The Road Through San Judas

by Robert Fraga

  Armando’s wife Blanca was inside the house getting the couple’s two-year-old daughter ready for daycare. She heard the shots. “Another shooting,” she said to herself. Blanca peered through a curtain and saw her husband sitting upright behind the driver’s wheel. He looked as if he was in the process of phoning El Diario to report the latest shooting. The Rodríguez’s daughter sat beside him sobbing hysterically. Blanca ran outside and pulled her daughter from the car. Back inside the house, she called for an ambulance. None ever came.

  The violence in Ciudad Juárez took its toll on the way the city functioned. Businesses throughout town closed and merchants fled to El Paso. The restaurant operated by Las Hormigas, the one that Alfred Von Bachmayr and his helpers had insulated, had to close, although Lina Sarlat promised to reopen it as soon as the situation calmed down.

  Settlers at San Judas had taken their case to the Agrarian Tribunal of Chihuahua. There several reporters received subpoenas to appear and testify. This was something they were understandably reluctant to do. Manuel del Castillo, the president of the Association of Ciudad Juárez Journalists, went along to show his solidarity with them. “Our profession is considered a high-risk one,” del Castillo said. “Although we are not in a war zone, the presence of organized crime and the high level of corruption makes us vulnerable.”

  Journalists were not the only target of assassins. A lawyer representing the residents of San Judas was shot and killed as he sat in his truck outside the Agrarian Court in Chihuahua City. His murderers peppered his head with an AK-47. A total of nineteen bullets pierced the lawyer’s brain.

  When he heard of the assassination, Father Joe told the press: “They let his body lie in the street as a message. By the time the police got there, passersby were collecting shells as souvenirs.” Then he said quietly, after a moment of reflection: “Even in death, you become a curiosity.”

  The Mexican press did not cover the lawyer’s death widely. After all, it was only one of ten that day in the province of Chihuahua.

  The colonos followed Subcomandante Marcos’s advice and engaged a lawyer from Mexico City, Barbara Zamora, to represent them at the Agrarian Court.

  “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass,” Barbara Zamora had written on her Facebook page. “It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

  Barbara Zamora had a long and illustrious career as a defender of the most vulnerable groups in Mexican society. The name of her firm, Land and Liberty (Tierra y Libertad), was a slogan adopted by the EZLN. It was first used by a revolutionary group active in Russia toward the end of the nineteenth century. In recognition of her work, Zamora received the Ludovic Trarieux Award in 2003. This award was named after a French jurist active at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. Nelson Mandela was its first recipient. Zamora shared the prize with another Mexican lawyer, Digna Ochoa, who was awarded the prize posthumously, after her assassination in the fall of 2001.

  Ochoa was a tiny woman of great courage. She once snuck into a military hospital to talk to a man being held there. In her own words:

  When I got to this room where this person was, the nurse at the door told me I could not go in. “We are not even allowed in,” she said. I told her that I would take care of it myself. All I asked of her was that she take note of what I was going to do and that if they did something to me, she should call a certain number…. I took a deep breath, opened the door violently and yelled at the federal judicial police officers inside. I told them that they had to leave immediately, because I was the person’s lawyer and needed to speak with him. They didn’t know how to react so they left. I had two minutes, but it was enough to explain who I was, that I had been in touch with his wife, and to get him to sign a paper proving he was in the hospital…. By then the police came back, and with the fierceness that usually characterizes their behavior. Their first reaction was to try to grab me. They didn’t expect me to assume an attack position—the only karate position I know, from movies, I suppose. Of course, I don’t really know karate, but they definitely thought that I was going to attack. Trembling inside, I said sternly that if they laid a hand on me, they’d see what would happen. And they drew back, saying, “You’re threatening us.” And I replied, “Take it any way you want.”

  At the time of her death, Ochoa was representing two activists who had protested illegal logging in the Sierra Tarahumara. This was the region in which Eloy Vallina’s family had long-standing business interests. The Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights claimed that Digna Ochoa’s clients had been “targeted by local authorities because they opposed wildcat logging; they were held and tortured over several days until they ‘confessed’ to marijuana cultivation and weapons charges.” The men languished for two years in prison despite court appeals. The men’s release from prison occurred days after their lawyer was killed in her own Mexico City office.

  Ochoa was a nun. And she was an Indian. She had studied law because her father, a union organizer in Veracruz, had said repeatedly that he and people like him needed lawyers, and the lawyers out there cost too much. Her father was arrested, tortured, and detained for more than a year before disappearing. “Anger is energy,” she said once. “It’s injustice that motivates us to do something, to take risks, knowing that if we don’t, things will remain the same.”

  Mexican authorities first claimed that Ochoa’s death was a suicide, but that was impossible to swallow. Her assassins had left a note beside her body warning other “sons-of-a-bitch” human rights lawyers that what happened to Ochoa could happen to them. What nailed the phony suicide hypothesis was a forensic detail: a bullet wound in Ochoa’s head showed that the bullet that killed her had penetrated her brain from the left side of her head, angling downward as it sped to the right. Ochoa, who was right-handed, would have needed to be a contortionist to kill herself like that.

  Zamora was born in Mexico City. She studied law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, graduating in 1988. At the time she began to represent the inhabitants of San Judas, she had been practicing law independently for a quarter of a century. The plight of indigenous people has long interested her. Though not herself a member of a Zapatista organization, she contributed regularly to Zapatista publications. A photograph in her Mexico City office shows her with Subcomandante Marcos. It hangs beside a sketch of Emiliano Zapata.

  In the Agrarian Court of Chihuahua, delay followed delay. This was the theater in which Pablo Schmidt and the San Judas settlers waged their legal war. In June 2008, the presiding judge accepted a motion put forth by Pablo Schmidt’s lawyer to dismiss the suit brought against the family by the settlers for lack of proof. The settlers were required to respond immediately to this charge. Later that month the judge ruled that a summons to any of the Schmidt henchmen would need to be served to them in person, at their houses, and not by an edict. Zamora, representing the colonos challenged this ruling.

  In July 2008, the court asked the assistance of the Juárez municipality, the Federal Electricity Commission, and the Office of Public Security to locate the Mara Salvatrucha who were being summoned to testify at the court.

  In August 2008, the Schmidt lawyers asked permission of the court to address the residents of San Judas directly to negotiate a settlement. Many of these residents were present in the court. Barbara Zamora turned to look them in the eye, to ask for their response to this offer of negotiation. They bellowed their response. It was an unequivocal “No!” Barbara Zamora demanded that the court act on the settlers’ request for protection against the Schmidt family’s threats and continuing harassment. When she attempted to present evidence of the settlers’ claims, the presiding judge told her that the time to make such a submission had passed. (This decision was later reversed.)

  In October 2008, the Agrarian Court admitted that a “small error” had been made in issuing summons for the MS-13: they had been published not in the state of Chihuahua but in the state of Zacatecas. More delays.

  Later that month the court agreed t
o consider the colonos’ complaints against the Schmidts at the beginning of the new year. Barbara Zamora issued a formal reprimand of the judge for his delaying to act on a plea that she had first made on behalf of the settlers five months earlier.

  On January 8, 2009, the court postponed a New Year hearing because the Schmidt representative came without a lawyer. The next session of the Agrarian Court was scheduled for January 21. On that day, the Schmidts’ legal representative presented the court with a medical document attesting to Pablo Schmidt’s illness. The developer had contracted salmonella poisoning. The presiding magistrate accepted the document and deferred the next session of the court to February 3.

  On January 30, 2009, the Agrarian Court announced that its docket was overloaded and the session scheduled for February 3 would be moved back to February 13. On February 13, the Schmidts’ lawyer asked for a postponement of the session to give him time to understand the case against his client. The court agreed to postpone the session to February 24. February 24 came and went. The session that day was deferred. So was the session scheduled for March 10. As was April 4 session. June 16: this time Barbara Zamora was sick and could not attend a court session. The session was pushed back to August 4. So on and so forth.

  How would the Zapatistas have reacted to this unending trickle of delays?

  Ya basta!

  TRUE RELIGION

  The words “liberation theology” never passed his lips. Not during the time that Father Joe spent ministering to the needs of his parishioners in San Judas. This was a hot-button subject, developed by Catholic prelates in Latin America during the 1970s—theologians like Leonardo Boff and Gustavo Gutiérrez, who attempted to interpret Catholic beliefs in terms of Marxist categories.

  As a child, Gutiérrez contracted polio. He spent the bulk of his Peruvian adolescence in bed. That experience predisposed him to contemplate a career in medicine. But midstream in his studies to become a doctor, he changed course and opted to become a priest. He studied in Europe, first at Leuven, the oldest university in Belgium, before going on to get a PhD from the French Université Catholique de Lyon. On his return to Lima, Gutiérrez worked as a parish priest in a Lima slum. There he came to realize that his education had not enabled him to deal effectively with the problems of his poor and persecuted parishioners. Poverty was not a virtue. That was one thing he quickly learned. Poverty was a destructive state, to be opposed relentlessly. At the time, he said:

  I live in a country in which about 60 percent of the population finds itself in a situation of poverty and 35 percent live in extreme poverty. A country where 120 out of every 1000 children die before reaching five years of age; a country where 2 of every 1000 people suffer from tuberculosis.

  Leonardo Boff was a Brazilian theologian, born in December 1938. Like Gutiérrez, he studied in Europe and published his thesis, which he wrote at the University of Munich in German, as Die Kirche als Sakrament im Horizont der Welterfahrung (literally “The Church as a Sacrament in the Horizon of the World Experience”), one of his books for which there is no English translation. He criticized both the Church for being “fundamentalist” and secular power for fostering neoliberalism. This was something else that he characterized as fundamentalist. Boff wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Earth:

  Today we are in a new phase of humanity. We all are returning to our common house, the Earth: The people, the societies, the cultures and religions. Exchanging experiences and values, we enrich ourselves and we complete ourselves mutually.

  The starting premise of these men was that theology, rather than being a static collection of truths independent of time or place, should be based on scripture viewed “from below.” Christians should see it from the vantage point of the poor and oppressed. Theology was a dynamic study that incorporated contemporary insights from disciplines like sociology and history.

  In fact, theology began—in the view of priests like the Franciscan Gutiérrez—with action on behalf of the underprivileged of the world. First came action, which by necessity is revolutionary, and from it arose a theology: the theology of liberation. The liberation theologian plunges into the battle to transform society, to make the world a more equitable and just place in which the oppressed will be liberated and the poor freed from the weight of capitalism.

  One liberation theologian defined sin as “unjust social structure.” Sounding rather like Protestants, some liberationists held in contempt prayers to patron saints and the veneration of Mary, the mother of Jesus. (This actually worked to their disadvantage among conservative and pious peasants in Latin America.) They ridiculed those in the Church who placed more importance on getting people to heaven than getting them decent living conditions.

  Reaction inside the Catholic Church to liberation theology was mixed. In his encyclical Evangelii Nuntiandi, Pope Paul VI commented with sympathy and at length on the yearning of oppressed people for liberation. The movement has also received support from men like Bishop Samuel Ruiz of San Cristóbal in Mexico. While he might not condone the violence of the Zapatista movement, the bishop could identify with the way Zapatistas acted to free the indigenous people of Chiapas of everything that oppressed them.

  His views, however, were not unanimously shared inside the Church. One Latin American bishop wrote, “When I see a church with a machine gun, I cannot see the crucified Christ in that church. We can never use hate as a system of change.”

  Despite his commitment to social justice, Pope John Paul II kept warning priests about becoming too involved in secular matters. “The conception of Christ as a political figure, as a revolutionary, as the subversive of Nazareth does not tally with the Church’s catechism,” he said.

  And, of course, there was the nagging worry about the Marxist underpinnings of the new theology. The Vatican watchdog on doctrinal correctness took the view that it was impossible to embrace Marxist principles without adopting Marxist methods and goals, so Catholics should shun Marxism, pure and simple. For Boff, this was no problem:

  In liberation theology, Marxism is never treated as a subject on its own but always from and in relation to the poor. Placing themselves firmly on the side of the poor, liberation theologians ask Marx: “What can you tell us about the situation of poverty and ways of overcoming it?” Here Marxists are submitted to the judgment of the poor and their cause, and not the other way around.

  Therefore, liberation theology used Marxism purely as an instrument. It does not venerate it as it venerates the gospel. To put it in more specific terms, liberation theology freely borrows from Marxism certain “methodological pointers” that have proved fruitful in understanding the world of the oppressed.

  In the mid-1980s one of Leonardo Boff’s books, Church: Charism and Power, brought him into conflict with Vatican authorities. They judged Boff to have endangered the doctrine of the faith. It was only a matter of time before the Brazilian Franciscan got into seriously hot water. This was the man, after all, who had coauthored, with his brother Clodovis, an essay entitled A Concise History of Liberation Theology, in which he stated, “The poverty of Third World countries was the price to be paid for the First World to be able to enjoy the fruits of overabundance.” Elsewhere, Leonardo Boff wrote “A questioning Christian cannot avoid feeling anguish. Has this pontificate [John Paul II’s] taken us to the essence of Jesus’ legacy?”

  The straw that broke the camel’s back came late in the decade in an essay that Boff wrote for a Catholic journal of which he was an editor. In 1991, Boff’s superiors in the Franciscan Order stripped him of his editorship and ordered him to stop publishing his views for one year. No less than the president of Latin American bishops supported his censure. To no one’s surprise, Boff quit the priesthood.

  John Paul’s successor as pope, Cardinal Ratzinger—who chose as his pontifical name Benedict XVI—branded liberation theology as a heresy and a threat to the church. At one time Ratzinger had been regarded as something of a liberal in the Church. But this was one leopard who could and di
d change his spots once he got tied up in Vatican politics as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In 1984, he issued a treatise entitled “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation,’” which lambasted the liberationists. One of these liberationists, Juan Segundo, labeled the treatise “a general attack on Enlightenment humanism … aimed at re-establishing an otherworldly and transcendentalist religion.”

  Father Joe had enough on his plate without locking horns with Church heavyweights on theological issues. So he said nothing about liberation theology. Still … how could a priest like him—battling for his flock in places like the Agrarian Court of Chihuahua, literally standing between his parishioners and Pablo Schmidt’s cholos in their physical clashes, writing about his people’s struggles, organizing meetings and support groups and prayer vigils and bake sales on their behalf—how could he be immune to the lure of a philosophy that he, in practice, subscribed to? True, he dealt with a local problem, something that liberationists disdained. They favored sweeping gestures that had what they called a transformational quality. But recording what Father Joe fought for impregnated his actions with the power for transformation. The good priest of San Judas was liberation theology in the flesh, in the blood, in the bone, a man who practiced what the liberationists preached.