provocateur
29th August 2003, 23:36
http://www.linearossage.it/Christ%20guerrilla.JPG
Excerpts from Inevitable Revolutions: the United States in Central America by Dr. Walter Lafeber
Internal Alternative: Bases for Christ and Other Revolutionaries
External changes in the Central American region were accompanied by an internal transformation. The Roman Catholic Church, whose main mission in Central America for centuries had been to comfort the rich, bless the military and christianize (but not disturb) the peasants, dramatically became an engine for revolution. Not since the sixteenth century had the Church made such a massive effort to change the lives of so many people.
The beginnings of the transformation went back to at least 1891 when Pope Leo XIII's encyclical, Rerum Novarum, officially stated the Church's position that capitalism as well as socialism could dangerously distort social and religious values. For the next half-century, however, priests in Latin America devoted their time to fighting socialism (as in post-1959 Cuba), not capitalism. A small breakthrough did occur in Chile, where the Church (trying to find an alternative to Castroism), worked with the Christian Democrat party to put Eduardo Frei into power in 1964. Frei's success and the onrush of Alliance for Progress funds raised hopes for a moderate reform movement that might provide a model for the continent. These hopes were dashed by 1968. Both Frei and the Alliance failed, especially in the critical area of land reform. Salvador Allende replaced Frei; the alliance gave way to Nixon-Kissinger militarization [CIA backed Pinochet coup]. And the Church began a fundamental reexamination of its role in a hemisphere where Castro had succeeded and Kennedy [i.e. Alliance for Progress] had failed.
The reexamination had begun with Pope John XXIII's extraordinary encyclicals of 1961 and 1963 that stressed the need to honor human rights and create decent standards of living for all peoples. Otherwise, Pope John warned, revolutions were probable. He then opened Vatican Council II (1963-65) that studied anew the relationship between the church and the world. The Church defined its members as a "Pilgrim People of God," that is, a changing people making their way through changing historical circumstances. The Church thus became concerned about development, and specifically how social science could help explain the changes that wracked such areas as Latin America. This in turn opened the clergy to ideas about "dependency" and the effect dependency had on the "Pilgrim People."
The impact of the debate on Latin American churches was profound. Not only had the Church failed politically by opposing Castro and supporting Frei. Membership and attendance had dropped steadily, and recruits for the clergy grew scarce. The working class and peasants, who had venerated priests, refused to defer to them. The gap between the poor and the rich also separated the poor and the priests. Concern in the hierarchy heightened until Pope Paul VI decided to speak personally to the Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops held at Medellín, Colombia, in 1968. The Medellín conference helped trigger the religious revolution that swept the Church into Central America's secular revolutions, and also proved crucial in formalizing liberation theology.
Pope Paul condemned violence as non-Christian, but the bishops turned his view around to argue for the existence of different kinds of violence. One of the worst and most prevalent, they concluded, was "institutionalized violence." The phrase (perhaps the most famous to come out of the meeting) referred to the social and structural conditions of poverty that starved the poor. This approach shifted the problem of sin from individuals to societies. Attention switched from personal conversion to social change, a change that could end "institutionalized violence." The Church thus focused on the poor, not the rich.
At this point in the argument, several other terms appeared that would haunt oligarchs during the seventies. Through a process of consciousness raising, or conscientización, the poor themselves were to change their conditions. The idea of the masses becoming catalyst for their own freedom became known as "liberation theology." During the late sixties, as the rhetoric of the Alliance [for Progress] became hollow, Medellín's documents placed a premium on acts: "It has not ceased to be the hour of speech," one document entitled "Justice" stated, "but it has come to be, with an even more dramatic urgency, the hour for action." Action was to reshape entire societies. To understand how that could be accomplished the bishops returned to dependency theory ---- the view that international capitalism had through a long process exploited Latin America and institutionalized poverty by making the continent dependent on foreign-controlled trade and investment.
The consensus view was captured by Marcos McGrath, Archbishop of Panama Mcgrath belonged to the moderate group at Medellín, but shortly after the conference he stood in the forefront of Panama's fight to gain control of the Canal, and he also aligned himself with Central American revolutionaries. In 1973, as these struggles intensified, McGrath explained his position in the influential journal, Foreign Affairs:
"The liberal capitalist system and the temptation of the Marxist system appear as the only alternatives in our continent for the transformation of economic structures. Both these systems are affronts to the dignity of the human person. The first takes as a premise the primacy of capital, its power, and the discriminating use of capital in the pursuit of gain. The other, although ideologically it may pretend to be humanist, looks rather to collective man, and in practice converts itself into a totalitarian concentration of state power. It is our obligation to denounce this situation in which Latin America finds itself caught between these two options and remains dependent upon one or the other of the centers of power which control its economy."
Neither McGrath nor the other clergy knew where the third option might be. The Medellín documents, however, agreed that a starting point for the search was to work with the poor to change the satus quo. That decision had special meaning for priests and especially nuns and laywomen who lived and worked with the poor. By the 1970 trouble stirred in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, among other Latin American areas, but the revolutionaries seemed confined mostly to the bourgeois class. Conditions changed after the failure of the Alliance for Progress and the 1973 economic crisis. They also changed as priests and nuns began to work in villages to transform not just isolated individuals, but a system.
The Church, it turned out, was superbly structured for such activities. At the local level it established communidades de base, or base communities, in which the clergy worked with the peasants at a smaller and more informal level than the Church parish. In the base communities, all issues could be discussed --- political, human, doctrinal, and religious. The bases became a more radical counterpart of the black people's churches in the United States during the civil rights drive. The base communities, moreover, could be protected by the Church's top hierarchy that continued to have close relations with high government officials, and by Roman Catholic international organizations that channeled funds into, and provided publicity for, the grass-roots operation. The military-oligarchy complex could chop down political opponents, but the Church's voice continued to be heard.
El Salvador became the first testing, and killing, ground in Central America. Shortly after Medellín, the Salvador Conference of Bishops split into conservative and liberal factions, but all, nevertheless, urged the government to divide some idle cotton and coffee plantations into small plots for campesinos. Oligarchs pronounced the bishops to be "Communist and Catholic leaders." Elderly Archbishop Luis Chavéz y González refused to back down. He sent a delegate to the nation's first congress called to debate agrarian reform. Right-wing vigilantes kidnapped the delegate; when later found he had been pumped full of drugs and was delirious. In January 1972 police arrested a parish priest who had been administering to peasants. The next day passersby found his body dismembered.
Repression deepened as revolution spread in the mid-seventies. Priests in the base communities lost heart when a moderate, Oscar Romero, became archbishop in 1977. But then a close Jesuit friend of Romero's Rutilio Grande, was murdered because of his work in the villages. Father Alfonso Navarro declared that Grande had been correct in believing that peasants, priests, and oligarchs were equal. Navarro and a fifteen-year-old boy who was in the priest's home were killed by right-wing groups armed with government rifles. One vigilante group, the White Warriors, threatened to kill the remaining forty-seven Jesuits in El Salvador. Pamphlets appeared: "Be a patriot! Kill a priest!" Once hesitant, Archbishop Romero became outspoken in condemning government and vigilante terrorism. The Church did not retreat. Priests continued to work with campesino groups. But the Church also publicly condemned the guerrillas' murder of the Salvadoran Foreign Minister who belonged to the dominant Fourteen Families.
Of most importance, many priests and nuns at the local level changed dramatically. They had begun the seventies ministering to the poor and obeying the instructions of their bishops. They soon learned that neither their commitment to the campesinos nor the principles of Medellín could be carried out without political action. When peaceful attempts to obtain food, land, and other rights ended without change or in repression, the clerics moved to nonviolent opposition, then to supporting violence. A religious commitment to ameliorate poverty could end in a political, even an armed, commitment to oppose the government. The system that enveloped Central America seemed to leave no other alternative.
A different Church met in 1979 at Puebla, Mexico, for the Third Council of Latin American Bishops. At the local levels, priests and nuns were radicalized. But atop the hierarchy a new pope, John Paul II, appeared to declare that while the church had to be committed to the poor and to evangelization, it had to be committed only in the religious, not the political sense. Priests were to be involved in "community," not partisan causes. Unlike the 1968 conference, conservative lay experts and clerics controlled the agenda and the position papers. But the debate at Puebla occurred in a limited ideological area. The Church had experienced too much to return to the fifties. As one scholar observed, the bishops worked within an intellectual consensus in which no one sounded like a true Marxist on the one side, or like a Latin American dictator on the other. The bishops could not change events in the base communities. Regardless of how they feared the animal, Church leaders now rode a tiger.
The bishops therefore condemned both capitalism and Marxism, both "terrorist and guerrilla violence." They warned that Catholics must not confuse "gospel values with a particular ideology." (That phrase brought the most revealing quip of the conference from a Peruvian bishop: "Let him who is without ideology throw the first stone.") The Puebla group then reconfirmed the central tenets of Medellín. Poverty had become worse among "our indians, peasants, women, marginal people of the city, and especially the women in these social sectors." The groups picked for attention were significant because they provided the support for revolutions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The conference denounced selfish multinational corporations that cared little about "the host country's welfare." It noted the "declining value of our raw materials in relation to the prices of the manufactured goods we buy."
The bishops explicitly condemned the "stages of growth" theory advanced by U.S. economists during the fifties and sixties: "Poverty is not a transitory state; but it is the product of economic, social, and political situations and structures." The key word was "structures," for it signalled the need to redesign the system and not wait for slow --- and often illusory ---transitions. The conference listed specific human rights and declared them to to be an "indispensable part" of the church's mission. But the Bishops went far beyond Jimmy Carter's political and civil rights; these were considered inadequate--- even a trap---because they provided restricted democracy, not a remedy for poverty. Conservative Catholic leaders might have prepared the conference agenda, but as one participant observed, "The visiting team managed a tie."
That judgement understated the meaning of Puebla for the more liberal and radical clergy. In Nicaragua, priests were instrumental in the revolution. At a critical moment they played the major role in transforming a narrow Marxist movement into a more moderate, broadbased, and powerful force. In El Salvador, Archbishop Romero became highly critical of government-supported vigilante groups and the atrocities committed by the military. One group of Jesuits led the first strike in history in a large sugar mill and worked closely with a peasant union that supplied soldiers and supplies for a guerrilla unit. As repression increased, Archbishop Romero found himself in a minority among the leaders of the church. He heard the voice of disapproval directly from Pope John Paul II in the Vatican. On his return to San Salvador, a right-wing political group murdered Romero while he said mass.
Later in 1980 the bodies of three nuns and a Catholic lay person, all U.S. citizens, were found in a shallow grave. At least three of the women had been sexually assaulted before being shot. With these atrocities, support for the revolution spread, even in the United States. One of the murderd women, Maryknoll Sister Ita Ford, said just before her death that "the Christian base communities are the greatest threat to military dictatorship throughout Latin America." One reporter Clifford Krauss, visited such a group in El Salvador's Chalatenango province---a rebel stronghold---in early 1982. He wrote that midway into the afternoon thirty-five guerrillas and peasants stopped working to read from the New Testament Gospels about the evil of egotism and selfishness. The lay minister then observed, "The word of god is for us to put into action, to develop our mission. God came to earth to liberate man. If we want to create a new society, we have to sacrifice, we have to suffer."
The best account of the Latin American Church in the seventies estimated the suffering of Roman Catholics who followed the Medellín principles: 850 priests, nuns, and bishops were torured, murdered, expelled, or arrested between 1968 and the Puebla conference of 1979. In Guatemala, the reaction took several forms. Priests who worked with Indian communities were driven away or murdered. But by the early 1980s they confronted a different challenge. Fundamentalist Protestant sects spread through the country, preaching individual conversion, the glories of the military and political authority, the virtues of capitalism and the value of inequality.
One sect was the Christian Church of the Word, associated with Global Outreach of Eureka, California. That group helped Guatemalans rebuild after the 1976 earthquake. Among the sect's missionary conquests was General Efraín Ríos Montt, who seized dictatorial power in 1982. His Church of the Word, not surprisingly, aligned itself with the Guatemalan military that defined priests and nuns as the enemy. Three priests were killed within a thirty-six month period in just one province --- an area in which rebel strength nevertheless grew. According to one Guatemalan army officer, General Ríos Montt's word for the Indians was simple: "If you are with us, we'll feed you, if not, we'll kill you." The Roman Catholic priests meanwhile warned that if the sects succeeded in spreading their doctrine of individualism, the village communities would be fragmented and the last hope of the Indians destroyed.
Little more than a decade after the Medellín meeting, the Roman Catholic Church literally stood on the firing line in Central America. The transformation had been historic, the kind of history measured in a half-millenium, not just a decade or a century. The post-Medellín years also turned out to be historic for the Central American nations: one fell to revolution, another was on the edge of doing so, and two others stumbled towards the edge. A guerrilla movement even appeared in Costa Rica. In the first four countries, the revolutions derived much power and direction from the priests and nuns who had not intended to become revolutionaries when they began searching for alternatives to the poverty and disease which enshrouded their work.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/039...9580416-2832043 (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393309649/qid=1062200737/sr=2-3/ref=sr_2_3/002-9580416-2832043)
Excerpts from Inevitable Revolutions: the United States in Central America by Dr. Walter Lafeber
Internal Alternative: Bases for Christ and Other Revolutionaries
External changes in the Central American region were accompanied by an internal transformation. The Roman Catholic Church, whose main mission in Central America for centuries had been to comfort the rich, bless the military and christianize (but not disturb) the peasants, dramatically became an engine for revolution. Not since the sixteenth century had the Church made such a massive effort to change the lives of so many people.
The beginnings of the transformation went back to at least 1891 when Pope Leo XIII's encyclical, Rerum Novarum, officially stated the Church's position that capitalism as well as socialism could dangerously distort social and religious values. For the next half-century, however, priests in Latin America devoted their time to fighting socialism (as in post-1959 Cuba), not capitalism. A small breakthrough did occur in Chile, where the Church (trying to find an alternative to Castroism), worked with the Christian Democrat party to put Eduardo Frei into power in 1964. Frei's success and the onrush of Alliance for Progress funds raised hopes for a moderate reform movement that might provide a model for the continent. These hopes were dashed by 1968. Both Frei and the Alliance failed, especially in the critical area of land reform. Salvador Allende replaced Frei; the alliance gave way to Nixon-Kissinger militarization [CIA backed Pinochet coup]. And the Church began a fundamental reexamination of its role in a hemisphere where Castro had succeeded and Kennedy [i.e. Alliance for Progress] had failed.
The reexamination had begun with Pope John XXIII's extraordinary encyclicals of 1961 and 1963 that stressed the need to honor human rights and create decent standards of living for all peoples. Otherwise, Pope John warned, revolutions were probable. He then opened Vatican Council II (1963-65) that studied anew the relationship between the church and the world. The Church defined its members as a "Pilgrim People of God," that is, a changing people making their way through changing historical circumstances. The Church thus became concerned about development, and specifically how social science could help explain the changes that wracked such areas as Latin America. This in turn opened the clergy to ideas about "dependency" and the effect dependency had on the "Pilgrim People."
The impact of the debate on Latin American churches was profound. Not only had the Church failed politically by opposing Castro and supporting Frei. Membership and attendance had dropped steadily, and recruits for the clergy grew scarce. The working class and peasants, who had venerated priests, refused to defer to them. The gap between the poor and the rich also separated the poor and the priests. Concern in the hierarchy heightened until Pope Paul VI decided to speak personally to the Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops held at Medellín, Colombia, in 1968. The Medellín conference helped trigger the religious revolution that swept the Church into Central America's secular revolutions, and also proved crucial in formalizing liberation theology.
Pope Paul condemned violence as non-Christian, but the bishops turned his view around to argue for the existence of different kinds of violence. One of the worst and most prevalent, they concluded, was "institutionalized violence." The phrase (perhaps the most famous to come out of the meeting) referred to the social and structural conditions of poverty that starved the poor. This approach shifted the problem of sin from individuals to societies. Attention switched from personal conversion to social change, a change that could end "institutionalized violence." The Church thus focused on the poor, not the rich.
At this point in the argument, several other terms appeared that would haunt oligarchs during the seventies. Through a process of consciousness raising, or conscientización, the poor themselves were to change their conditions. The idea of the masses becoming catalyst for their own freedom became known as "liberation theology." During the late sixties, as the rhetoric of the Alliance [for Progress] became hollow, Medellín's documents placed a premium on acts: "It has not ceased to be the hour of speech," one document entitled "Justice" stated, "but it has come to be, with an even more dramatic urgency, the hour for action." Action was to reshape entire societies. To understand how that could be accomplished the bishops returned to dependency theory ---- the view that international capitalism had through a long process exploited Latin America and institutionalized poverty by making the continent dependent on foreign-controlled trade and investment.
The consensus view was captured by Marcos McGrath, Archbishop of Panama Mcgrath belonged to the moderate group at Medellín, but shortly after the conference he stood in the forefront of Panama's fight to gain control of the Canal, and he also aligned himself with Central American revolutionaries. In 1973, as these struggles intensified, McGrath explained his position in the influential journal, Foreign Affairs:
"The liberal capitalist system and the temptation of the Marxist system appear as the only alternatives in our continent for the transformation of economic structures. Both these systems are affronts to the dignity of the human person. The first takes as a premise the primacy of capital, its power, and the discriminating use of capital in the pursuit of gain. The other, although ideologically it may pretend to be humanist, looks rather to collective man, and in practice converts itself into a totalitarian concentration of state power. It is our obligation to denounce this situation in which Latin America finds itself caught between these two options and remains dependent upon one or the other of the centers of power which control its economy."
Neither McGrath nor the other clergy knew where the third option might be. The Medellín documents, however, agreed that a starting point for the search was to work with the poor to change the satus quo. That decision had special meaning for priests and especially nuns and laywomen who lived and worked with the poor. By the 1970 trouble stirred in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, among other Latin American areas, but the revolutionaries seemed confined mostly to the bourgeois class. Conditions changed after the failure of the Alliance for Progress and the 1973 economic crisis. They also changed as priests and nuns began to work in villages to transform not just isolated individuals, but a system.
The Church, it turned out, was superbly structured for such activities. At the local level it established communidades de base, or base communities, in which the clergy worked with the peasants at a smaller and more informal level than the Church parish. In the base communities, all issues could be discussed --- political, human, doctrinal, and religious. The bases became a more radical counterpart of the black people's churches in the United States during the civil rights drive. The base communities, moreover, could be protected by the Church's top hierarchy that continued to have close relations with high government officials, and by Roman Catholic international organizations that channeled funds into, and provided publicity for, the grass-roots operation. The military-oligarchy complex could chop down political opponents, but the Church's voice continued to be heard.
El Salvador became the first testing, and killing, ground in Central America. Shortly after Medellín, the Salvador Conference of Bishops split into conservative and liberal factions, but all, nevertheless, urged the government to divide some idle cotton and coffee plantations into small plots for campesinos. Oligarchs pronounced the bishops to be "Communist and Catholic leaders." Elderly Archbishop Luis Chavéz y González refused to back down. He sent a delegate to the nation's first congress called to debate agrarian reform. Right-wing vigilantes kidnapped the delegate; when later found he had been pumped full of drugs and was delirious. In January 1972 police arrested a parish priest who had been administering to peasants. The next day passersby found his body dismembered.
Repression deepened as revolution spread in the mid-seventies. Priests in the base communities lost heart when a moderate, Oscar Romero, became archbishop in 1977. But then a close Jesuit friend of Romero's Rutilio Grande, was murdered because of his work in the villages. Father Alfonso Navarro declared that Grande had been correct in believing that peasants, priests, and oligarchs were equal. Navarro and a fifteen-year-old boy who was in the priest's home were killed by right-wing groups armed with government rifles. One vigilante group, the White Warriors, threatened to kill the remaining forty-seven Jesuits in El Salvador. Pamphlets appeared: "Be a patriot! Kill a priest!" Once hesitant, Archbishop Romero became outspoken in condemning government and vigilante terrorism. The Church did not retreat. Priests continued to work with campesino groups. But the Church also publicly condemned the guerrillas' murder of the Salvadoran Foreign Minister who belonged to the dominant Fourteen Families.
Of most importance, many priests and nuns at the local level changed dramatically. They had begun the seventies ministering to the poor and obeying the instructions of their bishops. They soon learned that neither their commitment to the campesinos nor the principles of Medellín could be carried out without political action. When peaceful attempts to obtain food, land, and other rights ended without change or in repression, the clerics moved to nonviolent opposition, then to supporting violence. A religious commitment to ameliorate poverty could end in a political, even an armed, commitment to oppose the government. The system that enveloped Central America seemed to leave no other alternative.
A different Church met in 1979 at Puebla, Mexico, for the Third Council of Latin American Bishops. At the local levels, priests and nuns were radicalized. But atop the hierarchy a new pope, John Paul II, appeared to declare that while the church had to be committed to the poor and to evangelization, it had to be committed only in the religious, not the political sense. Priests were to be involved in "community," not partisan causes. Unlike the 1968 conference, conservative lay experts and clerics controlled the agenda and the position papers. But the debate at Puebla occurred in a limited ideological area. The Church had experienced too much to return to the fifties. As one scholar observed, the bishops worked within an intellectual consensus in which no one sounded like a true Marxist on the one side, or like a Latin American dictator on the other. The bishops could not change events in the base communities. Regardless of how they feared the animal, Church leaders now rode a tiger.
The bishops therefore condemned both capitalism and Marxism, both "terrorist and guerrilla violence." They warned that Catholics must not confuse "gospel values with a particular ideology." (That phrase brought the most revealing quip of the conference from a Peruvian bishop: "Let him who is without ideology throw the first stone.") The Puebla group then reconfirmed the central tenets of Medellín. Poverty had become worse among "our indians, peasants, women, marginal people of the city, and especially the women in these social sectors." The groups picked for attention were significant because they provided the support for revolutions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The conference denounced selfish multinational corporations that cared little about "the host country's welfare." It noted the "declining value of our raw materials in relation to the prices of the manufactured goods we buy."
The bishops explicitly condemned the "stages of growth" theory advanced by U.S. economists during the fifties and sixties: "Poverty is not a transitory state; but it is the product of economic, social, and political situations and structures." The key word was "structures," for it signalled the need to redesign the system and not wait for slow --- and often illusory ---transitions. The conference listed specific human rights and declared them to to be an "indispensable part" of the church's mission. But the Bishops went far beyond Jimmy Carter's political and civil rights; these were considered inadequate--- even a trap---because they provided restricted democracy, not a remedy for poverty. Conservative Catholic leaders might have prepared the conference agenda, but as one participant observed, "The visiting team managed a tie."
That judgement understated the meaning of Puebla for the more liberal and radical clergy. In Nicaragua, priests were instrumental in the revolution. At a critical moment they played the major role in transforming a narrow Marxist movement into a more moderate, broadbased, and powerful force. In El Salvador, Archbishop Romero became highly critical of government-supported vigilante groups and the atrocities committed by the military. One group of Jesuits led the first strike in history in a large sugar mill and worked closely with a peasant union that supplied soldiers and supplies for a guerrilla unit. As repression increased, Archbishop Romero found himself in a minority among the leaders of the church. He heard the voice of disapproval directly from Pope John Paul II in the Vatican. On his return to San Salvador, a right-wing political group murdered Romero while he said mass.
Later in 1980 the bodies of three nuns and a Catholic lay person, all U.S. citizens, were found in a shallow grave. At least three of the women had been sexually assaulted before being shot. With these atrocities, support for the revolution spread, even in the United States. One of the murderd women, Maryknoll Sister Ita Ford, said just before her death that "the Christian base communities are the greatest threat to military dictatorship throughout Latin America." One reporter Clifford Krauss, visited such a group in El Salvador's Chalatenango province---a rebel stronghold---in early 1982. He wrote that midway into the afternoon thirty-five guerrillas and peasants stopped working to read from the New Testament Gospels about the evil of egotism and selfishness. The lay minister then observed, "The word of god is for us to put into action, to develop our mission. God came to earth to liberate man. If we want to create a new society, we have to sacrifice, we have to suffer."
The best account of the Latin American Church in the seventies estimated the suffering of Roman Catholics who followed the Medellín principles: 850 priests, nuns, and bishops were torured, murdered, expelled, or arrested between 1968 and the Puebla conference of 1979. In Guatemala, the reaction took several forms. Priests who worked with Indian communities were driven away or murdered. But by the early 1980s they confronted a different challenge. Fundamentalist Protestant sects spread through the country, preaching individual conversion, the glories of the military and political authority, the virtues of capitalism and the value of inequality.
One sect was the Christian Church of the Word, associated with Global Outreach of Eureka, California. That group helped Guatemalans rebuild after the 1976 earthquake. Among the sect's missionary conquests was General Efraín Ríos Montt, who seized dictatorial power in 1982. His Church of the Word, not surprisingly, aligned itself with the Guatemalan military that defined priests and nuns as the enemy. Three priests were killed within a thirty-six month period in just one province --- an area in which rebel strength nevertheless grew. According to one Guatemalan army officer, General Ríos Montt's word for the Indians was simple: "If you are with us, we'll feed you, if not, we'll kill you." The Roman Catholic priests meanwhile warned that if the sects succeeded in spreading their doctrine of individualism, the village communities would be fragmented and the last hope of the Indians destroyed.
Little more than a decade after the Medellín meeting, the Roman Catholic Church literally stood on the firing line in Central America. The transformation had been historic, the kind of history measured in a half-millenium, not just a decade or a century. The post-Medellín years also turned out to be historic for the Central American nations: one fell to revolution, another was on the edge of doing so, and two others stumbled towards the edge. A guerrilla movement even appeared in Costa Rica. In the first four countries, the revolutions derived much power and direction from the priests and nuns who had not intended to become revolutionaries when they began searching for alternatives to the poverty and disease which enshrouded their work.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/039...9580416-2832043 (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393309649/qid=1062200737/sr=2-3/ref=sr_2_3/002-9580416-2832043)