From the

Official News Magazine of the Diocese of Spokane

Guatemala Dateline: ‘Guatemala, te llevo en mi Corazon’ — ‘Guatemala, I carry you in my heart’

by Father David Baronti, for the Inland Register

(From the Aug. 22, 2002 edition of the Inland Register)

I also want to express my appreciation for and feelings of closeness with the many indigenous people (present). The pope has not forgotten you, and at the same time that he admires the values of your culture, he encourages you to overcome with hope the sometimes difficult situations that you encounter.
— Pope John Paul II, Guatemala, July 30, 2001

Guatemala City, July 30, 200l — One million people not only hear the most singular declaration of love that they have ever heard, but also return the sentiment.

That is because they are not viewers in one of the theaters or playhouses of this nation¦s capital, but are themselves today actors and participants. Nor are they scattered about in their usual social circles, according to the zoning restrictions that economy imposes, but are crowded together democratically rich man poor man, white man Indian, into a single vast plane - the very same place where, in former days, men with top hats and women with fans watched with wads of monies in their hands.

Before them, on the opposite side of the horse track from where they stand, stands the sign of contradiction, the 82-year-old-man, alternately rigid, alternately palsied, to whom their words are directed.

Most of the million, spread out before him like a fan under the noonday sun, have seen him before, in person — most during his second trip in 1996, and many during his first, in the early ’80s, when he visited them here, and in Quetzaltenango — the latter city, only a six hours walk from Ixtahuacan. For those of us who were there present, the image is as enduring as breath.

His choice of Quetzaltenango was deliberate, and, for those who recalled the government’s recent mass-murder torching of the Spanish embassy and the implicit message conveyed therein (that any act of insubordination will be punished by the nation’s authorities — no matter by whom, no matter what the consequences) even heroic. It is the Maya capital of Guatemala, and the native peoples were being turned into ashes — at first one by one, and then, in the months before he arrived, increasingly en masse, in the throes of an enormous holocaustal backdraft.

Operating under the philosophy that killing one engenders hatred in that man’s acquaintances, and killing the acquaintances hatred in a chaotic, multi-exponential series of chain reactions, the Lucas-Garcia government had turned from the tactics of selective kidnappings learned from the U.S. in the latter (Nixon) years of Viet Nam (where operation Phoenix imprisoned 250,000 people a year from 1968 to 1972 and electro-shocked the “uncooperative” to death) to air bombing entire villages and exterminating 500 to 1,000 in seconds.

In those days, no one seemed to care what happened to the victims. U.S. papers were predictably mute. Our familiar newscasters displayed the appropriate indignation when they canted on about the atrocities (20 dead, perhaps) committed by the hated Sandinistas of Nicaragua against the Indians who were then (as it turned out) allies of the U.S., and most Americans could recognize the word Misquito then. But the K’iche’, the Kaqchikel, the Ixil women and babies of Guatemala whose corpses were 10,000 times the multiple of Nicaragua’s, and who were allied with no one?

The evening news was silent.

What hope that someone of influence in our nation would care when the same silence surrounded the even more awful events of the late 1970s when our allies, the Indonesians, entered East Timor and gratuitously slaughtered 500,000 (practically all of them Catholics) local residents — in what has been regarded as the greatest genocide of the post-war era.

What hope had we when the American ambassador, when asked about why he had vetoed a virtually unanimous resolution of condemnation against the Indonesian government, commented that he had been given his orders, and that he had carried them out with (here Daniel Moniyhan’s face broke into a smile of self-satisfaction) “no inconsiderable degree of success.”

What hope had I when a friend of mine, murdered by government forces in Salvador, was described (because she worked with the poor?) by Alexander Haig as a communist?

What hope had we when President Carter, in a rare glimpse of humanity among the nation’s elite, was (because he referred to human rights violations among our “friends”) instantly assaulted by the chorus of united-we-stand news commentators and think-tank analysts who all but accused him of treason?

How dare you talk about the crimes of our client states, they lectured him, when you should be talking about (they used other words then) the axes of evil, as we define them?

Humanly speaking, we had little hope. We in the mission were still inventing codes of communication to use in case one of us was abducted when the breeze from the east blew in.

His name was John Paul, and he was not even greeted by Lucas-Garcia’s successor Rios-Montt when he landed.

Was it because the general was a law-abiding renacido (Rios Montt once explained to a persistent reporter that he had declared his state of siege so that he could “kill legally”) who could not countenance welcoming into his country “the New Jerusalem,” the man whom he identified as 666? Or was it because of the residual fear that this man evoked from his own Catholic past?

No matter. The people loved John Paul, and they en masse dared to commit their first public act of defiance against the government in years in showing it. They went (thousands on foot) to listen. Five hundred thousand stood before him in Quetzaltenan-go as he became the first bishop in memory to speak an Indian language (our own K’iche’) since the days of Bartolome de las Casas — the brilliant, indefatigable 16th-century Dominican.

I mentioned Las Casas’ name for another reason. If this man, the greatest of all defenders of the Indians, debated the sages of Salamanca to death, and ultimately, after countless entreaties, prevailed upon the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabela to promulgate the New Laws of 1542, which prohibited the enslavement of the New World Indians, and arguably, as a consequence, saved all of the autochthonous peoples in Latin America from going the way of the those in Cuba and the Caribbean - that is to say, from rapid-fire extinction — John Paul II was himself a kind of Las Casas then.

One point in his talk went beyond poignancy to the verge of redemption. At a time when few would dare to say such words to their friends, Juan Pablo said them (if we include all who were listening on television) to millions.

No other peoples in the world, he said, are suffering greater human rights violations than you, the Guatemala indigenous.

There was a pause.

I myself remember looking tentatively at a soldier.

I suspect that thousands also did.

The pause ended.

Did I imagine it? A new era seemed to begin.

“Juan Pablo Segundo, ¡te ama todo el mundo!” (“John Paul Two, all the world loves you!”) the people screamed, again and again.

Today, the Pope comes to Guatemala, as tortured in body as Guatemala was tortured then.

He has come to canonize a man whose holiness can be set beside that of the first Latin American saints, Martin de Porres and Rose of Lima.

Hermano (Brother) Pedro de Bentan-cour was renown for walking the streets of the old capital city with a bell and a refrain (“remember, one soul has been given to you, and if you lose it, you can’t get it back”), and for physically carrying the city’s sick (he was Guatemala’s first ambulance) to the hospital he founded.

If it was only discovered this year, when his body was disinterred, that the boils on his feet made each step of his daily trek a Calvary of love that not even the most devout members of the Religious congregations that he instituted could have imagined, the parallels between the canonized and the canonizer can hardly be more evident.

John Paul II returned to Guatemala today retracing with his own tortured steps the agony of Hermano Pedro before an audience love-sensitized to the utter poignancy and the awful irony of the occasion.

If in 1983 he brought a breeze to them that ushered away the heat of the past, today the people wished to be his Veronica, his Mary Magdalene, his fan.

If his words were slurred, they were still Calvary eloquent ... more eloquent perhaps to the degree that they limped from his mouth — rigid, palsied, half-formed and unerect.

Watching him, I thought again that the greatest commandment (to love God with all one’s heart, soul, strength and mind) became possible only with Jesus’ crucifixion. If our love for God is a reciprocal love, his own love’s reflex, I thought again, is not that the reason that the Gospel writers so underlined and elaborated on this part of his life — to enable this reflex to develop, through the contemplation of the image of his passion?

That is the kind of love that John Paul’s image today elicited from the people of Guatemala.

They saw his love in 1983, when he, young and strong, brought his fan to them, and they saw his love today when he struggled to his feet and then (pausing in pain at least three times along the way) read his text — a text that once again directed its gaze, lengthily and lovingly, towards the poorest among them.

So it was until the very end, with the people straining forward to listen — until, inevitably, as in 1983, it happened.

He put down his paper and looked at them:

“Guatemala, te llevo en mi Corazon” — “Guatemala, I carry you in my heart.”

The pause of 1983 was repeated. These were not simply words he said. They were links with the past.

“Juan Pablo Segundo, ¡te ama todo el mundo!” they screamed again and again.

The people with me assure me that the sun at that moment was ringed round by rainbows.

I don’t know about that.

But I do know that the famed Fuego (Fire) volcano streamed with lava with its greatest explosion of the last 29 years on the very evening that he landed.

(Father Baronti, a priest of the Diocese of Spokane, has been a missioner in Guatemala for nearly three decades.)

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