Dennis Smith talk

Longtime Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Guatemala mission worker and Central America Evangelical Center for Pastoral Studies educator and communicator Dennis Smith told three particular memorable stories at his Monday evening Fireside Room talk. All three were true stories (though he admitted that the first one was a composite):

- Let’s say you’re a sugar cane grower with a very small airstrip in the Izabal area. A man comes and offers you $25,000 if he and his colleagues can use your airstrip one day. All you have to do is not be there. There’s a catch: If you go to the local drug enforcement agents, who may or may not be working for this man and his colleagues – well, they know where your children go to school.

- A couple who had formerly belonged to the church pastured by Sunday’s guest preacher, Delia Leal, switched over to a megachurch in town where a local drug lord was a prominent lay leader. Through their church connections a bank connected with the drug lord offered this couple a loan so they could buy a house – a house they’d never be able to afford to buy otherwise, since they had no collateral. They went to the megachurch pastor – essentially Leal’s rival – and asked the pastor what they should do – whether they should take the money. (If they didn’t, they would certainly have to make the payments, given that through his backing of them the drug lord was on the line.) The pastor prayed over the check with them and encouraged them to go ahead.

- The nephew of a woman whose extended family lived in a neighborhood controlled by a gang was killed. Everyone knew who killed the nephew. Often in situations such as this the police or paramilitary or even government officials would have the man killed – both as a cause and a result of the inadequacy of the formal law enforcement and criminal justice system – and a tattooed young man would show up on the outskirts of time. This time, because the woman had relatives who worked in the Attorney General’s office, they asked her first whether they should have the man killed. The woman said No. As a Christian, I can’t condone this sort of killing. It won’t bring my nephew back, and it’s not right.

Smith explained how more than 100 years ago a Guatemalan president invited U.S. Presbyterian missionaries to Guatemala to develop a counterweight to the power of the Roman Catholic Church, which was sometimes at odds with the state. He explained that a majority of Guatemalans are either Protestant Pentecostals or Catholic charismatics. A Pentecostal leader, noting this fact, conceded not only Guatemalan Christians but also Pentecostals and Charismatics in particular – since they’re in the majority – must share some responsibility for the country’s violent, lawless culture.

Smith also reviewed history of the long civil war (now classified in some official international circles on a campaign of genocide against the indigenous Mayan population), the fall 2007 election and its aftermath (which could include the subsequent election of the current term-limited president’s wife as the next president), and the Honduran coup and its aftermath.

Smith explained that Rio Dulce and Izabal sit in the middle of a swath of land that goes from the Honduran to Mexican borders, that has become a transshipment belt for cocaine going from Columbia to North America.

Major economic actors in Izabal today would be: drug traffickers, operators of the nickel mine (and, elsewhere, extractive industries, which often use cyanide, in general), and large farmers (particularly of sugar cane and African palm trees, grown for their oil, which both produce export products).

Guatemala’s traditionally most powerful institutions, the military and the Roman Catholic Church, are both less powerful before. The shrinking power of the military is good in many respects, but the power vacuum – which gangs and drug traffickers have partly filled.

Smith recommended the following reading options:

On late 1800s Guatemala, The Divine Husband, by Francisco Goldman (who went on to write the nonfiction The Art of Political Murder)

After the talk, Smith said several other things that surprised me a little:

- The government is building a major highway that will go apparently go from Rio Dulce to Coban and beyond (running, coincidentally, through the drug transshipment belt, and probably swinging slightly north of El Estor, but still opening up the whole area quite a bit – probably both for better and for worse).

- Smith believes that the Izabal Presbyterians’ focus on evangelism and church growth is partly a product of this dangerous political, cultural, and economic situation, in which building up these places of comfort and solaces is a kind of resistance. The churches in our partner presbytery might have people who work for drug traffickers (indeed, Smith’s nephew delivers pizza for a pizza place that is a front for a drug operation), but it’s unlikely they would make a drug lord a lay leader (as at the Coban megachurch). Still, Smith says he thinks that Guatemala needs Guatemalans enhancing civil society, building religious and secular organizations and raising issues for discussion and debate – and, while our partners are building religious institutions, they are not raising issues for discussion and debate.

- Domestic violence against women is a problem, probably all the more so in rural areas of Guatemala, and it is a problem among church people too, where men might justify it as part of husband’s responsibility for disciplining his family.

- Ironically, the coup-installed Honduran govenment needed President Zelaya to return, in order to restore any kind of legitimacy to the elections later this fall. I'm not sure if Smith would still say this after the curfew, cut utilities to the Brazilian embassy, and bloody crackdown on Zelaya supporters. Smith also said pressure from the Obama Administration and European Community countries was beginning to faze the coup government, and it can no longer be so clear that that is the case.

-- Perry