Wake Up, Dead Man

I spent Holy Week on a retreat with Debbie and the YAVs in Huanta and Ayacucho. Alissa works and lives at a radio station there. It was an incredible cultural experience on many levels, but there’s one bit in particular that I want to share with you.

In past blogs, I’m sure I’ve alluded to the “Years of Violence” in Peru, from 1980 to 2000. It is, sadly enough, a pretty typical Latin American story. The Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”), a violent leftist group started by a professor at University in Ayacucho, began an insurgency fighting for a new leftist government that would end the extreme poverty that ravished the country and bring about financial equality. Good intentions, I think so, but they really just became a violent terrorist group. The military retaliated with violence and also carried out an inquisition, if you will, in search of leftist sympathizers that makes the McCarthy years in the US look laughable. Once again, I want to hope that good intentions were there at the start, but in the end the military killed more civilians than did the Sendero terrorist group. People today are still waiting to find out what happened to their loved ones as their bodies are uncovered in mass graves from when entire villages were killed because of rumors of terrorist connections.

The violence was felt in all corners of Peru – my host family has told me stories of walking over dead bodies in the streets of Lima – but the province of Ayacucho undoubtedly suffered the most. Alissa has told us that literally everyone in her community knew someone who was killed either by the Sendero or the military. These people have experienced violence, pain, and deaths in a way that I cannot even imagine.

Our first day in Huanta, Alissa’s family took us up to the “Mirador” (“look-out-point” from which you can see the entire city…these seem to be pretty popular in the mountain cities of Peru) where we, along with a HUGE white Jesus statue (think Jesus from the movie Saved times 10!) watched the town of Huanta in the valley below, a beautifully peaceful landscape. Gazing at the beauty before us, it was hard to imagine this area torn apart by violence only 10 or 15 years before.

On the way down from the Mirador, we stopped at a quaint, but fairly non-descript church on the side of the road. Alissa’s host-dad told us that during the Violence, a service at this church was interrupted by army officials bearing orders to detain and interrogate six young men. While the “terrorist suspects” were escorted out, the rest of the congregation refused to acknowledge the army’s presence and continued singing their hymns in an act of protest. After the service, the bodies of these young men were found not far from the church itself. It was evident that they had been brutally tortured before they were murdered.

This is just one story of many. One tragedy suffered by one community. But similar stories abound all over Peru. Last weekend I visited fellow YAV Anna in Huancayo, another “red zone” during the years of violence. In a conversation comparing the general behavior of people in Huancayo versus in my home of Lima, Anna commented that people in Huancayo tended to be more socially reserved and hesitant, more independent and inclined to fend for themselves. She attributed these behaviors to the effects of the Violence, when no one knew whom to trust and survival often entailed looking out for oneself and one’s family only. I forget too easily, I think, the immense impact that the Years of Violence still has on the lives and actions of my friends in Peru.

A few days later, we found ourselves in Ayacucho watching and waiting for the famous Good Friday procession over the alfombras, carpets made of colored sawdust and natural materials created solely to be trampled on in the holy procession, over which residents had slaved all day. We ate homemade ice cream, we browsed artisan markets, and we waited for the ceremony to begin. A fun day in a beautiful city.

But as the procession began and I watched the statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, accompanied by hundreds upon hundreds of devotees, walk solemnly around the Central Plaza, I was struck by the juxtaposition of Holy Week and the deaths of so many innocent campesinos at the hands of terrorists and government authorities. Because if we strip away all of the fancy theological trappings in which we have dressed him, who is Jesus but a political revolutionary killed by the Roman government? Martyred for his social ideals of justice, love, and equality that by their very nature threatened the concept of empire. Jesus, the one that we as Christians call Lord and Savior, the one in whose honor this procession was taking place, was just like those young men tortured and killed on the hill by the church. And in turn, those men, and the countless other men and women who suffered at the hands of the government without cause are just like Jesus. To blatantly steal imagery from the liberation theologians (I’m allowed to do that, I dedicated last year to researching and writing a thesis on the current state and theological validity of liberation theology), in the suffering, the deaths, the hunger, the poverty, the exploitation, the unjust detainment of each of these men and women, Christ was crucified again and again. And it continues today, in the Peru, in the US, in every part of the world. People are killed and exploited, poverty and dependence are the ever-enforced norm, and in each of these moments, Christ is crucified de nuevo.

My Peruvian friends understand Good Friday in a way that I may never be able to. But I leave you (and myself) with this question: Have they seen resurrection? Have we seen resurrection? What does resurrection in this situation look like? Is it the recovery of the remains of loved ones “disappeared,” a final answer to the question that have been lingering for so many years? Is it the conviction and imprisonment of Fujimori for the human rights abuses he committed? Is in the restoration of, at least relatively speaking, “peace?” Renewed relationships? Or is it, perhaps, an end to the social situation that fostered the violence in the first place? Liberation from poverty? An end to the imperialist policies of nations like our own that keep countries like Peru in an interminable state of dependence? Have we seen and taken part in this resurrection, or are we still crouched outside the tomb, waiting? Is it possible that this time, we’re going to have to work together to roll away the stone?