects, church-state relations had reached their nadir during the short rule (March 1982-August 1983) of the "born-again" Protes- tant evangelist and self-appointed president, Gen...

...In Guatemala, all must hope for this process to be more than yet another prelude to government-run "disappearances," assas- sinations, and massacres...

...Efrain Rios Montt...

...Many non-military groups greeted him favorably, but his triumph was facilitated by widespread dissatisfaction among Catholic officers...

...Claiming that the pleas constituted interference in Guatemala's internal affairs, General Kios Montt withdrew his ambassador to the Vatican, Luis Valla- dares Aycinela, who had served there for sixteen years...

...According to a former press secretary of the Interior Ministry, the stationery for these "unofficial" butchers was kept at his ministry and the lists were drawn up by senior.army officials and other government officials...

...The real dangers, how- ever, are far more immediate...

...It is in this light that the apparent docility of the population regarding campaigning under way for the July 1, 1984 election should be understood...

...What mellowing is revealed in the "disappearance" of over a dozen moderate trade union officials in January-February 1984 alone...

...A year and a half before, in September 1982, his brother, his two sisters, and his mother, Garciela Morales Herrera de Samoyoa, had been abducted...

...Father Ramirez had been abducted by heavily armed men as he returned from the capital to his parish in Antigua...

...Not even the lives of old people, pregnant women, or innocent children were respected...

...Church properties --alterna-tively called "abandoned" and hot-beds of "subversion" by the regime -- were seized...

...Look at the pattern: early in 1984, Sergio Vinicio Samoyoa Morales, the sole surviving son of one Guatemala City family, was attacked with machetes and hospitalized...

...Three priests there had fallen in earlier violence: Father Jos~ Mafia Gran Cirera (June 1980...

...Josd Guillermo Echeveria Vielman, was dis-charged after publishing an attack on General Rios Montt that charged him with anti-Catholic bias...

...Often these were promoted by troops, while Catholic services were fre- quently banned...

...Though eighty percent of Guatemalans are Catholics, Evangelical revival meetings, run principally by the California-based Church of the Word (El Verbo) in which General Rios was an elder, gained prominence...

...To whom have religious people become enemies in this part of the non-Communist world...

...think we'll give them two stars this year...

...The Reagan administration agenda for Central America calls for a "transition to democracy" to accompany massive transfusions of U.S...

...Monsignor Ramiro Pellecer, in September 1983, pub- lished a denunciation of anti-church violence...

...Oddly, the pope's sweeping criticisms of the regime failed to reach most American readers, as U.S...

...General Lucas Garcia's education minister, Clementino Castillo, virtually put the offi- cial stamp of approval on the religious slayings, saying the regime would be "inflexible and implacable" with nuns and priests found to have ties with the guerrilla movement...

...Repeatedly, from catechists to parish priests, from nuns to bishops, church people have expressed concern that this system no longer be one in which privilege is earned by using waves of violence to confine the laboring people to endemic poverty...

...WHILE MOST ANTI-CLERICAL outrages had occurred before General Mejia's current clique took charge, the general has continued to maintain that much of the Catholic church is "subversive...

...The pattern is unmistakable: in Guatemala things are not out of the state's control...

...Speaking for all the bishops of Guatemala, it stated: "In Guatemala, as in other Central American countries, we live every day in terror, in a constant 'state of emergency...

...His blood-stained vehicle later turned up in a remote area...

...Guatemala possesses important minerals (oil, nickel) and has a six-hundred-mile border adjacent to' the Mexican oil fields...

...Eight of ten children endure malnutrition...

...violence has further ripped this tattered cloth...

...One bishop reported over one hundred parishioners were killed in just two months under Mejia...

...Catholic churches 15 June 1984:361 example of post-Medellin Catholicism...

...Especially during 1980-1981, unofficial "death squads" published lists of their intended victims, then murdered without fear of arrest...

...The Guatemala City daily El Graphico reported two days after Father Ramirez fell that not only was Father Antonio Ptrez Luna also seized and expelled to Mexico...

...But the evidence unreported in the North American press is far from encouraging: where are Sebastian Solis Pajarito Aceituno and son, Christian Democrat leaders abducted January 18, 19847 How can religious insti- tions recover when Indian seminarians, like Prudencio Garcia Mendoza, are shot dead in their homes by soldiers (as Garcia was, December 12, 1983...

...Thirty-five days later a seminarian in Huehuetenango also was shot and killed by authorities...

...rather, this state is far too fully in control...

...Concealed within one of them was the body of a Franciscan priest, Father Augusto Ramirez Monasterio...

...Finally, even those officers in the army who profess to follow Roman Catholicism began to act against General Rios Montt's excesses...

...Since commissioners possessed the power to draft suspicious individuals into the Guatemalan security forces, conversions were brisk...

...Religious workers have been in the forefront of efforts to ameliorate these calamities and devise strategies to help the poor...

...In November 1983, unrecorded in any North American newspaper, the Guatemala City daily La Hora published yet another pastoral letter, this one by Prospero Penados de Bar- fios, president of the Guatemalan Roman Catholic bishops...

...El Verbo zealots were ap- pointed as military commissioners and mayors in many Catho- lic villages...

...Nearly two dozen religious workers, for example, were murdered or remain "missing...

...Targeted assassinations and "disappearances" such as Father Hermtgenes's became the defining feature of life dur- ing the tenure of Gen...

...Later in 1982, Amnesty Interna- tional and other international human rights groups confirmed the bishops' observations:"massive extrajudicial executions" were occurring in the rural areas, committed by army troops...

...O NDER General Rios Montt, indiscriminate violence was directed at virtuall'y the entire population of the highland Indian region, violence which led to at least fifteen thousand total deaths at the hands of the Guatemalan army since March 1982...

...Since 1978, widespread political GORDON L. BOWEN is assistant professor of political science at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia...

...Indeed, the very day Father Ramirez "disap- peared," General Mejia characterized the church as fiddled with "subversives...

...But many have been victims of violence and their projects forced to close...

...Other church grievances had more direct causes...

...It is an efficient system, the only part of government anti-guerrilla operations visible to many visitors...

...E1 Quich6, again, provides a suitable example...

...contract workers there, all occurring in 1983...

...They struck even sixty-six miles inside Mexico to kill Mexican priest Father Josd Hipdlito Cervantes, who worked with'the displaced Guatemalans...

...These trained, but lay, preachers often have served as the only spokespeople for the church in areas where priests are barred...

...Yet, on November 7, 1983, numerous roadblocks proved to be no obstacle to certain vehicles...

...The hope of the Guatemalan church is not simply that a stable authoritarian system evolve, one which kills fewer priests...

...Then, in early February 1984, heavily armed "unknown" men nonchalantly entered the hospital and abducted Sergio...

...In November 1983, Monsignor Pellecer stated that over five hundred catechists remained missing...

...Catholic activists in the non-Indian areas had also begun to vanish...

...Romeo Lucas Garcia, who took power the day after Father Hermtgenes fell and held office until deposed by General Rios Montt in March 1982...

...His bullet-fiddled corpse later turned up across town...

...additionally, they reported Mejia's ominous declaration that "many catechists" also were involved with "subversives...

...GUATEMALA'S WAR AGAINST THE CHURCH No roadblocks to death GORDON L. BOWEN T RAVELERS in Guatemala frequently are delayed by army roadblocks...

...There and elsewhere the catech- ists have multiplied the services able to be given by ordained clerics...

...Father Faustino Villanueva (July 1980...

...T HROUGHOUT Central America, the church steadfastly has remained committed to social justice, even in the face of overwhelming provocations...

...The current military government of Guatemala was born in an August 8, 1983 coup d'6tat and is led by Brig...

...Refugees from the highland violence huddled in camps in Mexico, further intimidated by "death squad" murderers from Guatemala...

...In June 1983, the most senior general in the army, Gen...

...Yet Guatemala is a poor nation which had problems meeting basic needs even before political violence became the plague it is now...

...Since the middle t970s, the work of the church has been nearly extinguished throughout the high- land home of the descendants of the Maya...

...According to testimony given by Guatemala's Roman Catholic bishops to the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights (CIDH), sermons at these Evangelical rallies contained marked anti-Catholic messages...

...Their report presented exhaustive evidence leading to the unmistakable conclusion that Indian culture, and church efforts to meet Indians' basic human needs, virtually have been destroyed...

...Incidents from but one province, El Quich6, are illustrative...

...Benedicto Coc remains "disap-peared," though the doctor who was abducted with him did turn up, shot dead in the face...

...papers which did note the pope's Guatemalan concerns centered almost entirely on his unsuc- cessful efforts to stop the execution of four prisoners by Guatemalan authorities...

...Vehicles are searched, apparently for weapons thought destined for guerrillas in the lush forests Of the mountainous northwest- ern part of Central America's largest and most populous na- tion...

...Answers to these questions may sharpen Americans' perceptions of the stakes that may be involved in current Congressional debates over foreign aid...

...This was not unusual: Prospero Penados de Barrios, president of the Guatemalan Roman Catholic bishops, on March 24, 1984, stated that each day ten to fifteen families of new victims of similar occurrences seek his help...

...Thus a clear-headed view may inform decisions which affect important interests for American policy...

...Few replacements ventured into the hills of E1 Quich6...

...Soldiers had looted their home the following day...

...15 June 1984:363 The vital role of the catechists may be hard for North Americans to comprehend...

...Yet to some these were sins, compounded by the fact that local peasants had formed a chapter of a (then growing, now repres- sed) rural labor movement, the Committee for Peasant Unity...

...The terror of massacres, assassinations, and "disappear- ances" was effective from a purely military point of view...

...His service to his people had included organizing opposition to army-forced sterilizations of local women, helping villagers to resist army conscriptions of local youths, and helping to organize protests when Argus corporation tried to divert the local water supply...