Redeemers (54 page)

La fiesta del chivo
picks its way through that sordid mob of courtiers, some of them grotesque, some of them atrocious, which every dictatorial regime produces. Some of them truly existed and appear under their real names. Others are fictitious but composed of sadly true details. They include Trujillo's favorite killer and torture specialist, Johnny Abbes García, his economic administrator (the cynical and corrupt Chirinos), his political advisor and crooked lawyer (the fictional “Cerebrito” Cabral, Urania's father), a dressmaker and pimp named Manuel Antonio, and the strangest of all, the man who briefly succeeded Trujillo in power (and would later be elected to a much longer term), Trujillo's poet and house intellectual Joaquín Balaguer. Vargas Llosa reports on Balaguer at his most craven when, in a speech, he asserts that God had protected the Dominican Republic from historical and natural disaster and then had passed on the task directly to Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, a judgment promptly approved by the dictator. But did Balaguer believe it? “I did in politics what I was able to do,” he confessed to Vargas Llosa in an interview. “I shunned women and corruption.” He was unmarried and a solitary man, a modernist versifier and a person of culture. Machiavelli would have appreciated the shrewdness of Balaguer's survival across the Trujillo years, and also the adroit political clockwork he put into motion after the assassination. He permitted Trujillo's heirs to take revenge on the conspirators (most of them died under extreme torture superintended by Trujillo's sons Ramfis and Rhadamés Trujillo, or else were summarily shot—except for a few who survived in hiding and emerged as heroes), but afterward he honored the conspirators and—implacably and delicately—drove Trujillo's bloodstained sons into exile. “This is politics,” he said in his interview with Vargas Llosa: “finding a way through among the corpses.”

Perhaps the greatest mystery was the voluntary, almost hypnotized submission of most of the population. Certainly they were controlled by fear, since Trujillo had total power of life and death within his realm, but also, Vargas Llosa thinks, “Trujillo drew from the bottom of their souls a vocation for masochism, of beings who fulfilled themselves by being spat upon, maltreated and feeling themselves abject.” He finds “something more subtle and indefinable than fear” in the paralysis of the will, not only of the ordinary Dominican citizen, but even in brave people like General José Román, who, after participating in the conspiracy, hesitates to commit himself after the actual death of the tyrant. He enters a state of psychic paralysis, which will result in his slow and horrible death by torture and a final gunshot from Ramfis. Vargas Llosa says that Trujillo, who had reigned for more than thirty years, continued living within the minds and feelings of many Dominicans, dominating them, continuing their vassalage. One of his major incentives in writing this novel was to reveal the mechanisms of such an acceptance of slavery.

Both stylistically and emotionally, Vargas Llosa's Trujillo is a very different figure from the dictators who move through the equally great novels of García Márquez. The well-made realism of Vargas Llosa's writing is far removed from the prose poetry of the Colombian. García Márquez's elegiac fascination with the inner life of the tyrant, and the atmosphere of power expressed in surreal or expressionistic images, is light-years from Vargas Llosa's harsh realism, which draws its strength not primarily from rhythm and image (though they are effective) but from devastating detail. The Colombian offers the complexity of the archetypical Latin American
caudillos
and
coronels,
our dictators, in works that use a range of devices and even humor for his indulgent portrayals of an “incontrovertible and devastating authority.”
La fiesta del chivo
, on the other hand, is a blistering indictment of the tyrant and anyone willing to serve him. There is no possibility of sympathetic identification with the malevolent “father of his country,” no trace of humor in this world of tyranny.
The Feast of the Goat
is a return to the moral universe of
Conversation in the Cathedral
, to the rage against patriarchal authority and its infinite possibilities of evil. And Vargas Llosa's great skill as a novelist allows him to give concrete form to this evil in even tiny details. In
The Feast of the Goat
, for instance, at a festive party in the open to which the abominable Ramfis Trujillo has sequestered some of the conspirators who were supposed to have been freed (instead they will be shot dead), one of Ramfis's cohorts runs, eager to participate, toward the men about to be killed, “without letting go of his shot glass of whiskey,” a strangely chilling and psychologically convincing detail.

Only the martyrs merit the author's sympathy, from Urania (delivered unwitting, an early adolescent decked out in her best dress, by her father to Trujillo, who has aged into impotence and raging against his sexual failure, rapes her manually and destroys her future emotional life) to those who die in agony or the few who live to be welcomed as heroes, or the moving figure of Salvador Estrella Sadhalá, a committed Catholic who discovers, within his own tradition, in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the right to tyrannicide as a last recourse for the benefit of “the common good.” And Vargas Llosa continues to oppose the fantasies that lead to the quest for power, for absolute power, as they continue to plague the life of Latin America. “If there is anything I hate,” Vargas Llosa has remarked, “anything that profoundly disgusts me and enrages me, it is dictatorship. It is not just a political conviction or a moral principle: it is a twisting inside me, a visceral reaction, maybe because I have endured many dictatorships in my own country, maybe because as a child I experienced in my own flesh the brutal imposition of authority.”

In the year 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa finally received the Nobel Prize for Literature, an honor he has long deserved, and reached the apogee of his literary reputation. He is admired by millions of readers, a multitude of friends, and, with Patricia Llosa and his children, has created a warm and intimate family life. In a sense he has rewritten his family history and reconstructed the Eden of his childhood years in Bolivia, before the Fall that ensued through the reappearance of his father. For the son of Ernesto Vargas, scarred in his youth by parental abuse, it may be time, at last, to be happy.

PART V

Religion and Rebellion

 

 

10

Samuel Ruiz

THE APOSTLE OF THE INDIANS

Four days after the Zapatista uprising in the impoverished Mexican state of Chiapas on New Year's Day, 1994, a reporter interviewed one of its peasant soldiers, a prisoner of the Mexican army, and asked, Why are you fighting? “I want there to be democracy, no more inequality. I am looking for a life worth living, liberation, just like God says.”

John Womack, Jr., uses these words as the epigraph to his book
Rebellion in Chiapas
,
An Historical Reader
. The speaker was José Pérez Méndez—a Mayan peasant like all the common soldiers of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation—and his statement conveys much of the impetus of the rebellion, whose leaders—at the highest level—were originally not Mayan
chiapanecos
but urban university graduates, like their chief, Subcomandante Marcos himself. They had been planning the uprising for ten years, with the original intention of establishing a guerrilla
foco
in Chiapas, a territory under their control from which revolution could spread. But the rebellion became something quite different: an event and movement that could go nowhere militarily but won extraordinary national and international attention.

The Zapatista soldier José Pérez Méndez had good reason to “want democracy.” For the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional
(PRI), which still governed Mexico at the time of the rebellion and had done so uninterruptedly for nearly seventy years, the state of Chiapas was a secure reserve of votes in national “elections,” giving the PRI, on average, 97 percent of its ballots. The electoral victories were engineered through efficient methods of fraud: vote buying, false ballots substituted for the real thing in areas where the government party felt threatened, and strong pressure from powerful local interests to vote the right way. The machinery of the corporate state had links with all levels of power in Chiapas, from the Indian
caciques
(political bosses) of small villages and communities all the way up to the dominant class—the owners of the coffee plantations and the cattle ranches, the lumber barons operating in the tropical forests, and other interests.

Pérez Méndez was justifiably protesting against the extreme social inequality in Chiapas. The state has immense natural resources. It is the primary producer of coffee, cattle, and cacao in Mexico, it is third in hydroelectric power, fourth in natural gas resources. And yet, in its population of 3.7 million as of 1994 (27 percent Indian, with four major groups of ethnic Mayans), 50 percent were undernourished, 75 percent earned less than the Mexican minimum wage (defined then as 1,500 U.S. dollars per year), and 56 percent were illiterate. In Los Altos (“the Heights”) and the Lacandón Jungle—centers of Zapatismo—the conditions were even worse, intensified by a population density of 76 inhabitants per square kilometer, almost double that of the rest of the state. And in these areas, close to 80 percent of the population was Indian.

Perhaps the greatest impetus for Pérez Méndez's militancy lay in the daily affront to his dignity (Womack's “a life worth living” translates to
una vida digna,
which also carries the overtone of “a life with dignity”). Mexico is a country that for four centuries has undergone the most successful process of ethnic and cultural mixing in the Americas, but the ancient region of Mayan civilization (in Mexico comprising primarily Chiapas and Yucatán) has been an exception to the rule from the very beginning of the Spanish Conquest. Racial discrimination, exploitation, and servitude flourished through the centuries in its haciendas and cities. And they have bred ferocious ethnic wars.

There is no doubt that the movement gave the image of the Indian (about 10 percent of the total population of Mexico) greater dignity, returning his problems at least for a time to the center of the national agenda. And the shock of the Zapatista uprising of 1994 surely helped to intensify the demand for democratic change in the country. Faced with the threat that Mexicans might renew their historical inclination toward revolutionary action, the power structure of the Mexican corporate state, for the very first time, genuinely opened up the possibility of democratic electoral competition. At the same time, the political left, represented by the
Partido de la Revolución Democrática
(PRD)—a coalition of various forces including socialists, former communists, and dissident defectors from the PRI—could cleanly distance itself from the idea of armed revolution (strongly favored, and implemented in urban and rural guerrilla actions, by some sectors of the left since the late 1960s) to take on clearer form as a social democratic party contending politically for power.

The leadership of the internationally famous Subcomandante Marcos should not obscure the great importance in the Zapatista uprising of another individual whose work in Chiapas preceded Marcos by twenty-five years, Bishop Samuel Ruiz of San Cristóbal de las Casas and his diocese. Without a consideration and understanding of Samuel Ruiz's long years of evangelical labor, the Zapatista rebellion cannot really be comprehended or evaluated. Bishop Samuel Ruiz carried out what was probably the most successful practical application in all Latin America of the Theology of Liberation that developed out of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), convened by Pope John XXIII in 1962. Hundreds of thousands of Indians in the state of Chiapas “became conscious” of the conditions of oppression under which they live. This is obviously a great good, but the pastoral work of Samuel Ruiz had other results as well, some perhaps less desirable, or at least more controversial.

 

II

Hanging on a wall of Bishop Samuel Ruiz's office in the episcopal building in the highland city of San Cristóbal de las Casas was a “primitive” folk-style painting that depicts an imaginary encounter between Ruiz and his remote precursor: Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, the great Apostle to the Indians of the sixteenth century. The artist had presented the pair almost as twins, except for the eyeglasses Samuel Ruiz is wearing.

Bartolomé de las Casas, the “protector of the Indians,” was the third bishop of San Cristóbal. The painting obviously fused the two men and recalls as well the traditional filial relationship in Mexico between priests and Indians, originating with the Franciscan missionaries summoned to Mexico by Hernán Cortés in 1524. Hidalgo and Morelos, the nineteenth-century leaders of the War of Independence against Spain, were both priests. Their armies—at least in the first stage of the rebel-lion—were primarily Indian. In many villages (both Indian and mestizo) throughout the Mexican republic, the village priest continues to be a figure of significant authority, both spiritual and secular. Chiapas, which is a living museum of Mexican history, seemed the perfect place for the resurgence of a very Mexican figure—the rebel priest who invokes the Thomist doctrine of the “just war” as a last resort of the oppressed against their oppressors.

The Dominican priest Las Casas was the victor in a theological dispute that had far greater importance than any mere change in the formulation of doctrine. He argued fervently that the Indians of the New World had souls, combatting the theologians who would define them as less than fully human and therefore natural slaves. The king of Spain was persuaded and in 1542 issued the New Laws of the Indies, through which the Indians officially became the wards of the Spanish Crown and not the brute property of the new Spanish rulers.

Parallels and echoes between the lives of Ruiz and Las Casas are many and resonant: “He was a good theologian and a consummate jurist . . . his soul was deeply troubled by the treatment of the Indian slaves who were bought and sold like flocks of sheep . . . he preached like an apostle teaching the means to their salvation, in order to put an end to such unlawful treatment,” wrote a chronicler of the period about Fray Bartolomé. According to his twentieth-century counterpart, Samuel Ruiz, the grim reality that he himself encountered when he arrived in Chiapas in 1960 was not “generically distinct” from what had profoundly shaken the soul of his great predecessor. In one community he was informed that all the children had died almost overnight, as the result of an epidemic wrongly diagnosed by the official health services. In some haciendas, owners whipped their resident peons. In San Cristóbal de las Casas, bastion of the
coletos
(a term used for the white upper-class, especially within this city), Indians would still step off the sidewalks to let whites pass and could still hear themselves addressed with the same words of racial contempt that had assaulted the ears of Fray Bartolomé four centuries ago: “Indian dogs!”

An aggressive racism has long been characteristic of Chiapas, and the regions where Mayans live have a long history of confrontation between whites and Indians. It is by no means typical of Mexico itself, with its overwhelmingly mestizo population, though regional pockets of strong anti-Indian feeling (as well as more pervasive and subtle forms of racism) certainly do exist.

“To put an end to such unlawful treatment,” both bishops took energetic action. They brought priests to the diocese who shared their concern for the Indians. Both would call on members of the Dominicans, which was a preaching order actively seeking converts. They showed a greater critical awareness of the injustice and cruelties inflicted upon the Indians and were the first to voice any doubts about the moral legitimacy of the Conquest.

Las Casas and Ruiz both had to deal with significant resistance from local ecclesiastics: Fray Bartolomé from members of other preaching orders, Ruiz with the old monsignors and other conservative priests of his diocese who were shocked when he would refuse to sleep in the “big house” of a hacienda and choose to spend a night in the modest home of a peon. Both would come to praise (and idealize) the values and customs of the Indians, arguing that they had lived in a better, harmoniously organized society, a harmony that had been subverted by the Conquistadores or—in this century—by exploiters and power brokers from outside the Indian communities.

In the words and actions of both men, you hear echoes of biblical prophecy. Before the Royal Court of Spain, Bartolomé de las Casas questioned the legitimacy of the Spanish Conquest, describing it as an action “unjust, iniquitous, tyrannical and worthy of all the fires of Hell,” and prophesied that “the wrath of God” would turn against Spain and destroy it. With similar zeal and single-mindedness, Samuel Ruiz showed the same condemnatory view not only of the period of the Spanish Viceroyalty but also of the Liberal state of the nineteenth century and the nationalist-revolutionary Mexico of the twentieth. His strong criticism concentrated on the specific issue of the treatment of Indians and the poor.

Ruiz's attacks on government were also a chapter in Mexico's long history of rivalry between the state and the Church, the “two majesties.” During the Spanish Empire, the power struggle between the Church and the Bourbon rulers would eventually spill over into the Mexican War of Independence, and throughout the nineteenth century, Conservatives and Liberals struggling for control of Mexico were fighting over the weight of secular or religious power. With the Liberal victory in the War of the Reform (1858–61), the vast properties belonging to the Church were expropriated and a constitutional separation of church and state was enforced. The conflict between them, however, has remained latent, and sometimes explosive. It surfaced most violently in the Cristiada uprising of the late 1920s when Catholic peasants (the Cristeros), especially in the west of Mexico, rebelled against the anticlerical measures of President Plutarco Elías Calles.

Bartolomé de las Casas was involved in a great moral confrontation more than 450 years ago. But he also achieved the victory of the Church over one aspect of secular power, the will of the local Spanish conquerors to make unlimited use of what was considered a material resource: the Indian as slave. Raúl Vera, while assistant bishop to Samuel Ruiz, was preparing arguments for the canonization of Las Casas and saw Ruiz as his direct descendant. Of Ruiz, he said, “He is a man who cannot be silent . . . who has assumed his responsibility mystically and mysteriously before the eyes of God.”

“He is a prophet who creates prophets,” said Miguel Concha, then provincial head of the order of the Dominicans in Mexico. And Samuel Ruiz did produce many prophets in his diocese: thousands of lay teachers of doctrine, called “catechists,” the great majority of them Indians, who for three decades sowed (they would say received) the “Word of God” in their small communities.

 

III

During the sixteenth century, throughout Meso-America, the Franciscans and Dominicans, Augustinians, Jesuits, and others did the work of converting the Indians. As part of the process of persuasion, they used not only words but theater, music, sculpture, and paintings in the churches; but they also depended on instruction or catechism. The new catechist movement in Chiapas is a variation on this function, the propagation of doctrine by personal teaching in the effort to make the Indians conscious of their oppression.

This evangelical effort was at the very base of the political transformations and revolutionary turmoil that have shaken Chiapas before and since 1994. Fray Toribio de Benavente Motolinía, a famous Franciscan opponent of Bartolomé de las Casas, expressed his fear that the ideas of Las Casas would someday be “read by the Indians.” This is precisely what Samuel Ruiz and his catechists had succeeded in accomplishing.

Samuel Ruiz was the center, the motive force of this peculiar catechetical movement. It is a role he came to play partly through his own origins, partly through the impact of a transforming conversion in the course of his life. He was the firstborn son of poor parents. His mother and father had met as braceros, migrant grape pickers in California. His mother was there illegally, as a “wetback.” They married and returned to Mexico, where their son Samuel was born in 1924, in Irapuato, within the highland basin of the Bajío, to the north of Mexico City. This zone (along with Jalisco to the west) forms the heart of Catholic Mexico. During the late 1920s (the era of the Cristero uprising of Catholic peasants) and into the '30s, his father, now a small grocer, was not only pro-Cristero but also a Sinarquista, member of a homegrown Mexican movement that can legitimately be described as deeply Catholic but also, in its racism and exclusivism, as fascist. The movement was quite strong in the city of León, where Samuel Ruiz entered a seminary in 1937, at the age of thirteen. The young Samuel Ruiz saw Sinarquismo as “a movement that shook things up, a necessary step in the civic and political education of society.” Later he moved very far from that position. The direct ideological descendants of Sinarquismo—the profoundly antidemocratic movements of the Catholic far right—were opposed to social Catholicism and Samuel Ruiz and liberation theology. But the fact that he came from a Sinarquista family surely did mean an early influence toward the rejection of the secular state in favor of a primarily religious affiliation.