RELIGION-GUATEMALA: Brief Social Truce to Receive Pope

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Néfer Muñoz

SAN JOSE, Jul 29 2002 (IPS) - Social and political organisations in Guatemala will interrupt their confrontation with the government for one day to receive Pope John Paul II.

The 82-year-old pope began his 18th Latin America tour Monday, this time in Guatemala and Mexico, where he plans to canonise an indigenous man who reportedly had a vision of the Virgen of Guadalupe and a Spanish missionary who helped the Indians and the poor.

The pope will spend 25 hours in Guatemala, where he will say mass Tuesday before more than half a million people from throughout Central America, including eight presidents.

Authorities have assigned 20,000 police to the pope’s security detail in Guatemala. Hotels are booked full, customs offices are working overtime as people flow in from the rest of the region, and a temporary truce has been declared in conflicts between the government and different segments of society.

“I would like to tell the pope to stay for a year and a half, so I could be calm,” joked Guatemalan President Alfonso Portillo.

The right-wing government is facing loud demands for changes in its farm policy by unions of small farmers, accusations from human rights groups, and corruption scandals.

But the temporary easing of the tension will do nothing to change the poverty and hunger that affects more than 70 percent of the country’s 12 million people. The United Nations Development Programme’s annual Human Development report released last week ranks Guatemala 120 out of 173 countries, and last of all Central American nations.

In Guatemala, the pope will canonise Brother Pedro (Pedro San José de Betancur), a missionary who was born on the Spanish island of Tenerife in 1626, and dedicated his life to helping indigenous people and other poor residents of Antigua, 25 kms southwest of the Guatemalan capital.

In Mexico, where the pope will head Tuesday, he will declare Juan Diego, an indigenous man who is said to have had a vision of the Virgen of Guadalupe in 1531, a saint.

“The canonisation of Brother Pedro is aimed at forging greater unity between the indigenous world and the ‘ladino’ world” of whites or people of mixed race ancestry who are culturally Spanish rather than Indian, Oscar Lobo, spokesman for Costa Rica’s bishops conference, told IPS.

The growing social unrest in Guatemala, where violent crime is on the rise and lynchings of suspected criminals have become frequent, has raised fears of a return to the 1960-1996 armed conflict, said Lobo.

According to a truth commission report, the army and right-wing paramilitary groups, fighting leftist insurgents, were responsible for most of the conflict’s 200,000 mainly civilian casualties.

“It is for that reason that the pope is going to talk to them about peace and love, about the example of Brother Pedro, so the war will not be reborn, and so the differences between Indians and ladinos will be reduced,” he added.

The Vatican sees the missionary, who died at the age of 41, as “the apostle of the Indians and the slaves” of the Mayan Quiche culture. It holds him up as a model, due to his efforts to educate children and to help the sick and the dying.

The canonisation ceremony will be attended by Portillo along with presidents Abel Pacheco of Costa Rica, Francisco Flores of El Salvador, Ricardo Maduro of Honduras, Enrique Bolaños of Nicaragua, Hipólito Mejía of the Dominican Republic, and Mireya Moscoso of Panama.

Also present will be Prime Minister Said Musa of Belize, bishops, priests and Catholic churchworkers from throughout Central America, and thousands of people from the region who have been streaming into Guatemala by land and by air.

The ceremony will begin at 09:00 local time (15:00 GMT) in the racetrack south of the capital, and a number of simultaneous religious activities will be held in Antigua, in whose church of San Francisco the future saint is buried.

According to Roman Catholic Church authorities, one of the aims of the pope’s visit is to bring unity to Central America at a time of turmoil, internal divisions and diplomatic conflicts.

“John Paul II has a charisma that other popes have lacked, and he has understood the international dimension of the Church,” Costa Rican sociologist Jorge Hidalgo told IPS.

When people feel insecure for social, economic and political reasons, they often seek refuge in religion, he said.

The pope’s arrival to Guatemala has given rise to a brisk trade in religious items, like cups, plates, towels, flags, t-shirts and wood carvings with images of the pope and Brother Pedro.

Hidalgo, quoting German-U.S. psychoanalyst and writer Erich Fromm, said “the more impoverished the human being, the richer his idols.”

Because the pope is in delicate health, the government has put at his disposal six doctors, a helicopter and a hospital room in case of emergencies.

Pope John Paul’s current tour is number 97 in his 23-year pontificate. His visit to Guatemala ends Tuesday at 16:00 local time (22:00 GMT), when he will fly to Mexico.