Mary Jo McConahay

Nicaragua and Honduras, most deeply affected, were, with Haiti, the rock-bottom poorest countries in the hemisphere, even before all their bridges fell, before landslides and the sheer force of water cracked every other kilometer of asphalt road.

Tiny, deforested El Salvador was already the ecological basket case of the region before the first drop of rain fell. (“Where is 99 percent of El Salvador’s territory?” the grim joke went. “In the sea.”)

And this country, Guatemala, was celebrating 22 months of peace after 37 years of civil conflict in which some 150,000 died. Government was coming up short on money to fulfill commitments in the peace accords, but scrambling to find it. Now all bets are off.

Historically in Central America, the dislocation and discontent that follows natural disasters have been fertile ground for would-be organizers of dissidents. That was famously the case following earthquakes in the 1970s in Nicaragua, where Sandinista youth worked in poor barrios that later supported their revolution. In Guatemala, young people who first saw the reality of the impoverished countryside when volunteering to help after the disaster eventually supported guerrillas.

Indeed, corruption in handling international earthquake relief on the part of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and his cronies was one of the nails in the coffin of that regime. And in the 1980s, rebel sympathizers were able to use the earthquake that hit the Salvadoran capitol to their advantage, too.

This is the first time in the memory of most Central Americans that the region is at peace. Observers are beginning to say that unless aid comes in quickly and is applied efficiently, without corruption, it will be a matter of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Here in Guatemala, many look back 25 years to the last terrible visitation, an earthquake that killed 24,000. While that immediate death toll was higher, the effects of Mitch may be more devastating: The earthquake did not destroy food crops. Mitch did. Not only are crops gone, but seeds too. “And not just any seeds,” as one elderly man reminded me, but those that had been bred year after year for the microclimate of each hill and valley, to produce the best for its soil and air. For these countries, famine is now a possibility.

At the edge of this town a church stands near the village that was overrun by the river that carried the mayor away. An ancient tree grows there that the local devout believe is miraculous. Often, they gather its seeds for the power they might contain. The plaza before the church is now a mass of mud. Townspeople gather there and watch workmen try to clear it, but the miracle tree remains out of reach.

Now that he is pontiff, both sides are holding their breath.

One key to Benedict’s papacy may be found far from the elegant St. Peter’s Square or the after-Mass coffees in U.S. church halls. Ratzinger made one of his hallmark stands as a Vatican force in the villages and rough urban-misery belts of Latin America, the globe’s most Catholic region. There, in the 1980s, he confronted the fast-moving tide of liberation theology, an intellectual and popular movement that linked Catholic theology and political activism in everyday issues of social justice and human rights. Ratzinger officially reversed the tide, forbidding certain Catholic theologians to publish, in what was called a “silencing.”

Ratzinger issued a 1984 document with something like the force of law. The “Instruction” defined Rome’s opposition to liberation theology’s “fundamental threat” and weighed in on naming conservative Latin bishops.

Unofficially, liberation theology lives. On a continent of some 500 million — where most are poor, where the neoliberal economic plans of the 1990s didn’t pan out, and where three-quarters of its people now live under democratically elected leftist governments — the attraction of a Catholicism that links God’s will with the desire for a better and more dignified life in the here and now, not just after death, remains strong. How Benedict XVI faces this reality, for face it he must in a church that claims to be not just “one” but “universal,” will be a marker of his papacy.

In the 1980s, the Berlin Wall remained intact and Ratzinger believed liberation theology was incipient Marxism with a religious veneer. He zeroed in on some intellectual proponents who linked Marx and Jesus. He did not focus on the outcomes of Vatican II — where Ratzinger himself was considered a liberal reformer — and the Latin American conferences in Medellin and Puebla, where bishops decided that the Latin church must stake its future on “an option for the poor.” He did not publicly regard the thousands of small communities who were reading the Bible together in a new way, sitting under trees or on dirt floors with no clergy or intellectuals in sight, finding what they called the strength to be actors in their lives.

What would have happened, Guatemalans and Salvadorans ask to this day, if Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II had supported the Latin American call for liberation from autocratic rulers with the same force with which the European churchmen supported the Polish Solidarity revolution?

On the eve of his election as pope, Ratzinger addressed the cardinals with an unmistakable condemnation of “relativism,” which can include the idea that one religion is as good as another. He also raised this idea last year in his book “Called to Communion.” In the 1980s, the idea that liberation theology was not strictly Catholic, but “frequently tries to create a new universality for which the classical church divisions are supposed to have become irrelevant,” rankled Ratzinger.

Indeed, liberation theology was quickly spreading at the time, and not only geographically from the thatched-roof chapels in Latin America to Africa, the Philippines and the barrios of North America. It was jumping churches, too. Renowned American Protestant thinkers such as Robert McAfee Brown spoke to it and defended Catholic theologians “silenced” by Ratzinger. The Rev. Luis Gurriaran, a Spanish Sacred Heart priest working in rural Guatemala, once recalled how fundamentalist evangelical Protestant preachers — the proliferation of whom are seen as a headache by bishops today — embraced local forms of liberation theology after massacres or intense hardships in their communities. “Those who identify with their congregations come to look at the world through their eyes,” he said. How the new pope regards this mutual embrace of people of faith on the ground, no matter what their churches, will be key to the shape of his tenure.

Archbishop Oscar Romero began his administration of the San Salvadoran church as an orthodox, conservative prelate who made no waves. But he stayed in touch with his congregations in a personal way and listened as over the years they told him of family members taken by death squads. He looked at the books of photos of the disappeared and of the tortured bodies of civilians who opposed the government, records that his church workers collected to help parishioners. Because of his pastoral work and his written reflections on it, because of his defense of the poor acting to change their own situation — even politically — and because of his 1980 assassination by a death squad after calling for a stop to the civil war, Romero came to be considered a symbol of the best of liberation theology.

In Pope Benedict’s first words “to the city and the world” from the balcony at St. Peter’s, he called himself an “insufficient instrument” and “a simple worker in the vineyard.” Will he listen with pastoral ears, as Romero did, to the voices of ordinary Catholics, whether gay, divorced, alienated or seeking? Will he listen with new ears to the realities that underpin the theology of liberation in all its senses, what Latin American Catholics call “the cry of the people”?

© Pacific News Service 2005

As if reading my mind, the woman said she wanted no money, only to give the baby girls to someone who might keep them together. Her eyes seemed absent, as if she were watching things that weren’t right in front of her. She said her husband had been killed a few days before, near a town on the south coast, in a nameless skirmish in a war that eventually took 75,000 lives, mostly civilians. It was my first encounter with the terrible decisions of mothers in wartime, and I can’t forget it as bombs begin to fall over Iraq.

That Salvadoran woman was freshly a widow, with two kids who had a chance to survive, even by begging on the streets, and she was looking for a way to help the infant girls to a chance. At least she might dream of them forevermore, truly or falsely, as being alive somewhere. Later I would hear of women who held their babies so tight they smothered, lest their crying give away a hiding place to the passing enemy, and that way they saved the lives of many others. I was under fire with civilians when I would hear these stories from women with infants, as if they feared such a decision would fall their way too — if not that day then another.

To look at the photos and video images that are bringing us the conflict in Iraq is to see war as the sleek, black nose of a fighter jet silhouetted against a purple sunset, or an airman practicing his golf swing off the deck of the Kitty Hawk, or increasingly, iconic images of tanks or individual soldiers seen through the diffusion lens of fine Arabic sand. None will be the picture of war the women of Iraq will carry with them. Because war on the ground is about surviving, and of course civilians have few survival tools once conflict breaks out around them. The picture of war for women may be a dark hiding place, where you can gather your family whose survival depends upon you.

This is the ultimate test of the parent’s ultimate responsibility — to keep the children out of danger — and control over success or failure is snatched from your hands. I think of a farmer in El Salvador, a guerrilla supporter, who showed me where he had hidden his 7-year-old daughter in a cave while he and others took a riskier hiding place in tall grass, only to watch a government helicopter land, find the girl and take off with her. Had he cried out, he would have betrayed the hiding place of everyone around him. “Do you think she knows I was just trying to protect her?” asked the agonized man. “Do you think people will know she is not an orphan?”

As conflict starts, the rule that says a parent protects her child is broken for her. Chaos becomes the rule. But the guilt and misery that come from failing to protect are permanent. Ten to 20 years after mass killing events in Central America, I’ve attended exhumations at sites surrounded by still-grieving families who lost loved ones, who tell the forensic anthropologists exactly what the husband or child was wearing the day the killers came, so they can help identify the remains.

U.S. officials are saying this Iraq war will be fast, days or weeks of shock and awe, then victory. The families under fire will time the duration of the war with a different clock.

© Pacific News Service.

Recently, the government permitted Malaysian-backed companies to log areas in the reserve and elsewhere — more than half a million acres in this district. Most people here are Maya, like Acal, and hold no deeds to their homesites or cornfields or to the hunting areas around the villages where they have lived for generations.

Belize, the former British Honduras, is small — about the size of Massachusetts with a population of only 210,000 — and sells its natural resources because it needs foreign exchange to repay a large national debt. But costs could be high — not only loss of the forest, but the possibility of serious dissent.

Maya in the region are subsistence farmers, using slash and burn methods and rotating fields in a careful, sustainable way. They are cash poor, and depend on the forests not only for necessities such as thatch for their housetops and medicine, but for fish and game, the only protein most of them eat.

They vote in elections and their children go to school and speak English. But residents insist that their participation in the life of the nation does not mean they are willing to sacrifice their own culture and identity for someone’s idea of economic development. And their lives are so interwoven with the forest, says Acal, that the logging concessions feel like an attack.

Opposition to the logging is headed by Julian Cho, a Maya who recalls the lesson he learned while visiting Indian reservations as a student in the United States. “We Maya are ignorant about laws that govern land. We simply come and live in a place but others do not think this way. Now we ask is there a way to get land security?”

Cho displays a computer-created map showing that logging concessions nearly cover all the traditional Maya lands.

Belize may be tiny, but its forests — with those in neighboring Guatemala and Mexico’s lowland Chiapas — form a living lung, a vital corridor for animals, especially wintering birds, and for genetic diversity.

The government has an excellent forest management plan and local district forest officer Wayne Bardalez claims that forestry officials are right alongside the loggers every hour that they work. But critics maintain there are not enough officials to patrol the region, and residents point to streams so clogged they make fishing impossible and irrigation difficult.

Opposition to the logging is far from universal. Support is strong in the capital, and in Toledo’s own provincial capital, Punta Gorda, a pleasant seaside town of some 4000, where the Maya presence is felt only on market mornings, when they arrive to sell fruits and vegetables.

The Maya way of life “is history,” said a car mechanic. “What we need now are healthy industries that bring jobs, like tourism. The roads being built into the forest by Malaysians can bring tourists there, too.”

Local businessman Calvert Supal also supports the logging. He owns the land on which the logging company built its sawmill — one of the largest in Central America, according to industry sources.

A customer in Supal’s hardware store, Basilio Ico, mayor of Silver Creek Village, explained that at first he had joined the peaceful protest with others in the Toledo Association of Maya Mayors. “But I have eight mouths to feed,” he said. “What is Toledo benefiting from such an organization? We need jobs.” Ico is now employed as a carpenter by one of the Malaysian companies.

Sylvestre Romero-Palma, first Hispanic head of the Anglican church here, and himself part Maya, has asked if Belize, independent since 1981, must “repeat the mistakes of the past.” Belize became a British colony more than 300 years ago when a group of loggers overcame the indigenous population, and imported black slaves.

Logging is set to begin again this year after the rain season ends, which is usually in February.

Quote of the day

Brit Lit

“Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964 and enountered a tribe of full-grown women … babbling excitedly about the doings of hobbits, it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the 20th century.”

– Author and essayist Germaine Greer, commenting on “The Lord of the Rings” being chosen as the “greatest” book of the 20th century in a British poll of 25,000 readers. (“Fiction and food fill up our bookshelves,” in Monday’s London Daily Telegraph)