Column All Saints Day takes on new meaning after trip to
Chiapas
By JOAN CHITTISTER
We were standing in line to check
baggage when I saw the newspapers on the counter. I and 15 other members of the
Interfaith International Peace Council were leaving San Christóbal,
Mexico, the home diocese of Bartolomeo de Las Casas, the first great advocate
of Indian rights. We had just seen for ourselves for the second time in two
years the suffering and destitution of the Indians of Chiapas, as well as the
governments fear of them. Any government that moves 60 percent of its
modern, technologically sophisticated federal army against peasants armed with
machetes has got to be afraid of something.
There, in front of us, two major newspapers carried front-page
stories and feature articles labeling 74-year-old Bishop Samuel Ruiz-Garcia of
Chiapas, the Nobel Peace Prize candidate and hero to the Indians, a
guerrilla priest.
Both stories were deceptively straightforward, apparently
reportorial: Money had come into the diocese for the Indians, the first story
alleged, but could not be accounted for. The second story was even more clever.
It accused the bishop of orchestrating the Indian tribes rebellion. His
purpose? To sustain an 8 million dollar stream of foreign donations for which
there has been no public accounting.
I didnt know whether to laugh or cry. The Peace Council
itself is one of the 25 groups who are said to have donated to projects in the
area. We gave $27,000 over a two-year period. To produce the amount the papers
imply Ruiz received, each group would have had to have given a minimum of
$80,000 a year for four years. Most active in the area are even smaller than we
are. The situation hardly smacks of an economic windfall for Ruiz or anybody
else, hardly a fortune with which to meet even the daily needs of a bereft
population. Its a scurrilous reading of international concern for an
issue that draws little positive concern from local and national officials.
Clearly, Ruiz is a threat to someone. But why? I think I saw and
touched and tasted the answer to my own question.
What I was not able to get out of my mind as I read the articles
was the memory of pictures of murdered children and their mothers, pasted
crudely on the wall behind the burial site we had just visited. What I could
not erase from memory was the ravine where the gravesite was located, five
times deeper than any I had ever seen. The army was armed to the teeth only
miles behind us; the people lived there on a sharp mountainside in shacks on
stilts. What I could not ignore as I studied the cold, devious articles was the
memory of hundreds of Indians who stood patiently at the gravesite as we
approached. What I could not drown out was the sound of them shouting
Viva, Dom Samuel as we struggled down the slippery slope behind a
procession of Indian banners and an old woman carrying incense while the wind
screeched through the sugar cane slats of the huts around us.
The Peace Council, which boasts three Nobel Peace Prize nominees
among its members -- Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa; Maha Ghosananda,
the Buddhist Patriarch of Cambodia who organized the Land Mine pilgrimages; and
the Dalai Lama of Tibet -- was in Chiapas as a group of religious figures from
various denominations around the world, to bring a word of comfort,
encouragement and hope. But looking around me on that mountainside, I had
trouble finding words of comfort in my heart.
We were in the village of Acteal, in Chiapas on All Souls Day, the
day on which Catholics remember those who have gone before us in the search for
holiness. I had not a doubt in the world that these Indians knew a great deal
more about saints and souls than I did.
All Saints Day and All Souls Day had never been much more to me
than one more date on the liturgical calendar. I have always liked the idea
behind the feasts, of course, but I have never had much personal understanding
of either one. I do now. French existentialist and hero of the World War II
resistance Albert Camus once wrote, The Saints of our time are those who
refuse to be either its executioners or its victims. For the first time
in my life, I was looking at both: living saints who refused victimization and
who also refused revenge, as well as holy souls who had already gone
defenseless down to death with prayers on their lips.
Acteal is the Chiapeneco Indian village where, 11 months ago, 45
women and children were killed in a bitter, calculated and bloodthirsty
four-hour massacre by government-supported paramilitary forces. Whats
worse, they were fired upon in the tiny wooden chapel where they were in the
midst of an all-day peace vigil. Most were women and small children. The Indian
men could run away from the killers. The women, their children clinging to
their skirts, could not. Instead, the mothers attempted to hide under bushes in
the woods around the chapel.
It was a pitiless operation. The women and their whimpering babies
were hunted down and destroyed. Few people remember the incident, if they ever
knew about it at all. But the Indians remember.
Committed to peace but intent on justice in an area where the
basics of government support -- education, medical care, housing, economic
development -- have never been extended, the Indians raised their voices to
claim their humanity and their citizenship, their ancestral lands and their
resources. And in this case, at least, the church heard them, made appeals in
their favor, counseled them to be patient, taught them nonviolent methods of
resistance.
At first, Ruiz was an acceptable liaison, a safe -- even benign --
bridge between the federal government and the people. But then he himself began
to support the claims of the Indians. He, too, began to call the government to
genuine, honest negotiation. Finally, aware that his own presence masked the
inauthenticity of the process, he resigned from the position of chairperson of
the governments mediation commission in order to reveal the
governments stalling techniques and the repressive measures it was using
to intimidate, divide and displace the Indians.
Now Ruiz himself is the enemy. Maybe thats what happens to
those who see no sin in curing lepers in the midst of the establishment.
Nevertheless, launching an all-out effort to discredit the Ruizes of the world
will not change the obvious. If Camus was right -- if the saints of our time
are really those who refuse to be either its executioners or its victims -- the
Indians of Chiapas qualify.
If Camus was right, the governments of the world have some
answering to do and All Saints Day and All Souls Day should take on a
completely different meaning. For all of us.
Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister, author and lecturer, lives in
Erie, Pa.
National Catholic Reporter, December 11,
1998
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