Father Ron Burke: Liberation Theology and the Odyssey of a Priest in Guatemala

The following narrative was edited from a series of interviews by Richard Bermack conducted in San Bruno, California, in 1983 with a priest who spent 12 years working with Indians in Guatemala. The story is told in his words.

This was all done by the government of Guatemala, and with the support of the United States government. Why did they destroy our community? What sort of threat did we present to them? That is a good question. We thought they would see some value in what we were doing, because we were talking about nonviolent social change. The guerrillas would leaflet our people. Those leaflets were interesting. They would say things like “Don’t believe the missionaries who tell you that it is possible to have social change without guns. They are deceiving you. There is no other way than taking up arms.” So we thought that because our position was so openly and systematically nonviolent, there was nothing the government could accuse us of.

I came to Guatemala in 1968 as part of LAMP, Latin America Mission Program. I have always been concerned with the plight of Spanish-speaking people since my early days in the seminary, when I observed the poverty of migrant farmworkers. Before that I used to consider myself poor because I had to work during the summertime. So when I was ordained I started working with Spanish-speaking people in Oakland and in southern Alameda County. That was really gratifying work, seeing young people coming out of the worst kind of environments — drugs, lack of education, prejudice — working together, dealing with all those things, bringing about their own development as well as social change.

There was a lot going on in those days. We lobbied against the Bracero program and against Public Law 78. Cesar Chavez was just starting out organizing in the valley, working with Fred Ross of the CSO, an Alinsky organization. It was a little later on when the first march took place. I was forbidden to participate in the march, so I went and took pictures.

We started working in Gilroy developing a program called the Interfaith Migrant Committee, which was a joint effort of the Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Catholic churches. We had committees on education, health, and housing. Education and health, that didn’t threaten anybody terribly, but when we got into housing we began to step on people’s toes. Some of the farmers didn’t appreciate having pictures taken of the dilapidated housing they were using for their farmworkers. With these photographs we put together slide shows on self-help housing and different alternative housing programs. Then we helped them initiate some of these programs.

But we got into real trouble when we took on the question of wages and working conditions, and that was too much for the farmers. They felt we had become their enemy. So they started saying I was a communist and a socialist. Then they went to the pastor — I was an associate pastor at the time — and asked him to get rid of me. When he wouldn’t do that, they started a boycott of the parish and the Sunday collection dropped. It was right in the middle of building a new church. I had put in several requests to work in Latin America, and up until that time it hadn’t been considered the opportune moment, but then it became the opportune moment [laugh]. First I was sent to Mexico and then to Guatemala, so that is how I got there.

When I arrived in Guatemala in 1968, it was right after the conference of Latin American bishops at Medellin, Columbia. The bishops took the fundamentals of the Second Vatican Council of 1965 and applied them to the situation in Latin America. They came up with a series of pastoral guidelines for Latin America, which they called the presence of the church in the transformation of Latin America. Within those guidelines you had, one, a very strong statement on social transformation as being part of evangelization; and two, a mechanism for the revitalizing of the church, which they called at that time basic Christian communities. These are now called basic ecclesial communities.

In a basic Christian community, you start with the reality of the life of the people wherever you happen to be. On the south coast of Guatemala with the sugarcane, cotton, and coffee plantations, it would be one thing. In the mountains which the Indians call home, where there is more community and awareness of their cultural heritage, it would be something else. In the city where you have the problems of city life, it would be something else again.

The last nine years I spent in the rural area. It was there, working with the Indians, that I had the most positive experience I have ever had. I saw communities of people grow, learning to assume responsibility and analyze reality in the light of the faith and then take action to creatively deal with their lives rather than being passive and submissive, as had been expected of Indians for centuries by the Ladinos, or Spanish-speaking people, who were the controlling group.

Within these communities there was a tremendous upgrading of the people’s educational level. They developed their own schools with their own volunteer teachers. They had their own economic development programs, with agricultural development, land purchase programs, financing for their crops, improvement of agricultural techniques, and cooperative organization for marketing.

There was a tremendous increase in ambition among the Indian youth. We gradually built a pastoral center for our work with the Cakchiquel Indians in Chimaltenango. The last year before I left there were weekly leadership conferences of 125 young people, Indian boys and girls, the leaders of their groups.

We took advantage of the work of the Wycliffe bible translators, using their bible translations to promote the use and heritage of the Indian languages. Part of our training classes included courses in Mayan culture in their own language, as well as writing and the grammar of the Cakchiquel language.

We developed translations for most of the hymns that were used in the liturgies, which included many that had to do with liberation and social transformation — “We Shall Overcome” type things in Spanish — coming out of a slightly different tradition than the Negro spirituals, but more or less in that same vein. So all of these things were translated into Cakchiquel and choirs were springing up all over the place. Every one of our basic ecclesial communities had its own choir with its own instruments. They were very poor with the guitar; given time I am sure they would have mastered all that. All of this, of course, has since then been systematically destroyed by the Guatemalan government.

We would talk about not just knowing theology but doing theology, learning how to use the scriptures to deal with life’s problems, which is part of liberation theology — taking the liberation aspects of the history of Israel and applying that to today’s reality. For example, the exodus from Egypt: from the liberation point of view, the coming out of slavery into the promised land symbolizes the internal freeing up of a person from guilt, and on a social level, equipping a people to move as a group from the death experience of injustice to a resurrection experience, to new hope and life and creativity. All of that is spelled out in the scriptures and is part of what we celebrate in Christian liturgy, especially during holy week. The death and resurrection of Jesus says something about our own death and resurrection experience, our own exodus story, whether individually or communally. And that is fundamentally the basis of liberation theology. Jesus refers to that when he quotes Isaiah in Nazareth, when he is announcing his message: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me; the Lord has anointed me.”

So you just read these passages and say, “Is there any similarity between what we have read and what you are living?” It doesn’t need any translation; in Central America people are living their exodus experience. The parallels are endless: the killing of baby boys in Egypt and Moses being saved from death with the Guatemalan policy of the involuntary sterilization of Indian women and the imposition of the American-sponsored birth control programs, like it or not, on the Indian women — getting paid by the head for the numbers of people they can talk into getting sterilized.

Why, you can go through the whole gospel. Jesus and the Gerasenes, for example, his recognition of the priority of human dignity over every other value including capital, especially capital. Jesus fouled up the entire economy of the Gerasenes to restore the human dignity of one person. Jesus allowing one person to be fully human had greater importance than that of a whole community losing its capital, its life’s investment. That says something about capitalism today.

Well, you work with scripture like that in relation to problems of oppression in a society like Guatemala, and you don’t have to belabor the point. It doesn’t leave you much choice as to where you have to take your stand.

At one point Jesus stood on the Mount of Olives looking over the city of Jerusalem and began to weep. He wept over the city and he said, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if you only knew the day of your salvation,” and he prophesized the destruction of the city of Jerusalem, which actually took place in the year 70 under Emperor Hadrian. We use that passage to ask people to look over their own city with that same perspective: what would Jesus be weeping over in this city? We ask them to adopt the vision that Jesus had for Jerusalem, feeling those same feelings that he had for Jerusalem for their own city.

The next question is what to do about it. Do you just weep about it and grind your teeth or wring your hands? Of course Jesus did far more than that. You have his voluntary going to the cross and then the death and resurrection of Christ, which in the Christian theology is regarded as the primary moving force behind our own personal liberation. So in that submission to crucifixion there is more power than if he had taken up the sword and organized armies or done something else politically. He rejected those old forms of power. He operated entirely outside of the power structure in a position of weakness, but what he did in Christian theology is acknowledged as the greatest force for social change that has been unleashed in history.

So the Indian people involved in the leadership training programs that were part of our church and the communities we were involved with began assuming a far more dynamic role than they had ever played in the four hundred years of their history since the conquest. Before they had just been a zero factor politically. At the last elections, before we had to leave, they were being considered a force to reckon with and were being sought after by the various political parties.

For instance, many communities would be electing an Indian mayor for the first time in their history. Sometimes this worked out well, and other times they would discover that just being an Indian didn’t automatically make somebody a candidate for mayor. They were going through that process of learning by mistakes. Indian kids were going to the university in Guatemala City, and the educational level jumped by leaps and bounds. It was just a fantastic transformation process.

But we knew that we were skating on thin ice. Because when people are used to running the lives of others, making their decisions for them, abusing them, exploiting them, manipulating them, even stealing their property, and just plain having the right of life and death over them, as is the situation for the Indians under the cacique system in the countryside of Mexico and Guatemala — well, when they see that they are losing that control, what they do and how they justify what they do — they call it by all kinds of fancy names — anticommunism. So in Paramos, that was the little town where I had my parish, my name was placed on the hit list. They tell me that I am still referred to down there as “Commandante Ronaldo” and I am accused of being one of the main communists.

Which was ironic, because at the same time we were being leafleted by the guerrillas — whose efforts were well under way and not without some justification — attacking our stand on nonviolence. We were getting it from both sides. Our people would have friends at the university, who would be dealing ideologically with these problems of injustice and oppression. They would become radicalized and then come back and tell our people, “You are working with the church. How can you do this? Don’t you know that the church is identified with the enemy?”

And then our people would have to explain to them our commitment to working for the poor and for justice with regard to the resurrection of Christ and social transformation. So it required every time they were challenged for them to face up to that reality and to justify our vision of a nonviolent response to the violence. And a nonviolent response, I might add, doesn’t mean an inactive or weak response. A nonviolent response can be a strong protest response and a speaking-out response, it just doesn’t include violence. Unfortunately, even that was considered unacceptable by the government. You were just not allowed to criticize any abuses on the part of the government. So some of the people I was working with were killed.

Let me tell you a story. There was a young boy who was something of a hoodlum, and he fell in love with a girl who worked in a cantina in the town where I was pastor. The owner of the cantina, named Tomas, told the boy to not come around any more, and the boy persisted. So Tomas hired some off-duty policemen to assassinate the boy. It was about 7 o’clock at night when they came. There were about eight people there. One of them was one of our catechists. The off-duty policemen grabbed our catechist, and Tomas cried out, “No, not him!” And he pointed out the young man in question. So they released our guy and grabbed this other fellow. He started a struggle with them, so they pulled out their guns and shot him dead in front of everybody.

Well, I had to say some prayers at the funeral of this young man. So after the prayers I talked about the need to respond to this kind of conduct and how we can’t keep quiet about it. Then I preached about it the following Sunday at Mass. Nobody was speaking openly about what had happened. Everybody was fearful that if they said anything they would suffer the consequences, which unfortunately proved to be the truth. So I told the people on Sunday that if we keep quiet about this we are all accomplices in murder. And if we allow this to happen, then other things are likely to happen, and then we would be a murderous people.

Well, Pio Coban was the only one who decided to do something. He went to the national police chief in Guatemala City and told him about it, and how nobody in Chimaltenango had investigated the murder, and that as a matter of fact everybody knew it was two off-duty police who were the assassins, the hired guns.

The next morning at 5 o’clock, the police from Chimaltenango came and dragged Pio out of bed. When I heard about it the next day, I went down to the jail to demand his release. We all thought that he was a goner, because when people are caught by the police in Chimaltenango very often they just don’t survive the abuse; they are tortured, killed, and their bodies dumped somewhere.

I confronted the colonel at the jail, demanding that Pio be released. At first he claimed to know nothing about it, but then he got word that Pio had already been released. I didn’t believe that. He was surrounded by his men, but I challenged him. I told him that I wanted Pio released and I wanted evidence that he was released. It turned out that he had been released.

I don’t think I made any points with the colonel that day and it might explain why my name was to later appear on the hit list. You just don’t do that in Guatemala, you don’t question people in leadership, because by tradition they have the authority of life and death over their subjects. Something that we in the United States take so much for granted, that everybody has basic fundamental human rights, in other countries that isn’t so.

In Guatemala, being “sympathetic to those who have grievances” is a crime. You can be executed for it. And everybody has grievances, especially if you are Indian, that 65 percent of the population that is outside of the general Spanish-speaking culture. Then you are considered dispensable — there are no questions asked about what to do with Indians. Which is why you have such a high rate of massacres going on now, condoned, I might add, by the United States government.

When I first came to Guatemala, the government of Guatemala had just assassinated the national president of the young Christian workers, so we incorporated the succeeding president into our team. They were very much identified with the labor union movement, as were we. Later the government began to systematically assassinate the union leadership in Guatemala that would not bow to pressures. Since then all the laws and constitution have been suspended and there are no group meetings and there are no labor unions, there is no nothing. And most of the labor union leaders are either dead or in exile.

The cardinal of Guatemala is another problem, and part of it may be due to his physical illness. His position ideologically has been anything but inspired by the gospel, and in many ways is contradictory to it. His identification is with the wealthy and the military — they control him. The other bishops have been trying to follow the guidelines of Medellin and the more recent conference they had in 1979 in Puebla for church renewal, but the cardinal would mess things up wherever he could. Just last year somebody asked him, “How about those twelve priest-martyrs that you’ve got down there?” And he says, “Priest-martyrs? We have no priest-martyrs. What we have are unfaithful priests.”

When a Belgian priest working on the south coast was assassinated, the news got to the cardinal at the bishop’s office, and his secretary described his reaction. He threw up his hands and he cried out, “I told them they could get rid of him. I didn’t tell them they could kill him!” When they assassinated a priest in his own archdiocese for working with the poor and publicly criticizing the military for their methods of recruitment, at the funeral the cardinal got up and told the assembled priests, “I hope none of you other priests are going to be so foolish as to meddle in politics as this man did, because you know that I will not support you.”

At the time Rios Montt was the president of Guatemala, and he was another problem for Catholics. He used to be Catholic years ago until he joined this church based in Eureka, California. He claimed to be sent by God and that all the massacres and the torture taking place under his regime were inspired by God. The cardinal was interviewed in Guatemala City, and the man interviewing him asked, “How are you getting along with Rios Montt?” “Oh fine,” he said, “Rios Montt is a wonderful Catholic.”

So the interviewer said, “But I understand that he left the Catholic church and he joined this other.” “Oh, no, Rios Montt is a wonderful Catholic, 100 percent Catholic.” Well, he was persecuting the Catholic church at that very moment.

A whole diocese in Guatemala was forced out — they were just systematically assassinating the priests and they tried twice to assassinate the bishop. Then you have these fundamentalist churches sponsored by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the 700 Club sending down missionaries to take the place of these priests and sisters forced out. Our U.S. army helicopters are ferrying in these fundamentalist missionaries to tell the Catholics they have to join the Christian church, because the Catholic church is all communist. The cardinal is supporting all that.

I spent three years in Guatemala City before working in the rural areas, when the cardinal expelled us from the archdiocese of Guatemala for siding with some of his clergy who requested that the Pope remove him. He accused us of being involved in a revolutionary process within the church.

In August of 1980, people began telling me that I was being accused of being a communist and that I should be very careful, that my life was in danger. Shortly before I had to leave I was conducting a mass out in a remote Indian community. After the mass, an Indian leader called me down to his cabin. He sat me down, closed the shutters — there was a little candle on the table — and very dramatically he whispered to me that he had word that there was a plot to assassinate me. And he prescribed various precautions I should take. But I told him that I thought he was the one who should take all these precautions, because I am a gringo and they just don’t do that sort of thing to gringos in Guatemala.

However, from that day on I stopped going to evening meetings where I would have to go along this dark road into the town where I was pastor. The same night they killed Pio they tried to kill this other fellow who had warned me, but he had set up an early warning system so when his people heard the cars coming along they warned him, and he got out. They tried three times to kill him, and failed each time. The third time they came in two carloads of police, with an informant from one of the villages. When they didn’t get him the third time they assembled the villagers and called forth Guillermo Alverado, who was the president of that community. They ordered the villagers to reveal the whereabouts of this Indian leader. When no one responded, they shot Guillermo. He was a young man of 22 with very small children, just starting his family, and they shot him dead in front of everybody. They also killed the informant because he failed them.

We had an informant on our board of directors. One reason we felt somewhat safe is that we had a man on our board of directors who we were told was an informant. Back in the 50s he had been the secretary of the Communist Party for Parramos. But then after the revolution, and the subsequent Eisenhower invasion in 1954 and with it the restoration of land to the owners and recriminations against communists, this man’s life was on the line, and the price of his survival was that he be the informant.

He came to everything that was going on and he was just regarded as the informant. We knew that and we just accepted it as something we had to live with. He was elected to this and elected to that just like everyone else, and he got elected to our board of directors. I would take him back to his house after the meetings, knowing that this man is going to let everybody know the results of our meetings. But we figured that since we had nothing to hide and nothing they could accuse us of, it was better that they get the story straight from somebody who is halfway friendly to us than to get it from somebody else and have all kinds of suspicions.

The day after Pio Coban was captured — it was Sunday afternoon, after our board meeting — I took him home and he wanted to be dropped off at the center of town, but we were afraid that if we did that they would have time to set up an ambush, knowing that we were in the center of town. So we dropped off everybody else first and then dropped him off last at his house and then quickly headed back to Chimaltenango, before he could give them the word. I remember shaking hands with him as he got out of the car, and his hands were soaking wet. He was very nervous. I can imagine what he felt like.

Right after that they set up an ambush for me, but my people warned me and kept me from coming in. Then they hid me out for a few days and got me to the U.S. embassy. Then the embassy people put me into a bulletproof car and took me to the airport with an armed guard.

And of course everything that is going on in Guatemala, who is pulling the strings behind this? It is our government. The Guatemalan government would never have been able to get away with half of what they have done in Guatemala to their people if it were not for the United States foreign policy that supports every bit of it.

In 1954 we sponsored the overthrow of the government of Guatemala, and since then they have had one military dictatorship after another disguised as democracy. And right now we are financing the destruction of those who have right on their side. If there is any justice in Guatemala, it has to be on the side of those in the mountains fighting for their lives and for their people. Although I believe that the nonviolent response — the response of Jesus going to the cross — is a more powerful response than that of taking up the sword, given their situation, I can’t condemn those who have armed themselves and are fighting back rather than sitting down and waiting to be killed.

I take the attitude of archbishop Helder Camara of Brazil. The problem is not the violence of the guerrillas, but the causes of their violence: the structures that condemn people to starve to death, babies to die of malnutrition — what the Medellin conference called institutionalized violence. The violence of the guerrillas is a response of people who feel that their lives have been threatened, their property seized, their relatives assassinated. Their natural reaction is to take up some kind of arms, and Camara says that he can understand that kind of violent response. And then you have the repressive violence of those who would come after them, calling them criminals and subversives, and claiming the right to wipe them out. I have no sympathy for that type of response because it does not deal with the initial violence.

I never had any contact with the guerrillas, but the people on our team would be constantly confronted by their friends and relatives, and would be forced to reassess their stand on nonviolence.

We used to meet every day for our morning prayer, and once a week we held a planning session and reviewed our work. In those sessions invariably there would be reflection on the violence that was going on and what people’s positions were. Then we would state that if people could not live with our position, if there was some change of mind, if they really felt that the violent response was the legitimate one, then they would be better off leaving our team for some other situation. We respected that choice, but to be on our team you had to be committed to nonviolence — to the response of Jesus going to the cross.