It's early morning in Weston—just after the five o'clock vigil prayer of our monastic community. This is the time when all of us brothers go quietly to our rooms to spend a few hours in personal prayer, a time of silent presence with the God who has created us, redeemed us, and constantly calls us to the newness of life.
This morning a voice compels me to write, to fulfill a promise that somehow takes me beyond schedules or even the opportunity for a time of quiet and peaceful prayer. It is a voice that I heard and that I still hear in a darkened room in southern Mexico.
It is a woman's voice, a young Guatemalan woman, holding an infant in her arms. Her quiet voice is filled with feeling. "Brothers, tell your people that we are not communists. We are simple people, Christians like yourselves, who only want food and shelter for our families, a place to work and live. Please, brothers, tell your people to stop your government from sending more arms that only kill and hurt our people."
Each brother promised to do what he could. Because I promised, because I still hear the voice in that hushed room, I write these lines at this time of prayer.
During the month of February in 1983, five brothers of Weston Priory in Vermont took a journey to Mexico. We spent the month visiting Christian base communities with the Benedictine Missionary Sisters of Mexico. A visit with a small family community of Guatemalan refugees was for me the most moving event in our journey to Mexico.
As we drove along the dusty country road, ox carts filled with children and their parents met us along the way. It was a Sunday evening. Some of the peasant folk waved in friendly fashion as we passed; others looked suspiciously or fearfully at our van filled with five North American monks, two Mexican women religious, and a Mexican priest.
Darkness had settled in by the time we reached our destination, a two-room cement-block building slightly removed from similar buildings scattered along this roadway. We hurried into the dwelling so as not to attract the attention of the neighbors.
The first room was almost completely bare of furniture. A young man greeted us. Soon a flock of children and three young women joined us. All of these people were dark-skinned, had Mayan features, and spoke Spanish. They greeted us with words of welcome, warmly, but almost in a whisper.
We were led into the second room, the bedroom of the house. There were two hemp cots, a few benches along the wall—nothing else. The benches were offered to us guests. The women holding infants sat on the cots surrounded by little children; the young man sat with more children huddled around him on the concrete floor.
The children were surprisingly quiet, as though they had been rigorously trained to be silent even in their crying. One of the older children anxiously rose from time to time to look cautiously out the window—an opening in the block concrete wall—to see if anyone was listening to the subdued conversation within.
The Mexican priest lit the little vigil candle on the floor in the middle of the room. He explained that we must speak very softly, as these people were not known to be Guatemalan refugees. They were marked by the Guatemalan death squads and had had to be removed from the refugee camps at the border because their lives were in danger. I puzzled: aren't these just young parents and little children?
The priest asked the family to share with us the story of their life.
Two of the women present said that their husbands were no longer able to be with them. The third woman was the wife of the young man seated among the children on the floor. He, along with a teenage son, was doing what he could to provide food for the family.
They described how they had all lived as simple peasant farmers in a small Guatemalan village. Their life was poor, and they barely had enough to feed their children. Education and health care were luxuries granted only to the rich.
Stories began to reach their village about the Guatemalan military and its intrusions into nearby towns. The stories became increasingly terrifying. They were told that in one village the military commanded the people to kill the five leading catechists or else the whole village would be annihilated. All the people met to talk together. The five Christian leaders offered their lives rather than sacrificing the whole community. All formed in procession and went to the cemetery where the people shot their own leaders.
Word reached their village that the military were entering other towns, rounding up the women and children and asking the whereabouts of the men. If the women would not tell, they were beaten and raped; children were abused and even dismembered within sight of their mothers. The young men, often just teenagers, were rounded up and conscripted into the army.
The terror became so intense and widespread that, at the news of the approach of the military, villagers of other communities fled in great numbers to the mountains. As they were fleeing, bombs were dropped on them from helicopters. The military would take over their villages, eat their food, kill their livestock, and burn their fields. Then they would wait while the people starved in the mountains, many of their children often freezing to death in the cold of night. The women told of the anguish of mothers whose infant children were smothered to death in their arms as they tried to stifle their crying so as not to be discovered by the soldiers.
As all these stories reached the village of this Guatemalan family, they became more and more terrified. Finally, the military arrived at their village. Two men were taken out of the village by the soldiers. The next day the bodies of these men were found beside the road not far from the village.
A few days later a group of military visited again. This time they took five men. They stripped them and marched them off to a neighboring village where they were killed in front of all the people.
Realizing that they were to be next, the family gathered to see what they should do. Two of the husbands had already fled into the mountains in fear that they would be conscripted into the army on the next visit. The one remaining husband determined to take his wife and children with his two sisters-in-law and their children across the border into Mexico. The father of his wife chose to remain in the village to help those who could not leave.
The frightened family fled with whatever they could carry. They managed to cross the border and found a refugee camp in Mexico. But Guatemalan death squads were constantly crossing the border, seeking families whose men were suspected of being with the guerrillas or of supporting them. The family was moved to a town farther away where they would not be known or recognized.
We asked the family how the soldiers, often taken from among the peasants themselves, could treat their own people so viciously.
The husband replied that one of his uncles had been in the military but had managed to leave it. He described the training of the young peasants. When a young man was inducted, he was first subjected to several days of starvation. Then a group of starving recruits would be gathered in a circle. A few tortillas would be placed in the center in front of them. They were then made to fight and brutalize one another to see who would get the tortilla to eat.
Similar "training" would then be given with live animals for bait. They would be taught to dismember the animals and eat them raw. At night they would be subjected to the blaring of loud-speakers telling them that the peasants were communists and the enemies of the country. After months of this kind of treatment, soldiers would become like brutes, with no sense of their humanity, and willing to perform any atrocities against their own people.
We asked why this was being done; for what purpose could the government of a people condone, let alone encourage, such action? Part of the answer came from the family, part from the priest who was aware of more of the political reality.
The family said that the government wanted to be rid of the guerrillas and were unable to do so directly because the guerrillas were able to hide in the hills. Often men would flee to the hills in order to escape the inhumanity of being inducted into the military. They could only survive, however, if the peasants fed and supported them.
The priest pointed out that 300 families control the wealth and resources of Guatemala. Two per cent of the population owns 80 per cent of the land. More than 60 per cent of the people are indigenous peasants who hold extremely small plots or no land at all. This Indian population has been exploited to the point of slavery, their families suffering from malnutrition and the deprivation of basic necessities at the hands of the large landowners.
The church, especially the priests and women religious, have helped the people to be aware of their human rights and dignity as people. Because of this, priests and religious, as well as at least two bishops, have been either killed or driven out of their parishes and dioceses. They have been replaced by fundamentalist ministers backed by U.S. funds and protected by the government.
These ministers preach a gospel of submission and acceptance of the present situation as the will of God for these poor people. They tell them that they must hope for a change only in the next life. They try to destroy any sense of solidarity and hope that has been built up by the church through the catechist leaders. Methodically, Christian leadership and influence on the social life of the people is being destroyed.
As this sad story was being recounted to us, my thoughts went back to the Jewish holocaust in Nazi Germany. I recalled that after the war I was discussing with a German monk the place of Christians and the church in the extermination of Jews in Germany. The monk said, "Well, we didn't really realize what was going on right under our noses. We believed our government when they told us that what they were doing was for the good of our country."
I could not help but think of the parallel. Genocide is going on in Latin America. Directly or indirectly, our own government is supplying advisers, bombs, planes, spare parts—all being used to exterminate a people. The weapons are made by our hands, paid for with our money. Our government is telling us that what it is doing is for the good of our country.
A few years from now, if the earth is still "civilized" and inhabitable, will a monk from Germany be asking a North American monk, "How could that happen? What were Christians doing, thinking? Where were you? Where was the church?"
The young mother concluded our visit telling us of the death of her father. She had received the news two weeks previously when one of her relatives, who had walked the long, perilous way from Guatemala, visited.
Her father had been visiting with two young men in his dwelling in the village. A group of military arrived outside. One young man volunteered to go to see what they wanted. As he stepped outside, they shot him. The other young man fled out through the roof while the woman's father held the military off with a pistol. The young man escaped to the hills; the father was shot to death.
As the woman concluded her story, the Mexican priest turned to her and said, "But you see, all North American people are not your enemies, and they are not all evil. They do not want your people to suffer and die; it is their government which encourages this evil. Look at these brothers. They are North Americans, and they are your brothers. There are many more like them. Tell them what you want from them."
The woman with the infant in her arms told us with tears, but without bitterness or despair, "We know that all your people are not evil. Please tell them to stop their government from sending arms; they only kill our people."
The story I have told is the simple story of defenseless people who had no reason to distort the truth. We promised to tell the story. I pray that their voice will be heard.
John Hammond, O.S.B., was prior of the Benedictine monks of the Weston Priory in Weston, Vermont when this article appeared.
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