Modern Crucifixion in Central America

Every day during the years of conflict in Central America, tortured bodies were found along roadsides—as in Jesus’ day the crucified victims of the Roman Empire were displayed on the side of the road—to instill fear in the population. Every day during the 1980s and early 1990s in Central America, people were killed, disappeared—because of  faith, because of their belief in a God who meant life, abundant life, life is all its fullness, for every human being.
–Margaret Swedish and Marie Dennis

 

People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador; they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones while parents are forced to watch.
–Father Daniel Santiago

From Guatemala to Gaza

1.

It was Ash Wednesday 1983.  In a darkened sanctuary with some lighted candles, an unfamiliar Catholic priest and several other people entered the sanctuary and sat in the front row.  The people wearing bandanas were refugees from El Salvador who had fled from the death squads and chaos of their country.  In his sermon, the priest planted the seed of an idea: Our community could offer public Sanctuary to such people as our guests.  We eventually did offer such shelter and protection to a Salvadoran family, in defiance of the INS ruling that they had no right to be in the U.S.

In my middle twenties in Louisville, I and many other people became a very small part of a movement of solidarity with the peoples of Central America. A few people I know gave their lives over to it, as they relocated for long stretches in Nicaragua; others made frequent visits to and maintained strong connections with grass-roots movements in Guatemala. Many of us participated in peace delegations, put pressure on Congress, wrote scores of op-eds and letters to the editor, and joined in civil disobedience against aid to the contra terrorists attacking Nicaragua.

Annie Boyd: Walking with the Salvadorans

In class we are currently reading Like Grains of Wheat: A Spirituality of Solidarity by Marie Dennis and Margaret Swedish. The authors interview scores of North Americans who had their eyes opened by their relationships with Central Americans since the early 1980s.

Here’s a passage from early in the book:

The stories of solidarity that impacted the lives of thousands of North American people of faith are profound and complex, yet with something quite simply in common. They began often with a small gesture of accompaniment, a decision to walk, for however a short time, with a people, a community, whether in a war zone, a refugee camp, a town under siege, or a village of displaced persons or refugees seeking safety in the United States.

What these stories initiated, however, was a journey far different from anything that had been anticipated, a journey into the real world and its painful reality, a journey into themselves within that world, a journey into a faith that for many had become cut off and isolated, detached from the conditions of real human beings. They discovered this faith vividly alive in the hopes and aspirations of the poor. They found themselves on a journey that stretched them, pulled them, stripped them, and liberated them. [page 21]

I just wish my students could meet Annie Boyd, who recently sent me the following letter.