FIRST U.S.-BORN COLD WAR MARTYR 

BEATIFIED

(While 20,000 witnessed the beatification of Fr. Stanley Rother in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on September 23, this was happening in Guatemala among the people where Rother served and was killed.)         

SANTIAGO ATITLÁN, GUATEMALA: Townspeople celebrated the beatification of their beloved “Padre Apla’s” with an outpouring of prayer, song and splendid display that commemorated his violent death and road to sainthood as the first U.S.-born martyr – although the faithful here claim Stanley Francis Rother as their own.

            “He is our example of love,” said Juan Ratzan Mendoza, who was married to his wife Antonia Ajcot by Rother, along with sixty other couples, two days before the Oklahoma priest’s murder by a government death squad.

            “He spoke our language well,” said 78-year old Maria Pablo Mendoza. At dawn on July 28, 1981, men went through the streets crying, “They killed our priest!”  His parishioners had expected it. Maria Pablo said she heard the church bells ringing and “wept and wept.”

            This town on the rim of sapphire blue Lake Atitlan, surrounded by three volcanoes, was one of the hardest hit in violence that cost 200,000 lives during Guatemala’s 26-year war that ended in 1996. Most of the dead were unarmed indigenous Maya, like the Tz’tujil Maya who live here, cut down by a brutal army. I don't want to desert these people, Rother wrote to the bishops of Tulsa and Oklahoma City in 1980.  He hid threatened men and boys, and decried attacks before officials.  The government regarded the indigenous as allies of the leftist guerrillas because they wanted the same kind of changes the guerrillas said they wanted. 

“The low wages that are paid, the very few who are excessively rich, the bad distribution of land -- these are some of the reasons for the widespread discontent,” Rother wrote to his bishops. “The Church seems to be the only force that is trying to do something [about] the situation, and therefore the government is after us.” Thirteen priests and hundreds of catechists were killed nationwide during the violence.

Washington supported the Guatemalan government.

On the eve of the beatification, upon a rise where a Maya temple once stood, parishioners filled one of the oldest churches in the Americas (capacity: 1500), St. James the Apostle. For five hours they celebrated mass, watched a documentary about Rother’s life and a startling, dramatic recreation of his murder by parish youth. Having arrived by boat, the papal nuncio Archbishop Nicolas Henry Theveni took almost an hour to walk the brief blocks from dock to church, regaled by children and townspeople, who are called Atitecos. The church went dark as women in traditional woven dress and indigo head shawls processed with candles, and an arc of candles flickered above the altar during veneration of the Blessed Sacrament.

The fervor of the hours felt memorable even to those who know the congregation well. “Inexplicable, extraordinary,” said Sister Concepción Xeché of the Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist, a nurse in the hospital Rother founded. “This blessing will bear fruit in priestly vocations, real marriages, and example for the young.”

The next day men put on their best clothing woven through with images of birds and animals, and women gathered in the churchyard to wind yards of woven ribbon around their heads in a traditional headdress worn on the most important occasions. 

As Rother was being beatified in Oklahoma, Atitecos packed the local church until there was hardly room to move.

“Padre Apla’s was part of my vocation, of attention to the most needy,” said Fr. Manuel Yojcom, using the familiar name – Tz’utujil for Francis – by which Rother was known. Yojcom, a Tz’utujil priest from another lake village, San Pedro La Laguna, concelebrated the mass in honor of the beatification with Theveni, Bishop Gonzalo de Villa y Vásquez, and more than a dozen priests including Americans Fr. John Spain, a Maryknoll working in El Salvador, and Rother’s successor in Santiago until 1996, Fr. John Vesey.

“This is a blessing for the poor, to see him recognized,” said Vesey as he watched parishioners still streaming into the church. “I hope this will inspire Guatemala to recognize all their holy martyrs.”

When Rother was killed the Catholics of Santiago begged to keep his heart, and the blood that spilled at his death, and Rother’s family agreed.  The relics have been enclosed in an altar, kept from view, under Rother’s picture. After the mass, Archbishop Theveni led a procession through the streets while holding high a monstrance containing a glass vial of Rother’s blood.

Considering Stanley Rother’s humble beginnings it is safe to say he would have been amazed to see the events in his honor. “He did not act superior, he was one of us,” said parish council president Gaspar Mendoza, the president of the parish council. On the day Rother was born in 1935 in Okarche, Oklahoma one of the worst storms of the Dust Bowl era was blowing through the family farmstead. While his mother, Gertrude, was in labor with her first-born, his father Franz was in the barn, where a mare was foaling.

            Perhaps the very reality of farm life that Stan Rother came to know, and the uncertainties inherent in farming – will the crop fail with the bad weather? – helped to make him feel at home in Santiago, where men and boys dig the soil to plant corn and beans, and women stand knee-deep in the lake to slap the family wash against rocks. Rother spoke the same language of working the earth to produce food as local peasants did. He was physically strong, and “he could fix things,” Atitecos say, not only a priest but a mechanic, carpenter and farmer pitching in where needed.

            Stanley Rother almost didn’t make it to Santiago, indeed he almost never became a priest. After six years, having wrestled with Latin – the language of textbooks -- and failed Theology twice, he was asked to leave the seminary.

            When he went home the Rother family pastor from Holy Trinity Church in Okarche accompanied father and son to meet with Oklahoma City Bishop Victor Reed, who recognized something in the disappointed young man, not the least his desire for the priesthood. He sent Rother to a different seminary, where he made fine progress and was ordained in 1963. In 1968 Rother answered a diocesan call responding to the request of Pope John XXIII for priests, sisters and lay people to fill needs in Latin America.

            In Santiago Rother came to speak not only Spanish but the far more difficult Maya language of his parishioners, Tz’utuhil. The ancient tongue was unwritten until 1966 when Father Ramon Carlin, Rother’s predecessor from the Oklahoma mission, began working with two parish men to commit its sounds to paper, a project pursued energetically by Rother. Most Atitecos then did not even speak Spanish, and many women still do not. On one anniversary of Rother’s assassination, upon the coffin that represented his remains, parishioners placed a folder that held the Tz’utujil translation of the Holy Mass.

Rother took grave risks to make sure the translation of the New Testament continued despite the violence, secretly moving a threatened translator, Juan Mendoza, to a safe house in Guatemala City, visiting him to bring food, and when possible, Mendoza’s wife and five children. “Padre Apla’s was enculturating the gospel for us,” making it understood in the world of the Tzutujil faithful, said Mendoza’s son Juan Ramon, 43.

But collaborating with the American priest was dangerous. Juan Ramon remembers how Rother stood with the family under the burned beams of their house after attackers set it afire, and tried to convince his father to go into exile. “ He said, ’I won’t lose anything by staying, I have no family, but you do.’” But Juan Ramon’s father wanted to finish the work, and be near his family. A year after Rother’s assassination, a death squad pulled Juan Mendoza from a bus, and he was not seen again. Today his son heads a parish committee to pray for Rother’s cause and tell his story. “He planted a good seed in us,” he said.

Just as he wanted scripture deeply understood by the Tz’utujil, Rother was also open to traditionalists who practiced an older Maya form of Christianity. Brotherhoods called cofradias helped the earliest Spanish friars carry out liturgies, then cared for the church and its images for centuries when Santiago had no resident priest, provided social services and prayed in a way that included ancient ways. Rother walked in procession with present-day cofrades, even though some consider them throwbacks, pagan, and he befriended them as individuals. He believed the Tz’utujil past was an important part of the Atitecos’ present, of who they were as a people, and deserved evangelization with this in mind.

Miguel Pablo Sicay, 42, a cofradia sacristan, compares Rother to a Maya prophet, Francisco Sojuel, who appeared “in a time of hunger” and “made the land produce,” improving lives. Rother had a “very special way” with the sacraments, said Sicay. “He talked about equality of people, and equilibrium, that people should love each other, like the harmony of our Maya cosmovision – he said this was the word of God.”

I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of these do you wish to kill me? Solola Bishop Angélico Melotto quoted Jesus’ words in a mass for Rother shortly after his death.

Some peasant farmers had to walk three hours to their subsistence fields; Rother started a 110-acre co-operative where they could experiment with fertilizers, higher-yield corn and try new crops – garlic, rice, wheat as a cash crop, Haas avocados from seeds he brought from the States. He brought in the first tractor most had seen. He began a weaving cooperative that helped women to earn cash, starting with priests’ stoles. Santiago’s undernourished children often died young – a measles epidemic killed 600 in 1964 --and for people of all ages treatable conditions like diarrhea, flu, or an infected machete cut could be a death sentence; Rother started a hospital that still serves the community, helping to build its walls with his own hands.

“His social works were important not because they were social but because as a pastor he realized it was difficult for people to be spiritually strong while they were physically damaged, hungry,” said the papal nuncio in an interview with NCR. Rother tended his parishioners, said Archbishop Thevenin, “without politics – only with his heart.”

            Rother’s martyrdom came most directly from his commitment to accompany the people of Santiago in their darkest hour, instead of fleeing as other clergy in the country and even a bishop felt forced to do.  “A shepherd does not leave his flock,” he said.

On January 7, 1981, an army truck hit a guerrilla mine and soldiers killed eighteen defenseless civilians in retribution. The bloodied bodies were laid out in the church square but only the bravest wives and mothers had the courage to defy the terror of the army and claim loved ones.  Stan stood by each woman as she did, one by one, and when seven bodies remained unclaimed, he brought them inside, had coffins made and gave them a Christian burial. In early 1981, Rother’s name appeared on a death list. He continued to check morgues and hospitals in distant towns when his catechists or other parishioners went missing, or searched the roadside where a body might have been thrown. He kept careful account of widows and children left behind even though “helping these people could very easily be considered subversive by the local government,” he wrote. In July, 1981, word spread that the army was going to forcibly recruit local youth during the town’s saint’s day fiesta, so he opened the church to five hundred young men who slept on the floor.

            “Even when we were sleeping inside we could hear gunshots,” said Diego Chavez, who stayed inside the church three nights then slept in a series of houses to avoid capture.  In happier times, Chavez helped his father carve a magnificent wooden altar at Rother’s request that reflected all aspects -- including the traditional  -- of the spiritual life of the community.

            Rother never denied his precarious situation with the army, but often said he would not be taken alive.  He would not risk divulging information under torture that could harm others, did not want parishioners to go through the experience of searching for his body.  On July 28, 1981, three armed men in ski masks forced the rectory guardian to lead them to Rother’s room. He called out, “Father, they are looking for you,” and the priest opened the door to protect the young man. Rother shouted, “Kill me here!” and fought so hard that the skin on his fists was torn bare and his blood leaped onto a wall. Finally one of the attackers got off two shots, one to Rother’s face, the other to his left temple.

Sisters sleeping in another part of the building heard the noise and rushed to the scene, but all they could do was pray, and reverently gather their pastor’s spilled blood into the handiest receptacle, a Mason jar. In recent preparation for the beatification, two people who saw the blood said it looked as if it had been shed yesterday, red, liquid.

Gaspar Mendoza, 51, who received his first Holy Communion from Rother, considered the priest’s last moments. “Maybe his body felt fear, but his spirit, no,” he said.

Questing the Sacred Book

In Chichicastenango, shunning the famous market, I embark on a quest...

Entering the nearby Indian municipal office, whose elders represented the Maya community, was like crossing into a world where straightforward questions were out of line. An ordinary calendar hung alongside a Maya calendar, its outside round made of glyphs to represent the year's twenty months, an inside circle turning within the first, carrying the bars and dots that numbered a Maya month's thirteen days. Thirteen, the Maya power number...

Now on Perceptive Travel -- Click here

Adoptions in Wartime?

This is my latest in the current edition of ReVista, the magazine of Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, edited by veteran Latin America journalist June Erlick.  If the subject is controversial, let the discussion unfold.

UNEARTHING THE PAST

Discovering Dominga

 Adoptions and Tangled Truths

BY MARY JO MCCONAHAY    

     In the open central market one morning in Rabinal, Guatemala, 28-year-old Denese Becker picked up a bolt of corte cloth, woven fabric used by Achi Maya women to make their skirts, and brought it to her face. She closed her eyes. “My mother,” she said. “This smells like my mother.” I knew which one she was talking about.
     That was more than a decade ago; we were in Rabinal to shoot the PBS documentary Discovering Dominga, the story of an Iowa housewife—Denese—a survivor of the 1982 Rio Negro massacre in which both her parents died. Denese, the former Dominga Sic, was returning to look for the bones of her father and to untangle the truth of a lifetime of nightmares. On that journey she also discovered a world of memory that might have remained hidden in small-town Iowa, where she arrived at age eleven, adopted by an evangelical pastor and his wife. Her adoptive parents were loving and attentive to her, their only daughter. However, as I watched Denese Becker in the Guatemala highlands, among trees and flowers once familiar to her, I couldn’t help thinking how much this young woman had lost by being taken from her roots to live in a strange land.
     “What is this tree called?” she would ask. “I know you can eat its leaves.” Or, “I think I recognize that flower. It’s bad. Don’t touch it.”
     Like Denese, thousands of children during the Central American conflict were adopted by foreigners, mostly from the United States and Europe. When my husband and I arrived in Tegucigalpa from San Francisco with our 8-month old in 1987, the hotel clerk glanced at the infant slung across my chest and said, “I assume you want the adopting parents’ rate.” During the week it took us to find a rental house, we learned that a dozen U.S. couples at the hotel, and several single individuals, had come to Honduras not to live, but to adopt.
     When conflict, displacement and extreme poverty were national conditions in the 1980s and 1990s in Central America, “orphans” was a term used indiscriminately for youngsters separated from their families, whether they had a living parent or close relatives or not. Reasons were myriad: both parents might indeed be dead, killed in the violence, as in Denese’s case, although close relatives said later they had searched for her fruitlessly in Guatemala; soldiers and other armed authorities took children after families were killed; in many cases desperately poor single mothers, pregnant again, gave away newborns or sold them to enganchadores, front men for corrupt lawyers connected to ostensibly legitimate operations that can only be called “the baby trade.” In Honduras, and sometimes in Guatemala, newspapers periodically ran stories about the latest discovery of a casa cuna, houses where multiple infants were fattened up from low birth weights before presentation to prospective adoptive parents.
     We will never know the true answer to the endless question, “Weren’t those children better off raised elsewhere?” We simply won’t know. What we can suggest in the wake of those terrible spasms of violence in Central America, at least, is that those of us who were meant to be watching events so closely did not track the region’s youngest and most vulnerable inhabitants to the degree they deserved.
     Their stories are many. In 1980s El Salvador, for instance, a six-year old being adopted by a blind Italian man and his wife at our hotel approached me to say her mother sold grilled meat near the Parque Libertad. She wanted to return to her mother. Engaged with my own toddler, covering post-earthquake events daily, I never investigated, and the moment slipped away. At a holding camp for civilians “rescued” by the army from Guazapa, a rebel stronghold, an elderly woman said her grandson had been taken by an officer; she feared he would raise him as his own. In mountainous Las Vueltas, known as territory sympathetic to rebels, a man showed me where he had lain in tall grass as his seven-year old was taken away in a helicopter during an army sweep, while she cried out, “Papi!” He wept to recall he could not reach out to her without endangering others who hid around him.
     “Do you think they will know that she is not an orphan?” he asked. “That I am her father and I am alive? Will she know that wherever she is?”
     There are reasons why journalists, academic researchers and others do not investigate such stories at the time, including the urgency of other coverage and the general confusion of war. Some feel that any child removed from the risk of war or life of poverty is indeed better off, and questions ought to stop there for the good of all.
     During the weeks we filmed Discovering Dominga in 2001 and 2002, Denese could not bring herself to accept invitations to sleep in the dirt-floor houses of her relatives; their lives and living conditions were too foreign to her. One day, we met an ajq’ij, a spiritual guide charged with giving thanks to the Creator lords, keeping the Maya calendar and performing ceremony. “What does his red kerchief mean?” she asked me later. “My grandfather wore one.” Now an evangelical Christian, she seemed to struggle with the knowledge that her grandfather had been a guardian of Maya spirituality, so inimical to the beliefs of her extended adoptive family. In the film Denese says that as a child in Iowa she never “fit in”; but off camera in Rabinal, it seemed clear that neither did Denese Becker/Dominga Sic “fit in” any longer among the people to whom she was born.
     An advantage of peace is the gift of space and time to ask questions about what has come before. How much of the memory of the homelands is carried in the minds of children, now adults, as they live far from where they were born? Should adoptions during time of war be forbidden, or truncated in any way? They are questions we might consider before we are forced, should the occasion arise, to answer them again.
 

Mary Jo McConahay is the author of Maya Roads, One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest(Chicago Review Press). She wrote the original story for the PBS documentary Discovering Dominga and co-produced it with producer Pat Flynn.  Here is the link to the ReVista story, in an issue on Memory: In Search of History and Democracy: http://www.drclas.harvard.edu/publications/revistaonline/fall-2013/discovering-dominga

Sexual Violence at Genocide Trial

Judge Jasmín Barrios said the sexual violence session of the Rios Montt genocide trial today must be public, but that it was permissible for witnesses to cover their faces. All so far have done so, except for the one male witness, Pedro Cobo, who had gone down to the riverbank the day soldiers killed villagers to look for his parents, brothers and sisters. "My mother was nude," he said. "The river was full of blood."

Seated left, former military intelligence chief, Mauricio Sanchez Rodriguez.  Seated right former president Efrain Rios Montt.  Both defendants in genocide case.

Seated at table second from right, defendant Gen. Efrain Rios Montt

Interpreter and witness

Spectators.  Front row.

Justice for Genocide?

200,000 Killed.   My take on the Rios Montt genocide trial, published in today, Sunday's, Los Angeles Times.  

CLICK HERE TO READ THE STORY

I'm adding for the blog a few photos I took one of the days.  An important trial. 

A brave judge, above, Miguel Angel Galvez

Rios and one of his defense attorneys 

Gore Vidal's Old House

For more than a decade, I lived in a house in Antigua, Guatemala, around the corner from the house where author Gore Vidal had lived in his early novel-writing days. The day he died in Los Angeles, July 31, 2012, I passed it one more time. Recently, this ran on Gadling.com

By Mary Jo McConahay

In later years...President Theodore Roosevelt's daughter, Alice Longworth, congratulated me every time we saw each other: "You got out. So wise."
"Reflections on Glory Reflected,"
-- Gore Vidal, United States: Essays 1952-1992

The day Gore Vidal died rain fell hard on the roof of his old house alongside the ruins of Our Lady of Carmen in Antigua, Guatemala. Braids of thick plaster twisted gracefully around chipped columns, dripping after the downpour that signaled the end of the canicula. Those golden weeks of sun and hummingbirds in the midst of the rainy season were over.

                   Read the rest of the story on Gadling.com

"Anais Nin visited her dear friend Gore in this house, even nursed him through a near-fatal case of hepatitis caught eating from pots in the market..."

"The day Vidal died, I stood on the curb across the wide street and considered the rich life in the author's house at the beginning of his career: sex, politics, the magical work of writing..."

 "You need only read him to see he understands the concept of "empire," because he lived in an outland of the American imperium..."

Read the entire story on:    Gadling.com

Before the Maya

 

      


THERE WERE THE OLMEC

The steamy east coast of Mexico is producing discoveries that are beginning to chip away at what we don't know about the mysterious Olmec civilization.  If they are famous at all, the Olmec are known for producing giant stone portraits in the round, beginning more than three thousand years ago in the regions of Veracruz and Tabasco. The imposing heads can weigh up to twenty-four tons. To see them  up close is to marvel at their individuality, and wonder how a people without the wheel managed to accomplish the task of their creation.

Those who have long claimed the Olmec were the mother civilization of Middle America, giving birth to the much-better documented Maya, have more and more to offer as suggestive evidence.

     When I think of Maya civilization certain images come to mind: the mighty jaguar; the Hero Twins whose valor and cleverness are central to the creation story in the Maya bible called the Popol Vuh; cranial deformation for beauty and status; the Maya calendar, still in use today and the Maya counting system expressed in bars and dots.

     The Olmec pieces from Mexico briefly in the United States now mirror these images, produced many years before that great Maya civilization appeared on the scene.  At the de Young Museum in San Francisco, where I visited recently as a member of the Bay Area Travel Writers
(allowing me to take these pictures inside the exhibit) colossal masterworks and fine smaller pieces are on display until May 8.  Have a look at the young twins on the left, and the larger royal twins on the right, and tell me if the Popol Vuh doesn't come to mind.  You haven't read it?  You must.  The translation by poet     Dennis Tedlock is my favorite.

                     In the same way, the bars and dots clearly seen here are like the Maya counting system, where the bar represents the number five, and the dot, one. The figures under the ball player's raised hand on the round stone on the right  (an altar?) might easily become, over the centuries, glyphs for three of the twenty "day signs" that mark a Maya month.

        The deformed heads, a sign of high status, are prominent in Olmec sculpture, as are jaguar faces on human bodies.

On occasion a pre-Columbian site will display both Olmec and Maya characteristics.  Last year I saw this at Tabalik Abaj in Guatemala near the border with Mexico, a site inhabited for more than two thousand years, from about 1000 B.C. until the great Maya collapse in about 900 A.D.  There are Olmec sculptures, and Maya features, a place where you can feel one civilization blending into another.

                                                         If you want to see how some of these huge pieces were moved from their homes on the Mexican coast to foggy San Francisco (very carefully), go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacma/sets/72157624945753603/show/