Joe Nangle, OFM, was in pastoral work in Lima, Peru, from 1964 to 1975, and later made many trips to Peru and other parts of Latin America. In August 1992, in response to the stepped-up activities of the Shining Path (see "Terror on the Left," December 1992), he returned to Lima to assess the situation personally and visit the people he had worked with years before.—The Editors
One Peru...
I first met Olga Valencia because of the killing of her oldest child by a hit-and-run driver on the Pan American Highway near the center of Lima, Peru. Nine-year-old Jose met an early death as he walked along that busy roadway toward home, carrying in a small pail the scraps of food he had just begged for his family from nearby middle-class homes. That day Olga waited for Jose until the clock told her that something was seriously wrong and she began to retrace Jose's route home. She eventually found a few of us gathered around his lifeless body on the shoulder of the road.
I came to know Olga, as well as her husband and other children, during the several days it took to get Jose buried. As a typical indigenous family, with roots in the Andean highlands, the Valencias could count on little help from their society, even in the tragic death of their child. Police investigators, medical personnel at the morgue, the judicial system of Peru, and the undertaker all seemed determined to block at every turn the Valencias' right to mourn their son and bury him with dignity. Nothing new here for members of Peru's underclass.
Finally, Olga decided in desperation to lay her son to rest in the paupers' area of the cemetery, a common grave for those whose loved ones lack the means even for a small place in the ground. So it was. I drove Olga and her husband to the cemetery with the crude little coffin in the back of the jeep. We carried Jose's remains to the farthest part of the burial grounds and in silence laid them down.
After a time of prayer, the three of us drove back to their one-room, dirt-floor shack in the shantytown of Pamplona Alta. The Valencias once again took up their daily struggle for survival, without the son who had begun to help with that overwhelming burden.
Since that time, Olga has had other children, one of them mentally retarded and in need of institutionalization. She went to the hospital some years ago to visit her second son, Vicente, only to be told, "Ha muerto" ("he's dead"); there was no further explanation. Olga's husband left her and the family one day in a fit of alcoholic despair. She remains today in the same slum area near Lima, living out her depressed, tragic existence.
...And Another
Some three miles up the Pan American Highway from Pamplona Alta is Monterrico, where Jaime Garcia Rodriguez lives. This 50-ish member of Lima's upper middle class went to the best Catholic school in the city, then on to the Catholic University of Lima. For 25 years he has made a substantial living as an importer of consumer goods, selling them at sizable markups in the chic stores of Lima and other cities of Peru.
Garcia Rodriguez lives with his wife and family in Las Casuarinas, an affluent subdivision in Monterrico, protected these days by a gate and police surveillance. He owns a second home in Punta Negra, one of the many upscale beach resorts south of Lima, where his wife and children spend carefree summer days away from the oppressive heat of the city. In both homes they enjoy the services of four domestic workers: two maids, a houseboy, and a gardener.
Some years ago Garcia Rodriguez noticed a swelling in his neck. The best doctors in Lima feared it signaled a tumor, perhaps cancerous. Without hesitation Garcia Rodriguez contacted business associates in the United States and made arrangements for an exploratory operation at the National Institutes of Health. Since his case turned out to be somewhat unique, Garcia Rodriguez was not billed for the successful operation and returned to Lima extolling the skill and generosity of "the gringos." To celebrate his cure, the family threw a fiesta--complete with a live orchestra and catered dinner--for 50 of their closest friends. Afterward, the Garcia Rodriguezes flew back to the United States for a week at Disney World.
Side by Side
The Perus of Olga Valencia and Jaime Garcia Rodriguez have existed side by side since the coming of the conquistadores in the l5th and l6th centuries. One is a Peru of grinding poverty and hopelessness; the other is a Peru of exorbitant middle-class privilege. (Garcia Rodriguez does not represent Peru's fabulously wealthy oligarchy, who for the most part have passed from the scene or are living outside the country. Rather, he is middle class and boasts that he is "self-made.")
In abstract statistical terms, the two Perus translate in the following ways: United Nations data from 1986 (before the country's current economic disaster) show 70 percent of the country's 22 million inhabitants to be classified as "poor" and 20 percent as living in "extreme poverty." (In which of these categories would one place Olga Valencia?) Underemployment (again the question of definition) at the end of 1989 stood at nearly 74 percent; four out of five houses in Peru lack water, sewers, or electricity.
On the other side of the ledger, the well-off send their children to high school, college, and graduate school (a few of the latter to educational centers outside Peru), in a country that in 1980 afforded only 5.7 years of schooling on average to its youth. This privileged population is the 8 percent that have television sets in their homes; the 32 percent that have electricity. They can call on immediate medical services in a country where each doctor has to serve more than 1,000 people (in the United States the ratio is 470 people to each doctor).
A Historic Opportunity
One of this Andean nation's tragedies--alongside incessant natural disasters such as the 1970 earthquake that killed some 70,000 people and the 1991 cholera epidemic--is a moral failure to reconcile the two Perus. The country had such reconciliation within its power at least once in recent history. Therein lies a quasi-biblical story of God's grace, prophetic vision, and political opportunity--all squandered.
Medellin
In l968, the Latin American Catholic Church made what can only be described as a providential and spirit-filled about-face, calling itself to conversion from a sold-out, power-hungry ally of the rich to a continent-wide faith community living out a preferential option for the poor. That year the Medellin Conference, so named for the Colombian city where bishops and theologians gathered, set out to apply the recently concluded Vatican Council (1962-1965) to Latin America's Catholic realities. It went far beyond that mandate.
Representatives from all the countries of Central and South America produced a series of documents that analyzed the many dimensions of life and faith in the region, offered theological principles by which to judge those realities, and then suggested pastoral guidelines for a whole new style of gospel ministry. The scope and impact of Medellin cannot be overestimated.
A church that had historically occupied a privileged place at the side of landed aristocracy and political-military power in Latin America now found within itself the spiritual fortitude to say: "The Church accepts history's judgement on her chiaroscuro [light and dark] past and assumes the full historical responsibility that befalls her in the present....We ought to sharpen the awareness of our duty of solidarity with the poor, to which charity leads us. This solidarity means that we make ours their problems and their struggles, that we know how to speak with them." In effect the church was calling itself to be a church of the poor.
The fact that the hierarchical leader of the Peruvian Catholic Church, Cardinal Juan Landazuri, served as one of the presiders at the Medellin Conference and that Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez received deserved credit as its leading thinker, point to the immediate and profound impact which this event had on that country. It was as if Medellin had happened with Peru in mind.
"Faced with the need for a total change of Latin American structures," said the Medellin documents, "we believe that change has political reform as its pre-requisite." They might as well have directly inserted "Peruvian structures." That was the way such statements were read in Lima and the rest of the country.
Liberation Theology
Underpinning the Medellin Conference was a new theology, or better said, a new way of doing theology. As yet the appellation "liberation" had not come into use to describe the new methodology that would develop shortly. But liberation theology was in full flower at Medellin, and it was a further gift of Peruvian Gustavo Gutierrez to that amazing conference. His church back home in Peru quickly implemented Gutierrez's vision of this incarnational theology based on concrete, historical, sociopolitical realities.
The "circle of praxis" came to dominate our decision making at virtually every level and in every aspect of pastoral life in the Peruvian Catholic Church. Whatever the question--the proper subject for next Sunday's sermon, whether to begin a soup kitchen, speak out on the most recent government economic initiative, or join the latest union demonstration--all was guided by liberation theology's "observe (from the side of the poor), judge (as the poor would judge), and act (with the poor in mind)" methodology.
"The Peruvian Experiment"
A final piece of Peru's historic opportunity also fell into place in 1968 with a leftist military takeover in October of that year. The government of Gen. Juan Velasco Alvarado envisioned a radically different society, one in which the old institutions that had maintained the two Perus would give way to new structures of opportunity for all.
The list of reforms instituted by Velasco's government includes virtually every aspect of Peruvian life. Chief among these was land distribution, that ultimate source of the country's wealth and class division. Some 50 percent of the total agricultural land went from the hands of large, fabulously rich haciendas to landless peasants, a move that benefited nearly a full quarter of Peru's campesino families.
In addition, people were given a chance to participate in politics. The Velasco experiment put into motion a democratization process that inevitably came into conflict with the authoritarian structures of military rule. Still, popular leadership came forward, something rare in Peru's history.
Beginning in 1968, then, Peru had the essential elements for a national reconciliation of its centuries-old divisions of wealth and poverty, education and illiteracy, opportunity and repression, and, especially, white and Indian. The dominant religious organization in the country and on the continent, the Catholic Church, had called in most serious terms for substantive changes in itself and in society; there was a growing philosophical and theological grounding and legitimation for the reconstruction of Peruvian society; and a military government, at least in the beginning, showed itself willing to implement economically and politically the practical steps required for such a reconstruction.
Whether such a command economy could have effected this fundamental change in Peru is doubtful. But the foundations were laid by the Velasco government--the attempt was made.
Success and Ultimate Failure
Those of us who lived and worked in Peru during those years sensed the historic opportunity and challenge before us. I was pastor of a Catholic parish in Monterrico where the Olga Valencias and the Jaime Garcia Rodriguezes lived virtually side by side. Our pastoral task there was deeply incarnational: to implement the church's call for a "preferential option for the poor," to stand with Olga in her struggle, to understand it, and to translate it as best we could to the Garcia Rodriguezes. We succeeded and failed--a microcosm of what happened nationally.
It was not difficult to stand with Olga as she struggled with such elemental tasks as burying her dead child. Anyone with basic human and Christian instincts would have done as much. It was more difficult to understand why Olga had such trouble in carrying out these tasks; why a society could be so cruel to its own; why there were such divisions between haves and have-nots in the first place; why, above all, a loving God allowed such awful discrepancies to exist between human beings.
The greatest difficulty was to translate Olga's plight to the likes of the Garcia Rodriguezes, who formed a major part of that parish. Many of them simply could not or would not understand Christian faith in terms of justice for the "cholos" (a term of derision applied to the Indian population of Peru). One of them said to me as he took leave of the parish: "I don't understand religion that constantly lifts up the social issues. Religion for me is the life of the soul, eternal salvation, my relationship with God." Another called us tontos รบtiles, "useful fools," a reference to those who were supposedly using the church for devious, subversive ends.
The words "communist" and "communism" were often used to describe the efforts to interpret Olga's life for the middle class. The well-intentioned women of the affluent class could not understand it when their suggestion of a fashion show to raise money for the poor was rejected as an insult to those who had only rags to wear.
The experience of the parish in Monterrico reflected what was happening slowly and inexorably across the country. Vested interests undercut or ignored the message of Medellin. Liberation theology began to come in for serious criticism from both church and secular intellectuals, in Peru and elsewhere. And the plain-spoken military men behind the Velasco revolution found themselves joked about, ridiculed, and dismissed as bumblers at best, destroyers of the country at worst.
I can only hint at the outside pressures that Peruvian society experienced during those years. International interests did not take kindly to the basic reorganization being proposed and implemented by Juan Velasco. His government's flirtation with Moscow over military hardware surely struck Washington as a threat to U.S. hegemony in the Americas. Nationalization of multinational industries threw a scare into the brokers from New York, Paris, and Tokyo.
The international part of this story will have to await another forum. What is important here is that Peru had the chance to bring about a just society and lost it. By 1975 a new, conservative, military government was in power; over the next few years Velasco's reforms were gradually rolled back; and the status quo of the past once again prevailed. In 1980 the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) terrorists made their first appearance.
By Their Fruits...
The consequences Peru suffered in not heeding its prophets are biblical and a warning to all peoples of privilege. Some years into the increasingly harsh and threatening activities of Shining Path, a few middle-class people of Monterrico said to me: "Had we listened to the church 15 years ago, we would not find ourselves today facing the possibility of a terrorist regime in this country."
Long ago Jeremiah warned Israel in the name of God: "Only if you thoroughly reform your ways and your deeds; if each of you deals justly with your neighbor; if you no longer oppress the resident alien, the orphan, and the widow; if you no longer shed innocent blood in this place or follow strange gods to your own harm, will I remain with you in this place, in the land which I gave your forebears long ago and forever" (Jeremiah 7:5-7). Israel did not heed nor obey and was driven into captivity. The lesson of Peru serves as a warning that even now societal sins and the continuation of injustices do not go unnoticed.
Peru has suffered immeasurably in the past 12 years. The activities of Shining Path terrorism (see "Terror on the Left," December 1992) and the countermeasures taken through the decade of the '80s by an equally murderous military have accounted for 27,000 deaths, untold numbers of disrupted lives, and an economic toll equal to Peru's entire gross national product.
Hope in the Promise
The great hope of Medellin, liberation theology, and the "Peruvian Experiment" of Velasco Alvarado now lies in ashes, just a memory for the Olga Valencias who once thought things might change. Still, today the pastoral people demonstrate what belief in the incarnation really means. In not giving up they act on the theological virtue of hope, relying on the slow, patient pastoral work of forming groups at the base--the ever-so-small communities at grassroots levels.
These good shepherds manifest heroic confidence in the old promise: "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom a light has shone. You have brought them abundant joy and great rejoicing, as they rejoice before you as at the harvest, as people make merry when dividing spoils. For the yoke that burdened them, the pole on their shoulder, and the rod of their taskmaster you have smashed" (Isaiah 9:2-4).
Sidebar: 'She Lives In Us'
In 1971, at the height of the Velasco revolution, a few thousand landless people occupied a stretch of desert land just south of Lima. Instead of driving them off the land, the leftist government declared the area a new pueblo joven ("young village") and named it Villa El Salvador.
Among the occupying families was a girl of 13 or 14, Maria Elena Moyano. As she matured, Moyano became politically active in that shantytown--first with church-related youth groups, then as a health promoter, and most important, in work with women's organizations. There she helped organize 112 soup kitchens and 507 committees of the famous "Glass of Milk" program for children and the elderly in Villa.
In 1989, Maria Elena was elected vice-mayor of Villa El Salvador, winning 80 percent of the vote in what was by then a city of 300,000. She intensified her work for these slum dwellers, her people. At the same time, she vociferously opposed the violent solutions to Peru's problems represented by Shining Path. "We say [in response to Shining Path] that by doing things for ourselves we are learning to govern ourselves, we are learning what democracy is, what freedom of expression is, what the socialization of the little we can get means."
On February 14, 1992, Shining Path called an "armed strike" in Lima, ordering the entire population to stay at home under threat of execution. Maria Elena led a peace march in defiance of the strike that day. On February 15, a masked woman, a member of Shining Path, shot Maria Elena to death as she was attending a community fiesta. Shining Path then dynamited her body, an act the terrorists call "exemplary justice."
The martyrdom of this mother, wife, person of faith, community leader, and national figure has already backfired against Shining Path, revealing the organization for what it is--a brutal, self-serving group of thugs. At a Eucharist in a mining town some 500 kilometers south of Lima, I witnessed a most remarkable scene. At the moment of offering, two women brought forward a large poster bearing Maria Elena's picture. The officiating priest asked the women to explain their offering. One of them replied, "Maria Elena is not dead. She lives in us and we shall continue her work."
Perhaps Senora Moyano's own words serve as her most fitting epitaph and hold out promise for Peru today: "Friends, revolution means affirmation of life, of the individual and collective dignity; it means a new ethic. Revolution does not mean death or imposition, nor submission or fanaticism. The revolution is new life. It means to fight for a just society based on dignity and solidarity on the side of the organizations created by our own people, respecting their internal democracy and generating new seeds of power for a new Peru.
"I will continue on the side of my people, of the women, the youth and the children. I will continue to fight for peace with social justice. Viva la Vida! Long live life!"
Joe Nangle, OFM, was director of Sojourners outreach when this article appeared.
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