Almost all of the interviews were conducted in Spanish, with the exception of some conducted in Mam, a native, pre-colonial Guatemalan language. Whenever I conducted interviews in Mam I had a translator with me. Later, the content of the interviews and the translation on the tape were double-checked by a second native speaker who had not been present during the interview.

William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 358 –359.

José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 62.

Danièle Hervieu-Léger, “Religion und sozialer Zusammenhalt,” in Transit: Europäische Review 26 (Winter 2003/2004): 101 – 119.

Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); and Davie, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

I hope that this motivation and my background do not disqualify me in the eyes of the Evangelical reader.

Max Weber [1864 – 1920] in a letter to Ferdinand Tönnies, dated February 19, 1909. Quoted in Max Weber, Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, Volume II/6, Briefe 1909 – 1910, eds. M. Rainer Lepsius and Wolfgang J. Mommsen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck Verlag, 1994), 63 – 66.

Fieldwork for this study – interviews and participant observation – was undertaken from March 2001 to February 2002.

Generally, Latin American religious scholars, demographers, and the wider public use ‘evangélico’ as an umbrella term that includes mainstream Protestants, classical Pentecostals, neo-Pentecostals, non-denominational Protestants, and, in some cases, Seventh-Day Adventists and Mormons. See Timothy J. Steigenga and Edward L. Cleary, eds., Conversion of a Continent: Contemporary Religious Change in Latin America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 7. In the United States, the term evangelical has a more narrow meaning. There, the emphasis is more on conversion (being ‘born again’), the corresponding call to evangelize, and Bible reading. The later usually implies a more literalist interpretation of the Bible.

I use the term Pentecostal here, because the majority of Latin American Protestants are Pentecostal Christians. See Timothy J. Steigenga and Edward L. Cleary 2007.

Canche is a Guatemalan colloquialism for a ‘blond’ person, usually used for women.

Kay B. Warren, Indigenous Movements and their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 166.

In fact, he later became a member of the Guatemalan Congress.

I should add here that the Maya movement constantly uses ‘blood’ as a metaphor when referring to Mayan culture. See Víctor Montejo, Maya Intellectual Renaissance: Identity, Representation, and Leadership (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 7, 62.

The Truth Commission of the United Nations (CEH, Commision de Esclarecimiento Historico) was able to identify 42,275 dead. 83 percent of the victims were Mayas. See the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), Guatemala memoria del silencio: informe de la Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico. Tomo I: mandato y procedimiento de trabajo: causas y orígenes del enfrentamiento armado interno (Guatemala: CEH, 1999a), 21. The conflict left behind 75,000 orphans and 56,000 widows. Edgar Gutiérrez, “Un nuevo tejido social para Guatemala. Dinámica Maya en los años noventa,” in Polémica. Revista Centroamericana de Ciencias Sociales 3 (Enero-Junio 1995): 7 – 20, 12.

This judgement is related to a comment from a U.S.-American friend and sociologist with European rather than Latin American roots.

Actually, in Nazi Germany the situation was quite the same, which was the reason that the Nazis pressed so much on the existence of phenotypic and genotypic differences. A book that takes these discourses into literature is The Nazi and the Barber by Edgar Hilsenrath.

David Mason, “Introduction. Controversies and Continuities in Race and Ethnic Relations Theory,” in Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations, eds. John Rex and David Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 7.

David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999).

Kay B. Warren 1998: 176. Diane Nelson also criticizes constructivist approaches in her study on the indigenous movement in Guatemala and links it with the current discussion on hybrid forms of identity. She writes, “[…] making arguments for hybrid identities, no matter how well supported by the U.S. academy’s current hip theory, may feed right into anti-indigenous arguments that is all made-up, inauthentic hogwash.” Diane Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 133.

Pentecostal Christianity is used here as a generic expression, including neo-Pentecostalism, Pentecostalism, and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal as a Catholic variant of Pentecostalism. For various reasons, I chose not to adopt the term Evangelicalism or Evangelical Protestantism as an umbrella term. Using the term Evangelicalism as a synonym for Protestantism, as most researchers do, does not address the religious dynamic properly. Most of the Christian movements and churches that have emerged during the last decades in Guatemala and elsewhere are Pentecostal in nature. Furthermore, in a strict sense, Pentecostals are not Evangelicals. Historically, the latter stress the Bible, while the former focus on experiences with the Holy Spirit (individually and collectively), including divine healing. On the difference between Evangelicalism, Charismatic Christianity, Pentecostalism, and neo-Pentecostalism, see the section on Protestantism in this book.

Carol Smith (1991) used the term Maya nationalism; Edward F. Fischer and R. McKenna Brown used pan-Maya movement; and Richard Wilson used Maya revitalization movement. Yet members and secondary sources often refer to the Maya movement, which is why I have retained this denotation. Carol A. Smith, “Maya Nationalism,” in NACLA. Report on the Americas 23 no. 3 (1991): 29 – 33; Edward Frederick Fischer and R. McKenna Brown, eds., Maya Cultural Activism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996); Richard Wilson, Maya Resurgence in Guatemala: Q’eqchi’ Experiences (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995a).

Roger Grossmann from SEPAL, an authoritative interdenominational voice on Evangelical matters in Latin America, presents the following figures: 58.1 percent Catholics, 25.4 percent Evangelicals (mainline denominations are included in their survey), 13.9 percent without a religious affiliation, and 2.6 percent what they call sects, including Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Roger Grossmann, “Conclusiones acerca de los hallazgos de este proyecto,” in Estado de la Iglesia Evangelica en Guatemala – Enero 2,003 – Reporte Actualizado (Guatemala: SEPAL, 2003).

Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals (Washington, D.C.: The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, October 2006), http://pewforum.org/publications/surveys/pentecostals-06.pdf . For figures that are more detailed and a discussion on data acquisition, see the section on Protestantism in this book.

Grupo Internacional de Trabajo de Asuntos Indígenas, http://www.iwgia.org/regiones/latin-america/guatemala ; Leopoldo Tzian, Mayas y Ladinos en cifras: El caso de Guatemala (Guatemala City: Cholsamaj, 1994).

See Timothy J. Steigenga and Edward L. Cleary, eds., Conversion of a Continent: Contemporary Religious Change in Latin America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007).

I am thinking here first of all about the famous categorization of religious communities. The categories are ‘the Universal Church,’ ‘Ecclesia,’ ‘Denomination,’ ‘Established Sect,’ ‘Sect,’ and ‘Cult.’ One way to conceptualize this typology is a scale that indicates the degree of organization and institutionalization. See Max Weber, “Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie,” in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1980), 721–722; Ernst Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (Aalen: Scientia-Verlag, 1965), 967; H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Forms of Denominationalism (New York: Henry Holt, 1929); and John Milton Yinger, Religion, Society, and the Individual: An Introduction to the Sociology of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1957). Likewise, a classification of the Maya movement as part of new religious movements (NRMs) is problematic, since their aim is not exclusively religious but also political.

I am aware that what follows pre-empts empirical results. Yet, in order not to be accused at the outset of ‘comparing apples with oranges,’ I decided to include these similarities here.

Theories of cultural hybridity are built on the universal idea that all cultures are ‘hybrid,’ that is, that they borrow and reinterpret elements from other cultures. See Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Mexico, D.F.: Grijalbo, 1990).

Furthermore, the Christian movements studied here also tend to have very aggressive methods in seeking converts; not so the Maya movement.

This might sound ironic, since Protestantism in Latin America is widely considered to be a disempowering force, with ties to the political conservative establishment, a sectarian nature, and an individualism that makes it more amenable to neoliberal economic agendas. See Susan Eckstein, “Epilogue. Where Have All the Movements Gone? Latin American Social Movements at the New Millennium,” in Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements, ed. Susan Eckstein (Berkeley: University of California Press), 351 – 406. I do agree that, similar to the United States, there are Protestant currents in Guatemala that reflect these tendencies. Yet, as Mathews Samson has argued for the Presbyterian Church in Guatemala, the story told here shows that the case is much more complex. C. Mathews Samson, Re-enchanting the World: Maya Protestantism in the Guatemalan Highlands (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007), 140. For the United States, see Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

T. Paul Thigpen, “Catholic Charismatic Renewal,” in The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, eds. Stanley Burgess and Eduard M. Van Der Maas (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 460 – 467, 462.

Ibid.

R. Andrew Chesnut, “A Preferential Option for the Spirit: The Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Latin America’s New Religious Economy,” in Latin American Politics and Society 45, no. 1 (Spring, 2003a): 55 – 85, 55; R. Andrew Chesnut, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003b), 66.

Document with survey information provided by the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (Quetzaltenango: June 2001).

Carol A. Smith, “Maya Nationalism,” in NACLA. Report on the Americas 23, no. 3 (1991): 29 –33 ; Edward Frederick Fischer and R. McKenna Brown 1996; Richard Wilson 1995a.

José Roberto Morales [Sic!], Religión y política: El proceso de institucionalización de la espiritualidad en el movimiento maya guatemalteco (Guatemala: FLACSO, 2007).

From the perspective of political scientist Roddy Brett, Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a member of the Maya movement. He merges the popular movement (with its human rights agenda) and the Maya movement into the category indigenous movement. Yet I found this definition too broad. First, the critique of Mayan activists that non-indigenous actors have used their ethnic agenda for strategic reasons (pointing more or less directly to racist tendencies within the organized civil society sector) is obscured. Secondly, the explanatory power of what distinguishes the Maya movement from other organizations remains invisible. See Roddy Brett, Social Movements, Indigenous Politics and Democratization in Guatemala, 1985 – 1996 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 61.

Unofficially formed in 1972, based on the idea of Jesuit Spanish priests, and more or less planted by them in the K’iche’ village of La Estancia, it grew into the most powerful peasant association. At the end of the 1970s, the CUC became the political wing of the EGP, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. See Andrea Althoff, Klasse, Ethnizität, Reformismus im diskursiven Trans-formationsprozeß einer guatemaltekischen Landarbeiterorganisation. Eine qualitative Studie (Duisburg: Gerhard-Mercator-Universität-Gesamthochschule, 1999).

I have not used the term Charismatic Christianity for two reasons. First, I want to avoid confusion with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Secondly, the term Charismatic is used differently in Latin America and the United States. In the latter, Charismatic Christianity encompasses Catholic and Protestant churches. In Latin America, however, ‘Charismatic’ refers to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal.

As explained in the chapter below on Protestantism.

It is important to note that mainline Protestant churches form only a tiny minority in Guatemala. Sociologist and theologian Heinrich Schäfer has already talked about an extinction of historic mainline churches, such as Presbyterians and Episcopalians. Email correspondence with Heinrich Schäfer, August 8, 2002.

Popular or folk Catholicism is a syncretic or hybrid Catholic faith tradition that mixed pre-Colonial religiosity with European Catholicism. The terms popular and folk Catholicism are used here interchangeably.

The mentioning of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe testifies to the global success of Pentecostalism and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Today Pentecostalism constitutes the largest faith current within Christianity worldwide. See Stanley Burgess and Eduard M. Van Der Maas, eds., The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002).

Constrictively I have to add, there is now a second, third, and even fourth generation of Pentecostals, neo-Pentecostals, and Catholic Charismatics in Guatemala.

I have put ‘Western’ in quotation marks here because this book provides a sort of counter-evidence to the usefulness of these clear cut categories, taking into account that Mayas re-create aspects of their culture and worldview in the context of a religion that has been seen by many simply as a colonialist or imperialist imposition from the outside.

Two things are important in this respect. First, the older non-Pentecostal movement, Catholic Action, also called for the conversion of its members. Second, Protestant Pentecostalism includes Catholicism in its spectrum of pagan and idolatrous religions. On a more abstract level, this means boundary discourses exist which are constructed around polarized and dichotomized religious identities and institutions, e. g., Catholic versus non-Catholic, Christian versus non-Christian (pagan), etc.

One of these battle sites is exorcism. For instance, when neo-Pentecostals call for the renouncement of ancestral spirits, they often refer to Mayan pre-colonial culture, which included human sacrifice. This is regarded as a sin in former generations that still affects present generations in the form of demons, which have to be cast out.

Andrea Althoff, Religion im Wandel. Einflüsse von Ethnizität auf die religiöse Ordnung am Beispiel Guatemalas (Halle a.d. Saale: Ph.D. diss., Martin Luther Universität Halle Wittenberg, 2005); Kevin Lewis O’Neill, City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

For a critique on Pentecostalism destroying indigenous culture, see Manuela Canton Delgado, Bautizados en fuego: Protestantes, discursos de converión y política en Guatemala (1989 –1993) (Antigua: CIRMA, 1998); David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 98 – 105; Ingelore Möller, Kirche und Kultur in Mexico und Guatemala: Auswirkungen des christlichen Engagements auf die kulturelle Selbstbestimmung der Maya (Bonn: Holos Verlag, 1997); Elisabeth Rohr, Die Zerstörung kultureller Symbolgefüge: Über den Einfluß protestantisch-fundamentalistischer Sekten in Lateinamerika und die Zukunft der indianischen Lebenswelt (München: Eberhard Verlag, 1990); David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant?: The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Juliana Ströbele-Gregor, Indios de piel blanca: Evangelistas fundamentalistas en Chuquiyawu (La Paz: HISBOL, 1989); Juliana Ströbele-Gregor, Dialektik der Gegenaufklärung. Zur Problematik fundamentalistischer und evangelikaler Missionierung bei den urbanen Aymara in La Paz (Bolivien) (Bonn: Holos-Verlag, 1988).

Andrew Canessa, “Contesting Hybridity: Evangelistas and Kataristas in Highland Bolivia,” in Journal of Latin American Studies 32, no. 1, Andean Issue (February, 2000): 115 – 144, 116.

Jaime Valverde, “Sectarismo religioso y conflicto social,” in Polémica. Revista Centroamericana de Ciencias Sociales no. 3, FLACSO (September – December 1987): 15 – 25, 25.

Fenggang Yang and Helen Rose Ebaugh, “Transformations in New Immigrant Religions and Their Global Implications,” in American Sociological Review 66, no. 2 (2001): 269 – 288, 269. That Latin American scholars were sometimes well-known liberation theologians or academics with leftist agendas contributed to a situation in which at times the discourse of a few ethnic actors was appropriated and generalized.

Samuel J. Escobar, “Conflict of Interpretation of Popular Protestantism,” in New Face of the Church in Latin America, ed. Guillermo Cook (New York: Orbis Books, 1994), 117.

For a more complete answer, see Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982 – 1983 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Veronica Melander, The Hour of God? People in Guatemala Confronting Political Evangelism and Counterinsurgency (1976 – 1990) (Uppsala: Uppsala University Library, 1998); Enrique Domínquez and Deborah Huntington, “The Salvation Brokers: Conservative Evangelicals in Central America,” NACLA. Report on the Americas 18, no. 1 (January / February 1984): 2 – 36; David Stoll, “Evangelistas, guerrilleros y ejército: El triangulo Ixil bajo el poder de Ríos Montt,” in Guatemala: Cosechas de violencia, ed. Robert M. Carmack (San José, C.R.: FLACSO, 1991), 155 –199 ; David Stoll, “Jesus is Lord of Guatemala”: Evangelical Reform in a Death-Squad State,” in Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, eds. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 99 – 123. For the use of cultural-indigenous elements in the counterinsurgency campaigns see Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), Guatemala, memory of silence: report of the Commission for Historical Clarification. Conclusions and Recommendations (Guatemala: CEH, 1999c), and Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala (ODHAG), Guatemala, Never Again!: REMHI, Recovery of Historical Memory Project: the Official Report of the Human Rights Office, Archdiocese of Guatemala (New York: Orbis Books, 1999).

In Guatemala, the process of acculturation is usually called ‘ladinization.’ The term Ladino refers to non-indigenous Guatemalans. For Guatemala, see Richard N. Adams, “Guatemalan Ladinization and History,” in The Americas 50, no. 4 (April, 1994): 527 – 543. Humberto Flores Alvarado, El adamscismo y la sociedad guatemalteca (Guatemala: Editorial Piedra Santa, 1973); Humberto Flores Alvarado, La estructura social guatemalteca (Guatemala: Editorial Rumbos Nuevos, 1969); Severo Martínez Peláez, La patria del criollo (México: Siglos Veintiuno Ed., S.A., 1970). See also Indios de piel blanca from Juliana Ströbele-Gregor, 1989.

This doesn’t mean that a white identity has completely vanished in Guatemalan society. However, the main political, social, and economic division is between the indigenous and non-indigenous population. See Carol Smith, ed., Guatemalan Indians and the State. 1540 to 1988 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 89. For a discussion on the role of families that still identify as white and/or of European descent and the social construction of racism and ethnic identity, see Marta Casaús Arzú, Guatemala: Linaje y racismo (San José: FLACSO, 1995).

John Hawkins, Inverse Images: The Meaning of Culture, Ethnicity and Family in Postcolonial Guatemala (Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, 1984), 187; Carol Smith 1990: 3.

Cletus Gregor Barié, Pueblos Indígenas y Derechos Constitucionales en América Latina: Un Panorama (La Paz: Editorial Abya Yala, 2003), 45, online version available at http://acnur.org/paginas/index.php?id_pag=7562 .

Instituto Nacional de Estadística, “Población en Guatemala (demografía),” (Guatemala: INE, 2011), http://www.ine.gob.gt/np/poblacion/index.htm.

Grupo Internacional de Trabajo de Asuntos Indígenas, http://www.iwgia.org/regiones/latin-america/guatemala ; Leopoldo Tzian 1994.

Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), Guatemala, memoria del silencio: informe de la Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico. Tomo I: mandato y procedimiento de trabajo: causas y orígenes del enfrentamiento armado interno (Guatemala: CEH, 1999a), 21.

Edward Frederick Fischer, and R. McKenna Brown 1996; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,MRGI,,GTM,,49749d163c,0.html.

Bryan R. Roberts, “Protestant Groups and Coping with Urban Life in Guatemala,” in American Journal of Sociology 73, no. 6 (1968): 753 – 767; Christian Lalive d′Epinay, Heaven to the Masses: A Study of the Pentecostal Movement in Chile (London: Lutterworth Press, 1969); Emilio Willems, Followers of the New Faith: Cultural Change and the Rise of Protestantism in Brazil and Chile (Nashville, TN: Vanderbuilt University Press, 1967).

In particular, Christian Lalive d’Epinay 1969.

Andrew Canessa writes, referring to Juliana Ströbele-Gregor: “Protestant groups consciously exploit the disorientation and dislocation of recent migrants, being well aware that it is in the period when migrants first arrive in the city that they are most vulnerable, and most in need of the support and sense of community that membership of a small and dedicated group can bring” (Canessa 2000: 134); reference to Juliana Stroebele-Gregor, “Las communidades religiosas fundamentalistas en Bolivia: Sobre el éxito misionero de los Adventistas del Séptimo Día,” in Allpanchis 40 (1993): 219 – 253.

Cofradías organize annual fiestas and take care of saints and other statues in the churches. However, the range of activities varies from village to village.

Andrew Canessa 2000: 137.

David Martin 1990; David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).

See Robert Alun Jones for a description of Durkheim’s thoughts. Emile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 1986), 24 – 59.

Bryan Wilson, Contemporary Transformations of Religion (London: Oxford University Press, 1976); Charles Young Glock and Robert Neelly Bellah, eds., The New Religious Consciousness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000).

Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. Hans Heinrich Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129 – 156, 155.

André Corten and Ruth Marhall-Fratani 2001: 4; Bruce Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age (San Francisco, C.A.: Harper & Row, 1989): 227–229 ; Thomas Meyer, Fundamentalismus: Aufstand gegen die Moderne (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991).

This is an important aspect when we look at the ethnic composition of Christian congregations and the Maya movement, and it is discussed throughout the book.

Interestingly, when ethnicity is taken into account, the holy sphere corresponds with the ethnic homogeneous community in which Pentecostal members congregate. Similarly, the community of practitioners of indigenous spirituality view themselves as belonging to a ‘holy’ group, protecting and performing ancestral rites.

David Martin 1990: 253.

Henri Gooren, Rich Among the Poor: Church, Firm, and Household Among Small-Scale Entrepreneurs in Guatemala City (Amsterdam: Thela Thesis, 1999); David Martin 1990, 2002.

Everett Wilson, “Guatemalan Pentecostals: Something of Their Own,” in Power, Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America, eds. Edward L. Cleary and Hannah Stewart-Gambino (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 139 – 162, 151.1.

Roger Grossmann, The Deleterious Effects of Syncretism in the Evangelical Church of Guatemala. Paper presented to Intermissions (Antigua: March 2007). Pew presents the figure of 11.2 percent with no religious affiliation in 1995 and 15.6 percent for 1998 – 99. That is an astonishing rise of 4.4 percent in only three to four years. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2006: 76.

By contrast, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal is booming and therefore does not reflect overall tendencies within Catholicism. For a consideration of booming Catholicism in Latin America see the report of an insider, Edward L. Cleary, How Latin America Saved the Soul of the Catholic Church (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 2009).

Henri Gooren, “Reconsidering Protestant Growth in Guatemala, 1900 – 1995,” in Holy Saints and Fiery Preachers: The Anthropology of Protestantism in Mexico and Central America, eds. James W. Dow and Alan R. Sandstrom (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2001): 167– 201, 175.

Manuel A. Vásquez and Marie Friedmann Marquardt, Globalizing the Sacred: Religion Across the Americas (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

Andrew Canessa, referring to theories of postmodernity in the following quotation, shows that their argument is similar to that of globalization theories: “This line of reasoning presents Indian nationalism as an example of the fracturing of the nation-state as global economies erode the clarity of national boundaries and undermine the cohesion of nation identity, while simultaneously increasing inequalities. These inequalities disproportionately affect indigenous minorities, as the case of the Zapatistas clearly attests.” Canessa 2000: 121.

Andrew Chesnut 2003b; Anthony Gill, Rendering unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Chesnut writes in his introduction that his research was guided by Anthony Gill’s work.

Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969), 138.

Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776 – 1990 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 18.

See Andrew Chesnut 2003b: 6. As a short side note to explain the religious differences between the United States, Latin America, and Europe, what is usually called the ‘disestablishment clause’ clarifies the historical standing of religious pluralism in the United States. Since the founding of the American Republic, the state may not support religion, but also has no right to determine what an acceptable religion is. For more information on the United States and Europe, see R. Stephen Warner, A Church of Our Own: Disestablishment and Diversity in American Religion (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005).

Anthony Gill 1998.

In this respect, Max Weber’s action theory proves helpful. Weber distinguished four types of action: 1) instrumental action, wherein the actor perceives goals clearly and combines means to attain them (this type of action is clearly the one rational-choice theorists have in mind); 2) value rationality, wherein the actor is willing to accept consequences to remain faithful to values; 3) affective action, wherein the act is based on emotions; and 4) traditional action, wherein the action is based on customs. See Weber, Soziologische Grundbegriffe (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1984).

I use the term ‘modest’ because I want to distinguish this constructivist approach from the radical constructivism of post-modern theorists who argue that there is no objective reality at all. According to these theorists, social reality as objectivity is non-existent. The brain does not reproduce or reconstruct reality by cognition (perception, senses etc.) but by constructing it within a closed structural system (autopoiesis). This supposition partly makes use of neu-rophysiologic research. See Ernst von Glaserfeld, Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning (London: Falmer Press, 1996); Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht: Reidel, cop., 1980). German sociologist Niklas Luhmann used the idea of autopoetic systems for his system theory. With regard to religion, see for instance André Kieserling, ed., Niklas Luhmann: A Systems Theory of Religion (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012).

This line of reasoning harks back to Max Weber and his ‘interpretative sociology,’ Pierre Bourdieu and his ‘theory of practice,’ and Frederik Barth and his concept of ethnic groups and boundaries. Weber, “Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie,” in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1980), 727–757; Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1969); Frederik Barth, “Enduring and emerging issues in the analysis of ethnicity,” in The Anthropology of Ethnicity Beyond “Ethnic Groups and Boundaries,” eds. Hans Vermeulen and Cora Gouers (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1996), 11 – 32.

This is a paraphrase from Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s famous book The Social Construction of Reality, only Berger and Luckmann are referring to a Tibetan monk and American businessman. See Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966), 2 – 3.

See David Mason, “Introduction: Controversies and Continuities in Race and Ethnic Relations Theory,” in Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations, eds. John Rex and David Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 7.

Miguel Angel Asturias, “Sociología Guatemalteca: El Problema Social del Indio,” in The Americas 66, no. 4. (2010): 579 – 580. See also David McCreery in this respect. He sees this position as normal among the Guatemalan liberal elite between 1820 and 1920: “Liberal ideology held that the Indian was lazy, dirty, and drunken, but it also portrayed him as sly, vicious, brutal, and prone to violence,” assessments that overlap with Asturias. David McCreery, “State Power, Indigenous Communities, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala, 1820 – 1920,” in Guatemalan Indians and the State, 1540 to 1988, ed. Carol Smith (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 96 – 115, 113.

Mark Silk, “Defining Religious Pluralism in America: A Regional Analysis,” in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 612 (July 2007): 64 – 81, 64 – 65.

Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 5 – 7. In the case of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, the institutional domain is obviously the Catholic hierarchy. Still, the movements covered here possess an institutional background too, in that they regulate the religious discourse, practices, and community, reproducing them over time and modifying them as necessary. Moreover, they own the necessary formal or semiformal structures to secure continuity of these elements.

Most of the ethnographical data was analyzed using the software program winMAX 98. WinMAX is a CAQDAS-software program (Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software) that allows the codification and systematic evaluation of texts. See http://www2.essex.ac.uk/cs/documentation/use/acrobat/winmaxmanual98.pdf .

Regarding Pentecostalism, I focused on the Iglesia de Dios del Evangelio Completo and Ministerios Elim MI-EL, as well as small, local, independent Pentecostal churches in indigenous villages. Among the neo-Pentecostal churches were Fraternidad Cristiana (capital), Iglesia Eben-Ezer (capital), Iglesia de Dios (capital), Iglesia de Cristo Central, and Ministerio Rey de Reyes. Additionally, the Iglesia del Príncipe de Paz and the Central American Mission (CAM) were among the churches I researched. For data on church services and interviews, see the appendix.

This comparison forms the nucleus of the conclusion. Among the few scholars that use a comparative approach are John Burdick, Andrew Chesnut, Manochehr Dorraj, Andrew Canessa, and Christian Gros. Of these, only Andrew Chesnut uses Guatemalan data to some extent. See Burdick, “What is the Color of the Holy Spirit? Pentecostalism and Black Identity in Brazil,” in Latin American Research Review 34, no. 2 (1999): 109 – 131; Chesnut 2003b; Dorraj “The Crisis of Modernity and Religious Revivalism: A Comparative Study of Islamic Fundamentalism, Jewish Fundamentalism and Liberation Theology,” in Social Compass 46, no. 2 (1999): 225 – 240; Canessa 2000; Gros, Políticas de la etnicidad: identidad, estado y modernidad (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia [ICANH], 2000).

Vásquez and Marquardt voice a similar critique regarding rational choice theories: “[M]ost rational-choice theorists reduce complex religious fields to the behavior of elites, or ‘religious entrepreneurs.’ Furthermore, they assume that these elites act as one unitary agent, in accordance with a universal rationality of cost-benefit calculation. The result of these simplifications is a one-dimensional view of religious practices and institutions that is at odds with the increasing complexity and fluidity of the religious sphere.” Manuel A. Vásquez and Marie F. Marquardt 2003: 24.

David Stoll and Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America (Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1993), 6.

One example is the anthropological account by Kevin Lewis O’Neill on the neo-Pentecostal mega-church El Shaddai. Undoubtedly, it is an excellent study because it provides an in-depth analysis of this church. Still, the emphasis on the self-ascriptions of active participants make one wonder if the views expressed are paradigmatic for the overall constituency of this mega- church or even neo-Pentecostal adherents in general. See Lewis O’Neill, City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). I rather agree with Edward L. Cleary, who pointed out, citing Pentecostal scholar Everett Wilson and well known Protestant church-historian Virginia Garrard-Burnett, that many religious adherents spin with enthusiasm but leave after they learn the demands of the new religion. Cleary 2009: 11.

In the Guatemalan context, the term pluricultural is used more often than the term multicultural. I assume that users try to avoid, probably unconsciously, bringing this issue into debates on multiculturalism.

John Bowker, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 236.

Translation by author. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

Andrew Canessa, “Contesting Hybridity: Evangelistas and Kataristas in Highland Bolivia,” in Journal of Latin American Studies 32, no. 1 (2000): 115 – 144, 116.

For similar assessments, see Bruce Calder, “Interwoven Histories: The Catholic Church and the Maya, 1940 to the Present,” in Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change, eds. Edward L. Cleary and Timothy J. Steigenga (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 93 – 124; and Virginia Garrard-Burnett, “‘God Was Already Here When Columbus Arrived’: Inculturation Theology and the Mayan Movement in Guatemala,” in Resurgent Voices in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change, eds. Edward L. Cleary and Timothy J. Steigenga (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 125 – 153.

See Robert J. Miller, “Not quite a papal mea culpa,” in Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2007. latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-miller24may24,0,6816959.story. See also Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala (CEG), “500 Años Sembrando el Evangelio, Carta Pastoral Colectiva de los Obispos de Guatemala, 15 agosto 1992,” in Al servicio de la vida, la justicia y la paz, ed. Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala (CEG) (Guatemala: Ediciones San Pablo, 1997), 572 – 630, 574.

It was also Rigoberta Menchú Tum who brought attention to the fate of the Mayan people. I have included her story in the chapter on the Maya movement, although her life closely intersects with Catholicism, representing several stages of Mayan activism that are typical for Mayan activists. First an active Catholic, she became involved in social activism, later guerrilla activism, was forced to go into exile, returned, participated in the popular movement, and finally established her own human rights organization. Thus her biography reflects a change in how she defines herself religiously. After receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, this devout, progressive Catholic, heavily influenced by liberation theology, started to emphasize her Mayan religious identity and to speak almost like a convert. Last but not least, her position draws attention to the conflict between the new indigenous activism of Mayans and Catholicism. The biographies of indigenous activists Juana Vásquez and Audelino Sac Coyoy are also telling in this respect. From Catholic activism they turned to the problems and issues of Mayan people. See Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj, Pueblos indígenas, estado y lucha por tierra en Guatemala: Estrategias de sobrevivencia y negociación ante la desigualdad globalizada (Austin: University of Texas, 2005), 163. http://www.lib.utexas.edu/etd/d/2005/velasqueznimatuji38553/velasqueznimatuji38553.pdf . For Audelino Sac Coyoy see the chapter on the Maya movement.

T. Paul Thigpen, “Catholic Charismatic Renewal,” in The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, eds. Stanley Burgess and Eduard M. Van Der Maas (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 460 – 467, 462.

R. Andrew Chesnut, “A Preferential Option for the Spirit: The Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Latin America’s New Religious Economy,” in Latin American Politics and Society 45, no. 1 (Spring, 2003a): 55 – 85, 55. R. Andrew Chesnut, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003b), 66; T. Paul Thigpen 2002.

R. Andrew Chesnut 2003a: 55 – 85, 55.

Interviews Oscar Rolando Sierra (CECODE, consultant for NGOs), June 16, 2001, San José, Costa Rica; and Carolina del Valle (CRS, Catholic Relief Service), May 31, 2001, Guatemala City.

Famous Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff for instance, who left the priesthood and the Church in the 1990s, derided the renewal as “an emotional drug aimed at making Christians feel good despite their lack of commitment to the poor.” See Alejandro Bermudez, “Charismatic Renewal enriches Brazilian faith,” in Our Sunday Visitor (OSV), Newsweekly 2/26/2012. http://www.osv.com/tabid/7621/itemid/9047/Charismatic-Renewal-enriches-Brazilian-faith.aspx

T. Paul Thigpen 2002: 464.

A case in point, although not on the lay level, is Monseñor José Carrera, a former priest of Comitancillo (a municipality in the Guatemalan Western Highlands), who turned eighty during my fieldwork (2001– 02). He implemented both Catholic Action and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in the area. For him this was certainly no contradiction.

I agree with Andrew Chesnut that the doctrinal emphasis on pneumacentricism is an important ingredient, which contributes to the potency of these religious movements. Pneumacentricism can therefore be called one of the religious common denominators that Pentecostal movements and their forerunners share with local cultures. Additionally, Chesnut observed that religious movements of a pneumacentrist nature are extremely successful in Latin America. Chesnut expands the originally Christian definition of pneumacentricism beyond its traditional Christian boundaries, defining a pneumatic religion as anyx faith-based organization that puts direct communication with the Spirit or spirits at the center of its belief system. See Andrew Chesnut 2003b.

The argument as to why members of the Maya movement can sometimes be regarded as converts is discussed at greater length in the chapter on the Maya movement. Briefly, these members share the conviction with Protestant Pentecostals, neo Pentecostals, and Catholic Charismatics that religion – or as they call it cosmovisión – ought to permeate all aspects of human existence.

For instance, the clergy backing pedophile and abusive priests was one such issue. Moreover, headlines were made by the controversial Saint Society Pius X and the decision of the Vatican to absolve four of their bishops, among them Holocaust-denier Richard Williamson, from excommunication. Because the case has a strong Latin American connection, a short note on its background is appropriate. Both Williamson and another formerly excommunicated bishop, the Spaniard Alfonso de Galarreta, served long terms in Catholic seminaries in Argentina. In this respect, it is worthwhile to mention that six months after the decision to remit the excommunication of the four bishops, the Holy See fired the leader of the Vatican Commission Ecclesia Dei, the former Columbian cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, replacing him with the U.S. cardinal Joseph Levada. The Pope considered the Columbian cardinal as chiefly responsible for the close relationship between the Saint Society and the Vatican. For more on this decision, see the “Decree Remitting The Excommunication ‘Latae Sententiae’ of the Bishops of the Society of St Pius X,” published by the Vatican. http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cbishops/documents/rc_con_cbishops_doc_20090121_remissione-scomunica_en.html .

I am well aware that many priests and bishops put their lives at the service of poor, indigenous people and literally became the ‘voice of the voiceless.’ Some, such as Monsigñor Juan José Gerardi Conedera, died for their efforts. Gerardi presided over the work of the Catholic Truth Commission (REMHI). He was murdered in his Guatemala City residence on April 26, 1998, two days after he had released a final report on the civil war that formally ended in 1996. Another Guatemalan bishop, Álvaro Ramazzini Imeri, also condemns human rights violations. So far, he has survived numerous death threats. See the Amnesty International document and Human Rights Watch report. Amnesty International, “Document – Guatémala. Craintes pour la sécurité. Alvaro Ramazzini,” PUBLIC AI Index: AMR 34/011/2008, 08 April 2008, UA 91/08 Fear For Safety. http://www.amnesty.org/fr/library/asset/AMR34/011/2008/fr/d318ae1f-05a7–11dd-bd68–81b1e430d9f9/amr340112008eng.html ; Human Rights Watch, “Guatemala Events of 2005,” http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2006/guatemala.

Document provided by the Guatemalan Bishop Conference. Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala, Fechas para recordar (Guatemala: CEG, 2009). Email from CEG, June 9, 2009.

Roger Grossmann, “Conclusiones acerca de los hallazgos de este proyecto,” in Estado de la Iglesia Evangelica en Guatemala – Enero 2,003 – Reporte Actualizado (Guatemala: SEPAL, 2003), 4.

Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals (Washington D.C.: The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, October 2006), 76 – 77. http://pewforum.org/publications/surveys/pentecostals-06.pdf. For a discussion of these figures see the chapter on Protestantism.

The SEPAL and Pew percentages are very similar. SEPAL’s figures are: 58.1 percent Catholics, 25.4 percent Evangelicals (category includes all Protestants such as mainline denominations, Pentecostals and neo-Pentecostal churches), 13.9 percent without a religious affiliation, and 2.6 percent what they call sects, including Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses (Roger Grossmann/SEPAL 2003). Pew referred to the 1998 – 99 Guatemalan Demographic and Health Survey and documented 52.6 percent Catholics, 29.4 percent Protestants, 15.6 percent Non-Affiliated, and 1.9 percent Other (Pew 2006: 76). CID/Gallup polls from January and June 1994, quoted in Gooren, indicate similar percentages. According to these polls, 23.2 percent and 21.6 percent of the population respectively said they were Protestant. See Henri Gooren, “Reconsidering Protestant Growth in Guatemala, 1900 – 1995,” in Holy Saints and Fiery Preachers: The Anthropology of Protestantism in Mexico and Central America, eds. James W. Dow and Alan R. Sandstrom (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 167– 201.

Roger Grossmann, The Deleterious Effects of Syncretism in the Evangelical Church of Guatemala. Paper presented to Intermissions (Antigua: March 2007). Pew presents the figure of 11.2 percent having no religious affiliation in 1995 as compared to 15.6 percent in 1998 – 99. This is an astonishing rise of 4.4 percent in only three to four years. See Pew 2006: 76.

Ricardo Bendaña Perdomo, S.J., Ella es lo que nosotros somos y mucho mas. Síntesis histórico del Catolicismo Guatemalteco. II Parte: 1951 – 2000 (Guatemala: Artemis Edinter, 2001), 98.

Maximón or San Simón might be called a ‘pagan saint,’ embodying pre-Columbian, Catholic, and Spanish as well as good and bad faculties. Popular belief has it that Maximón has the power to curse people, to generate wealth, to resolve conflicts, and many other things. People bring him cigars or cigarettes to smoke and plenty of alcohol to drink in order to ensure his goodwill. For more information, see the photo coverage of Maximón by James Rodríguez on http://www.mimundo-fotorreportajes.org/.

Within the reformist current he includes several Catholic movements: the Cursillos de Cristiandad, the Renovación Carismática, Neo-Catecúmenos, Focolares, Encuentros de Promoción Juvenil, Escoge, and Asociación de Damas Católicas.

Ricardo Bendaña Perdomo 2001: 98 – 99. Important to note is that the 10 percent figure for the reformist current – which includes the CCR – contrasts sharply with the numbers given by the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. According to the movement, 60 percent of the Guatemalan Catholics are already affiliated with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Interview with Luis Kelex (CCR, Maya K’ekchi), February 15, 2002, Guatemala City.

T. Paul Thigpen 2002: 460 – 467; Edward L. Cleary, “The Catholic Charismatic Renewal: Revitalization Movements and Conversion,” in Conversion of a Continent: Contemporary Religious Change in Latin America, eds., Timothy J. Steigenga and Edward L. Cleary (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 153 – 173, 153.

Interview with Luis Kelex (CCR, Maya K’ekchi), February 15, 2002, Guatemala City.

Jesús Ynfante, Opus Dei. Así en la tierra como en el cielo (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1996). Living conditions during field research provided their own rich experience in this regard. Throughout my research stay I rented a room in the provincial town of San Marcos where I could leave baggage that I did not need in isolated villages and periodically use the local, more urban infrastructure, such as a phone and Internet connection. It turned out that my landlady was a member of a formerly important San Marcos family, who owned a coffee plantation on the coast and, as I found out later, had ties to the military. In her house she had set up a huge Catholic altar, with a life-sized figure of the Virgin Mary and a portrait of the Opus Dei founder Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer. Religious pluralism was present in the household too, since the Ladina housemaid was a member of a strict Protestant church, AGAPE (Misión Cristiana de Avivamiento). She refused to take medicine because she was convinced of divine healing.

Consequently, the term ‘base community’ is somewhat misleading, because it suggests the existence of grassroots religious communities.

In a way, the position of a bishop is comparable to that of a provincial governor, but this does not mean that the ecclesiastical boundaries overlap with provincial boundaries.

The same document lists 533 national and 369 foreign priests. With regard to indigenous priests, the CEG notes that because of alienation from their culture, some Catholic priests of indigenous descent do not identify as being Maya anymore. Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala (CEG), Fechas para recordar (Guatemala: CEG, 2006). Email from CEG, June 9, 2009.

It should also not be forgotten that the Catholic Church is operating a large number of schools and several universities.

Interview Bishop Álvaro Ramazzini Imeri, November 9, 2001, San Marcos.

Pastoral Indígena, “Encuentro Mesoamericano de Pastoral Indígena,” (Santa María Chiquimula, Guatemala 10 – 15 de marzo de 2003), 14.

Siglo XXI, March 12, 1991.

Pastoral Indígena, “Encuentro Mesoamericano de Pastoral Indígena,” (Santa María Chiquimula, Guatemala: March 10 – 15, 2003), 15.

The following quotation demonstrates the balance the hierarchy tries to achieve between defending the spread of the gospel and apologizing for the violence committed: “Reflecting on the historical presence of our Church in Guatemala, the gift of faith that has enriched our lives fills us with joy and happiness. We recognize and admire the extraordinary gesture of the first evangelism. With humility, we ask for forgiveness for the limits and shadows [límites y sombras], errors and sins. With hope and dedication, we thrust ourselves into the future to carry out the new evangelism, which – sustained by the Catholic roots of the people and cultures of Guatemala – strengthens and purifies, and makes the presence of the Kingdom of God in our land and among our people more and more evident each day.” In Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala (CEG) 1997: 574. Translation Timothy Neil Gilfoil.

Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 4–5. Also Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4.

Ultimately, this asymmetrical ethnic relationship created the basis for the death of millions of indigenous people. I have not applied the term genocide here, because this is a term that is subject to policies of the nation-state that did not exist at that time. Furthermore, it is an elaborate strategy of this entity with the concrete aim of extinguishing a particular ethnic group, a strategy that cannot be attributed to the former colonizers.

It was not until 1928 that the Guatemalan territory was divided into several dioceses. Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala (CEG) 1997: xxv.

Adriaan C. van Oss, Catholic Colonialism: A Parish History of Guatemala, 1524–1821 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Of course, the destruction of almost all the codices (written accounts of the pre-colonial Mayan population) by priests and other Church representatives should not be ignored. It had the terrible effect of severing the indigenous population from their own cultural history. From then on, oral history has been the only way of memorizing culture collectively.

Carol A. Smith ed., Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540 to 1988 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

The term Ladino carries the connotation of people of a Western cultural heritage. This is different from the term Mestizo, as Mario Payeras notes. According to him, Guatemalans who call themselves Mestizos do not deny the possibility of having indigenous ancestors. See Mario Payeras, Los pueblos indígenas y la revolución guatemalteca. Ensayos étnicos (1982–1992) (Guatemala: Editorial Luna y Sol, 1997), 93 Interestingly, Mestizo is hardly in use in Guatemala. In my view, this underlines and reflects the strong orientation towards Western culture. The etymological neglect of the historical fact that the indigenous culture is part of people’s individual and collective history can be also seen as an expression of a racialized society. In this sense Guatemala is very different from countries such as Mexico, Bolivia, or Ecuador, in which the process of ‘mestizaje’ (a term that refers to the blending of people and culture of European and indigenous descent) is an important part of national identity.

Bruce Calder 2004: 94.

Silvia Brennwald, Die Kirche und der Maya-Katholizismus. Die katholische Kirche und die indianischen Dorfgemeinschaften in Guatemala. 1750–1821 und 1945–1970 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001); Andrew Chesnut 2003b: 22.

Andrew Chesnut 2003b: 19.

Ibid., 20.

A German Jesuit priest, who worked for many years in indigenous communities in Peru and Bolivia, once compared the significance of baptism with that of getting a passport. In my view, this is a great way of explaining how the integration of the indigenous population was and is understood on a practical level.

The Iberian conquerors clearly saw themselves as superior, especially in terms of religion, intellect, and Weltanschauung. An example for this is the famous debate between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. The latter argued that the native people of Latin America were inferior, thus legitimizing both mission and forceful pacification (Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indian Freedom: The Cause of Bartolomé de las Casas (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1995), 6 – 7.7.

Anthony Pagden 1986: 3.

Bruce Calder 2004: 94.

Virgilio Zapata Arceyuz, Historia de la obra evangélica en Guatemala (Guatemala: Génesis Publicidad Guatemala, 1982); Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (Austin: Texas University Press, 1998).

Jean-Pierre Bastian, “Le rôle politique des protestantismes en Amérique latine,” in Les Politiques de Dieu, ed., Gille Kepel (Paris: Édicions Du Seuil, 1993); Jean-Pierre Bastian, Protestantismos y modernidad latinoamericana. Historia de unas minorías religiosas activas en América Latina (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994).

Criollo refers to locally born people of Spanish ancestry. Tulio Halperín Donghi, The Contemporary History of Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 49.

Gustavo Porras Castejón, Las huellas de Guatemala (Guatemala: F & G Editores, 2009), 149 –50. Translation Timothy Neil Gilfoil.

These new laws initiated the need for the indigenous population to work on the coastal plantations and obliged the indigenous day laborer to work a certain number of days per year on the plantations. Severo Martínez Pelaez, Racismo y análisis histórico en la definición del indio guatemalteco (Guatemala: Facultad de Ciencias Económicas. Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. Colección Investigación para la Docencia No. 1. Departamento de Publicaciones, 1986), 16.

Bruce Calder 2004: 94.

Because of this paradoxical character, some anthropologists and the Maya movement in particular have defined the cofradías as an institution of resistance for the indigenous population. See Flavio Rojas Lima, La Cofradía. Reducto cultural indígena (Guatemala: Seminario de Integración Social, 1988), 185.

The costumbres, or local customs, are also an important part of Maya Catholicism. Furthermore, ancestor veneration occupies a crucial role. See Maud van Cortlandt Oakes, The Two Crosses of Todos Santos: Survivals of Mayan Religious Rituals (New York: Pantheon Books, 1951).

The Spanish conquerors named the villages of the indigenous population after regional and linguistic characteristics and additionally gave each the name of a Catholic saint or Catholic symbols, for instance, the cross. According to Catholic idiosyncracy, these Catholic patrons or symbols should protect the villages from mischief and calamities. See Flavio Rojas Lima 1988: 186.

Until the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the anti-clerical reforms of the liberal regimes, many cofradías possessed land and other material goods. Santiago Montes, Etnohistoria de El Salvador: cofradías, hermandades y guachivales (San Salvador: Ministerio de Educación, 1977), 83 – 85, quoted in Flavio Rojas Lima 1988: 196. There are a variety of different terms for this institution in English, such as civil-religious hierarchy, religious brotherhood, or saint-society.

Flavio Rojas Lima 1988: 61.

Authors who confirm the pre-Columbian origins of the religious brotherhoods include Donald Thompson, “Maya Paganism and Christianity,” in Nativism and Syncretism, ed. Munro S. Edmonson (Tulane: Tulane University Press, 1960), 1– 35, 5; Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of México, 1519 – 1810 (Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 1964), 100; Eric Wolf, Sons of the Shaking Earth: The People of Mexico and Guatemala – Their Land, History, and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), 169; Flavio Rojas Lima: 1988, 190, 195; and Maud van Cortlandt Oakes 1951.

Richard Wilson, Maya Resurgence in Guatemala: Q’eqchi’ Experiences (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 164.

Maud Oakes described the role of shaman priests in Todos Santos Cuchumantanes. Her field notes are from the 1940s. Maud van Cortlandt Oakes 1951.

Apart from the alcohol consumption and the breaking of sexual taboos, the annual celebrations resemble neo-Pentecostal and Pentecostal types of worship, representing a form of collective catharsis that liberates the villagers from conflicts and inner tensions through an emotional abreaction (see the chapter on Protestantism). The demand for such a collective catharsis is probably the result of the catastrophic living conditions and the extreme poverty the indigenous population is confronted with.

Susan Fitzpatrick Behrens, Confronting Colonialism: Maryknoll Catholic Missionaries in Peru and Guatemala, 1943 – 1968 (Notre Dame, IN: Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Working Paper No. 338 – May 2007), 24. Due to religious pluralism (including the implementation of orthodox Catholicism) and the criticism of religious competitors, the significance of the cofradías certainly decreased in the course of the last century. Yet many cofradías survived the criticism and the rise of religious pluralism. Therefore their importance for the communities should not be underestimated. On the decline and revival of the cofradías, see the next section.

Santiago Montes, Etnohistoria de El Salvador, Cofradías, Hermandades y Guachivales (San Salvador: Ministerio de Educación, 1977): 83 – 85, quoted in Flavio Rojas Lima 1988: 196.

Frank Cancian, “Political and Religious Organizations,” in Handbook of Middle American Indians 6 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), 283 – 298, 283.

Robert M. Hill II and John Monaghan, Continuities in Highland Maya Social Organization: Ethnohistory in Sacapulas, Guatemala (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1987), 146. See Frank Cancian for a definition of the term cargo system (Frank Cancian 1967: 284). Flavio Rojas Lima contradicted in a way Hill’s and Monaghan’s assertion. Cofradías as a religious-political and administrative entity, he wrote, existed only until the middle of the twentieth century. A separation into religious services on the one hand and political offices on the other took place after the revolution of 1944, but in particular with the establishment of Catholic Action in the 1950s. In his view, the expansion of an electoral and party system within the indigenous communities largely contributed to this separation. As an example, Rojas Lima refers to the position of the mayor, whose role until the 1950s was in some villages tied to a position within the cofradía (Flavio Rojas Lima 1988: 120). My own experience is that the described model cannot be generalized, because every community varies in its secular and sacred organization. I found that even today, some cofradías still organize the work of the alcaldes auxiliares (auxiliary mayors). This is for instance the case in the surrounding villages of San Miguel Ixtahuacán (Interview Padre Eric Gruloos, December 10, 2001, San Miguel Ixtahuacán, San Marcos). The auxiliary mayor is a voluntary post which almost every male villager occupies once in his lifetime. Interestingly, in San Miguel Ixtahuacán this devotion to serve the community with time and labor does not depend on religious affiliation. According to the priest, Catholics and Protestants alike occupy these posts. Perhaps this is due to the specific characteristic of being auxiliary mayor. This post is not regarded as religious in nature, although a religious institution, primarily a Catholic institution, is organizing the service in this community. Alcaldes auxiliares can be compared with a communal police force, helping to prevent conflicts or intervening to reconcile opposing parties in already existing conflicts. Important in this respect is that up until recently, many rural indigenous highland communities had no police force, and therefore auxiliary mayors occupied a crucial position as a local peace force.

Silvia Brennwald asserted that in order to secure the interests of the indigenous village, e. g. to preserve their own way of judicial, social, and religious organization, the villagers tried to keep external influences to a minimum. Hence autonomy for the cofradías as an institution which embodied the cultural heritage of the pre-colonial culture, was the only way to secure cultural continuity (Silvia Brennwald 2001). In the end, the cofradías became a body of indigenous authorities that could decide in complete independence on religious practices as well as social and political concerns. My own interviews reveal that in some villages the autonomy gained was such that the village population did not identify as being Catholic anymore. For example, for Catholic Mayans in the area of Comitancillo the re-evangelization campaign which was introduced by Catholic Action meant in fact the penetration of the area with Catholicism for the very first time in history.

See Silvia Brennwald 2001; Robert M. Hill II and John Monaghan 1987: 139; and Thomas and Marjorie Melville, Whose Heaven, Whose Earth? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971).

Susan Fitzpatrick Behrens 2007: 27.

John M. Watanabe, Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992).

There were also many economic benefits that Ladinos enjoyed through the activities of the cofradías. Warren reports that the local Ladino merchants often provided the alcohol and other items (candles, fireworks, etc.) needed to keep the fiestas and rituals going. See Kay B. Warren, The Symbolism of Subordination: Indian Identity in a Guatemalan Town (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989).

Prestige, power, and social control naturally increased with the transcendental abilities attributed to the shamans or generally to the highest members of the religious brotherhoods.

This does not mean that there were no Ladino religious brotherhoods. Still, according to Rojas Lima they were called mostly hermandades and practiced rites and customs much more oriented towards the sacramental practices of the Catholic Church (1988: 203). In other words, no ethnically mixed religious brotherhoods existed. Interestingly, Rojas Lima also reports that in the village of San Pedro Jocopilas, the Ladinos would despise the religious practices of the indigenous village population (see Flavio Rojas Lima 1988: 204).

Warren writes that next to the cofradía, “[b]lood, land, and costumbre inherited from the ancestors are the core symbols of this separatist identity.” Kay B. Warren 1989: 172 – 173.

Douglas E. Brintnall, Revolt Against the Dead: The Modernization of a Mayan Community in the Highlands of Guatemala (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979), 147– 148. Brintnall executed his study in Huehuetenango, a province where, similar to San Marcos, the majority of the indigenous population is Mam.

The Catholic Action movement, a re-Christianization project, was largely behind this new religious pluralism.

John Watanabe 1992.

Robert M. Hill II and John Monaghan 1987: 18.

Anthropologists argued that the costs attached to service in a cofradía were part of a communal strategy that aimed to level material disparities within the community. This observation is important because it reflects the cultural disparities between a modern, more individualistic notion of Western society and the traditional, more communally oriented model of Mayan villages. See Rojas Lima 1988: 288.

For instance, whereas in the past the lives of indigenous villagers were much more bound to the communal environment, the diversification of the labor market and the opening of opportunities through predominantly Catholic projects brought more and more Mayans into contact with life outside the village. Working as salesmen, merchants, bus drivers, and teachers were jobs far less concordant with a position in a cofradía. Additionally, the former prestige that was bound to such service eroded gradually after the 1950s, when the strong attacks from orthodox Catholicism that went along with the re-evangelization campaign of Catholic Action started to have an impact. See Silvia Brennwald 2001.

Costumbristas means those who practice traditional customs.

Robert Stanley Carlsen, Of Bullets, Bibles and Bokunabs: What in the World Is Going On in Santiago Atitlán? (Boulder: Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1992), 200.

Ibid.

Kay B. Warren, Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala (Princeton University Press, 1998), 249.

The popular movement has a focus on social inequality and a class-based interpretation of Guatemala’s problems. After the signing of the Peace Accords, the platform broke apart and lost its ability to speak with a uniform voice. Many protagonists of the popular movement were socialized in the Catholic Church, in particular Catholic Action.

Majwail Q’ij 1992, quoted in Manfred Hofmann, Religion und Identität. Maya in Guatemala (Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 2001), 201. Italics in the original quote.

Interview Nikolai Grube (Anthropologist of the Americas), September 21, 2000, University of Bonn.

Kay B. Warren 1998: 249.

Demetrio Cojtí Cuxil, “The Politics of Maya Revindication,” in Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala, eds. Edward F. Fischer and R. McKenna Brown (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 19 – 50, 36.

Interview Nikolai Grube (Anthropologist of the Americas), September 21, 2000, University of Bonn.

Considering that today the discourse of the Maya movement and that of Christian churches are in many ways opposed to each other, the historic accounts are of particular importance from a contemporary perspective. Put differently, the current rejection of the religious ‘Other’ includes the denial of a shared history.

Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944 –1954 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).

In September 1821, the Captaincy-general of Guatemala – formed by Chiapas, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras – officially proclaimed its independence from Spain, but was dissolved two years later. Lynn V. Foster, A Brief History of Central America (New York: Facts on File, 2000), 134 – 136. In December 1985 the first democratic elections where held.

Tom Barry, Inside Guatemala: The Essential Guide to its Politics, Economy, Society, and Environment (Albuquerque: The Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center, 1992), 189.

Ricardo Beldaña Perdomo 2001: 9. Esquipulas, where the Cristo Negro is located, is a famous place of pilgrimage in Central America.

Silvia Brennwald 2001: 156.

Tom Barry 1992: 190. Much has been written on the 1954 coup by Colonel Castillo Armas and the ‘Guatemalan Spring.’ Probably the best account of what happened is the book by Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944 – 1954 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). Also Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer’s Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (London: Sinclaire Brown, 1982) provides a well-written and informative report.

Tom Barry 1992: 190.

Víctor Gálvez Borrell, Política y conflicto armado: cambios y crisis del régimen político en Guatemala (1954 – 1982) (Guatemala: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2008).

According to Silvia Brennwald, one of the main tasks of Catholic Action was to villainize and defame local committees and organizations that were close to or part of the government. See Silvia Brennwald 2001: 198.

Gustavo Porras Castejón 2009: 134.

This seems to be at variance with the argument that Catholic Action had a detrimental impact on the traditional religious customs and bodies, such as the cofradías. Both arguments are valid, however; Catholic Action drew people away from traditional expressions of Mayan Catholicism, but it also sparked the Mayans’ interest in their culture. What explains the apparent contradiction is that between both dynamics lay the crucial experience of armed confrontation. In other words, Catholic Action and its negative impact on Mayan culture were not followed immediately by an ethnic revival. Furthermore, Catholic Action served as a basis for the creation of several new movements, of which the Maya movement was one and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal another.

Silvia Brennwald 2001. Pope Pius XI had requested in his encyclical Abi Arcano of December 23, 1922 the establishment of a global Catholic Action in light of what he saw as an expansion of organized atheism. Pius XI had in mind a much broader participation of the laity under the direction of a bishop in the fields of dogma, morals, liturgy, education, and charity. See Alfred Klose, Wolfgang Mantl, and Valentin Zsifkovits, eds., Katholisches Soziallexikon (Innsbruck: Verlag Tyrolia, 1980), 1294. The goal of reinvigorating Catholic Christianity and the insistence that Catholic Action members should undergo a new personal conversion and renounce superstitious practices strongly resembles not only the Catholic Charismatic Renewal but also Protestant Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches.

Ricardo Bendaña wrote that in 1970 there were 594 priests in the country. Only 19 percent of these, that is 113 of them, were Guatemalan nationals. Ricardo Beldaña Perdomo 2001: 93.

Bonar Ludwig Hernández Sandoval, Re-Christianizing Society: The Institutional and Popular Revival of Catholicism in Guatemala, 1920 – 1968 (Austin: Ph.D. diss., University of Texas 2010), 319. Clearly, without the service of the catechists, the re-evangelization of the highland would have been impossible. They served as missionaries and mediators between the church hierarchy and their indigenous flock. Familiar with the religious traditions of their own ethnic group, they were able to overcome cultural and language barriers.

Greg Grandin, “To End with All These Evils: Ethnic Transformation and Community Mobilization in Guatemala’s Western Highlands, 1954– 1980,” in Latin American Perspectives 24, no. 2 (1997): 7– 34, 11. Hence, Catholic Action contradicts and corrects the common notion that Catholic mission and its destructive force are exclusively related to the conquest. In other words, the common emphasis on the conquest hides the fact that recent Catholic pastoral policies, including liberation theology, have also had a cataclysmic impact on Mayan culture.

Compared to Europe, Catholic Action in Guatemala gained importance relatively late. Whereas in Europe it had already been installed in the 1920s, Archbishop Rossell y Arellano brought it to Guatemala in 1939. Bruce Calder 2004: 95.

The prevailing anti-communist discourse of the 1950s, an era that produced extreme reactions such as McCarthyism, is important in this regard. Rodolfo Cardenal observes that the Guatemalan Catholic Church of the 1950s was greatly influenced by Opus Dei. See Rodolfo Cardenal, “Radical conservatism and the challenge of the Gospel in Guatemala,” in Church and Politics in Latin America, ed. Dermot Koegh (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 205 – 224, 215. Since its beginnings in Franco’s Spain, the modus operandi of Opus Dei was closely attached to conservative bourgeois elites, particularly members of the military, the economy, and academic circles. This attachment stems from the reactionary doctrine, but also the desire to impact society through secular people who act in the corridors of power under the premises of Opus Dei’s agenda. For a detailed historic and international description of Opus Dei, see Jesús Ynfante, Opus Dei. Así en la Tierra como en el Cielo (Barcelona: Grijalbo Mondadori, S.A., 1996).

Kay B. Warren 1989; Silvia Brennwald 2001.

The ideological common ground between liberation theology and Marxism is described in the following sections.

Susan Fitzpatrick Behrens 2007: 1.

Robert M. Carmack, Historia social de los Quiché (Guatemala: Editorial Pineda Ibarra, 1979), 384. The same aggressiveness in attacking traditional Mayan spirituality can be found among contemporary Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches. See Ricardo Falla for details on the history of Catholic Action within indigenous communities. Falla, Quiché Rebelde. Estudio de un movimiento de conversión religiosa, rebelde a las creencias tradicionales, en San Antonio Ilotenango Quiché (1948 – 1970) (Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria de Guatemala, 1978a).

Richard Wilson 1995: 190.

The section of this book on the Maya movement describes the strategy and effect of these policies within the indigenous community of Comitancillo.

David Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 45; Robert M. Carmack, Harvest of Violence: The Maya Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988).

Interview with Gregorio Chay (URNG-EGP, Maya K’iche’), Guatemala City, October 10, 1998.

Incaparina is a cheap, high-protein food. Among other ingredients, it is made of corn, cottonseed, sorghum flours, and yeast and is used to prevent protein-deficiency diseases.

Sergio Fernández (URNG-EGP, NGO Fundamaya, Maya K’iche’), Fall 1998, Guatemala City.

Catholic and Protestant work among the indigenous population included several grant programs, which made it possible for Mayans to enter the school system and achieve higher education. Rigoberta Menchú Tum, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, benefited from such a grant. Other Mayan protagonists were Gregorio Chay, Pablo Ceto, Sergio Fernández, Juana Vásquez Arcón, Juan León, and José Serech. Gregorio Chay co-founded the indigenous journal Ixim and later participated in the guerrilla branch EGP, which became part of the guerrilla umbrella group URNG. Pablo Ceto was also part of the EGP and then the URNG. Rigoberta Menchú Tum worked for the CUC, later overseas for the EGP, and established the Fundación Vicente Menchú (renamed Fundación Rigoberta Menchú Tum). Sergio Fernández was part of the EGP, the URNG, and is now a member of FUNDAMAYA. Juana Vásquez Arcón is a former member of the CUC, the EGP, and the Movimiento Uk’u’x’ Mayab’ Tinamit, and is now working for the government Council on Mayan Education, the Consejo de Educación Maya. Juan León is a former member of the EGP and founder of the Defensoría Maya. José Serech worked in the 1970s for PROMIKA, the Programa Misionero Kaqchiquel Chimaltenango, and these days in the Centro de Investigación y Documentación Maya (CEDIM). The compilation also reflects a common characteristic, given the historic primacy of the Catholic Church: Catholic initiatives were far more numerous than those emanating from Protestant institutions.

Interview with Gregorio Chay (URNG-EGP, Maya K’iche’), October 10, 1998, Guatemala City.

An observation Douglas Brintnall made for Huehuetenango, too. See Douglas E. Brintnall 1979: 147– 148.

Similar motives – costs in time and money – have been observed regarding participation in Protestant churches. See Sheldon Annis, God and Production in a Guatemalan Town (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); Douglas Brintnall 1979.

David Stoll 1993: 23; Ricardo Falla, “El movimiento indígena,” in Estudios Centroamericanos 33, no. 356/357 (1978b): 437– 461. Seen from this perspective, Mayan participants started to share the belief of missionaries and other non-indigenous religious agents that the indigenous people themselves must overcome traditional cultural expressions in order to progress and experience deliverance from poverty.

Later a center for indigenous students was added in Zone 8 of the capital. It aimed to help indigenous students in this “hostile environment.” Arzobispado de Guatemala, Oficina de Derechos Humanos (ODHAG), El entorno histórico (Guatemala: Informe del proyecto interdiocesano de recuperación de la memoria histórica, Volume 3, ODHAG, 1998), 84.

Lately, José Serech has been directing the indigenous research center Centro de Investigación y Documentación Maya (CEDIM).

Arzobispado de Guatemala, Oficina de Derechos Humanos (ODHAG) 1998: 85.

In 1992 the Center Ak’Kutan and the Center Bartolomé de las Casas were founded to continue this work.

The Asociación de Forjadores de Ideales Quichelenses was one of these athletic associations, established in the early 1970s. See Emmerich Weisshaar, Ethnische Identität, nationale Identität und Maya-Bewegung. Vom Movimiento Indio zum Movimiento Maya (Tübingen: Universität Tübingen, 2007), 7.

Interview Gregorio Chay (URNG, Maya K’iche’), October 10, 1998, Guatemala City. Later Chay was active in the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP). He survived the repression and became part of the executive committee of the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG), the head association of the four guerrilla units (ORPA, EGP, FAR, and PGT). The URNG developed into a political party after the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996.

Ibid. I found the comment quite telling in its combination of racism and misogynism, namely that indigenous women were seen by the governor as mere puppets of men, not capable of voicing protest on their own.

At the time of the interview, Juan León was the director of Defensoría Maya, an organization which aims to support and strengthen the rights of the indigenous population in Guatemala.

Interview Gregorio Chay (URNG, Maya K’iche’), October 10, 1998, Guatemala City.

Ibid. This movement is different from the Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo Ixim (MRP-IXIM). The latter is an offshoot of the guerrilla faction ORPA (Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas). For more details, see “Los indígenas y la estratégia de guerra popular prolongada en Guatmala: El caso del MRP Ixim. Entrevista a Mario Roberto Morales por Ángel Rodolfo Palma Cruz,” reprinted by Centro de Documentación de Movimientos Armados (Valencia: CEDEMA, 2010), http://www.cedema.org/ver.php?id=5010.

Edward F. Fischer and R. McKenna Brown, Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 61– 62. I have no answer as to how the Ixim activists reconciled the particularistic tenets of an essentialized interpretation of culture with their Catholic identity, in particular the religious universalism and the call for religious supremacy of Roman Catholicism. After all, they were closely connected to the Catholic Church.

Diócesis del Quiché, El Quiché: El Pueblo y su Iglesia. 1960 – 1980 (Santa Cruz del Quiché: Guatemala, 1994), 107.

This raises another question, namely how activists bridged the gap between their ethnic activism in the Ixim movement and their activism in the CUC and later the EGP. This apparent contradiction is probably the result of different stages of activism.

Interview Enrique Corral (URNG), November 16, 1998, Guatemala City.

Support for the Christian Democratic Party by members of Catholic Action had a long tradition, especially in the province of El Quiché. See Diócesis del Quiché 1994: 72, and Tom Barry 1992: 191.

Diócesis del Quiché 1994: 73.

Ibid., 72 – 73; Manuel Camposeco Cruz, La propuesta de desarrollo sostenible denominada de campesino a campesino: Una experiencia en San Martín Jilotepeque: 1972 – 1982 (Guatemala: Master Thesis, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, Faculty of Political Sciences, May 2011), 16.

Tom Barry 1992: 300. This was before Ríos Montt’s conversion to neo-Pentecostalism in 1977. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit. Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982 – 1983 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 55.

José Manuel Fernández Fernández, Comunidades indígenas y conflicto social en Guatemala (Madrid: Colección Tesis Doctorales. Nr. 157/88. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Faculty of Political Sciences, Department of Social Anthropology, Madrid, 1988), 232.

Information for this paragraph is drawn from Ricardo Falla 1978b: 438 – 461, and Edward F. Fischer, “Induced Culture Change as a Strategy for Socioeconomic Development: The Pan-Maya Movement,” in Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala, eds., Edward F. Fischer and R. McKenna Brown (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 56 – 68, 62.

Bonar Ludwig Hernández Sandoval 2010: 17.

See Philip Berryman, Christians in Guatemala’s Struggle (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1984), 16. Berryman also discusses the problems of the cooperatives on that page.

Manuel Camposeco Cruz 2011: 14 – 15.

IDESAC was founded in the early 1960s by the Christian Democratic Party. In the beginning it was an educational center for the party. Later it gained more autonomy. See Philip Berryman 1984: 15.

Arzobispado de Guatemala, Oficina de Derechos Humanos (ODHAG) 1998: 85.

On the history of the CUC, see Andrea Althoff, Klasse, Ethnizität, Reformismus im diskursiven Transformationsprozess einer guatemaltekischen Landarbeiterorganisation. Eine qualitative Studie (Duisburg: Universität Duisburg, 1999).

In February and March of 1980, the CUC achieved a complete shut-down of harvesting and the adjoining agro-industrial segments. See Andrea Althoff 1999: 52.

The term refers to the use of chemical fertilizers, leading to an unprecedented growth of the harvest. Cooperatives and development agencies often introduced fertilizers.

Comité de Unidad Campesina and Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Klage der Erde. Der Kampf der Campesinos in Guatemala (Göttingen: Lamuv Verlag, 1996), 72 – 73.

Interview Juan León Alvarado (Defensoría Maya, Maya K’iche’), November 8, 1998, Guatemala City.

According to historian Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Protestant relief agencies often had a U.S. background and an interest in using the earthquake as a stepping-stone to promote conversion. Virginia Garrard Burnett 1998: 121– 122.

Apparently, Guatemala is not an isolated case. When Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar in 2008, the Burmese military junta tried to prevent foreign relief workers from entering the country. Fears that rebuilding efforts outside military control would trigger a rebellion against decades of repression were cited in a BBC report. See BBC news, “Burmese dodge junta to supply aid,” (May 20, 2008), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7409834.stm.

This is not to say that there was no state-sponsored violence before. However, state repression was especially severe from 1978 to 1984. 91 percent of the human rights violations documented by the CEH (1960 to 1996) occurred during that time. See Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), Guatemala, Memory of Silence: Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification. Conclusions and Recommendations (Guatemala: CEH, 1999), 33 – 34. Military camps and civil patrols (paramilitary groups) were set up throughout the Western Highlands. Zones of major guerrilla activity, such as the Ixil Triangle in the Province of El Quiché, were among the most heavily militarized regions. To control the population, the government and military also created thirty-three model villages, the so-called development poles or polos de desarrollo. Their goal was to resettle the internally displaced indigenous population. Kay B. Warren 1998: 89.

“The Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) registered a total of 42,275 victims, including men, women, and children. Of these, 23,671 were victims of arbitrary execution and 6,159 were victims of forced disappearance. Eighty-three percent of fully identified victims were Mayan and seventeen percent non-indigenous Ladinos. The CEH estimates that the number of persons killed or disappeared as a result of the fratricidal confrontation reached a total over 200,000.” Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH) 1999: 17. According to Lowell and Lutz, Guatemala had a population of 6,873,176 million in 1980. See W. George Lowell and Christopher H. Lutz, “Conquest and Population: Maya Demography in Historical Perspective,” in Latin America Research Review 29, no. 2 (1994): 133 – 140, 136.

Although it happened a few weeks before Lucas García took office (July 1978), the massacre of Panzós in Alta Verapaz (May 29), when at least 53 people were killed, can be seen as the starting point for unprecedented state repression. For more on the massacre, indigenous activism, and the role of the state, see Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

The term internal enemy originated in the National Security Doctrine (NSD), which formed part of the anti-Soviet strategy of the United States applied in Latin America. Tragically, this doctrine ended with an overall identification of civilians as being part of the insurgency, an interpretation that led to criminalizing the counterinsurgency and to an extremely high death toll, in particular among the Mayan population. See the summary of the report of the United Nations’ truth commission, “Conclusions: Human rights violations, acts of violence and assignment of responsibility.” Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH) 1999: 19 – 20.

Thomas and Marjorie Melville 1971; Julio César Macías, La guerrilla fue mi camino. Epitafio para César Montes (Guatemala, C.A.: Colección Afluentes de Modernidad. Editorial Piedra Santa, 1997). The group Cráter was among the most influential groups. It was filled with young, enthusiastic, affluent students, some of whom later became guerrilla commanders and ideologues, such as Gustavo Porras. He described his experiences in his memoir, Las huellas de Guatemala (Guatemala: F & G Editores, 2009).

Fernando Hoyos and Enrique Corral decided to become active guerrilla combatants in the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP). At that time, the EGP was the largest of four guerrilla factions, the other three being the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR), Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajo (PGT), Organización del Pueblo en Armas (ORPA), and the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR). The participation of priests and former Catholic activists in the guerrilla movement provoked much criticism, since it offered the military legitimacy for carrying out political murders against catechists and priests and starting a campaign against the Church as an institution, equating them with subversive forces. Ricardo Bendaña Perdomo 2001: 88 – 90; María Pilar Hoyos de Asig, Dónde estás?: Fernando Hoyos (Guatemala: Fondo de Cultura Ed., 1997).

Thomas and Marjorie Melville 1971; Diócesis del Quiché 1994.

Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH) 1999: 22.

Ibid., p. 23.

Ibid.

Víctor Montejo, Maya Intellectual Renaissance: Identity, Representation, and Leadership (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Interview Fernando Suazo (Spanish, former priest in Rabinal, Baja Verapaz), Santa Cruz del Quiché, August 1998. Mario Roberto Morales, La articulación de las diferencias o el síndrome de Maximón: los discursos literarios y políticos del debate interétnico en Guatemala (Guatemala: FLACSO, 1999).

The repression also led to the formation of several new groups which protested against massacres and human rights violations. Strong relationships to ecclesiastical institutions remained an essential characteristic of these new initiatives; for instance, the ecumenically oriented Committee for Justice and Peace (Comité para la Justicia y la Paz).

Interview with Juan León Tuyuc Velásquez and Antonio Ixmata, Guatemala City, Summer 1997, in Amnesty International Rundbrief: Central America Special Action (CASA), October 1997, 20 – 26. Translation by Timothy Neil Gilfoil.

Arturo Arias, “El movimiento indígena en Guatemala, 1970 – 1982,” in Movimientos Populares en América Central 1970 – 1982, eds. Daniel Camacho and Rafael Menjívar Larín (San José: Editorial Universidad Centroamericana, 1985), 62 – 119.

David Stoll 1993: 67. In my view, the foco theory added to the ethnic exclusiveness of the guerrillas, because it meant that a few committed militants from outside an area should come in, take the intellectual lead, and integrate the predominantly Mayan population. In practice, these guerrilla vanguards were mostly city-bred intellectuals trained in Cuba, the place where the theory originated. See Gustavo Porras Castejón 2009, and Julio César Macías 1997.

David Stoll 1993: 66 – 67.

These military structures took their toll after the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, when the URNG, the United Guerrilla Front, attempted to organize the transition towards a democratic party. They were not used to consulting with or including the Mayan activists, and large parts of the Mayan electorate turned away from the former commanders. Consequently, the relationship between the insurgency and Mayan activists is far from harmonious and spans the spectrum from loyalty to outward hostility. Santiago Bastos and Manuela Camus, Quebrando el silencio: Organizaciones del Pueblo Maya y sus demandas (1986 – 1992) (Guatemala: FLACSO, 1996).

David Stoll writes about the Ixcán grande area, in which the Catholic Church had organized large, agricultural cooperatives and settlements, and where the EGP had a stronghold: “It was because the Catholic colonies were already so well organized that the EGP was attracted to them in its search for a popular base.” David Stoll 1993: 66. For an account of the first initiatives to organize these colonies, see Thomas and Marjorie Melville 1971.

At a first glance, this seems to be at variance with the foco theory. A deeper analysis indicates, however, that both strategies – political mass movement and guerrilla vanguardia –existed among the EGP.

Rafael Mondragón, De Indios y Cristianos en Guatemala (México, D.F.: Claves Latinoamericanos, 1983), 92 – 93.

Julio César Macías writes about the 1960s: “In those years, Latin American guerrillas were rather anticlerical, or, as they were humorously referred to, comecuras [literally: ‘priest eaters’]. The religious community wasn’t very tolerant of those involved in the social struggle with weapons in hand, either.” Julio César Macías 1997: 170, translation Timothy Neil Gilfoil.

Mario Payeras 1997: 51; Nicolas Anderson, Guatemala, escuela revolucionaria de nuevos hombres. Con el Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, 1981–1982, Experiencias, testimonios y reflexiones (México, D.F.: Editorial Nuestro Tiempo, 1982), 111. The now-famous quotation by Shelton Davis on the motivation of the indigenous to fight in the guerrillas must be added. He wrote in the 1980s: “Indians began joining with the guerrilla organizations not because of a deep ideological understanding of or commitment to their cause but rather as a means of individual and community defence against the selective killings and acts of terror by the army and the death squads. In response to the Indian mobilization, the army stepped up its counterinsurgency efforts in the highlands.” Shelton Davis, “Introduction History of Violence,” in Harvest of Violence: The Maya Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis, ed. Robert Marquess Carmack (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988): 19 – 63, 23.

Dependency theory was very popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Developed by Brazilian, Argentinean, and Chilean social scientists, it understood Latin America’s economical and social stagnation as a consequence of a ‘center-periphery’ dynamic, in which Latin America (and Africa) occupies the periphery and is dependent on the center, the Northern hemisphere. For dependency theory, see the writings of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Enzo Falletto, and Andre Gunder Frank. Cardoso and Faletto, Development and Dependency in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967).

Karl Marx, [1859] “Preface,” in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin Press, 1963), 67.

Claus Bussmann, Befreiung durch Jesus? Die Christologie der lateinamerikanischen Befreiungstheologie (München: Kösel Verlag, 1980), 27.

The other three were Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajo (PGT), Organización del Pueblo en Armas (ORPA), and the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR).

The patronizing language of Marxist scholars speaks for itself: “It would be naive to assume that the Indian knows his course, or that he understands his place in the structure of society to which he belongs. If only he knew. Then he would understand that the majority of Indians are proletarians and semi-proletarians and that the terms of the struggle have changed. He would understand that there is a multitude of proletarian and semi-proletarian Ladinos who are in fact his class fellows, and he would understand that the real cause of all the calamities, the exploitation, can only be suppressed if all exploited people acknowledge themselves as such and clearly define their real common enemies.” Severo Martínez Peláez 1986: 25. Translation Timothy Neil Gilfoil.

Obviously, Martínez Peláez’s interpretation is identical to that of progressive sectors of the Catholic Church from those times, who also viewed traditional indigenous culture as backward and fatalistic, characteristics that ought to be overcome.

Martínez Peláez 1986: 24. Translation Timothy Neil Gilfoil.

The EGP, however, used both foquismo and the strategy of the masses.

ORPA can be traced back to the guerrilla movements of the 1960s. They operated in the East of the country (mainly the province of Zacapa). Its commander Rodrigo Asturias was the son of Guatemala’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Miguel Angel Asturias. Rodrigo Asturias’ nom-de-guerre, Gaspar Ilom, comes from one of the protagonists of his father’s novels, Gaspar Ilom (Men of Corn, 1949). According to the CEH, ORPA was working secretively until they finally went public in 1979. The attack on the Finca Mujullía in the municipality of Colomba, Quetzaltenango, on September 18, 1979, served as their coming-out. See Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), Guatemala, memoria del silencio: informe de la Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico. Tomo I: mandato y procedimiento de trabajo: causas y orígenes del conflicto del enfrentamiento armado (Guatemala: CEH, 1999a), 175 – 176.

Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), Guatemala, memoria del silencio: informe de la Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico. Tomo II: Las violaciones de los derechos humanos y los hechos de violencia (Guatemala: CEH, 1999b), 256 – 257.

Miguel Angel Reyes (1986) has written more extensively on the subject of ethnicity in the Church, unions, the guerrilla movement, and the social sciences. See Angel Reyes in his article: “El indio en la lucha ideológica,” in Polémica. Revista centroamericana de ciencias sociales 20 (May-August 1986), 5 – 16. In a way, the Gúzman-Böckler book represents a Guatemalan version of the Latin American Indigenismo ideology, a cultural interpretation of the relationship between the Indígenas and Ladinos in the nation-state that is, by definition, designed by non-indigenous intellectuals.

Carlos Guzmán Böckler, Donde enmudecen las conciencias (Crepúsculo y aurora en Guatemala) (México, CIEASAS-SEP, 1986); see also the 1998 article “Las identidades bajo el terror” in Exilios, no. 1, 33 – 48.

Guzmán Böckler is a controversial figure. Journalist and political analyst Tom Barry writes that he interviewed him in 1987, reporting that “he feels that an ‘indian war’ may be necessary to protect indian rights and assert indian culture.” Barry also describes him as an advocate of the so-called Fourth World Theory, defending an essentialist position that holds that indigenous people have little in common with Ladinos. In this theory, indigenous people are considered inherently different from non-Indians, who, spoiled by Western industrialized culture, will never understand or respect indigenous lives and culture. Tom Barry 1992: 228. For more information on Fourth World Theory, see Kathy Seton, “Fourth World Nations in the Era of Globalization. An Introduction to Contemporary Theorizing Posed by Indigenous Nations” (Olympia, WA: Center for World Indigenous Studies, 1999).

See Carlos Guzmán-Böckler and Lean-Louis Herbert, Guatemala: Una interpretación histórico-social (México, D.F.: Siglo XXI, 1970).

To put it differently, Herbert and Guzmán-Böckler defended an essentialized position.

Severo Martínez Peláez 1986: 25.

Severo Martínez Peláez [1970], La Patria del Criollo. Ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial guatemalteca (San José: Editorial Universitaria, 1985), 607.

MAYAS is an abreviation for a group called Movimiento de Ayuda y Acción Solidaria (Movement of Support and Solidarity Action).

Tojil is a reference to a pre-colonial deity. See John W. Fox, Maya Postclassic State Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 62.

Arzobispado de Guatemala, Oficina de Derechos Humanos (ODHAG) 1998: 85.

A Spanish reprint of the declaration can be found in Mario Payeras 1997: 71– 89.

David Stoll wrote the following on the lower-level insurgency structure: “Ex-combatants usually described command in terms of multiethnic committees including, for example, an Ixil, a Kaqchikel, a K’iche’, and a ladino.” David Stoll 1993: 138. However, Tom Barry as well as David Stoll underline that guerrilla leadership was composed entirely of non-indigenous Ladinos. Tom Barry 1992: 230; David Stoll 1993: 67. Irma Velásquez Nimatuj writes that 90 percent of EGP leaders were educated Ladinos from the middle class. Velásquez Nimatuj 2005: 121. Within the EGP, two Mayans were part of the National Directory of the EGP: the Mayan-Ixil Pablo Ceto and the K’iche’ Gregorio Chay. Both reestablished the CUC after 1986. See Andrea Althoff 1999.

Yet not everybody blamed the Catholic Church, as David Stoll’s interviews with Ixil Mayans suggest. In his opinion, conversion to Protestantism occurred not because people felt deceived by the Catholic Church or had lost faith, but because they were searching for a neutral social space. David Stoll 1993: 172 – 174.

Yvon LeBot, La guerra en tierras mayas: comunidad, violencia y modernidad en Guatemala (1970 – 1992) (Mexico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, Sección de Obras de Sociología, 1995), 147.

As early as the 1960s, contacts existed between Catholic priests, nuns, and the insurgents. The Cráter, a Catholic youth group, became the center for this exchange. Marjorie Melville, alias Sister Marian Peter, a Catholic nun who supervised the Cráter, brought the group into contact with the insurgency. She describes the encounter in Whose Heaven, Whose Earth? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971). For other accounts, see Julio César Macías 1997: 169 – 173; Gustavo Porras Castejón 2009.

The CUC went public in 1978, but the origins of the association date back to 1972 and the Southern Quiché village of La Estancia. For a history of the CUC, see Andrea Althoff 1999. On La Estancia and the Spanish priests, see David Stoll 1993: 86 – 88; José Manuel Fernández Fernández 1988; Fernández Fernández, “Crisis agraria, organización del campesinado y conflicto político en Guatemala,” in 500 años de lucha por la tierra. Estudios sobre propiedad rural y reforma agraria en Guatemala, ed. J. C. Cambranes (Guatemala: FLACSO, Vol. 2., 1992), 117– 202.

Several other factors have to be added. Among them are the terrible earthquake in 1976, the march of the Ixtahuacán miners in 1977, the massacre of Panzós in 1978, and the massive strike on the South coast organized by the CUC in 1980. See Andrea Althoff 1999.

Arzobispado de Guatemala, Oficina de Derechos Humanos (ODHAG) 1998: 124. Marta Harnecker, Pueblos en armas (Managua: Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1985), 208 – 09.

Gustavo Porras Castejón 2009: 306. Stoll also asserts that the former bishop of El Quiché, Monseñor Juan José Gerardi Conedera (he was murdered in 1998 shortly after he presented the Catholic Truth Commission Report REMHI), disavowed the Church in Exile, not wishing to join the revolutionary movement. David Stoll 1993: 171. It is also important to note that on several occasions and during the height of military operations between 1980 and 1982, prominent guerrilla commanders gave interviews in which they publicly acknowledged using popular organizations for their own goals, thus giving additional ammunition to military arguments that the indigenous population supported the guerrillas. The above example of Gustavo Porras, who mentions Rolando Morán, describing the Guatemalan refugees in Mexico as the support base of the EGP, is just one. Martha Harnecker, a famous Marxist scholar and disciple of French Marxist Louis Althusser, who interviewed Rolando Morán, is another. See Marta Harnecker 1985.

Interview with Antonio René Argueta, Fall 1998, Guatemala City.

According to the CEH: “Acts of violence attributable to the guerrillas represent three percent of the violations registered by the CEH. This contrasts with ninety-three percent committed by agents of the state, especially the Army. This quantitative difference provides new evidence of the magnitude of the State’s repressive response. However, in the opinion of the CEH, this disparity does not lessen the gravity of the unjustifiable offences committed by the guerrillas against human rights.” Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH) 1999c: 42.

Information drawn from interviews with former guerrilla members, conducted in 1998. See Andrea Althoff 1999.

Charles D. Brockett writes that MRP-Ixim was founded in 1979. Charles D. Brockett, Political Movements and Violence in Central America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 122.

Diane Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 150.

Ibid.

David Stoll 1993: 127– 128.

Veronica Melander, The Hour of God? People in Guatemala Confronting Political Evangelism and Counterinsurgency (1976 – 1990) (Uppsala: Uppsala University Library, 1998).

David Stoll, 1993: xiv. Violence does explain some but not all conversions to Protestantism, since conversions already occurred before the civil war. Furthermore, they took place independently of the above-mentioned earthquake, a catastrophe in which countless missionary agents – many from the United States – tried to combine material aid efforts with evangelization. Seemingly, the factor of a ‘spiritual rationale’ should be added, an aspect that is discussed throughout the chapter on Protestantism and, in relationship to Catholicism, in the second part of this chapter.

Peace negotiations formally started with the Esquipulas II agreement in February 1987. In 1989, members of the Conference of Religious Orders of Guatemala (CONFREGUA) were appointed delegates to the National Dialogue and the National Commission of Reconciliation (CNR). Between 1992 and 1994, the Church figured prominently in the Assembly of Civil Society (Asamblea de la Sociedad Civil, ASC). Paul Jeffrey, Recovering Memory: Guatemalan Churches and the Challenge of Peacemaking (Uppsala: Life and Peace Institute, 1998); Bruce Calder, “The Role of the Catholic Church and Other Religious Institutions in the Guatemalan Peace Process, 1980 – 1996,” Journal of Church and State 43, no. 4 (2001): 773 – 797.

Some of these organizations had virtually all-Mayan membership, which did not translate into an ethnic agenda until the early 1990s, however.

The civil patrols were paramilitary units, installed by and under the control of the military. The members were often young indigenous men forced to do this service. Officially the patrols –or PAC (Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil) as they are known by their Spanish acronym – had to control the villages and their surroundings to ‘protect’ the inhabitants from the guerrilla. The PAC often misused their authority and became infamous for human rights violations. Amnesty International, Amnesty International Jahresbericht 1995 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995), 206.

Observation based on field research in 1998. See Andrea Althoff 1999.

Ibid.

Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj, a K’iche’ anthropologist and journalist, asserted that the EGP helped to establish CONAVIGUA in 1988, the Council of the Displaced (CONDEG) in 1989, and the Consejo de Comunidades Étnicas Rujunel Junam (CERJ). Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj 2005: 121. See Andrea Althoff 1999.

See Velásquez Nimatuj 2005. My impression is that the same assessment can be made with regard to the Catholic Church. In other words, the Catholic Church also became infused with Catholics who had close ties to the guerrilla. Similarly to the popular movement, some of those who occupied positions in Catholic pastoral agencies and had ties with the guerrilla had to leave Guatemala as political refugees, especially those who participated in the Guatemalan Church in Exile (IGE). See Yvon LeBot 1995. These Catholics strongly defended the class paradigm – that is liberation theology – over an ethnic interpretation of Guatemalan reality, pushing out Mayans who felt that ethnicity was never a real concern of the Church.

Kay B. Warren, “Indigenous Movements as a Challenge to the Unified Social Movement Paradigm for Guatemala,” in Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements, eds., Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 165 – 195, 167.

Tom Barry 1992: 227.

Back then, Majawil Q’ij was a coalition of grassroots organizations, including CUC, CONAVIGUA, CONDEG, and CCDA. Tom Barry, Inside Guatemala: The Essential Guide to its Politics, Economy, Society and Environment (Albuquerque: The Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center, 1992), 227.

Tom Barry 1992: 227. Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj asserted that the II Encounter in Quetzaltenango was to a large extent organized by the EGP. Velásquez Nimatuj 2005: 161.

What remains clear from the descriptions of insiders is that the overwhelmingly non-indigenous leadership of the URNG (the guerrilla umbrella association), especially the EGP, wanted not only to control the CUC (and other organizations it helped establish after the extreme violence abated) but also demanded the exclusive right to negotiate with the government in the peace negotiations. Furthermore, the EGP did not accept the ethnic demands of the indigenous base of the CUC, an organization that was still to a large extent Mayan (Velásquez Nimatuj 2005: 113, 158). After accusing the EGP of being co-opted by the government, several leaders of the CUC finally decided to leave and establish another organization, named CONIC. Important in this respect is that those who replaced the original leaders in the CUC were also indigenous. However, they were loyal to the non-indigenous EGP leadership. In short, this example shows that indigenous activists did not always side with their ethnic fellows. Furthermore, there is no coherent ethnic resistance or polarization in Guatemala.

Santiago Bastos and Manuela Camus 1993; Santiago Bastos and Manuela Camus, Abriendo camino. Las organizaciones Mayas desde el Nobel hasta el Acuerdo de Derechos Indígenas (Guatemala: FLACSO, 1995); Kay B. Warren 1998: 165 – 195; Tom Barry 1992.

Andrea Althoff 1999.

Tania Palencia Prado, and David Holiday, Towards a New Role for Civil Society in the Democratization Process of Guatemala (Montreal: International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, 1996); Yvon LeBot 1995.

Tom Barry 1992: 227.

Apart from the Guatemalan context, the conflict between a class- and an ethnic-based interpretation of social injustice followed the general Latin American ideological fault lines, in which some social movements and agents moved away from interpretations of class struggles to a position where previously insignificant antagonisms such as ethnic cleavages now become the center of attention. This was triggered by a transformed political agenda. Nestor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (México, D.F.: Grijalbo, 1989).

For example, Juan José Monterroso, a long-term Catholic activist and anthropologist responsible for social and cultural pastoral work in the diocese of San Marcos, explained in an interview that for him the cause of social grievances is still the unjust distribution of socio-economic resources. He argues that when analyzing social and political problems, what is left at the end of the day is always the unjust allocation of wealth, and therefore for him only a class analysis is the right way to measure social conflict adequately. Interview Juan José Monterroso (pastoral social, pastoral indígena), June 29, 2001, San Marcos.

Lyuba Zarsky and Leonardo Stanley, Searching for Gold in the Guatemalan Highlands. Economic Benefits and Environmental Risks of the Marlin Mine (Medford, MA: Global Development and Environment Institute. Tufts University. September 2011); Joris van de Sandt, Mining Conflicts and Indigenous Peoples in Guatemala (The Hague: Cordaid, September 2009).

Interview with Padre Tomás García (Maya K’iche’), June 3, 2001, Almolonga, Quetzaltenango. Father Tomás García was killed in a car accident in December 2009, aged seventy-three.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid. Interestingly, political repression also supported an ecumenical alliance between historical, mainline Protestants and Catholics. On this topic Padre Tomás noted, “What the official religious dialogue has not achieved, has been achieved to a certain extent by the suffering of the people.”

See Robert J. Miller 2007. See also Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala (CEG) 1997: 574.

The universalism of Roman Catholicism is, of course, not a real universalism but rather an expression of the ‘Western’ and ‘European’ background that by and large has infused official Guatemalan Catholicism. Not surprisingly, this is reflected in the composition of the Guatemalan Bishop Conference. This body is almost exclusively comprised of bishops who represent traditional-sacramental Catholicism.

Interview Ernestina López (PI, Maya K’iche’), April 24, 2001, Guatemala City.

As mentioned earlier, there is no seminary for indigenous people who want to become priests.

Interview Padre Tomás García (Maya K’iche’), June 3, 2001, Almolonga, Quetzaltenango.

Ibid.

The surrounding hamlets of Almolonga are more accessible than those of Cantel, a topographical detail which makes priestly visits less burdensome.

In San Andrés Xecúl (province of Totonicapán) Padre Tomás gave orders to paint the Church in a very colourful way, referring symbolically to the colourful garment of indigenous women. The endeavor was so successful that the Church became a tourist attraction. Moreover, the national phone company TELGUA printed the Church on their phone cards.

Lilian R. Goldin and Brent E. Metz, “An Expression of Cultural Change: Invisible Converts to Protestantism among the Highland Guatemala Mayas,” in Ethnology 30, no. 4 (October 1991): 325 – 338; Goldin, “Work and Ideology in the Maya Highlands of Guatemala: Economic Beliefs in the Context of Occupational Change,” in Economic Development and Cultural Change 41, no. 1 (October 1992): 103 – 123; Goldin, “Models of Economic Differentiation and Cultural Change,” in Journal of Quantitative Anthropology 6, no. 1 – 2 (1996): 49 – 74.

Yet Padre Tomás also talked about his successes. According to him, the celebration of the mass in Spanish and K’iche’ led to a return of Protestants to the Catholic Church. Interview Padre Tomás García (Maya K’iche’), June 3, 2001, Almolonga, Quetzaltenango.

Lucía Xoc Caal (Mayan priestess, Maya K’iche’, pseudonym), June 5, 2001, Cantel, Quetzaltenango. On inquiry, Walburga Rupflin Alvarado, who runs a Mayan school and library in Cantel, mentioned in an email that the priest did succeed in demolishing an enormous corncob Padre Tomás had placed in the Church. Email correspondence with Walburga Rupflin Alvarado, March 10, 2010.

Interview with Bishop Martínez Contreras, May 23, 2001, Quetzaltenango.

Interview Padre Tomás García (Maya K’iche’), June 3, 2001, Almolonga, Quetzaltenango; Isabela Yax (Mayan priestess, Maya K’iche’, pseudonym), June 10, 2001, Guatemala City.

Interview Padre Tomás García (Maya K’iche’), June 3, 2001, Almolonga, Quetzaltenango. Interviewees in Comitancillo and Tajumulco mentioned the presence of Catholic priests during Mayan ceremonies several times. See Interview Vicente Sandóval Tarragona (Maya Mam, pseudonym), September 15, 2001, Chicajalaj, Comitancillo, San Marcos.

An Aj Q’ij is a non-Catholic Mayan priest who celebrates religious rituals.

Interview Padre José, November 10, 2001, Tajumulco, San Marcos.

Interview Luís Vásquez (pastoral social, Maya Mam), May 15, 2001, Quetzaltenango.

For those who associate with it, the Popul Vuh is emblematic for Mayan culture as a whole and not just the K’iche’ culture.

Pastoral Indígena, “Encuentro Mesoamericano de Pastoral Indígena,” (Santa María Chiquimula, Guatemala: March 10 – 15, 2003).

Participant observation and conversations with catechists in the Centro de Formación Interdiocesano, Aldea Champoyap, San Marcos, June 23, 2001, Champoyap, San Marcos.

Bishop Álvaro Ramazzini Imeri, November 9, 2001, San Marcos.

Interview Bishop Hugo Martínez Contreras, May 23, 2001, Quetzaltenango.

Interview Dolores Martínez Nube (pastoral indígena, Maya Mam, pseudonym), June 26, 2001, San Marcos. Interview Ernestina López (pastoral indígena, Maya K’iche’), April 27, 2001, Guatemala City.

Interview Dolores Martínez Nube (pastoral indígena, Maya Mam, pseudonym), June 26, 2001, San Marcos.

The interviewee uses the K’iche’ diction.

Interview Ernestina López (pastoral indígena, Maya K’iche’), April 27, 2001, Guatemala City.

Interview Dolores Martínez Nube (pastoral indígena, Maya Mam, pseudonym), June 26, 2001, San Marcos.

Interview with Dolores Martínez Nube (pseudonym), Maya Mam from Comitancillo. June 26, 2001, San Marcos. The marimba is a musical instrument, and resembles the xylophone or sticcado. Apart from that, the interview illustrates how similar Catholic and Protestant churches were – and often still are – in their critique of Mayan culture.

See Richard Wilson for Alta Verapaz. Richard Wilson 1995; Richard Wilson, “Anchored Communities: Identity and History of the Maya Q’eqchi’,” Man 28, no. 1 (1993): 121 – 138.

Heinrich Schäfer, December 23, 2007, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany.

See Diócesis del Quiché 1994: 107.

Participant observation and conversations with catechists, priests, and trainers. (Centro de Formación Interdiocesano, Champoyap, San Marcos, June 23, 2001.

Ibid.

Interview Juan Tornero (Maya Mam, catechist, pseudonym), January 6, 2002, Llano Grande, Concepción Tutuapa, San Marcos.

Interview Dolores Martínez Nube (pastoral indígena, Maya Mam, pseudonym), June 26, 2001, San Marcos.

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Pseudonym.

Interview José María Durango (Maya Mam, catechist, pseudonym), January 4, 2002, Llano Grande, Concepción Tutuapa, San Marcos.

Despite this assessment, in Tajumulco the costumbre and other traditions were practiced much more frequently than in other villages, such as Comitancillo. In my view as well as that of a Canadian couple who worked for the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Comitancillo and then in Tajumulco, the isolated location of the latter is the likely explanation.

Interview Padre José, November 20, 2001, Tajumulco, San Marcos.

Here the different roles of anthropologists in the construction of cultural difference and essentialism become apparent. Whereas anthropologists’ findings sometimes help indigenous activists to support their cultural alterity, here their writings support the ethnic identity politics of a Christian institution whose meta-discourse is clearly opposed to particularistic ethnic identities. See Roger M. Keesing, “Theories of Culture Revisited,” in Assessing Cultural Anthropology, ed. Robert Borofsky (New York: McGraw Hill, 1994), 301 – 312.

Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala (CEG) 1997: 572 – 630, 574.

The main goal of the National Catholic Office was to implement the results of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), also largely known as the cradle of Latin American liberation theology. For this purpose, the bishops created several departments using the model of the Latin American Bishops’ Conference, among them the pastoral indígena. The enthusiastic U.S. Maryknoll priest Jim Curtin was endorsed to establish the National Secretary. Silvia Brennwald 2001: 176 – 177. Not surprisingly, one interviewee called him the founder of the pastoral indígena. Interview Ernestina López (pastoral indígena, Maya K’iche’), April 24, 2001, Guatemala City.

Silvia Brennwald 2001: 177.

The meeting took place in Cobán, the provincial capital of Alta Verapaz. Hans Siebers, “El trabajo de pastoral y la institucionalización de la Iglesia Católica en la actualidad,” in Guatemala. Retos de la Iglesia Católica en una sociedad en crisis, eds., Luis Samandú, Hans Siebers, and Oscar Sierra (San José: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigación, DEI, 1990), 111 – 162, 132 –133. In the 1990s, the Catholic Centro Ak’Kutan in Cobán would play a pioneering role in revitalizing indigenous culture within Catholic Church structures. The center publishes on indigenous theology and pastoral practice.

Ibid., p. 133.

Ibid., p. 132 – 133. Silvia Brennwald 2001: 177.

Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala (CEG) 1997.

Interview Ernestina López (pastoral indígena, Maya K’iche’), April 24, 2001, Guatemala City.

Juan José Monterroso (pastoral social, pastoral indígena), June 29, 2001, San Marcos. Nevertheless, working on and voicing concerns about international mining companies operating in the dioceses of San Marcos is connected to indigenous affairs, e.g., the protection of the environment and the lack of consultation with the indigenous population before granting licenses to the mining companies. Apparently this work is also dangerous; Bishop Ramazzini Imeri has received numerous death threats in recent years. See urgent action from Amnesty International (UA 91/08, AI Index: AMR 24/011/2008).

Interview Ernestina López (pastoral indígena, Maya K’iche’), April 24, 2001, Guatemala City.

Ibid.

Hans Siebers 1990: 135.

Ibid., p. 133 – 134.

Although the Catholic Charismatic Renewal was introduced by U.S. American priests and nuns, I think it is fair to say that, similarly to Protestant Pentecostalism, it developed into a national grassroots movement.

Interview Dolores Martínez Nube (pastoral indígena, MayaMam, pseudonym), June 26, 2001, San Marcos.

Publication Diócesis de San Marcos Nan Tx′otx “Madre Tierra”, Qchwinqel tze′n qo ul anq′in. El nacimiento (San Marcos: n.d.), 5.

Dolores Martínez Nube (pastoral indígena, Maya Mam, pseudonym), June 26, 2001, San Marcos.

Participant observation and conversations with catechists in the Centro de Formación Interdiocesano, Aldea Champoyap, June 23, 2001, Champoyap, San Marcos.

Padre Eric Gruloos, December 10, 2001, San Miguel Ixtahuacán, San Marcos.

Similar to the women’s choir in San Miguel Ixtahuacán, Padre Tomás asserted the success of his efforts, too. Interview Padre Tomás García (Maya K’iche’), June 3, 2001, Almolonga, Quetzaltenango. The city of Almolonga belongs to the diocese of Los Altos and is situated near Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s second largest city.

Interview Padre José, November 10, 2001, Tajumulco, San Marcos. It might also be that the local Protestants didn’t want to participate, because they widly view Catholic and Mayan spirituality as pagan and diabolic.

Isabela Yax (Mayan priestess, Maya K’iche’, pseudonym), June 10, 2001, Guatemala City.

Ibid. The following information is based on this interview.

Atxum Mekel Pas Ashul and Miguel Matías Miguel Juan, “La espiritualidad maya y su papel en la construcción de la identidad,” in Identidad. Segundo Congreso de Estudios Mayas 6 – 8 Agosto 1997 (Guatemala: Universidad Rafael Landívar, Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales (IDIES), Estudios Sociales No. 59, 1998), 283 – 287, 285.

Interview Adriana Pascual Batz (Theology Student, Maya K’iche’, pseudonym), May 10, 2001, Guatemala City.

Interview Bishop Álvaro Ramazzini Imeri, November 9, 2001, San Marcos.

In 1996, the Government of Guatemala ratified the International Labor Organization’s Convention (ILO) 169 on the rights of indigenous peoples. This convention allows for a consultation with indigenous peoples before approving policies with significant impact on their territories. Despite the ratification of ILO Convention 169, the Canadian Goldcorp’s Marlin mine went into operation without such consultations in 2005. The lack of prior consent and consultation at the project and policy level is at the root of much conflict and violence in Guatemala’s mining sector. Targeted attacks and criminalizing those opposed to mining occur frequently. See Lyuba Zarsky and Leonardo Stanley 2010: 6.

Interview Ernestina López (pastoral indígena, Maya K’iche’), April 24, 2001, Guatemala City. Julio Cabrera is now bishop of the diocese Jutiapa.

The pastoral indígena itself stresses that the Church community and its unity are important criteria. Pastoral de las Culturas (n.d.), Juan Ortega, Los servidores comunitarios de ayer, hoy y siempre. Pastoral de las Culturas (San Marcos: Diócesis de San Marcos).

Interview Ernestina López (pastoral indígena, Maya K’iche’), April 24, 2001, Guatemala City.

Interview Dolores Martínez Nube (pastoral indígena, Maya Mam, pseudonym), June 26, 2001, San Marcos.

To avoid confusion, I have used the term ‘charismatic’ for Catholics only. This differs from other parts of the globe, where Charismatics can be of Protestant or Catholic affiliation. See Peter D. Hocken, “Charismatic Movement,” in The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, eds. Stanley Burgess and Eduard M. Van Der Maas (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 477 – 519.

T. Paul Thigpen 2002: 460 – 467.

Pew 2006: 77.

Interview Luis Kelex (CCR, Maya K’ekchi), February 15, 2002, Guatemala City. This was confirmed by bishop Álvaro Ramazzini. Interview bishop Álvaro Ramazzini Imeri, November 9, 2001, San Marcos.

T. Paul Thigpen 2002: 460 – 467.

Here ‘pneumatic’ refers to religious experiences attributed to the Holy Spirit.

Salvador Carrillo Alday, Carismáticos. La presencia jubilosa del Espíritu Santo en el mundo actual (Madrid: Ed. Atenas, 1986), 23 – 25.

The Latino constituency is different in this respect. Within this group, poor migrants and the lower middle class abound. See Andrea Althoff, Religious Identities of Latin American Immigrants in Chicago: Findings from Field Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Divinity School, 2006). http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/062006/althoff_religious_identities.pdf

Accounts on Latin America vary. According to Catholic political scientist Edward L. Cleary, O.P., the priests and sisters who organized the first retreats were mostly reaching out to the poor and lower classes. Cleary explains this with liberation theology’s ‘preferential option for the poor,’ which by that time had become popular among Latin American ecclesial grassroots workers. As a result, Cleary thinks that the Latin American movement took on a different class composition and a different theological emphasis compared to North America. The basic cohort south of the Río Grande was poor, which is consistent with Cleary’s analysis, and many proponents were committed to the goals of liberation theology. Edward L. Cleary, “Protestants and Catholics: Rivals or Siblings,” in Coming of Age: Protestantism in Contemporary Latin America, ed. Daniel Levine (Lanham: University Press of America, 1994), 205 – 231, 217. This interpretation differs from that of Andrew Chesnut and G. Eva Pizano Cejka, who stress that initially the Catholic Charismatic Renewal was a middle- and upper-class movement. Pizano Cejka underlines that in Mexico the movement was introduced by the hierarchy and then found adherents in upper-class segments of Mexico’s Federal District. From being an upper-class, urban movement, it then spread to rural and lower-class segments of society, a dynamic that, in my view, equals that of Guatemala. Andrew Chesnut 2003b: 68, 75. G. Eva Pizano Cejka, “La identitdad de los Carismáticos vista a través de sus prácticas comunes,” in Sectas o iglesias: viejos o nuevos movimientos religiosos, ed. Elio Masferrer Kan (Mexico, D.F.: Plaza y Valdés Editores, 1998), 207–217, 208 – 209. In sum, the findings of these authors suggest that the class background of CCR members varies from country to country.

T. Paul Thigpen 2002: 460 – 467.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Interview Bishop Álvaro Ramazzini Imeri, November 9, 2001, San Marcos.

Comisión de Derechos Humanos en Guatemala, The Repression of Christians in Guatemala: Preliminary Report on Human Rights and Basic Liberties in Guatemala, July-October 1983 (Guatemala: Comisión de Derechos Humanos en Guatemala, 1983).

So similar are Catholic Charismatics to their Protestant counterparts that many of the former are publicly perceived as being Protestants. See preface for more information.

Edward L. Cleary 1994: 207.

The situation is very different in Brazil, where samba-inspired religious music sung by the star of the Brazilian CCR, Padre Marcelo Rossi, is immensely popular and has secured national and international coverage for the movement. See Garry Duffy, “Catholic Church Tested in Brazil,” in BBC News, São Paulo, published 2007/05/09. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/6630311.stm

J. Rodman Williams in the International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements distinguishes Spirit baptism from other forms of baptism: “Since the essential meaning of baptism is immersion, pentecostals often emphasize that to be baptized in the Holy Spirit is to be immersed in the Holy Spirit. This signifies a total submergence in the reality of the Holy Spirit so that whoever is so baptized has a vivid sense of the Spirit’s presence and power.” J. Rodman Williams, “Baptism in the Holy Spirit,” in The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, eds. Stanley Burgess and Eduard M. Van Der Maas (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 354 – 363, 355.

María Cecilia Arias, “Inicio de la Renovación Carismática Católica en Guatemala,” in Renovación Carismática Católica en Guatemala, ed. José María Delgado Varela (Guatemala: Separata de Estudios Teológicos, 1976), 37 – 40, 37.

Ibid., 37. Arias was herself a contemporary witness who supported the movement and the two U.S.-American sisters in its initial phase in 1972.

José María Delgado Varela, Renovación Carismática Católica en Guatemala (Guatemala: Separata de Estudios Teológicos, 1976), 9. Marjorie Melville, a former Maryknoll nun and guerrilla supporter, had worked in this school only a few years earlier, recalling in a memoir that parents proudly referred to the school as the Maryknoll Hilton. Thomas and Marjorie Melville 1971: 31.

José María Delgado Varela 1976.

Cardinal Casariego, who died in 1983, was not a member of the movement. He was well known for his conservative mind-set, however. In the 1970s, he often clashed with progressive clerics from the Guatemalan Ecclesial Conference (CEG) who, influenced by the Second Vatican Council, poverty, and political violence in rural and indigenous Guatemala, demanded political and social reforms from the government. Casariego, to the contrary, maintained close proximity to the military elite. Similar to his predecessor, Archbishop Rossell y Arellano, he was an ardent anticommunist. Jesús Ynfante, a Spanish scholar, characterizes him as sympathetic to Opus Dei. Jesús Ynfante 1996: 428. In spite of Casariego, the Guatemalan bishops did circulate several progressive communiqués and pastorals during his tenure, protesting the bloodshed in rural Guatemala. Tom Barry 1992: 192 – 193.

The introduction of the CCR through the Church hierarchy merits attention, because it calls into question the critical capacity of a movement that claims to reform inner ecclesial structures.

José María Delgado Varela 1976.

The goal of the Cursillo movement is similar to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Both want to achieve a renovation and restoration of the Church. The name Cursillo is Spanish and means ‘little or small course.’ As the name already suggests, the movement organizes small groups in order to familiarize the flock with doctrinal content and a correct Catholic life style. David D. Bundy writes in the International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements that the Cursillo movement is crucial for understanding the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. See David D. Bundy, “Cursillo Movement,” in The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, eds. Stanley Burgess and Eduard M. Van Der Maas (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 567 – 569, 568. On the close relationship between the Cursillo movement and the CCR in Guatemala, see also Edward Cleary, “Catholic Charismatic Renewal: Guatemala –Flourishing and Challenging. Part One.” Religion and Latin America Blog. http://ecleary7.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/catholic-charismatic-renewal-guatemala-flourishing-and-challenging-part-one/

José María Delgado Varela 1976: 11. This is no different from today, as interviews with activists indicate. Rigoberto Fernández (pseudonym), May 21, 2001, Quetzaltenango; Pascual Terretón (CCR, Maya K’iche’, pseudonym), May 24, 2001, Parish San Francisco de Asis, Quetzaltenango.

Padre Hugo Estrada, co-founder of the movement in Guatemala, said that up to the present many problems with priests and bishops have continued, including a total disregard for the Renewal by parts of the clergy. Interview Padre Hugo Estrada (CCR), February 18, 2002, Guatemala City. The Mayan employee of the Pastoral de la Tierra in Quetzaltenango, Luís Vásquez, said that there is also a general lack of acknowledgement on the parish level. Interview Luís Vásquez (pastoral social, Maya Mam), May 15, 2001, Quetzaltenango. Eric Gruloos, priest in San Miguel Ixtahuacán (diocese and province of San Marcos), reported that in his Municipio the Catholic Charismatic Renewal was banned until a few years ago. Interview Padre Eric Gruloos, December 10, 2001, San Miguel Ixtahuacán, San Marcos.

Interview Padre Hugo Estrada (CCR), February 18, 2002, Guatemala City.

Pew 2006: 77. Luis Kelex, who works for the CCR in the Guatemalan capital, reported that the Renewal is present in about 60 percent of the Catholic parishes. Interview Luis Kelex (CCR, Maya K’ekchi), February 15, 2002, Guatemala City.

Interview Luis Kelex (CCR, Maya K’ekchi), February 15, 2002, Guatemala City.

Conversations with participants at a Charismatic mass gathering in Guatemala City (Congreso de Sanación), Colegio El Rosario, Auditorio P. Juan Pedro Pini, February 16, 2002.

Chimaltenango is not a diocese proper but rather a province.

Document with survey information provided by the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Quetzaltenango in June 2001.

Interview with Padre Hugo Estrada, February 18, 2002, Guatemala City.

Virginia Garrard Burnett 1998: 121 – 122.

Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala (CEG), “Confirmados en la Fe” Carta Pastoral Colectiva de Episcopado Guatemalteco. 22 Maya de 1983,” in Al Servicio de la vida, la justicia y la paz. Documentos de la Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala 1956 – 1997, ed. Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala (CEG) (Guatemala: Ediciones San Pablo, 1997), 320 – 340, 337.

Peter D. Hocken, “Charismatic Movement,” in Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, eds. Stanley M. Burgess and Gary B. McGee (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1988), 130 – 160, 154.

Interview Pascual Terretón (CCR, Maya K’iche’, pseudonym), Parish San Francisco de Asis, Quetzaltenango, May 24, 2001.

In a survey the hierarchy conducted in 2001, information sought included whether the individual group belonged to a parish or not.

Interview Álvaro Ramazzini Imeri, bishop of province and diocese San Marcos, who asked himself the same question. He also asserted that in his diocese, where indigenous and non-indigenous Guatemalans live, the number of indigenous CCR members is far higher than that of non-indigenous Ladinos. Interview Bishop Álvaro Ramazzini Imeri, November 9, 2001, San Marcos.

The rejection of Mayan spirituality by Charismatics is well documented and was underlined in many interviews. Bishop Álvaro Ramazzini Imeri, San Marcos, November 9, 2001; José María Durango (Maya Mam, catechist, pseudonym), January 4, 2002, Llano Grande, Concepción Tutuapa, San Marcos; Padre Tomás García (Maya K’iche’), June 18, 2013, Almolonga, Quetzaltenango; Luis Keléx (CCR, Maya Q’eqchí), February 15, 2002, Guatemala City; Luis Vásquez (pastoral social, Maya Mam), May 21, 2001, Quetzaltenango; Padre Hugo Estrada (CCR), February 18, 2002, Guatemala City. The strong rejection of Mayan spirituality is also part of the Protestant Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal religious discourse and repertoire. See the Protestantism section of this book.

As outlined before, it wasn’t until the 1940s, with the creation of Catholic Action, that the Church started its first concerted effort to establish orthodox Catholic hegemony in indigenous communities. The agents of Acción Catolica wiped out many of the existing spiritual – and often other cultural – Mayan practices. Greg Grandin 1997: 7 – 34, 11.

In Comitancillo, for instance, the local priest, who introduced both the CCR and Catholic Action to his parish, tried to shut down the local cofradía. Part of his criticism and that of his supporters was that they raised money for the implementation of the saints’ days and the ensuing heavy alcohol consumption. Furthermore, he and his followers disapproved of the traditional marimba music financed by the cofradías. The marimba often provokes conflicts, because in the eyes of orthodox Catholics it is part of a pagan context and is considered evil. Interview with Dolores Martínez Nube (pastoral indígena, Maya Mam, pseudonym), June 26, 2001, San Marcos.

Padre Tomás García (Maya K’iche’), June 3, 2001, Almolonga, Quetzaltenango.

See the chapter on the Maya movement in this book for a full account of the policies the Catholic Church used to evangelize in the rural areas in the 1950s and 1960s and the effect this has had on contemporary life in a Mayan town.

According to popular beliefs, Maximón has the power, among other things, to curse people, generate wealth, and resolve conflicts. Well-known sites where Maximón figures can be found are: San Andrés Izapa (Province Chimaltenango), Zunil (Province Quetzaltenango) und Santiago Atitlán (Province Sololá). The physical expression of a San Simón is mostly that of a life-size puppet. People give it alcohol to drink and cigarettes and cigars to smoke. Interestingly, the figure resembles that of the non-indigenous person; in some cases it has the features of a Spanish conqueror. Despite the institutional contempt of both the Catholic Church and Protestant churches, many Christians visit the Maximón figure and perform religious rituals such as prayers in front of it. The latter was confirmed by a Mayan priestess who hosts a Maximón in her house (Zunil). Interview with Marta Toj (Maya K’iche’, Mayan priestess, pseudonym), June 4, 2001, Zunil.

Interview Luis Kelex (CCR, Maya K’ekchi). February 15, 2002, Guatemala City.

Padre Tomás García from Almolonga gives some concrete examples, e.g. opposition to the marimba, a traditional musical instrument that resembles the xylophone, the saints’ days and the veneration of saints. Padre Tomás García (Maya K’iche’). June 3, 2001, Almolonga, Quetzaltenango.

Interview Pascual Terretón (CCR, Maya K’iche’, pseudonym), Parish San Francisco de Asis, May 24, 2001, Quetzaltenango.

Ibid. In reading publications that deal with Catholic Action, I was struck to discover how paramount the motive of conversion is in both movements. See Ricardo Falla, Quiché Rebelde. Religious Conversion, Politics and Ethnic Identity in Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001) for other cases.

Interview Pascual Terretón (CCR, Maya K’iche’, pseudonym), Parish San Francisco de Asis, Quetzaltenango, May 24, 2001.

After all, the effort of the Catholic Church to incorporate the costumbre does indeed counteract in certain respects what is said in the Bible, at least if a strict biblical literalism is applied. See e.g., Exod. 20:3 – 5, Os. 2:4 – 11, Rom. 1:23 – 25, Gal. 5:20, and Acts 7:41– 42.

For Luis Vásquez, a member of the pastoral social, biblical literalism and the gap between Church doctrine, practice, and tradition is an ideal target for critics and can draw new attendees and members into the CCR movement. Interview Luis Vásquez (pastoral social, Maya Mam), May 15, 2001, Quetzaltenango.

Members of the pastoral indígena said that no CCR members are active in their ranks. In line with the anti-Mayan spiritual discourse of the CCR, employees of the pastoral indígena spoke of many tensions between the Catholic Charismatics, Protestant Pentecostals, and neo-Pentecostals. Interview Ernestina Lopez (pastoral indígena, Maya K’iche’), April 24, 2001, Guatemala City. Interview Luis Vásquez (pastoral social, Maya Mam). May 15, 2001, Quetzaltenango.

The spiritual or social emphasis of the CCR and Catholic Action respectively does not always imply contradiction and/or conflict. In Comitancillo, for instance, a municipality in the highlands of San Marcos, the same priest introduced both.

Information in this paragraph is drawn from T. Paul Thigpen 2002: 460 – 467.

Catholic Charismatics, similar to Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal Christians, emphasize the glorification of God (in Spanish alabanza) during the first part of the service. Applause, enthusiastic singing, and prayers also take place. In Guatemala, this is the main reason why Catholic Charismatics are often mistaken for Protestants. Furthermore, when analyzing the interviews with Catholics and Protestants, I discovered that whole sections were identical in their wording. This suggests that similarities exist not only in terms of worship, liturgy, and doctrine but also in the form of a ritualized rhetoric.

John Bowker, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997); Allan H. Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 206.

The enthusiastic way of worship and the idea of renewal do not translate into a progressive Catholic understanding, however. On the contrary, Catholic Charismatics profess a conservative doctrine when it comes to topics such as Catholic lifestyle, family, and gender relationships. Additionally, there is a more literalist understanding of the Bible, an aspect that explains why some scholars have labeled the movement as fundamentalist. See for instance Martin Riesebrodt, Fundamentalismus als patriarchalische Protestbewegung: amerikanische Protestanten (1910 – 28) und iranische Schiiten (1961 – 79) im Vergleich (Tübingen: Mohr, 1990).

T. Paul Thigpen 2002: 460 – 467.

Ibid., 464.

Edward L. Cleary 1994: 211 – 212.

Interview Pascual Terretón (CCR, Maya K’iche’, pseudonym), Parish San Francisco de Asis, May 24, 2001, Quetzaltenango.

Rosario Fernández, a Mayan convert, said that prayer is meant to be the manifestation of God through the Holy Spirit; one wants to cry and feels a great joy in the heart; the Holy Spirit rocks the person; a great feeling of peace and of love comes over her. Later she describes how, when she is sure of the presence of the Holy Spirit, she feels a breeze in her face. Rosario Fernández (Maya K’iche’, CCR, pseudonym), May 21, 2001, Quetzaltenango. Her husband relates the capacity of the gift of prophesy to a physical manifestation; prophesying is to feel the future, he says. Problematic in this respect is that within the CCR, as in Protestant Pentecostalism and neo-Pentecostalism, there is a great expectation of the dynamic and empowering presence of the Holy Spirit, leading in some cases to a stigmatization of people who do not possess these gifts (e. g., speaking in tongues, healing, prophesying, etc.). These people are then labeled as less ‘holy.’ Interview Adolfo Barrientos (IdDEC), May 9, 2001, Guatemala City.

This belief dates back to the classical doctrine of Pentecostalism and is shared by the CCR. In this respect, Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, Catholic and Protestant, differ from mainline Western Christian churches. The latter claim the ‘cessation of the charismata teaching,’ which holds that at the end of the apostolic age the charismata (that is, the gifts of the Holy Spirit) were withdrawn from the Church. See Harold Vinson Synan, “Classical Pentecostalism,” in The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, eds. Stanley Burgess and Eduard M. Van Der Maas (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 553 – 555, 553.

As discussed elsewhere, the spiritual emphasis has made the movement prone to criticism from progressive Church sectors, above all by adherents of liberation theology.

The doctrinal profile finds an expression in the organizational structure of the movement, the so-called prayer groups (Grupos de Oración). Most of these groups have ties to local parishes, although this does not necessarily mean that they are controlled by the parishes. Lately, the hierarchy has tried to integrate the groups more strongly in order to avoid parachurch tendencies. See the upcoming sections on Church policies regarding the CCR. Obispado San Marcos, “Orientaciones y disposiciones sobre la Renovación Carismática en la Diócesis de San Marcos” (San Marcos: April 25, 2001).

John Bowker 1997: 416.

Interview Pascual Terretón (CCR, Maya K’iche’, pseudonym), May 24, 2001,Parish San Francisco de Asis, Quetzaltenango.

Consequently, radical Charismatic or Pentecostal believers argue that those who go to a doctor or a hospital are people who lack faith.

In fact, in order to denounce cultural practices, Charismatic and Pentecostal expressions draw on the devil quite often. For instance the marimba, a musical instrument similar to a xylophone is sometimes called the “ribs of the devil,” and alcohol is referred to as “Satan’s urine.” Interview Padre Tomás García (Maya K’iche’), June 3, 2001, Almolonga, Quetzaltenango.

The prayers of traditional Mayan priests are often a polyglot mix of old Catholic Latin, Spanish, and indigenous Mayan languages. The Latin elements come from the pre-Vatican II masses. Until recently, older Catholic priests used Latin to say mass, which included turning their back to the congregation rather than facing it. Interview with anthropologist Emmerich Weisshaar, April 21, 2001, Guatemala City. Conversations with nuns from Concepción Tutuapa also confirmed this.

The Guatemalan Episcopal Conference draws attention to cases in which exorcisms were performed without the permission of a bishop and speaks of “irregularities that should be watched.” “Renovados en el Espíritu. Instrucción pastoral colectiva de los obispos de Guatemala sobre la Renovación Carismática. March 30, 1986,” in Al Servicio de la vida, la justicia y la paz. Documentos de la Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala 1956 – 1997, ed. Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala (CEG) (Guatemala: Ediciones San Pablo, 1997), 402 – 420, 415.

Interview Luis Kelex (CCR, Maya K’ekchi), February 15, 2002, Guatemala City.

In relationship to previously marginalized groups I have to add another comment from Rosario Fernández. She told me in the interview that although she had never attended school or taken lessons, she had learned to read and write with the help of the Holy Spirit. An almost identical comment was made by a Protestant convert. Enrique Sandóval (CAM, Maya Mam, pseudonym), August 19, 2001, Comitancillo, San Marcos. Whether both assessments are pure rhetoric or can be traced to the Holy Spirit is not of importance here. What is crucial is the effect of conversion in the life of converts; they are able to compete better in larger segments of society and, at least potentially, gain the chance for social mobility. Moreover, the acquired skills – here literacy through Bible reading – can be seen as a way of easing integration into wider society.

Pseudonym.

Interview Rosario Fernández (CCR, Maya K’iche’), May 21, 2001, Quetzaltenango.

In general, Mayan women have retained much more of the traditional cultural heritage than men. Rural indigenous women mostly wear traditional garments, whereas men have abandoned this custom to a large extent. Furthermore, indigenous women are far more often monolingual (Mayan) speakers, because men are usually more exposed to the world outside the villages.

According to Moisés Guillermo Quintanilla from Misión Trigo – an influential Catholic Latin American Missionary organization – authorization to preach is one of the most contentious points between the hierarchy and the CCR. Interview Moisés Guillermo Quintanilla, Misión Trigo, February 18, 2002, Guatemala City, A workshop for catechists that I attended confirmed this assessment; the preaching issue caused the hottest debates among participants. Centro de Formación Interdiocesano, Aldea Champoyap, June 23, 2001, Champoyap, San Marcos. A document from the San Marcos diocese discussed below provides further proof.

Conferencia Episcopal de Guatemala (CEG) 1997: 412.

Ibid., 402. The spiritual focus is, however, only one cause for the lack of recognition. Compared to Catholic Action, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal was never an instrument of the Church hierarchy to strengthen the influence of the Church among the laity and to realize social projects. In this, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal differs from other Church bodies that emerged from Catholic Action, e.g., pastoral social and pastoral indígena.