The ranchers also owned some of the water rights in the area, excluding the native people from one of their few resources, except in the higher elevations. The people here were used to having nothing and expecting nothing. So when missionaries came in, they were grateful but knew the generosity could end any day and their schools and minimal clinics could disappear. It had been this way for as long as anyone could remember. The armies of Spain had come through in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had tortured and crushed everyone. Bolivar, el libertador, had lived at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth and had managed to create an independence based on the ideals of the American independence. Now everything in Venezuela was still named after Bolivar. You even paid with a Bolivar if you had any money. But for three quarters of the people, nothing had really changed. There remained poverty and oppression. The people learned not to complain. Once again, the little that these people had could disappear with no warning.
“A couple of years ago,” Father Martin said one evening, “there was an incident at another village named Barranco Yopal.” Martin spoke as he shared a fish dinner by candlelight with the other resident missionaries inside the church. “President Chávez ordered a Christian missionary group working with indigenous tribes to leave the country. They were mostly American from a group based in Florida.”
“Why did Chávez want them out?” Alex asked.
Father Martin laughed ruefully and shook his head. “Chávez accused the missionaries of ‘imperialist infiltration’ and links to the CIA.”
“Was there any truth to it?” she asked.
“No, Chávez was being a demagogue,” the priest said. “The missionaries at Barranco Yopal were dedicated people. They spent several years living among the tribes in order to learn the language, creating a written form for it, and translating the Bible into it. Then they taught Christianity to the people. The missionaries brought along their families. Their kids grew among the native children and didn’t interfere with native culture. All they wanted to do was bring Christ and the Word of God to the people. They dedicated years of their lives to this. Then Chávez turned up one day with his military uniform and his red beret and held a ceremony to denounce ‘colonialism.’ He presented property titles to several indigenous groups. He gave them title to land that they had been on anyway. Title to something that they already had. He came off as a hero and, in truth, hadn’t really done anything.”
Around the table, people shook their heads.
“Chávez accused the missionaries of building luxurious camps next to poor Indian villages,” Father Martin continued. “He accused them of circumventing Venezuelan customs authorities as they freely flew in and out on private planes. The missionaries had built their own compound, but it was hardly luxurious. And they flew their own aircraft in and out so that their supplies wouldn’t be stolen. The most efficient thieves in any South American country are the customs officials, the police, and the army.”
One of the female missionaries at the table, a nurse from Toronto, chipped in. “There are people who resent us for philosophical reasons,” she said. “In primitive societies, there’s no separation of religion and the rest of the society. We are among people who for centuries have followed rituals intended to make the corn grow, bring rain, and remain healthy. The people who criticize us claim that by bringing Christianity to them, even if we leave their own rituals alone, we’ve rendered meaningless the core of the native culture.”
“But we’re here to help them,” someone said.
“All cultures are in transition,” Father Martin added. “We feel we’ve given them something new and joyous.”
“We’re accused of acting the same way the Spaniards and Catholic Church did with less remote Indians when the conquistadores came through,” the nurse said.
“Except the Spaniards and the Catholic Church didn’t try to bring them electricity and health care,” another missionary chipped in.
There was laughter.
“It’s incredible,” Father Martin said. “As soon as you try to bring these people anything, people try to stop you, to take it away. Why?”
Alex had no answer. To the obvious next question of who was undercutting the missionaries’ work there, there remained no easy answer, either.
Leaving dinner that night, Alex watched a group of men assembled on the edge of the field that was contiguous to the village. The men were watching their children, teenage boys for the most part, compete in a soccer game in the dying daylight.
Despite the efforts on the missionaries, everyone she saw was destined for a life of poverty. These men would work in the distant fields, swelter in the sunshine and the humidity, and barely get by day to day, grateful for any small crumbs from life’s table.
She went to bed fitfully that night. Very early the next morning, in the midst of a pleasant dream, she awoke to the staccato sound of gunfire.
The little village of Barranco Lajoya was under attack.
SEVENTY
Alex threw off the mosquito netting that covered her and sprang to her feet. She grabbed her gun belt, which had both her Beretta and her knife hitched to it. She strapped it over her hiking shorts. She shoved her feet into her boots without bothering with socks and went quickly to the window of her hut.
It was just past dawn. She could hear a terrible commotion but couldn’t see it. There was sporadic gunfire and people screaming.
She saw people of the village running in every direction, fleeing into the woods.
She drew her Beretta. Then she moved quickly to her door, opened it slightly, saw that it was safe to leave, and stepped out. The commotion was coming from the center of the village. She headed toward it, her weapon aloft, moving along the wall of the church.
Screaming became louder. Voices pleading. People fleeing past her. She reached the corner and looked around it.
At first she thought that a gang of bandits had invaded. When she looked closer, a greater fear coursed through her. These were soldiers of some paramilitary organization, some local militia, she guessed. Maybe they were the men the girls had seen on the mountain. There was no way of knowing.
There must have been a dozen of them, just that Alex could see. Everything was happening too fast, too chaotically. It was Kiev all over again, except this time in Spanish, in the heat, and just after dawn.
More shouts and screams. The gunmen wore masks. They fired rifles and pistols into the air. They were using clubs and huge sledgehammers to strike at houses and structures. Residents, some of them barely clad, fled into the woods around the village.
Then she saw some of the gunmen drag Father Martin and his family out of their residence. Father Martin’s hands were raised and he looked terrified. He was pleading with the invaders. They kept yelling at him.
“¿Dónde está?” their leader screamed to Father Martin. “¿Dónde? ¿Dónde? ¿Dónde?”
Where, where, where? They wanted to know where something was. Something they wanted. They threw Father Martin to the ground. He shook his head. Whatever the secret was, he wasn’t telling. They let his family flee.
They meant to kill him.
A local boy came out of a hut with a rifle to defend the priest, and the attackers shot him from two different directions. When a woman came to the door behind him, his mother, she too was dropped by gunfire.