Maya spirituality enjoys 
new freedom in postwar Guatemala

By Paul Jeffrey
Guatemala City, Guatemala

    When Diego de Landa burned the books of the Maya in the 16th Century, the Catholic inquisitor thought he could wipe out indigenous memory by destroying those long sheets of bark paper where signs and images spoke of dreams and wars and people born before Christ, of the movements of stars and frequency of eclipses, of the respect for God in nature necessary to call for timely rain and good corn harvests. Yet Landa, in his Spanish zeal to destroy what he deemed idolatry, was mistaken, for the faith of the Maya wasn't bound in those primitive codices he turned to ash. Evidence that Landa ultimately failed can be found every morning throughout the indigenous highlands of Guatemala and southern Mexico, where Maya farmers rise from their sleep to thank father sun and mother earth for yet another day of life.
    Though he failed in his campaign against paganism, Landa shouldn't be forgotten. To write about interfaith relations in Guatemala today necessarily leads back to the beginning of the encounter between two worlds, the violence and ethnocide that followed quickly upon Colombus' journeys to what Europeans called the New World. Although Landa, a Franciscan priest, was clearly a fanatic, and had his share of Spanish critics, his naming as a bishop shortly after his book-burning rampage indicates that he faithfully carried out imperial and ecclesiastical policy. Despite notable exceptions to the murderously anti-indigenous policies of the Conquest (such as Bartolomé de las Casas, who valiantly defended the Indians but encouraged the enslavement of Africans in their place), it is clearly a period of history marked by incredible fear and arrogance, European sins for which millions of Maya paid with their lives over the centuries.
    By tearing down Maya altars or building their Catholic churches directly on top of the Indians' sacred sites, and forcing the Maya to convert to Christianity or perish, the Spanish engaged in what some historians call a “sacramentalization” of indigenous culture, as opposed to an authentic process of evangelization which seeks to express Gospel values within a culture. Imposing patterns of belief from above produced generations of Maya who became Christians in order to survive, who went to mass but in their hearts still felt the presence of the sacred altars below the cathedral floor, who practiced what over time became a syncretic faith mixing their ancestors' faith with elements of the colonial master's religion.
    This is not ancient history. In Guatemala, the violent repression of indigenous spirituality that began with Landa has continued until very recently. Until 1992, just eight years ago, when the observance throughout the Americas of the 500-year anniversary of the Conquest allowed many indigenous groups to freely assert their identity, practitioners of indigenous spirituality had to celebrate their ceremonies in secret. With the reaffirmation of indigenous culture that has accelerated since 1992, which was also the year that Rigoberta Menchú–a Maya K'iche' woman from Guatemala–was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Maya spirituality has come out of the closet and can be practiced with few restrictions in Guatemala today. According to some estimates, more than one-third of Guatemala's 11 million people today practice some element of traditional Maya spirituality, and observers expect that percentage to grow in coming years.
    This process has been helped along by the December 1996 peace accords that put an end to Guatemala's 36-year civil war. Among the accords are agreements calling for a recognition of indigenous culture and identity, the practice of customary law in some indigenous communities, and unhindered access to traditional sacred sites.
    Yet it hasn't been simple; 500 years of history doesn't turn around overnight. Problems still exist. The Guatemalan military, for example, closely monitors the resurgence of indigenous spirituality, just as it watches–and represses–Catholic and Protestant groups that challenge the dominance of the country's economic elite. According to Felipe Gomez, coordinator of Oxlajuj Ajpop–the National Conference of Ministers of Maya Spirituality–the army has infiltrated the ranks of Maya priests. “The army knows that indigenous spirituality is at the heart of Maya communities, so they've studied our religion in depth, and they've infiltrated our ranks in order to make the study more complete. We've had some people studying to be spiritual guides who were sent secretly by the army,” Gomez says. “The army has very good investigators, and maybe through their study they'll learn the truth about us. That's fine, unless they think that they can better destroy us by first understanding us better.”
    The access of Maya to their traditional sacred sites has also not been resolved overnight. Some of the major sites, such as the famous ruins of Tikal, are in the hands of government tourist officials who often view the sacred sites as archeological digs or businesses to generate hard currency from the thousands of tourists who flock to Guatemala every year. Maya leaders have complained that the graves of their ancestors are seen as curiosities, their altars converted into tourist traps, and their culture reduced to marketable items of folklore. A joint government-Maya commission, set up to implement the requirements of the 1996 accords that require sacred sites to be protected and access guaranteed, fell apart after the government refused to make concrete proposals.
    “We're not against tourism,” Gomez states. “The problem is that in many tourist zones the people aren't the real beneficiaries. The areas of Guatemala with the most tourists are also the areas with the most poor people. A small group benefits from tourism, not the majority.” Gomez insists that a minimum code of behavior needs to be established for tourists who enter sacred Maya sites, and that local indigenous communities need to participate in the administration of archeological sites, as well as benefit from the entrance fee that visitors pay. 
    A series of measures that would have strengthened indigenous rights was defeated in a 1999 referendum which indigenous voters enthusiastically supported but mestizo voters strongly opposed. Among other things, the proposals would have reformed Guatemala's constitution to give equal legal status to the languages, religions and customary laws of the Maya majority.
    Opponents mounted an emotional campaign warning that increased legal recognition of Guatemala's indigenous would lead to a Balkanization of the country. Homeowners were told that if the referendum passed indigenous people would invade their property en masse, seizing their backyards as sacred sites.
    Conservative evangelical leaders also opposed the measures. “There was a kind of religious fear that affected the conscience of many voters,” says René Poitevin, director of the Latin American Social Sciences Faculty. “Information was manipulated to encourage a fear of idolatries or religions that seemed strange. Given this fear, the reaction of many voters was to keep things the same.”
    Evangelical churches, particularly the neopentecostal congregations that flourished during the violence of the 80s and have attracted many of Guatemala's urban middle and upper classes tired of priests telling them to treat their hired help with respect, have formed a new bulwark against the growth of indigenous spirituality. In many ways a throwback to Landa, neopentecostal preachers–the new inquisitors–today brand practitioners of Maya religion as devil worshipers, and blame their alleged idolatry for the lack of economic development experienced by the country's indigenous majority.
    This aggressive racism disguised as theology has caused enormous suffering, given the political power that Guatemalan evangelicals have exercised of late. General Efraín Rios Montt, a member of the Eureka, California-based neopentecostal Church of the Word who seized control of the country in 1982 (and was himself overthrown by fellow officers the following year), reigned over the most intense period of repression of indigenous communities in recent history. Hundreds of Maya villages were wiped off the map, their residents massacred.
     Today president of the Guatemalan Congress, Rios Montt continues to exercise his anti-indigenous policies (by delaying consideration of indigenous legislation, for example), though in a more temperate way than in the 80s. “The neopentecostals have had to rethink their position, and are today less rabid in their opposition to indigenous peoples,” says Celso Lara, a professor of history and anthropology at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala City. “Although they still consider them diabolical, the neopentecostals have had to accept the Maya as they search for a consensus upon which to build their economic and political project.” As an example of this, Lara points to the appointment early this year of Otilia Lux de Coti as culture minister in the new government of President Alfonso Portillo, the candidate of Rios Montt's party. A Maya K'iche' woman, Lux was a member of the United Nations-supervised truth commission that in 1999 lambasted Rios Montt and other military officials as being responsible for over 90 percent of the 200,000 dead and disappeared during the country's civil war.
    While Christian fundamentalists have had to modify their posture, a few Maya leaders have “swung the pendulum to the other extreme,” Lara claims. “Some Maya intellectuals are today refusing to engage in any dialogue with the mestizo community. This reverse racism is fueled by fundamentalism and the ready availability of international funding. In some cases, the more fundamentalist you are, and the less interested in national development and dialogue, the more money becomes available. It becomes a business, and the rescue of Maya culture becomes corrupted. This closes spaces for real intercultural dialogue and makes difficult the recognition of the true characteristics of multiculturality. If you assume that your position is the only valid posture, then you're just repeating the sins of the mestizos during the last 500 years. It seems normal, however, that this would happen in a country that's just emerging from a war that was as complicated and baroque as the war in Guatemala.” 
    If conservative evangelicals, as well as some Maya leaders, have changed their approaches to interreligious relations in recent years, so too are Catholics wrestling with the changing landscape. Through the development of an official indigenous ministry in some dioceses, some Catholics have opened the door to dialogue and even to encouraging the recovery of indigenous forms of worship. Others have reacted to these developments, along with the growth of indigenous spirituality and a fall-off in vocations, with alarm. “There's a horrible fear in the Catholic church today,” Lara says. “They've always maintained obedience through fear, but that bond has been broken. Christianity doesn't work like it did anymore. So some Catholics are trying to recover ground by resorting to some Catholic-animist forms that will allow the church to continue to have influence within the indigenous population.”
    Historic Protestant churches–including Guatemala's mostly indigenous Methodist Church, centered in K'iche'-speaking regions of the western highlands–have been influenced by a variety of factors, including the anti-cultural attitudes of missionaries from the United States. “The missionaries imported a lot of concepts,” states Diego Chicoj, a K'iche'-speaking Maya and a Methodist pastor in Chichicastenango. “As a result, Pentecostalism has grown a lot in the highlands, and people sing and shout during worship, but they sing and shout in Spanish. To enter the church you've got to leave your culture and your language outside. I worry about our young people in these churches who are growing up thinking that God only speaks Spanish.”
    Juana Riquiac, a K'iche' woman and Methodist community health worker in Chichicastenango, says missionaries brought pianos and accordions from the north, claiming these were acceptable for use in worship, but prohibited use of the marimba, which is an integral part of Maya community life.
    Riquiac says she has witnessed a few Maya religious ceremonies, although she gave up Maya spiritual practice when she became a Christian at age 14. “It feels good to be present, if I'm clear about what I believe and don't believe,” Riquiac says. “I can be present with respect, not criticizing, but being present.” Yet Riquiac reports that some other Methodists have scolded her for “fraternizing with witches” as a result. She shrugs it off, saying that because she wears a cross around her neck some other Methodists condemn her for being a closet Catholic.
    Chicoj, who admits that he was much less tolerant when he was a young pastor, argues that Protestants are in no position to cast stones at practitioners of Maya spirituality. “We've been taught over the years to think that these people are serving the devil, but if we look more closely at reality we realize that's not true,” Chicoj says. “There are people of the custom [who practice Maya spirituality] who are much more respectful toward everything around them than are we Christians. Whether they really worship the trees or the mountains, it's obvious that they have respect for nature and feel deep love for God and their neighbor. So what can I say? I don't think I can say anything.”
    Much of the fear of Maya spirituality grows out of Christian ignorance, according to Juana Vasquez, coordinator of Uk' U'x Mayab (“Heart of the Maya People”), an organization dedicated to the rescue and reaffirmation of Maya culture. “A lot of the persecution against us, going way back to the Spanish invasion, grows out of a bad interpretation of Maya spirituality,” argues Vasquez, a Sakapulteko-speaking Maya. “The Maya relate closely to nature. There's respect for the sun, the moon, the water, the land, there's a relationship to nature of respect which is still misinterpreted today. People say we're diabolical, that we have a lot of gods. That's not true. The Maya believe there is only one supreme god, creator and former of the world. The spirit of this God is what's found in living beings and matter. That's why there's respect.”
    Many observers suggest that dividing lines between religious expressions are not clear cut, and that the same syncretism that allowed the Maya to resist centuries of Spanish repression has taken on new form. Gomez says Maya spiritual guides are often consulted in the middle of the night by Christian believers–including clergy–who don't want their fellow Christians to see them there but who “are experiencing a vacuum in their life, who have a need that's not otherwise being met, and we're happy if we can serve them.”
    This has larger ramifications, according to Dennis Smith, an analyst at the Central American Evangelical Center for Pastoral Studies. “With the globalization of culture and the marketing of symbolic goods through an electronic church, and with so many more offers out there in today's religious supermarket, it's both easier and more common than in the past for people to simultaneously embrace apparently contradictory belief systems,” Smith says. “I know people who attend Catholic mass, charismatic services, mass neopentecostal religious spectacles, and when push comes to shove in a moment of profound personal crisis, they go off to consult a spiritist. There's no sense of needing to divide their spirituality into separate boxes. They're all there. At certain moments in your life you call upon what can give you a sense of meaning or guidance or support in that moment. The churches are simply puzzled by this phenomenon, and just haven't figured out how to respond.”
    A formal dialogue among leaders of all Guatemala's major religious traditions, including Jews, got under way in the middle of the year. Participants said the talks got off to a friendly start, but given the decades of animosity, no one expected dramatic developments to emerge soon. One of the objectives of the dialogue, supported in part by the World Bank, is to examine how religious groups can work together to encourage economic development in postwar Guatemala. “Everything in this country is fundamentally sacred,” Lara says. “No social or economic project will get off the ground here unless it takes into account the deep variants in the religiosity of the Guatemalan people.”