Under the Peruvian volcano
Ranly, Ernest W.
THE CHURCH. TERRORISM. & DEMOCRACY Under the Peruvian volcano ERNEST W. RANLY T HE WHOLE WORLD is watching Peru's new young dashing president, Alan Garcia Ptrez. His stellar performance at the...
...After one or two harvests, the people may live better than just a few years ago...
...I asked, a sudden queasiness in my bowels...
...The Maoist revolutionary strategy I had so innocently studied was being replayed right here in Peru...
...There were twelve or fifteen people in the bus...
...You should memorize this piece for the party," Mrs...
...Oh, the formation of church was always slowly, positively in the process of being born...
...Can these same bishops (some with oligarchic surnames) really promote a pastoral presence within the "liberated zones...
...A genuine Christian reconciliation must begin with Jesus himself, who, by his blood, made peace with the Father for all of us distant sinners...
...Dynamite explosions in front of public buildings become regular features...
...That is about the sum and substance of my apostolate...
...Up to this time in Peru there simply is no Christian leaven inside the grim politics of Sendero Luminoso...
...When are you coming home...
...By now "the Shining Path" of the Peruvian highlands made international news...
...Much of the Department of Ayacucho, as the area is called, seems like bare, formidable, uninhabitable mountains...
...And get your hair cut...
...Certainly my visit (and the same can be said of the pope's visit in February, 1985) did nothing to abate the terrible violence...
...Who held the wakes...
...Nor were they about Maoism as such...
...The Spirit must be allowed to emerge from within the culture, the history, and the folk piety of the very people of Ayacucho...
...He remains quite creditable to date for the honesty he has demonstrated in talking publicly about Peru's very serious problems...
...The situation is extremely complex and delicate...
...I would ask myself...
...They can enter any home, arrest any citizen, execute on the spot, and not one can be denounced by name or number...
...Ah, yes, the church, insists Pope John Paul II, is to I~e non-political...
...I heard about the academic disputes going on in many Peruvian universities, especially those in the provinces, such as Huaneayo and Ayacucho...
...Slowly the awful truth dawned on me...
...In Quechua, "Ayacucho" means "the .,ss,o,, THEO% J I~)M ~.% (" ~,1 HOI,I(" ~('H(X)I...
...We stayed faithfully with the people at the grassroots, at the bases as they say in Spanish, as those elusively titled basic Christian communities slowly took on form and structure...
...The Conference of Religious of Peru has begun to ask: What should be the presence of the church in the emergency zones...
...Hastings's prodding became more specific: "There, it's right under your third f i n g e r . . . No, third finger left hand...
...from death to resurrection...
...I didn't want to think about what the actual consequences might mean of slogans such as: "Armed fight to the ultimate consequences...
...More specifically, in the "liberated zones," how can the Gospel be preached, faith in Jesus be proclaimed, and the sacraments administered...
...As usual when I am panic-stricken, I hammed it up pretty outrageously...
...What one finds today in the Peruvian Andes is a completely separate identified culture which, for all its pagan roots, is now a Christian/ Catholic culture...
...The military arrive in force...
...Well," I replied...
...Unfortunately, I was unable to find the first note...
...A general environment of terror is created...
...I saw no revolution in the making...
...How does one form church in such an environment...
...I kept asking myself the same question...
...Catechesis, worship, and the Eucharist must go on...
...In my five days in Ayacucho I discovered no new data...
...How are you ' doing, Timmy...
...Where does my personal story begin...
...THE PITFALLS & TRI JMPH OF ADULT EDIJCATION I/,The virtuoso pianist ROBERT H. BELL necessary...
...You have a month to memorize this piece...
...But the fact that such stories can be told and accepted as true reveals the tragic mentality now common...
...In Chile (perhaps also in Central America) the heavies wear black hats: one knows against whom to protest...
...Where the Senderistas are genuinely rejected, the peasants have resorted to the vigilante justice of the rondas which violently drives off the Senderistas...
...Youth become the special targets of the Senderistas, either for indoctrination and defection, or for outfight assassination...
...Hastings's fall recital...
...But my chuckle lacked spontaneity...
...Peruvian independence, industrialization, and modern technology have barely affected the almost self-sufficient agricultural base of Ayacucho...
...I took him on a long day's outing, up past a series of high mining camps, over a bare summit, and then down through a valley of sheep, cattle, llamas, and alpacas...
...he hunts partridges and vizcachas, a type of ground squirrel...
...How goes the revolution...
...But mostly, I retained the intellectual ideals of nonviolence...
...I've never played in front of anybody...
...If the logic of the argument is not convincing, the immediate presence of armed Senderistas is indeed very compelling...
...If one will not kill on the side of the Senderistas, he must kill on the side of the police (and be killed by the Senderistas...
...Mrs...
...A brutal anarchy reigns...
...That is hard to say...
...Ayacucho until very recently was still feudal...
...William McConville, OFM, Ph.D...
...Clearly, the first need is that of reconciliation: the church's presence must be a reconciling presence...
...The Peruvian church and its bishops are a relatively strong, active body of the faithful...
...Mrs...
...As was the case in Vietnam, there are few clear geographical boundaries...
...I saw everything become Commonweal: 78worse, but I felt that I had to truck along in a kind of Christian incamationalism...
...After three years they asked: "Haven't you about changed the world...
...Weeks later common graves are uncovered of twenty . . . thirty . . . fifty . . . mutilated, tortured cadavers...
...Thus I became again as a little child, addressing myself to such compositions as "Going to the Circus," "Skipping Rope," and the traditional scale exercises in Hanon's venerable primer, The Virtuoso Pianist...
...Families come to see if their own "missing" are among the dead...
...The next week I found eight-year-old Timmy McGrew completing his lesson with Mrs...
...The left made some dramatic displays of strength, although always internally divided...
...They promote the local arts, local music and dance, and folk medicine...
...Some peasants are killed...
...The city of Ayacucho became a major Spanish colony as early as the sixteenth century...
...They hold all-day, all-night classes in consciousness-raising...
...I've come back to Lima to pray...
...This is to prevent the Senderistas from threatening and bombing their families and homes...
...After hitchhiking, I boarded a cold noisy old bus which brought me back to La Oroya...
...Hastings explained that Dr...
...Do you know what I call this lesson...
...All too soon I had to perform "The Happy Fisherman" at Mrs...
...There are three large active communities of women contemplatives...
...And now twelve years later, such things as health, housing, jobs, and schooling have deteriorated...
...Well-indoctrinated teachers went out to all parts teaching a pure Maoist ideology...
...It is extremely interesting to watch the Peruvian church tiptoe around the announced policies of the new government...
...Rand...
...Tonight I came in by bus...
...But to date it has made no explicit move against the church...
...Most religious in the archdiocese retain traditional works such as staffing schools and running homes for the elderly...
...Then it was my turn...
...FOR MI'~I~TR~ ALOYSXVS pmmSo s.j...
...When student idealism cooled in the early seventies, my restlessness found a new direction in liberation theology...
...My family never could understand me...
...No one is watching Garcia more closely than we in Peru...
...It is said that ancient family feuds and disputes are being settled...
...First of all, the intellectual shallowness of what was often pure~sloganeering turned me off...
...Only recently has Garcia's own government openly admitted that the armed forces have been responsible for some grisly massacres of peasants, including old women and children...
...I see now that my work in the mining area made me unsympathetic to what Peruvian Maoism might mean...
...Bridges, railroads, and high-tension electric lines are destroyed...
...There were seven pianists at the recital -- four children lacking discipline and three adults craving sedatives...
...Who will openly defy a Senderista...
...The Senderistas perform summary executions of all "squealers" (soplones...
...Cecil Harper, who had been studying only six weeks, would also perform "The Happy Commonweal: 82...
...A sense of siege, of terror, of fear, of distrust falls on all sides...
...Consequently, the level of poverty approaches that of Bangladesh and sub-Saharan Africa...
...Hastings said firmly, "A below middle C." I hit a note...
...Garcia's government is trying to reassert civil, legal controls over what was rapidly becoming Peru's own dirty war...
...I heard that the major disputes were not about Marxism: that was a foregone conclusion...
...See," they say...
...The church is trying to set up soup kitchens in and around Ayacucho, trying to find housing for orphans, widows, for the old and the abandoned...
...In Peru, the principal problem is this: how does one remain nonviolent, talk nonviolence, train for nonviolence in a context of uncontrolled violence...
...FRANCISCAN CHAIR OF MISSION STUDIES Spring Semester 1987 INTERDISCIPLINARY EXPLORATION OF MIS- . SION ISSUES PASTORAL INTERNSHIPS IN THE THIRD WORLD For information on degree and non-degree programs and scholarship assistance, contact: Rev...
...I was a college philosophy teacher during the decade of the turbulent sixties...
...He started to play from memory, deleted an expletive, stopped abruptly, fumbled for his music, and finally completed a lovely Chopin prelude...
...The body count as of early 1985 was: 6000 dead...
...I call it a terrible lesson...
...It is said that the Senderistas have infiltrated the armed forces, even entering the crack "Green Berets," called Sinchis...
...Most of the schools can operate quite normally since many teachers were part of the advance revolutionary activities...
...The official colonial coat-of-arms of Ayacucho is that of the apocalyptic Lamb of God sitting on the book of seven seals, holding aloft the banner of victory...
...Small cells of totally dedicated youth began to form military cadres...
...One part of the story should begin with Ayacucho itself...
...Romantic readings of the Che Guevara diaries did not prepare me for this...
...Reconciliation means that we simply accept one another anew, conscious that we are all, in...
...Well," I replied...
...By now there is such a fear of the police that families may choose to leave their own dead unburied rather then be identified publicly as family members of a suspected (now dead) Senderista...
...attendance and compliance are obligatory...
...We meet four times a year and everybody plays...
...Hastings...
...The Senderistas return to the village...
...The Peruvian government sent in its armed forces...
...There is the strictest possible internal discipline...
...The big arguments were over the precise type of Maoism which would be applicable to Peru...
...Hastings instructed me...
...Far back into the mountains, a small armed band comes upon 14February1986:79an isolated peasant village...
...As a priest, I anguished over the decisions (and the death) of Camilo Torres...
...If some social structures of Ayacucho are still feudal, much of the local church is pre-Vatican II...
...Or, from another point of view, is Sendero Luminoso such an embodiment of evil (like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot) that any kind of presence would mean -- as a nonpacifist friend of mine would say -- "an acquiescence in, or accommodation to, human degradation...
...But the church dares not allow itself to be identified too closely with a political party (APRA) whose history is marked with anti-clericalism...
...A strategic move by one side has its own logic and its own consequences, only to be offset by a counterpositioning logic on the other side...
...Towns and major cities - even Lima -- have frequent blackouts...
...Even the cast of players is not clear...
...A below middle C." I hit another wrong note...
...Along with youthful idealists, I read the diaries of Che Guevara, followed the careers of the Castro brothers, tried to strategize with Regis Debray in The Revolution in the Revolution ? (Grove, 1967...
...In the face of immediate dire need, the church is beginning to serve the thousands of refugees fleeing from the violent zones and streaming into the overcrowded shanty-towns around Lima and into other major cities...
...I've come back to Lima to arm myself for the revolution...
...One problem is that of open terrorism/guerrilla warfare in some parts of the interior of Peru...
...Obviously, if the church stays only on the side of the government and its forces of law and order, it is being terribly political and in the precise way that the Marxists define church: a part of the ideological superstructure, represented by the forces of power to keep the poor and the oppressed in their proper place...
...That's it...
...The church must be servant to such a Spirit...
...Who says you are doing fine...
...The pure truth of Gandhi's nonviolence as Christianized by Martin Luther King, Jr., James Douglass, and Cesar Chavez satisfied in me an intellectual need for integrity and a Christian need for commitment...
...It must ask for peace, a fair distribution of food and medicines, and a simple good life for all...
...When youth are expertly trained in all the best techniques of killing, they defect and carry with them to the Senderistas not only newly learned skills of killing, but often some of the latest weaponry...
...Hastings interjected...
...We talked and laughed all the way home...
...But deep in the interior are rich valleys at comfortable altitudes with a dry, pleasant climate...
...The sad case of Nicaragua is still unresolved...
...The papers de- --:-scribed some massacres...
...Peru's governments never bothered to invest in the modernization of Ayacucho, nor in improvement of its schools, health services, or social communication...
...What was I doing in Ayacucho...
...This is what terror and violence do to a people...
...This is extremely dangerous because the Senderistas can return with superior forces and make reprisals...
...I studied, I wrote, I taught, and I left the symbolic blood-pourings to Mike Cullen, the Berrigan brothers, and the like...
...Dead bodies are found...
...I knew half of them personally...
...But a sense of orthopra~is persists in my blood...
...Adolfo Ptrez Esquivel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, set up international chapters of SERPAJ (Service for Peace and Justice...
...Who informs the police...
...But the reports continued, each story more gruesome W'~'~ ~ than the next...
...Another Peruvian priest-friend, Nephthali Liceta became the Peruvian General Director of SERPAJ...
...his military brother was the Minister of the Interior under the military government...
...This also means that officers can now act with complete impunity...
...Within three weeks I had progressed to "The Happy Fisherman...
...They are taken off and "disappear...
...humor on National Public Radio...
...Fine...
...I cannot withdraw myself from the realidad...
...What really is a non-political church...
...Not only had A below middle C mysteriously disappeared, but I couldn't locate middle C, although I remembered it was around the middle of the keyboard...
...For five years now the Maoist guerrilla force called "the Shining Path" (Sendero Luminoso) has been terrorizing a vast area of the Andean highlands...
...I went to Ayacucho as a sort of "messenger" and "scout" for the Conference of Religious...
...I watched Peru's military government (1968-80) inaugurate a new democratically elected constitutional government in 1980...
...I don't know what she had you doing," she humphed in her genteel Virginia accent...
...The process is...
...The phenomenon of mass unmarked graves passed without official recognition for almost two years...
...I strode to the piano like Gary Cooper heading for the showdown in High Noon...
...But, personally, I heard another drum and tried to step to another beat...
...I watched church groups toy with different aspects of Marxism...
...Most of the diocesan clergy, of peasant stock, who speak Quechua, are old and unprepared to cope with what has happened all around them...
...The emphasis she placed upon "discipline" suggested that the parents should begin with flogging and get tough if Ill I I ROBERT H. BELL teaches English at Williams College, and airs his...
...I do know one little shepherd way back in the mountains who owns a shotgun...
...Nephthali came to visit me for several days in 1983...
...They all knew me...
...I always found myself on.the outside...
...At every human juncture we were well received...
...The armed forces, of course, cannot maintain a permanent presence in every out-of-the-way village...
...He may simply be getting what he can get for himself...
...Rich families owned agricultural lands in the valleys and homes in the city...
...The army arrives...
...You spoil him...
...When the open violence began I was simply aghast, almost incredulous...
...Furthermore, it is physically very dangerous...
...Gee, I don't know, Mrs...
...The armed forces have discovered the danger of sending local youth back to defend their own neighborhoods...
...I found a few precious drops of Scotch and we sat by the open fire of the fireplace...
...He asked me how the pastoral work was going...
...But mine remained an academic nonviolence...
...2000 missing...
...Each family home (hacienda) had its own church, so that Ayacucho is still famous for its thirty-three churches...
...some ways, guilty of the bloodshed by our sisters and brothers, but we are assured that the blood of Christ is more powerful still...
...So in 1973 1 packed away my philosophy books and spent the next ten years in full-time pastoral work in the very highest parts of the Central Andes of Peru, working with peasants and shepherds, but mostly with miners and workers...
...One night I came in from far out in the country...
...Especially the youth are easily converted and conscripted into the revolutionary movement...
...Latin America was saying that Christianity was first of all pastoral action (orthopraxis) and not simply formal intellectual truth (orthodoxy...
...Holy Week ceremonies in Ayacucho conclude with a triumphant dawn procession of the Resurrected Christ...
...The army retreats and tries to defend itself in the few larger cities...
...When I sat upon the bench, I imitated Van Cliburn's extravagant gestures at the Moscow Music Festival...
...The archbishop himself is from one of the landed families of the area...
...The haciendas were worked by the local indigenous peoples, often referred to simply as "Indians...
...the university of the "coffee klatches" became much more than "academic...
...They were all brutally killed by the local peasants using only sling shots, clubs, and primitive weapons...
...And so, I say, the best way to describe the situation of the church is to say that it is "delicate...
...For example, traditionally the peasant communities have always been able to maintain their own type of local vigilante justice by defense groups called rondas...
...In .- .. January 1983, eight jour- ' ~ nalists went as a group to verify a particular massacre...
...no church personnel have been touched...
...A Peruvian priest-friend had stopped over for the night...
...At the tempo I played it, it was more like a funeral march for the Happy Fisherman...
...I always say you can't swallow the whole apple in one bite...
...Back home in La Oroya, Nephthali said: "I think you are genuinely working for peace and justice...
...When Timmy's mother anived, she received a dressing-down from Mrs...
...What party...
...Meanwhile the other grownups, Cissey Caffrey and I, awaited our calls in states resembling clinical shock...
...I I that, over the centuries, Spanish Christianity has thoroughly penetrated and changed the original culture...
...I could not imagine how three or five or seven villagers could have been killed...
...I was still following nonviolence at a safe distance when I heard about the Argentinian reprisals and about the "disappeared...
...Few can dispute the general tone and intentions of the new reforms...
...Did some priest say Masses for the dead...
...In January 1984, I left the high Sierra, dusted off the philosophy books, and I am now working in seminary formation and teaching...
...Only the blood of Jesus can convert the awful bloodshed of Ayacucho into a saving, reconciling blood...
...I considered working with him...
...No one dares to investigate...
...So some villages have asked for arms and training by the armed police forces...
...Hastings, my new teacher, II took one look at my technique and another at my Bach assignments...
...Someone enters a shop and secretly displays a red hammer and sickle and asks for a large quantity of goods...
...His stellar performance at the United Nations was upstaged only by his address to the World Food Organization in Rome...
...The armed forces do hear about the Senderista presence in the village...
...What is worse, the armed forces in turn, now manipulate and direct these vigilante peasant groups -- often against their own will -- against their own people: peasants killing peasants...
...Recently, I spent five days in the emergency zone of Ayacucho, Peru...
...The respected Jesuit anthropologist Manuel Marzal thinks FATHER ERNEST W. RANLY, a priest of the Society of the Precious Blood and a philosophy professor at Saint Joseph's College, Rensselaer, Indiana, spent the past twelve years in Peru...
...There is absolutely no communication, no information, no reports from Sendero Luminoso itself...
...The government reacted at first with reinforced police protection, then with crack army divisions...
...His father spoils him...
...Hastings...
...The officers in the armed forces now serve under false names and numbers...
...I sure hope I've got my lesson right today," I jested...
...So what was I doing in Ayacucho...
...Hastings...
...thousands tortured and violated...
...Secretly, unknown to the villagers themselves, insurrectionists return and kill a few army troops...
...The Peruvian church has often asked for social reform, for justice and peace, for fair labor practices, and for hum~ rights...
...in my last hundred rehearsals I executed it flawlessly...
...Garcia promises complete investigation and sanctions for all guilty parties...
...He needs discipline...
...But is he a Senderista...
...The first adult pianist was Dr...
...How did the mothers, the wives, the children react to all this...
...I became resigned to a certain kind of Christian existentialism/fatalism/mysticism...
...It's become mystical...
...From the Peruvian Bishops' Commission for Social Action...
...The village and its area is declared a "liberated zone...
...But it has always spoken out in the context of Peru's own liberal political traditions...
...In other words, the first need is not military nor social nor political...
...The church must say "no" to violence, to revenge, and to reprisals...
...They spoke Quechua, a language and a culture rich in meaning, in community living, in handicrafts, in dance and in song...
...All ordinary public officials -- the mayor, the notaries, the representatives of government bureaucracies -- have either been executed or have long since left...
...If you practice so poorly next week, I will really become cross ! ' ' She already sounded pretty cross to me...
...They are the ones who kill...
...The National University of San Cristobal of Huamanga in Ayacucho became the center of the new conscientization...
...Abimael Guzmfin and all his leaders are local people, speak Quechua, and live comfortably within the local culture...
...it is mystical...
...They shook their heads in disbelief when I tried to explain that emotionally, politically, technically everything was worse with our people than when I arrived...
...Timmy and I shared a moment of silent commun~-a ~-...x ~,,,,,, ion, two hapless victims of oppression...
...I spent hours memorizing this complex composition...
...What really is a non-political church...
...The army is sure it has identified the Senderista leaders in the village...
...A FEW MONTHS after beginning piano lessons as an adult, I changed teachers...
...In Argentina, some members of the church sided with the military solution to subversion...
...Can the Peruvian church dare to envision the remote possibility (in ten to twenty years) of an eventual military-political victory by the likes of Sendero Luminoso...
...I somehow clumped out a facsimile of "The Happy Fisherman...
...they won.., so it seemed, for a while...
...Only in his blood is there peace...
...It seems to be an exclusively atheistic, anti-Christian ideology...
...Cissey somehow survived her ordeal, delivering a rather catatonic Bach fugue...
...It must be a church without feudal power and without oligarchic and capitalistic privileges...
...One can talk about the case of Cuba where the bulk of the church decided to align itself with a particular faction -- and Commonweal: 80lost...
...There is the enemy...
...They are sniped at, ambushed, demoralized...
...Their leader was (and is) a charismatic person with an Old Testament patriarch's name: Abimael Guzm...
...I cannot verify all the stories...
...My recent trip to Ayacucho helped me to understand better the physicalhistorical setting -- what Peru's president meant at the Word Food Organization (when he spoke about Peru's own geography serving as the basis for an agricultural solution to its economic problems...
...I greeted him...
...A general shootout ensues...
...Will Sendero Luminoso permit such a Christian presence...
...On occasional home visits, some old friends of the "movement" would ask me: "How goes the revolution...
...The Agrarian Reform of the military government broke up the haciendas and began to raise the consciousness of the indigenous peasants, but these surface changes did not really equal the formation of a new moral consciousness at the grass roots...
...Rand didn't have time to memorize his whole piece adequately...
...I do not speak Quechua...
...Also, I saw no serious programs that could change the fate of our people working the mines...
...Where does the story begin...
...after all, I was their "Padrecito...
...Program in Contemporary Mission WASHINGTON THEOLOGICAL UNION 9001 New Hampshire Avenue Silver Spring, MD 20903-3699 (301) 439-0551 14 February 1986:81corner of death...
...Who will dare investigate...
...I knew our own people of the peasant villages...
Vol. 113 • February 1986 • No. 3
