Guatemalan bishop gets threats, again Tegucigalpa, March 18 (CNS) - The bishop of San Marcos, Guatemala, Monseñor Alvaro Ramazzini, is once again facing threats because of his support for landless peasants. “What they really want to do is terrorize us, make us afraid, while at the same time delegitimize our pastoral work among the poor,” Ramazzini told CNS in a telephone interview. “The conflicts in this diocese are just a few of the many conflicts over land throughout the country, and the landowners are worried that what’s happening here could be the spark that will set off a big fire. So they want to stop it here.” At issue is Ramazzini’s support for some 350 peasant families that in early February seized the San Luis plantation near Malacatán. The peasants claim they were awarded ownership of the land by a 1953 government decree, part of an ambitious land reform program that was dismantled when the U.S. government overthrew Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz the following year. The Guatemalan Chamber of Commerce claims the land is owned by some of its members, and promptly demanded that the government evict the peasants. Chamber officials also publicly criticized Ramazzini for allegedly instigating the plantation takeover. Ramazzini, who has characterized the plantation system as “an invention of the devil, where people are maintained in slavery,” denied he was behind the invasion. He said his diocese responded to a request from the invaders to provide them with water, food, and medicines. He said he also agreed to their request to serve as a mediator with the other owners. On February 19, after a judge issued an eviction order, diocesan workers convinced the invaders to voluntarily leave the contested plantation. Yet on February 26 the peasants once again took over the farm, reportedly to pressure the government to form a committee to investigate who really owns the land in question. Diocesan staff supported the call for an investigation. The same day, a message was left on an answering machine of the diocese’s social ministry office, accusing Ramazzini of instigating the takeover. The caller claimed to be the owner of the plantation and left a phone number, which Ramazzini called, reaffirming his willingness to mediate. Yet on March 3, the diocesan radio station received an anonymous call complaining of church support for the peasants and stating that there would be “surprises” ahead which “would hit the church where it hurts the most.” The diocese’s pastoral team interpreted the phone message as a threat against Ramazzini, according to Victor Lopez, a coordinator of the diocese’s Recovery of Historic Memory Project. He said the diocese presented a formal complaint to the government’s interior ministry, as well as to the United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA). Diocesan staff issued a public statement denying “accusations that implicate members of the diocese as inciters of acts of violence.” The statement declared that the invasion of plantations “is not a fruit of the pastoral work of the diocese, but rather of the condition of extreme poverty in which the Guatemalan populations lives.” On March 14, the peasants again abandoned the disputed plantation, giving the government a 45-day period to resolve the land conflict or face renewed public demonstrations. Ramazzini is not the only priest under fire in the diocese. Two armed men walked into the parish clinic in San Jose el Rodeo on February 22 and said they wanted to schedule a funeral mass with the parish priest, Father Juan Jose Aldaz. When they were told the priest wasn’t available, they told receptionist Ana Alicia Solis that the funeral mass was for the priest. After threatening Solis, they drove away in a waiting car with dark windows. Aldaz had been the object of earlier threats and harassment. The priest’s problems likely stem from his support for Guatemalan refugees who lived in Mexico and returned to their homeland last year. In February, Ramazzini had asked the government and MINUGUA to provide protection for Aldaz. On March 16, hundreds of Catholics demonstrated their support for Aldaz and Ramazzini during a march and mass celebrated in San José El Rodeo. In the early morning hours of March 17, unidentified persons broke into the diocesan land ministry office in San Marcos, stealing money and apparently reading information from the office’s computers. Two Guatemalan church workers were also among a group of 11 forensic anthropologists who were threatened in late February with a series of letters and phone calls. All have been involved in exhuming graves of massacre victims in the war-ravaged western highlands. Among the group was Mariana Valdizon, until recently director of the forensic anthropology team of the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala. Police protection has been provided to several of the group. In a related development, church officials claimed arson was the cause of a February 21 fire in the Catholic church in Nebaj that destroyed files containing evidence about 35 war-time massacres in that area, in the north of the province of El Quiché. The day before the fire, forensic anthropologists had removed human remains that had been stored in the church after being exhumed from a mass grave in the village of Xecot. On March 15, MINUGUA issued a communique regarding the church workers in Nebaj and the diocese of San Marcos, as well the forensic anthropologists, demanding that the government “adopt the necessary means to protect the victims and begin an opportune and profound investigation of all possible hypotheses.” Amnesty International had earlier issued “urgent action” alerts about Ramazzini, Aldaz, and the forensic anthropologists. Ramazzini told CNS that the threats would not deter the diocese from continuing its support for the poor. Yet he also refused to discard the threats as baseless. “There are some people who don’t like me, and we’ve seen in this country what they’re capable of. They labeled me in the past as a guerrilla and continue seeing me as Comandante Ramazzini. Their way of thinking really hasn’t changed. We’ve made public these threats so that if anything does happen, the world will know who’s responsible.” Ramazzini said that part of the reason for the land conflict on the San Luis plantation was the government’s refusal to implement a modern land registry as required by the 1996 peace accords. Such a registry, which would clear up confusion about who owns what, has been opposed by large landowners. “Until that happens and we begin to change this system of land ownership that doesn’t contribute to the welfare of the majority, the situation in the countryside is only going to get worse. The unemployment and despair of the poor is growing more acute every day,” Ramazzini said. Ramazzini is no stranger to threats. In 1996, a communique from the “Emergency Committee to Defend Private Property” warned the bishop and two nuns that they would be the “direct target of our commandos” if they didn’t stop supporting workers in land disputes. The anonymous group blamed Ramazzini and Franciscan Sisters of the Assumption Carmelina Reyes and Carmen Barrera with “pro-socialist ideological indoctrination” among the diocese's rural poor. During the same year, the owners of the El Tablero coffee plantation filed legal charges against Ramazzini, charging him with being the “intellectual author” behind the seizure of their farm by workers, as well as the kidnapping of a judge and seven other people by workers on the seized farm. During an attempted eviction of the El Tablero workers, a police officer and a peasant were killed. Threats against one Guatemalan bishop preceded his assassination. In 1998, the auxiliary bishop of Guatemala, Juan Gerardi, was bludgeoned to death in Guatemala City. Gerardi had been the main architect of the Guatemalan church’s Recovery of Historic Memory Project, which gathered testimony from thousands of victims of the three-decade long civil war. Last year a Guatemalan court found three military officials and a priest guilty of Gerardi’s killing, and ordered a deeper investigation of who else in the government and military might be involved.