Did war change Guatemala's faith?

[Judi Lynn]

Did war change Guatemala's faith?

PRI's The World
June 30, 2016 · 8:30 AM EDT

By Amy Bracken



A wide variety of churches now dot the misty landscape of Guatemala's Western Highlands.

Credit:
Amy Bracken

. . .

The 36-year conflict is generally seen as a military versus guerrilla struggle for power and land, and also a front in the Cold War. But many of the estimated 200,000 people killed were civilians, and massacres of mostly indigenous people led to widespread charges of genocide.

Miguel de León Ceto was born in Nebaj, a town in the hard-hit Maya Ixil highlands, but his family fled to Mexico when he was a baby. When he finally came back, he was a teenager, and there was something that particularly puzzled him. “When I returned to Guatemala, and specifically Nebaj, one thing that surprised me a lot was how many evangelical churches there were,” he tells me. “There were so many. For me it was something strange, something new.”

. . .

De León Ceto became fascinated with the role of religion in his homeland. He wrote a master’s thesis on the topic. Now he’s writing his dissertation on it. He says the war had a lot to do with the rise of evangelicalism. For one, the government created a vacuum when it targeted the Catholic Church because it was seen as siding with insurgents.

“The military wanted to neutralize, depoliticize the population,” de León Ceto says, “and many priests were assassinated. ... So the evangelical church grew exponentially during the war. It was an extraordinary growth. And also many people turned to evangelicalism to save their lives. I mean, if you join the evangelical church, the military won’t bother you.”

More:
http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-30/did-war-change-guatemalas-faith

[sadie jones]

1. the Lord works in mysterious ways

judi, wasn't Rios Montt an evangelical ? I've always heard that when the Central Intelligence Agency iost their reliable sources among the priesthood they were the ones who encouraged and infiltrated these mostly American religious organizations.

[Igel]

2. That's what Wikipedia says.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efra%C3%ADn_R%C3%ADos_Montt#Background

[Judi Lynn]

4. Hi, sadie jones. Just saw your post, have been listening to the dallas police shooting all night.

Efraín Ríos Montt has been most certainly up to his gnarly evangelist's nose in this group of shallow, reactionary, stupid people. He was on great terms with U.S. TV evangelist, Pat Robertson, as well as Jerry Falwell, and others.

Here's something helpful:

Case #95: Reagan’s Butcher Carries Out Genocide in Guatemala

May 30, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

. . .

THE CRIMINALS: Two Truth Commissions—one sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church and the other by the United Nations—documented widespread massacres, rape, torture, and acts of genocide carried out under Ríos Montt. In 2013, Ríos Montt was tried and convicted in Guatemala City of genocide, in particular the murders of 1,771 Ixil Indians. A higher court, filled with Ríos Montt’s political allies, overturned his conviction.

The United States has never been held accountable for its role in any way. The CIA advised, trained, and helped to run the Guatemalan forces who carried out these massacres and provided “technical assistance”—communications equipment, computers, and special firearms. The Green Berets instructed Guatemalan Army officers at the U.S. School of the Americas in Panama. And when the genocide in Guatemala threatened to expose the nature of the U.S. and its ally, the U.S. subcontracted much of the dirty work to Israel, which supplied transport to remote villages, war planes, military training, “advisors,” and 10,000 Galil assault rifles.

Everything Ríos Montt did was orchestrated, embraced, endorsed, and backed by the U.S.—with ghoulish gusto by President Ronald Reagan. At a time when the massacres were becoming an international scandal, Reagan declared Ríos Montt ‘‘a man of great personal integrity and commitment.” He said Ríos Montt was “getting a bum rap” from human rights activists. Reagan was never put on trial for his role in these and other crimes against humanity. Instead, he is promoted as one of the most honored and revered U.S. presidents of modern times—praised by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Ríos Montt was a favorite of the leaders of the Christian fascists in the U.S.—Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell—who vigorously supported Reagan’s backing of Ríos Montt’s military dictatorship. Ríos Montt became a minister in the California-based Evangelical/Pentecostal Church of the Word after leaving the Catholic Church in 1978. Robertson praised Ríos Montt’s “enlightened leadership” and claimed the dictator insisted on “honesty in government.” A week after Ríos Montt seized power, Robertson flew to Guatemala to give him his first interview and aired it on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s program The 700 Club. Robertson was in Guatemala three days after the coup and claimed the people were “dancing in the street for joy, fulfilling the words of [the Bible]... When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice.”

THE ALIBI: Reagan claimed Ríos Montt was “confronting a brutal challenge from guerrillas armed and supported by others outside Guatemala.” Reagan called this genocidal slaughter an effort to “restore democracy and to address the root causes of this violent insurgency” and to “improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice.”
Christian fascists in the United States provided an alternate alibi: A pastor with the California-based church that Ríos Montt belonged to told a group investigating the atrocities, “The [Guatemalan] Army doesn’t massacre the Indians. It massacres demons, and Indians are demon possessed; they are communists.”

More:
http://www.revcom.us/a/441/american-crime-case-95-reagan-butcher-carries-out-genocide-in-guatemala-en.html

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Over 10 years ago, some DU'ers were discussing the US using missionaries to do all kinds of things, through the freedom or excuse given them by their professions to indigenous citizens in other countries, and someone mentioned John D. Rockefeller had started sending a lot of these clowns especially to Latin America to infiltrate, influence, manipulate the citizens, as missionaries, and this became more skilled as time went by, with various other groups partaking in the same kinds of actions.

This conversation came up repeatedly regarding several different events in other countries, all involving "Christian" missionaries in situations which went poorly for the citizens. One group was the Wycliff Bible Translators, one, World Vision, etc.

I bought a book about John D Rockefeller written about his destructive missionary missions, mentioned by an outstanding DU poster but haven't had time to read it, yet, rats, or I'd know a great deal more, by now.

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Here's a quick google grab I found just to try to illustrate a little:

On The CIA And Christian Missionaries

Establishing a direct link between missionaries, US AID, the CIA and other intelligence agencies like the NSA, is not a very difficult task. The question for the Black electorate, in the Western Hemisphere and Africa is how such a history impacts on the monopoly of thought that Christian Solidarity International has obtained over the issue of the Sudan, influencing members of the US Congress and the British parliament, as well as White Conservatives and Black Civil Rights leaders?

The recent emergence of the relationship between the mainstream media, elected officials, White conservatives, Black civil rights leaders, a Sudanese opposition group (SPLA/M), and a Christian human rights organization, Christian Solidarity International (CSI), caused us to reflect over a long history of covert relationships between US and foreign intelligence agencies and Christian missionaries. One of the best examples of such was the relationship between the famous Wycliffe Bible Translators and the CIA. The relationship was documented in a book, Thy Will Be Done, written in the 1990s.

According to Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, the association between the intelligence community and Christian missionaries predates the public emergence of the CIA. In Thy Will Be Done, they write of the Wycliffe Bible Translator's (also known as the Summer Institute of Linguistic -SIL) and its founder William Cameron Townsend's (also known as "Cam&quot association with the intelligence community.

"This was not the first time that SIL had served U.S. government intelligence purposes during the war. In 1942, after discussions in Washington with "some men who are interested in furthering good will between our countries", Cam specifically requested SIL's Mexico City office to solicit reports from "any of our workers who may have observed efforts on the part of anyone to make the Indians think that Americans are not their friends." Cam's directive ended with a message, "Please give my regards to Mr. Lockett in case you should see him in this connection." Thomas Lockett, commercial attaché', was Cam's confidential contact at the embassy after Ambassador Daniels departed in 1941. Lockett carried out intelligence missions for Washington, identifying suspected Nazi sympathizers and their companies for (Adolf) Berle and (Nelson) Rockefeller. SIL was one of his intelligence sources.

"SIL had helped gather anthropological information on the Tarascan Indians that ended up in Nelson Rockefeller's intelligence files. The files contained cross-references to reveal behavioral patterns among Indian peoples in everything from socialization (including aggressive tendencies) and personality traits, drives, emotions, and language structure, to political intrigue, kinship ties, traditional authority, mineral resources, exploitation, and labor relations. Rockefeller called these data the Strategic Index of Latin America."

While the majority of SIL or the Wycliffe Bible translators work with the intelligence agencies took place in Latin America they also worked hand in hand with the CIA in Asia,
"As souls ascended to heaven in the flight against Satan, many clergy became direct collaborators with the CIA. One member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA) was proud of this collaboration. William Carlsen, a missionary in northeastern Thailand, considered it " a privilege to share information with responsible agencies of the government where they seek us out." Carlsen gave an eight-hour briefing to the CIA on Thailand's tribal areas when he returned home for a furlough. Most C&MA missionaries did likewise, according to a CIA source. Most of the information gleaned was about people, their actions, opinions, and grievances."

Interestingly, the link between the CIA and missionary groups was quite often the US Agency for International Development (AID). This is written of in great detail in Thy Will Be Done:
" William Cameron Townsend watched the controversy over the CIA's use of missionaries with curiosity and growing alarm. The CIA's penetration of religious missions, an issue previously overlooked by the media, was now, in 1975, making international headlines.

More:
http://www.finalcall.com/perspectives/sudan_cia05-15-2001.htm

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The NSA, Spies and Missionaries

The fact that the NSA has been regularly and consistently spying on US citizens has become undeniable. What impact do these revelations have on global missions?

Plenty.

Throughout the last half centuries there have been charges leveled by anti-Christian governments that missionaries are spies. I personally have never met a missionary-spy. Do they exist? I have no doubt that they do.

There was a story that circulated among the missionary community in the Balkans about a certain missionary from a large denominational board was a “dual-income-creative-access” worker. Upon leaving the field he moved to the Langely area and supposedly worked for the CIA. It was an intriguing story but never verified. The infamous John Birch society got its name from a missionary who also spied on Japanese forces during World War 2. There are other historical examples.

The use of missionaries as spies discredits the work of all missionaries and should be strongly condemned. It puts the people in danger, calls into question the character of foreigners and brings dishonor to the gospel. I have no hard proof that contemporary agencies are harboring spies. The sheer devious and evil nature of the NSA, as we have come to learn, gives me concern. We in agency leadership should do all we can to oppose this perverse approach to intelligence gathering.

More:
http://www.esler.org/2014/01/01/the-nsa-spies-and-missionaries/

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Also, for useful reference:

The Guatemalan Military:

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 32

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB32/vol2.html

[sadie jones]

5. Muchas Gracias Judi Lynn

Judi Lynn, I've been a long time fan. Worked as a landscape designer in Miami for many years. During that time i knew, intimately dozens of Central Americans. A harder working, more concientious, family oriented people you would be hard pressed to find anywhere in the world. Just the sort of people you'd think America would welcome as new citizens. But, you would be wrong. As kids we were all moved by UNICEF's poster child, that little girl with the dirty face, tattered dress, bare feet and empty plate. We filled those orange milk cartons every Halloween with change as we collected candy. But the next year there she was again, still hungry still bare foot. In the meantime we gorged ourselves on cheap, delicious bananas, our favorite fruit, never knowing their relationship to that hungry little girl, Had America paid attention and genuinely been concerned about human rights instead of, almost exclusively the interests of big business, the propaganda from other sources would have never stood a chance, John Kennedy knew this and I believe he tried, but we lost him and ,I think, our way all those years ago, Every generation since we've sent people like Dewey Clarridge or Col. James Steele or ambassadors like Negrapointe to provide lip service and cover mainly to fool the American people. Central Americans always knew the truth, they live it.







,

[Igel]

3. Perhaps.

But as far as shifting from Catholicism to charismatic churches, Guatemala isn't at the top of the list.

http://www.pewforum.org/2014/11/13/religion-in-latin-america/

However, it's a nice way to get a story about military dictatorship and repression. The thesis may be correct, but the problem with a lot of motivated research isn't the facts marshalled to support the position but not looking at facts that weaken it. You get a nice correlation with Guatemala-internal events and the shift in religion, but if the same shift happened in 15 other countries, some to a greater extent, you start to wonder if the principle of parsimony shouldn't have a bit more of a say in the discussion.