The diaspora began in the early 1970s with selective expulsions and killings. As the violence mounted, the victims numbered in the hundreds, then the thousands, until Central America became an enormous refugee camp, its borders marked by mass graves, like the Sumpul River on the Salvadoran-Honduran frontier, where more than 600 men, women, and children were slaughtered last May.
Among the dispersed or murdered were many members of the Central American Catholic Church, including Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was gunned down while saying Mass in a San Salvador chapel in March of this year. Since then, three more priests have been killed in El Salvador, bringing the total to nine in the past three years. Hundreds of lay leaders have suffered the same fate.
In neighboring Guatemala, military persecution is dismembering the church. Five priests have been killed in the last two years. The bishop of Quiche diocese and president of the Guatemalan Episcopal Conference, Juan Gerardi, was forced to abandon the area after he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. Twenty-five Sacred Heart missionaries from Spain, as well as a group of Dominican nuns, also left Quiche in August because of military persecution, including the bombing of convents. The exodus recalled events in Olancho, Honduras, in 1975, when nine people, including two priests, were killed and the local bishop and all his clergy expelled from the region. Five years later a new wave of violence threatens the Honduran church.
In the crucible of terror, priests and nuns in Central America face a difficult choice. Usually it is not between life and death, since the majority share the feelings of a Guatemalan priest who said, "I am afraid in my body, but not in my soul." Rather, the dilemma is whether they can better serve the people and the church by staying behind as witnesses, thus risking death, or by following the diaspora to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mexico, or Colombia, where Central American churches are in exile. Often, they are forced to take the latter course, either under orders from concerned religious superiors or because they are literally run out of the country at the point of a gun.
While each country in Central America is different--Costa Rica, for example, boasts an admirable tradition of democracy--most of the region shares a history of violence and social injustice described as semifeudal by such independent observers as the United Nations. A few wealthy families control most of the arable land and all the industry, and share political power with a military regime. The vast majority of the people live in acute rural or urban poverty, undernourished and illiterate with no access to political power. Guatemalan peasants are as poor as the poorest in Bangladesh, Somalia, or Haiti, according to a recent United Nations report.
Most of Central America's poor are Indians or of Indian extraction, socially denigrated and economically exploited. Guatemalan Indian youths, for example, are forcibly recruited by the army, then given a humiliating form of training that includes being forced to insult their parents and their Indian heritage. Over the decades the peasants' communal lands were expropriated by large plantation growers, often accompanied by violence, as in the massacre of 30,000 Salvadorans in 1932. With little or no land, the peasants must work for subsistence wages on coffee, cattle, sugar, banana, and cotton plantations, which are the principal sources of the region's exports and wealth.
Though an old story of exploitation of poor by rich, Central America's experience has a peculiarly malevolent twist in a tradition of violence so extreme as to be almost a caricature. A peasant in Guatemala or El Salvador is not merely murdered. The man, woman, or child--yes, child--is so brutally tortured that the corpse is often unrecognizable. Interviews with women survivors of the Sumpul River massacre, for example, describe the slaughter of babies. Recalled one woman: "I saw a National Guardsman, whom I recognized from the silvery buttons on his green uniform, throw up two babies into the air one after another and catch them on the edge of his machete."
Violence and injustice are hallmarks of Central American governments. The major difference today from the conditions at the time of the 1932 Salvadoran peasant massacre lies in the emergence of popular symbols and organizations of resistance. The two most important symbols are the successful Sandinist revolution in Nicaragua, which toppled the Somoza dynasty last year, and the martyrdom of Archbishop Romero.
The Nicaraguan experience included Christians as well as Marxists in a broad opposition front representing all sectors of society. It can be argued that without Christian support, the Sandinist revolution would have failed. That, at least, is the conclusion of guerrilla groups in other Central American countries, who have embraced the Nicaraguan experience by seeking alliances with non-Marxist unions, peasant organizations, political parties, and church groups. As in Nicaragua, these groups have been driven to an alliance with the left because of the extreme repression by right-wing military regimes.
In El Salvador the death toll for the first eight months of this year was more than 6,000; in Guatemala, 3,252 during a recent 10-month period. Amnesty International reports that nine out of 10 killings are the work of the extreme right. The overwhelming majority of the victims were representatives of non-Marxist popular groups, such as catechists or union organizers, who were killed by paramilitary and parapolice squads directed by government leaders. Official disclaimers notwithstanding, there is conclusive proof that the Central American military regimes have unleashed a regional bloodbath to stamp out any political opposition in the wake of the Nicaraguan revolution.
Guatemala's Vice President Francisco Villagran Kramer, a liberal lawyer opposed to official death squads, fled to Washington where he charged President Romero Lucas Garcia with "participating in cover-ups of assassinations." "There are no political prisoners in Guatemala," he said, "only political murders."
Atilio Ramirez Amaya, the judge appointed to investigate Archbishop Romero's death, was forced to flee to Costa Rica after he discovered that the murder had been planned by a Salvadoran general who founded the government's paramilitary arm and a retired major who heads a rightist assassin squad. Stated Robert White, the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador: "We have had it right up to the craw with officially tolerated and officially instigated violence."
"We're like animals in a game reserve where the hunters come to pick us off as they wish,'' recently complained a Salvadoran peasant, whose teenage son had just been murdered; no one knew why.
"It's the organizations they're after," explained another peasant. By "organizations" he meant anything from a Bible study group to a peasant women's sewing circle to a labor union. "In our zone, there's not a house of an organizer left," he said, adding that an "organizer" is anyone who belongs to an organization, whether or not he or she takes a leading role. In 10 out of 10 cases, priests and nuns have been persecuted, even killed, not because of any guerrilla links, but for supporting such organizations. "Today it is subversive to have a Bible in El Salvador," explained one Salvadoran priest.
Archbishop Romero's death gave the Central American church a new kind of martyr. Romero's sacrifice seemed to sum up everything that the resurgent Latin American church has been working towards since the historic meeting of bishops in Medellin, Colombia, in 1968, which placed the church on a new course for social justice. A quiet, apparently conservative man, Romero changed almost overnight when he was catapulted into the strife-torn archdiocese of San Salvador.
"When I became archbishop," he said, "priests were being killed, accused, tortured. I felt I had to defend the church. Then again I felt that the people the church has to serve were asking me to defend them."
Romero represented no political party or ideology but the people of El Salvador, the vast majority of whom are poor. His was "the voice of the voiceless." Although he opposed violence from any source, such opposition cost him his life. Many people in El Salvador believe that his last homily was his death warrant because he called on Salvadoran troops not to shoot their brothers. Observed Peruvian liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez: "Before Romero the church tended to say: these Christians died for political not religious reasons. Now it has been made clear that Romero died for religious reasons. He was killed not because he defended the rights of the church, but because he defended the rights of the poor."
In the months since Romero's murder, El Salvador and Guatemala have been driven further into the maelstrom of violence. Priests and nuns honor the archbishop's memory by aiding popular organizations and denouncing human rights violations. But some are beginning to move to a new level of activism by following the example of the Nicaraguan bishops in supporting insurrection. "Either the church takes the side of the people or it is excluded from participation with the people in their liberation," the Guatemalan Confederation of Religious has announced.
As in pre-revolutionary Nicaragua, there is no absolute consensus among priests and nuns about the extent of such activism. Since Romero's death, complains one church observer, members of the Salvadoran clergy appear to have retreated into a religious shell, oblivious to what is happening around them. However, most of the mainline religious orders, such as the Jesuits, Franciscans, the Immaculate Heart of Mary Mission Society, and Maryknoll, are aligned with the people. They have paid for such commitment with unprecedented persecution.
El Salvador's Jesuits have repeatedly received death threats, their schools sacked and bombed. Death threats also have been directed against Guatemala's Jesuits. Several foreign priests have been killed, among them Father Walter Voortkers, 41, a Belgian missionary who worked with Guatemalan peasants, and Conrado de la Cruz, a Filipino priest, who was kidnapped in Guatemala May 1 and never seen again.
Revenge also is exacted against the families of native priests and nuns. Father Porfirio Martinez's parents, two brothers, a brother-in-law, and three nephews were murdered in the family's home by the Salvadoran military.
Unlike Nicaragua, there is no majority opinion among the region's other bishops in favor of opposition groups, with the potential exception of Guatemala. Four of El Salvador's remaining five bishops did not attend Romero's funeral. Bishops Jose Eduardo Alvarez and Pedro Arnoldo Aparicio publicly side with the military regime.
Romero's replacement, Apostolic Administrator Arturo Rivera y Damas, is attempting to follow the archbishop's example but must contend both with the uncertainties of his own temporary appointment and an ever-increasing spiral of violence, including police searches of the archdiocese's legal aid office and Catholic schools, and the bombing of the archdiocese's radio station and the archbishop's home.
There are also pressures from misguided or uninformed Vatican officials, whose primary source of information on Central America is the conservative Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio, president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America. Baggio, who once served in the El Salvador nunciature, prides himself on being a regional expert. One of his principal sources of information is Guatemala City's powerful, arch-conservative Cardinal Mario Casariego, whose commitment to the military regime extends to official support for the expulsion of foreign priests, although Casariego himself is a Spaniard.
Witnesses and sometimes victims of government-sponsored violence, Guatemala's bishops would like to take a stronger stand against the government, but have had to do so surreptitiously by issuing critical statements when Casariego is out of the country. Tensions between Casariego and the bishops were so strained at one point that seven resigned in protest.
In Honduras the hierarchy has finally recovered from its scare over the Olancho massacre to issue a surprisingly critical document denouncing the poverty of the peasants and Indians and the lack of economic reforms and democratic structures. But only one bishop, Jose Carranza, has consistently denounced human rights violations and is actively supportive of peasant and labor organizations.
The Honduran government, for its part, is involved in a regional military counteroffensive against the Salvadoran insurrectionists, and has begun to follow the example of its neighbors by sponsoring "preventive" repression in border areas. Three foreign priests have been expelled and 20 others threatened with expulsion, an ominous situation in a country with only 55 native priests. Despite a veneer of democracy, thanks to elections last April for a constitutional assembly, political and economic power remains in the control of the military and large landowners--the same partnership that dominates Guatemala and El Salvador.
The tragedy of Central America is that it seems to prove that violence is the only solution. Yet Costa Rica's development shows that a violent revolutionary process need not be inevitable if political parties, unions, and peasant organizations are allowed to function in a relatively free society. Of course, as the Costa Ricans point out, their country has been fortunate in that it has never been of economic or political importance to the United States. It has therefore been able to go its own way with little outside interference.
Nicaragua and Guatemala, on the other hand, have a long history of U.S. intervention: The first Somoza came to power in Nicaragua in 1936, courtesy of the U.S. State Department; Guatemala's current government is the sixth military regime since the CIA helped overthrow a reformist administration in 1954. The process is now being repeated in El Salvador, despite pleas to Washington by Archbishop Romero before his death and by U.S. religious organizations to stay out of the Salvadorans' affairs.
The U.S. government has given the Salvadoran military regime $5.7 million in military aid this year, and in October, President Carter went a step further by authorizing the training of 250 Salvadoran military officials in the Panama Canal Zone, over the protests of Ambassador White. "U.S. military intervention has done more to radicalize the struggle in El Salvador than any other single development," says Father Benito Tovar, a Salvadoran priest.
When Archbishop Romero attended the hemisphere conference of bishops in Puebla, Mexico, last year, he begged his fellow priests to give him some sign of support. Otherwise, he said, the military would "kill my church." Only a minority of bishops did so, in a declaration also addressed to the Nicaraguan bishops.
The official church document which came from the Puebla conference contained no mention of El Salvador's suffering, nor that of any other individual country, a reflection of the divisions that plague the Latin American church. But the document did make a statement often quoted in Central America today, in the midst of poverty, torture, and assassination: "Jesus well knows what today is so often silenced in Latin America: that pain must be liberated through pain. This means taking up the cross and converting it to the source of a paschal life."
Penny Lernoux, the author of Cry of the People, was a reporter living in Bogota, Colombia when this article appeared.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!