Redeemers (55 page)

The bishop's first thirty-five years did not clearly foreshadow the conversion that would make him a second “apostle of the Indians.” At the seminary he showed considerable intelligence and application. In 1947, he entered the Collegio Pio-Latino-Americano Pontificio in Rome, a key center for the training of Latin American priests. He seemed well on his way to a relatively cloistered career as a church theologian when, at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, he studied biblical exegesis and began, as he would later say, “to half understand that the Bible is the only book written for a poor people in search of the promised land.”

He returned to Mexico in 1951 and in 1954 was appointed dean of the Seminary of León where he had once been a student. In 1959, Rome chose him to become bishop of Chiapas. The bishopric entrusted to Ruiz comprised two-thirds of Chiapas, one of the poorest, most socially backward states in the Mexican Republic.

He was formally ordained in January 1960, and in 1962 he became one of the 2,692 bishops to attend the historic council that changed much of the direction of the Catholic Church, the Second Vatican Council convoked by Pope John XXIII. Shortly before the proceedings began, he had his first transforming revelation. It was his emotional response to one of the major themes Pope John presented as a preamble to the conference: the declaration that it was to be in the arena of developing countries, in the “Third World,” that the Church would discover what it really is and what it really had to do. For the bishop of Chiapas, this exhortation implied a mandate: “it clarified and determined the essential mission of the Church: if it does not maintain an adequate relationship with the structural world of poverty, it is no longer the Church of Jesus Christ.”

In 1964, Ruiz decided that his diocese was much too large for him to deal effectively with social problems. The poorest, overwhelmingly Indian area was what interested him most. Rome divided the diocese in two: the diocese of Tuxtla Gutiérrez (administered by Bishop José Trinidad Sepúlveda Ruiz Velasco) and what would become Ruiz's own, that of San Cristóbal de las Casas, which makes up 48 percent of the state and includes the great majority of its Indian population.

A year earlier, Ruiz had invited Dominicans and other groups into Chiapas, most of them dedicated to the new directions within the Church. In 1966, these “apostles” established the Mission to the Chamulas, which would undertake—along with normal priestly duties—the construction of a health center and workshops for arts and crafts, a night school for domestic science instruction, and the establishment of a communal farm. In 1967, Ruiz would restructure his diocese into six administrative zones, based in part on the ethnic identities of the Indian populations. But it was the opening of schools for the training and organizing of Indian catechists that was the decisive step in implementing the new evangelism. Ruiz celebrated Mass at one or another of these schools every Sunday. By the 1970s, more than seven hundred of these catechists had already been trained, and there would be many more in the years to come. It was an effort that, for the most part, met with approval from the higher authorities of the Church.

The “Preferential Option in Favor of the Poor” received its classic articulation at the 2nd Conference of Latin American Bishops—held in Medellín, Colombia, in the critical year of 1968. Ruiz attended the conference. The new theology incorporated some aspects of Marxist analysis: the class struggle as an objective fact, capital as the product of alienated labor, and especially the explanation of the underdevelopment of the so-called Third World as a direct product of the development of the so-called First World. In addition, the liberation theologists would try to discover, in their own way, “the Plan of God” in the Bible, and attempt to “activate the transforming energy” of biblical texts. And finally, the new theology would call for peaceful struggle to resolve the problems of the poor and the oppressed but would not exclude violence as a last resort.

 

IV

The communities of Las Cañadas—the area within the Lacandón Jungle that was to become a center of the Zapatista movement—had been a site of immigration from elsewhere in Chiapas ever since the 1950s. Most of these immigrants had been peons on estates directly bordering the jungle who were forced out when the government began to encourage the spread of cattle ranches by giving the landowners financial incentives to switch from farming. Little attention was paid to the fate of the peons, who were dismissed en masse. The local oligarchy, the landowners and the politicians of the PRI, who were deeply imbued with a master-servant notion of the economy and a racist view of society, lobbied locally and nationally against government land distribution, and they used their hired gunmen to prevent peons settling on unused lands within their estates. Other workers lost their places on the coffee plantations in the south of the state as the growers began to hire cheaper, Guatemalan labor. For many Indians, emigration to the jungle seemed to offer the only opportunity for bettering their lives. Between 1950 and 1980, the population of the Lacandón Jungle, originally fewer than 80,000 souls, nearly tripled, growing to about 225,000.

Diocesan catechists also moved into this area and began to apply a new method for “sowing” questions and “harvesting” responses, partly inspired by the ideas of the Brazilian (Jesuit-trained) educational reformer Paulo Freire—especially in his key work,
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
(1970). Freire's ideas involved eliciting original thought and verbal contributions from illiterate peoples in order to teach literacy and self-sufficient (potentially transformative) thinking and judgment. A truly liberating education was to center around “the appropriation of the Word . . . The Word of God summons me to recreate the world not for the domination of my brothers but for their liberation.” Put into practice in Chiapas, the process came to be called “The Word of God” and the catechizer would be termed a
tijuanej
, which in the Tzeltal Mayan language means “the animator, the provoker, the stimulator.”

Javier Vargas, a member of the Marist Brothers order and a leading teacher and director of the catechists, was traveling on one of his frequent inspection tours through the Ocosingo region near the Lacandón Jungle when it occurred to him that the experience shared by all the new inhabitants of the area, including the catechists themselves, was that of a new Exodus: the departure from the estates, the long and dangerous period of wandering through the jungle and the eventual building of new villages. Inspired by this idea as well as by Freire's thinking, Ruiz and Vargas, along with other workers of the diocese, conceived of replacing the traditional Catholic catechism of fixed doctrinal questions and answers with a new catechism, more in accord, as they thought, with Vatican II, which would express “all the sources of the Word of God, the Bible and tradition” but also “the history of the Indians as they record it, their traditions, their culture, wherein is the seed of ‘the Word of God.' ”

The result was a document fundamental to the conversion of many Indians to an indigenous form of liberation theology:
We Are Seeking Freedom: The Tzeltales of the Jungle Proclaim the Good News
. The text was based on collective conversations between catechists and Indians, originally in Tzeltal Mayan and later translated into Spanish, to form a printed book of a little more than a hundred pages (issued by the diocese in 1971). It contained prayers, songs, and readings of various kinds organized around the theme of four types of oppression: economic, political, cultural, and religious. There were many citations from the New Testament and the prophetic books of the Old Testament, used to support specific arguments. The economic oppression that the emigrants to the jungle had experienced was compared to Pharaoh's Egypt within the context of an appeal to God:

 

You said to the ancient Israelites when they were living as slaves: “I have seen the sufferings of my people. I have heard them weep and ask me for aid. I come to liberate them from their oppressors and carry them to a fine and spacious land that offers many fine fruits” (Ex, 3.7–8). Because of this we have come together to ask you, O Lord, to help us as well, to be of aid to us!

 

Oppression was also seen as political because the laws favor the rich; it was cultural because the
caxlanes
(non-Indians) despised the languages and cultures of the Indians, who as a consequence fell into the error of despising themselves. And it was religious because conventional religious practice concentrated far too much on external acts of worship, undermining the strength of men and doing no real honor to God. The only valid response and reaction was to fortify the community: “We live in community, we have a culture, we are worth a great deal . . . the community is life, it carries me to freedom . . . the good Christian is he who makes the world grow for the good of his brothers . . .” And more. God Himself was present in the community. He spoke through those who speak and, in a sense, He
was
the community.

This Catechism of the Exodus concluded with the question: “What are we to do?” In 1974, to honor the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of Bartolomé de las Casas, the state government of Chiapas inadvertently set the stage for a further step toward action. The state authorities convoked a National Indian Conference (
Congreso Nacional Indígena
), undoubtedly meant to be one of the feel-good cultural events that are a common feature of Mexican official calendars. The state authorities asked for organizational help from the diocese, which Samuel Ruiz provided. The results were unexpected.

Months before the conference, six representatives of the diocese visited numerous villages and settlements, encouraging their participation. Fourteen hundred delegates attended, representing more than five hundred communities, most of them from Chiapas. The sessions dealt with specifically Indian problems and were conducted in Chiapas's four major Indian languages. Translators worked to reduce the language barriers. For many it was the first contact they had ever made outside their closed worlds. It was also the first major public conference in Chiapas at which the Indians themselves discussed their own problems without the restrictive presence and interference of the government. During one session, an old man wept, because “no one had ever asked him anything in his whole life.”

The delegates agreed on statements about areas that required major improvement: the protection of Indian land rights, far better programs in health and in education, and a call for cooperative economic organizations to protect the Indian communities against exploitation. A speaker linked the conference to the labor of the catechists and dubbed this assembly “the son of the Word of God.” It was followed by a series of conferences and meetings and journeys meant to encourage solidarity throughout the country and even abroad. A newspaper was started and a hymn was composed with versions in all four languages: “we advance as a single heart, as a single heart we are building our liberation.”

A small number of political organizers attended the conference, men of the left, many of them radicalized by the massacre of students at the Plaza of Tlatelolco in Mexico City before the Summer Olympics in 1968. They had been in Chiapas, says Javier Vargas, “more invisible than visible . . . not that they were living there clandestinely—it was that they smelled, they felt the social force of the Chiapas Indians.” They were in a sense the older brothers of men like Subcomandante Marcos, who was eleven years old in 1968. It was they who were mostly responsible for the Marxist phrases and ideas in some of the documents produced by the conference, but they were by no means its leaders. The overwhelming force of language, argument, and moral will clearly came from the Church. Given the societal abandonment of Chiapas and the resultant weakness of all its political institutions, it was natural enough that the leadership be taken by a more archaic institution, by the Church and specifically by a bishop who was a “convert” and on a mission to protect the Indians.

Inspired primarily by the catechist movement and stirred to a higher degree of social consciousness charged with the certitudes of religion, many of the Indians of Chiapas—especially in the newly settled areas of the Lacandón Jungle—began to seriously consider that the government was their enemy. Faced with a growing wave of requests for the partition of lands or formal acknowledgment of small land tenancies, the local authorities responded with threats, often carried out, of expulsion and violence. They did not understand that a new kind of community was forming in the jungle—more austere, more united, and much more combative. An absurd decree issued in 1972 by the national government of President Luis Echeverría contributed even more to its cohesion. The decree was presented as an act of “historical restitution” to the “last survivors” of the Maya culture: the Lacandón tribesmen living as hunters and gatherers in the jungle. An area of about 1.5 million acres was made the exclusive range of the Lacandón, a total of sixty-six families. But the decree was—at least in large part—a smoke screen for the gift of exclusive rights to large Mexican lumber companies that could reap the valuable tropical woods of the jungle. The welfare and lives of almost four thousand Indian families now settled in the region were threatened by this decree. The new communities began the hard struggle against its implementation.

Toward the end of the 1970s, the Church allowed (in Chiapas and elsewhere) another important structural innovation. A new category of church workers was established among the Indians, with new theological-political responsibilities. These were the deacons (
tuhuneles
, “servants”) who, while laymen like the catechists, could, unlike them, offer the sacraments of baptism, extreme unction, and the Eucharist, and could serve as marriage witnesses in the name of the Church. This new office, which could be filled for life and was open to married men, was greeted with great enthusiasm. It responded to a centuries-old aspiration of the Indians—the desire, in the words of a
tuhunel
, “to have our own leaders, our own priests, our own religion.” A drive to accomplish this aim of “spiritual autonomy” had been one of the reasons for the Indian rebellion of 1712, when the Tzeltal Maya not only struggled to overthrow the local government and reject burdensome taxes but also—an unusual objective during most of the colonial period in Mexico—fought to end Spanish domination and regain control of their religious life.