Landscape of Migration by Ben Nobbs-Thiessen

Author:Ben Nobbs-Thiessen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

Negotiating the Transition: Faith and Authoritarianism

In colony cooperatives and Methodist circles, the effects of the coup were felt immediately. The week after the bridge resolution, Espejo learned that paramilitaries were rounding up union leaders in Yapacaní. He and a friend swam across the Yapacaní River well downstream of the ferry crossing and wandered through the bush until a friendly Japanese farmer from San Juan Colony directed them to a nearby road. From there they traveled clandestinely through Santa Cruz and up to the highlands before settling in the Alto Beni colonization zone near La Paz. Returning to Yapacaní the following year, Espejo was captured, detained, and tortured in Santa Cruz by agents of the government and spent the next three years in prison.112

The coup also impacted the Methodist Church, albeit in uneven ways, thereby revealing points of fracture between national and foreign workers as well as between Protestant missionaries and workers more and less committed to radical measures. In a report on the fallout from the coup also distributed to the MCC, local Presbyterian missionaries James and Margaret Goff explained to their mission board that “during the Ovando and Torres administrations a group of progressive priests had moved far ahead of the [church] hierarchy in advocating and promoting social change [and] the Methodist Church in Bolivia has seen itself as having a humanizing role in the revolutionary process.”113 MCC officials, who worked alongside the Methodists in rural development, but had remained distant from radical politics, also expressed their unease. In a letter to the home office in the days after the Banzer takeover, MCC-rep Dale Linsenmeyer reflected that “in one sense this was just another coup … but this one affected us more directly in Santa Cruz and a shift from left to right was a surprise. I hope the Methodists aren’t too far out on their limb.”114

Some were. Although uninvolved in the hostage situation, Jaime Bravo was working with the settlers and fieldworkers in UCAPO at the time, and the organization was targeted by the new Banzer regime. When local radio broadcast a list of people that had been asked to present themselves before the authorities the week after the coup, Bravo’s name appeared along with other Methodists, both national and foreign, including Harry Peacock and Brooks Taylor. Authorities arrested both Bravo and Taylor, several priests, and student leaders like Capobiano that had shown solidarity with the colonists. Foreigners, like Taylor, were soon released. Peacock presented himself before authorities—some of whom had been students at the Methodist Rural Institute in Montero—and was not incarcerated.115 Others went into hiding. In their report, the Goffs noted that forty priests were in exile while others had taken sanctuary in foreign embassies.116 Several current and former Maryknoll sisters—such as U.S. citizen Mary Harding—were also among those targeted by the regime.

“I never thought I was a Communist, I was a Methodist Christian with a socialist orientation, but Communist, no” Bravo would explain, but conceded that the ideological climate of the Cold War, “took hold of us Christians like a sandwich” making those distinctions impossible.

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