The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution

by John L. Allen

  • On September 19, 2012, a Protestant pastor named Henry Rodriguez of the United Pentecostal Church was shot to death in Bogotá. According to eyewitness reports, the murder was carried out by multiple gunmen riding on a moped, a common method for paid assassins in Colombia. Many observers believed the murder was retaliation for Rodriguez’s unwillingness to go along with the demands of a local criminal gang.

  According to the evangelical watch group Rescue Christians, intensifying violence throughout 2011 and 2012 marked a deteriorating national situation in Colombia. Their figures suggest the following:

  1. Twenty-five to thirty Colombian pastors are murdered by armed groups every year.

  2. More than three hundred Protestant pastors have been murdered since 2000.

  3. More than two hundred churches are currently closed in areas controlled by armed groups.

  4. Entire Christian communities have been targeted by armed groups and forced to leave their homes. These internally displaced Christians often end up living in refugee camps.

  5. Sixty percent of the murders of human rights workers throughout the world took place in Colombia in 2011 and 2012, including scores of Christians who speak up for justice and against corruption and illegality.

  CUBA

  Following the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the officially atheistic Castro regime confiscated church property, closed church-run schools, and actively discouraged participation in religious life. Thousands of Catholic priests and nuns, along with leaders in Cuba’s small Protestant community, were either forced to leave the country or thrown in jail, while church attendance plummeted. In the 1990s, however, following the collapse of Communism in Europe, the regime began to reverse its hard-line policies, triggering a slow and still uneven glasnost for Christianity. In 1992, the constitution was amended to outlaw religious discrimination and to remove references to atheism as the official state ideology. In 1996, Fidel Castro visited the Vatican, paving the way for trips to Cuba by Pope John Paul II in 1998 and by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012. During the last two decades, the regime has alternated between allowing greater expressions of religious belief and practice, while still suppressing individual Christians who oppose the regime and push for swifter political reform.

  Violence is still sometimes directed against the so-called “Ladies in White,” meaning spouses and relatives of arrested leaders in the Christian liberation movement famous for wearing white dresses while marching in their memory. Even after most of these prisoners have been released, the Ladies in White continue to demonstrate in favor of broad political reform. The Catholic Church successfully negotiated with the regime to allow for peaceful assembly by the Ladies in White in one section of Havana, but the women continue to be subject to various forms of harassment and intimidation. One day prior to Pope Benedict’s visit in March 2012, seventy members of the Ladies in White were detained by security forces, in what was seen as a warning not to embarrass the government while the pope was in town. (The trip also illustrated the tightrope that visiting Christian leaders sometimes have to walk in trying to cajole Cuba toward reform, without making things worse for the believers left behind after they go home. Benedict did not meet with the Ladies in White in order not to provoke the Cuban authorities, but he called on Cuba to build a “renewed and open society” and said bluntly that Marxism “no longer corresponds to reality.”)

  The Catholic Church continues to be restricted from operating religious schools and from operating private religious schools. Observers continue to report that limitations on churches and other forms of civil society, including restrictions on freedom of speech, of the press, and of free assembly, continue to be routine. Lay faithful continue to face discrimination in the workplace based on their overt expressions of religious identity, and there is still no breakthrough on the return of church properties expropriated by the regime forty years ago.

  Further, rapidly growing Protestant forms of Christianity have not benefitted from the gradual opening under Raul Castro to the same degree as the Catholic Church. According to Cuba’s Council of Churches, the number of evangelicals in the country has grown from seventy thousand to eight hundred thousand in the last twenty years, and Afro-Cuban religious traditions are also attracting large numbers of new faithful. The government continues to arrest members of these house churches, subjecting them to lengthy detention without legal recourse and to heavy fines. All Christian communities in Cuba have also voiced alarm about an upsurge in monitoring by the national security services.

  Christian Solidarity Worldwide issued a report in April 2010 indicating that the Cuban regime remains inflexible in certain key areas related to religious freedom. It cited increasingly frequent visits to churches by security staff and government officials, which the report described as a strategy of intimidation. The government’s Office of Religious Affairs also continues to block many religious activities and has refused visas to clergy wishing to travel abroad. The report concluded: “Rather than moving towards a more open society, the government of Raul Castro still views religious organizations, and in particular their leaders, as potentially dangerous, and as a result continues to exert as much control as possible over their activities.”

  At times the harassment of religious figures in Cuba becomes overtly violent. In early February 2012, a Pentecostal pastor named Reutilio Columbie was beaten unconscious in eastern Cuba and left for dead, though he survived the attack. Two months later, Columbie, who led the Shalom Christian Center in the town of Moa, continued to suffer dizziness, intense nausea, and vomiting as a result of the assault. The report by Christian Solidarity Worldwide indicated that Columbie had been advised to seek treatment from a neurologist in Havana but was physically unable to make the trip. According to Columbie, he had been on his way to file a complaint with regional authorities about the arbitrary confiscation of a church vehicle when he was attacked by unidentified assailants. The only thing taken from him, he said, was a document proving his legal ownership of the vehicle. Columbie said that local police were reluctant to investigate the attack, and because his ownership papers had disappeared, he also never got back the confiscated car. Most observers saw the attack as part of a broad campaign by pro-Castro elements to intimidate Christian leaders into silence on human rights and religious freedom issues.

  The story of Rev. Carlos Lamelas, an evangelical pastor once imprisoned by the regime, is emblematic of the current realities in Cuba. In July 2011, the fifty-year-old Lamelas, along with his wife and two daughters, arrived in Miami after having been granted political asylum in the United States. A prominent national evangelical leader in Cuba, Lamelas had been arrested in 2006 and charged with “human trafficking,” the usual accusation for dissident leaders who help people escape the country. Lamelas had also been an outspoken critic of the Castro regime’s record on religious freedom. He was released from prison four months later after an international campaign on his behalf, but he could no longer serve openly as a pastor, since his congregation had expelled him under pressure from the regime. Lamelas supported his family as a freelance photographer while continuing to engage in informal pastoral activity, constantly facing the threat of another arrest and long-term imprisonment. He first applied for asylum in the United States in 2010 and was denied, but a reapplication in 2011 succeeded.

  It’s still not entirely clear whether the death of famed Christian activist Oswaldo Payá in July 2012 was an accident or another chapter in the global war on Christians. Cuban officials have insisted that Payá lost control of his car and collided with a tree, while members of Payá’s family have suggested that the sixty-year-old dissident was run off the road by government agents. What’s clear, however, is that the harassment and intimidation Payá endured over the years illustrate the price of Christian resistance in Cuba. He founded the Christian Liberation Movement in 1987 to oppose the one-party rule of the Cuban Communist Party, and was internationally known for launching the Varela Project, a petition drive demanding that the Cuban
government recognize freedom of speech and assembly. He was a devout Catholic and frequently suffered for it. As a young man, he was expelled from the University of Havana when officials discovered he was a practicing believer. He was sentenced to three years of hard labor when he refused to transport political prisoners during his mandatory military service.

  Over the course of his life, Payá reported receiving multiple death threats and complained that he was subject to constant surveillance. Some fellow activists were arrested following a scuffle with police at his funeral, a further reminder that democratic reform in Cuba remains a work in progress.

  MEXICO

  Like Colombia, Mexico is a sophisticated democracy, regarded by many observers of the geopolitical situation as an emerging regional power in the twenty-first century. Yet also like Colombia, Mexico is also a society of contradictions. Criminal gangs and various paramilitary groups exercise essentially unchallenged authority over some neighborhoods and even entire regions. Especially in those combat zones, Christians may be the only voices speaking out on behalf of the interests of ordinary folks.

  The story of Maria Elizabeth Macías Castro, a journalist, blogger, and leader in a Catholic lay movement, illustrates the sometimes harrowing realities facing dedicated Christians in today’s Mexico. On September 24, 2011, her decapitated body was found on a road near her town of Nuevo Laredo in the eastern state of Tamaulipas. Her corpse was left naked in a small piazza, along with a note saying she had been killed for using her blog to expose the activities of a local drug cartel known as the Zetas. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, it was the first murder ever documented for the use of social media. Thirty-nine at the time of her death, Macías had been the editor in chief of a local newspaper in addition to blogging about the cartels under the pen name “The Girl from Laredo.” She was also a champion of the poor, especially migrants, volunteering regularly at the Casa del Migrante center in Nuevo Laredo.

  By all accounts, Macías was a woman of deep courage. She called herself “Marisol” after a sister who died of leukemia in childhood. Later she suffered an accident in which she lost a leg, triggering her husband to abandon the family and leave Macías to raise two young children on her own. She persevered, regaining the ability to walk with a prosthetic leg, keeping her family intact, and building a career as a journalist and human rights activist. She was also a woman of deep religious faith, becoming the local leader of the Scalabrian lay movement and a strong devotee of Blessed John Baptist Scalabrini, the Italian bishop who had founded the community in 1887. Her Skype account featured a picture from her commitment ceremony as a lay member of the movement on June 1, 2009, along with a quote from Scalabrini: “We must do good, all the good possible, and do it in the best way possible.”

  Based on later reconstructions of what had happened, Macías apparently was abducted on September 21 and abused by her kidnappers for three days before she was killed. Her body was left near a monument at the main entrance to the city of Nuevo Laredo. A keyboard, a DVD, and a sarcastic sign were left next to her, and a pair of headphones was posed on her decapitated head. According to many Mexican observers, because established media outlets often censor themselves out of fear and under political pressure, bloggers such as Macías have become the leading edge of efforts to expose the drug gangs. Friends and colleagues reported that Macías had been determined not to bow to their intimidation, believing that her Christian faith required her to speak out.

  Though chilling, Macías’s fate was hardly unusual. In February 2011, a Mexican priest named Fr. Santos Sánchez Hernández, a pastor in Mecapalapa, Puebla, was murdered in his rectory. According to the local bishop, the assailants had probably entered the rectory in order to steal, and upon discovering the priest, they hacked him to death with a machete. Sánchez, who was forty-three at the time of his death, was known locally as a passionate friend of the poor.

  On April 26, 2011, Fr. Francisco Sánchez Durán was beaten to death at dawn in the church of El Patrocinio in San José, in Coyoacán, south of Mexico City. Local observers attributed the murder to retaliation against the priest, who had been critical of local bands of thieves preying upon the area’s families and businesses. One month later, the body of Fr. Salvador Ruiz Enciso was discovered in a Tijuana neighborhood, with his hands and feet tied, beaten so far beyond recognition that positive identification had to rest on DNA testing. “Father Chavita,” as he was popularly known, was well liked in the area for promoting a “family Mass” in which he used hand puppets to explain Christian teaching to young people in an attractive way. Some locals suspected he had been targeted by criminals because of his success in persuading young people to stay away from the gangs.

  In July 2011, Fr. Marco Antonio Durán Romero, a diocesan priest, was shot to death amid a gunfight between Mexican soldiers and an armed guerrilla group in the state of Tamaulipas, near the border with the United States. He was struck by a stray bullet and taken to a nearby hospital, where he died from the wound.

  In July 2012, a Protestant youth camp was attacked by a criminal gang in the Colibri ecological park near the town of Ixtapaluca, about twenty-two miles outside Mexico City. Prosecutors said the gang subjected the campers to an ordeal lasting several hours. Seven girls were sexually assaulted, and several other youths were beaten. The attackers took cash, cameras, and mobile phones and escaped in two stolen vehicles. The attackers burst into the camp at around midnight on Thursday, firing shots into the air, the victims said. The campers were rounded up and held at gunpoint while their belongings were ransacked and some were assaulted. The park is located in a hilly region with no mobile phone coverage, so it was some time before the alarm was raised. There did not appear to be any religious motive for the assault. Nevertheless, the incident was a reminder that simply taking part in religious activity in public in some parts of Mexico is tantamount to wearing a bull’s-eye.

  Mexico is also home to a nasty, and reportedly growing, intra-Christian form of violence. It’s often fueled by traditionalist groups of Catholics who see the mushrooming evangelical and Pentecostal footprint in the country as a threat to Mexico’s Catholic identity. These traditionalist groups tend to be especially strong in rural areas.

  In September 2011, a group of about seventy Protestant Christians living in the village of San Rafael Tlanalapan in Puebla state were issued a frightening ultimatum: leave immediately or be “crucified” or “lynched.” Traditionalist Catholics in the village, located about sixty miles from Mexico City, threatened to burn down their homes and kill any Protestants who remained, styling them as a threat to the Catholic identity of the area. The threats were hardly shocking, as local Protestants had complained back in 2006 about the traditionalist Catholics cutting off their water supply. According to reports, the community continued to experience small growth despite the harassment, which led to the ultimatum in 2011. After the intervention of government authorities, the Protestants were eventually allowed to remain and to construct a small church far from the town center.

  One evangelical organization claims that almost fifty thousand Protestants have been dislodged from their homes due to conflicts with Catholics over the past thirty years, while hundreds of people have been injured in violent altercations and possibly dozens killed. One such victim was Lorenzo López, a twenty-year-old evangelical in the state of Chiapas, who was killed in 2007 when he entered the village of Jomalhó in order to repay money he had borrowed for his wedding. Two relatives who were with López that day, and who escaped, reported that a band of thirty assailants shouting Catholic slogans tied a rope around López’s neck and dragged him into a nearby hall for a “trial.” After they sentenced López to death, he was forced to dig his own grave. The attackers strangled López until he collapsed, threw his body into the grave, and smashed his skull with rocks. López had been a member of a fellowship of evangelical churches called New Hope. At roughly the same time he died, other reports from Chiapas indicated that a group of traditionalis
t Catholics had kidnapped four evangelical women—ironically, to prevent them from attending a workshop on religious freedom sponsored by an evangelical human rights commission.

  The 2001 murder of a forty-eight-year-old Mexican Pentecostal pastor named Gilberto Tomás Pizo may also fall into this category. Pizo was shot to death while on his way to attend a service at his small church in Villa Hidalgo Yalalog, located in the state of Oaxaca, leaving behind a wife and five children. A police investigation concluded that “religious reasons” were the motive for the slaying, meaning tensions between traditionalist Catholics and non-Catholics. Pizo had been born a Catholic and was active in the faith, even supporting the construction of his local Catholic parish. When he converted to Protestant Pentecostalism, he experienced strong blowback. When Pizo tried to build a Pentecostal church in his neighborhood, he was forced to move it to the outskirts of town following repeated threats from ultraorthodox Catholics. An evangelical human rights group sent investigators to Oaxaca to look into the case, charging that local police seemed to have “little interest” in identifying and charging those responsible.

  VENEZUELA

  Christians and their churches have emerged as important centers of opposition to the government of the late president Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, particularly with regard to human rights abuses and the suppression of political dissent. Because the vast majority of Venezuelans are at least nominally Catholic, the Catholic Church has borne the brunt of the resulting anti-religious crackdowns. Some church-owned properties have been expropriated, church-affiliated media outlets have been muzzled or intimidated, and a new education law essentially eliminated instruction in religion from state-owned schools. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom reported that in 2012, “the government began wire-tapping the telephones of some Catholic leaders; expropriated some Catholic schools and community centers; and prohibited church representatives from visiting prisoners for humanitarian or spiritual missions.”