MissionariesÂ’ mission is at issue (fwd)

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Missionaries’ mission is at issue

Caracas, Wednesday November 23,2005
http://www.thedailyjournalonline.com/article.asp?ArticleId=205470&CategoryId=10717

PUERTO AYACUCHO – Earnest and God-fearing, jungle missionary Gary
Greenwood may not look like a spy for the CIA. But President Hugo
Chávez says the lanky young man from central Michigan is no less than
an advance scout for an imminent U.S. invasion of Venezuela.

Last month, Chávez ordered the expulsion of about 200 evangelical
Baptist missionaries from the country’s Amazon rain forest. He accused
them of spying, mining, exploiting indigenous tribes and using jungle
airstrips for “imperialist penetration.” Last week, the missionaries
were given 90 days to leave the zone.

Greenwood laughs off the charges and said there was no time for
espionage in Cuwa, the isolated Yanomami Indian village where he and
his family lived for four years. Although he and other missionaries
acknowledge that their primary goal was to convert Indians to
Christianity, the 33-year-old said he spent most of his days helping
them: drilling wells, fixing outboard motors, and making their huts
more livable.

As for the issue of U.S. intentions, Greenwood jokingly wondered why the
Pentagon would launch an invasion from the dense jungle of the Amazon,
where movement of troops or military vehicles would be problematic.

“Wouldn’t the Caribbean coastline make more sense?” he asked as he made
his way out of the jungle from this Orinoco River port town.

The seemingly outlandish accusations illustrate the deterioration in
Chávez’ relations with the United States, a once-close ally that still
depends on Venezuela for 12 percent of its oil imports. Chávez blames
the “imperialist” United States for a host of social ills in Latin
America, rhetoric that polls show is resonating in a continent
impatient for change.

Some observers see the expulsion, which targeted the Florida-based New
Tribes Mission and its offshoots, as a part of a hardening attitude
toward religious groups since U.S. televangelist Pat Robertson
suggested in August that someone assassinate Chávez – for which he
later apologized. The Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints announced last month that it had withdrawn all 219 of its U.S.
missionaries from the country because of increasing delays and
difficulty in obtaining or renewing visas.

Chávez has also sparred with the Roman Catholic Church. Retired Cardinal
Rosalio Castillo Lara, a Venezuelan who was a confidant of the late Pope
John Paul II, has accused Chávez of being increasingly autocratic.

“Chávez needs confrontation, because this allows him, among other
things, to lessen tensions within his coalition,” said Javier Corrales,
a political scientist at Amherst College and a Venezuela specialist. “He
is also trying to weaken organized groups that are autonomous,
especially if they are foreign.”

Some anthropologists and government officials cheered Chávez’ action,
saying the expulsion was a welcome conclusion to a 60-year debate in
Venezuela over whether the evangelicals threaten cultural diversity by
forcing assimilation and modernity on the tribes, even as they deliver
much-needed services.

The problems posed by the missionaries, they say, are not espionage or
unbridled capitalism, but the religious and behavioral changes that
critics say the missionaries force on tribes in exchange for material
and medical help. Those changes are destroying the tribes’ primitive
rituals and robbing people of what the United Nations has termed world
cultural patrimony, the critics claim.

“New Tribes activity amounts to cultural genocide for which the state
has to share responsibility,” anthropologist and former Sen. Alexander
Luzardo said in an interview in Caracas, the capital. “The state
tolerated their presence in those areas too long, and ceded to them its
responsibilities in health and education services too long.”

But many of the estimated 45,000 indigenous people in the Amazon basin
resent the expulsion order, saying the missionaries have improved their
lives.

Ingrid Turon, a city councilwoman and member of the Yeguana indigenous
community in the village of Toki, six hours by outboard motorboat from
here, said those who oppose missionaries want to deprive indigenous
people of the advantages of modern life. “For them, we are like animals
in the zoo that people should pay to come see, so they can charge
admission, publish their books and take pictures,” Turon said. “They
want to deny us the progress that they want, that the entire world
wants.”

Greenwood says living among the Indians as a “friend and neighbor” gives
him a different – and, he says, more caring – perspective than that of
the anthropologists who visit periodically to study the communities and
their customs.

“That’s where we are a little bit critical of the scientists who look on
the Yanomami as a classroom project. These aren’t objects – these are
people,” Greenwood said. “If you have a textbook approach to them,
rather than relational, the Indians suffer as a result.”

Greenwood doesn’t deny that he wanted to teach the Indians the Bible,
which has been translated to the Yanomami language, and to show them
the “way of the Lord.” Those teachings include discouraging Yanomami
from taking alcoholic or hallucinatory substances, from committing
polygamy and incest, and from engaging in intertribal violence.

But he insisted that none of the Indians in Cuwa were denied clothing,
food or medicine for failing to follow his religious teachings.

The son of a contractor, Greenwood is a self-described Mr. Fix-It, and
much of his activity is spent “fixing” Yanomami living practices he
views as unhealthy. For instance, he installed concrete floors and
built tables and benches for many of the huts in Cuwa as part of an
effort to dissuade the Indians from eating on the floor, which leads to
diseases such as amoebic dysentery.

But he has learned not to intrude in some areas, especially politics.
“We never criticize the president. These people are very patriotic.”

A relatively small part of Greenwood’s day was dedicated to religion, he
said. He spent most of it helping the Yanomami stay fed, clothed and
healthy, always a struggle in the unforgiving Amazon. His wife, Sarah,
a nurse, operated a clinic where she treated the dysentery, malaria and
snake bites suffered by the 120 Indians who live in Cuwa, which in
Yanomami means “you are here.”

Some proponents of the expulsion view it as a positive sign that the
Venezuelan government is finally assuming responsibility for the
indigenous. Chávez has in recent months sent outboard motors, food and
generators to isolated Amazon communities.

Liborio Guarulla, the first indigenous governor of Amazonas state and a
Chávez ally, said in an interview that Chávez was defending diversity
in Venezuela. Guarulla called it a reversal of previous presidents’
policy of favoring “cultural unity,” a goal that he said the
missionaries brought closer by speeding assimilation of the tribes.

“What you saw on analysis was a disconcerting picture – the New Tribes
Mission imposing an apocalyptic, compulsory view on the indigenous that
the end of the world was near,” Guarulla said.

He says the Chávez government is making a commitment to provide the
health and education services that missionaries have shouldered in the
past.

But anthropologist Isam Madi, who favors the presence of the
missionaries, fears that the new government impulse will fade after
local elections in December.

He warned that death rates among the Yanomami and other tribes, which
have fallen with the presence of the missionaries such as Sarah
Greenwood, will rise again, especially among newborns and infants, once
the missionaries have left.

“Yes, there is a cultural change that comes with missionaries, but I
prefer the cultural change if it comes with a lower death rate,” said
Madi, who runs a charitable foundation called Foundation for Indigenous
Democracy in Santa Elena, Bolívar state.

The Greenwoods last month changed affiliation to a Venezuelan church in
hopes of being allowed to stay. They are now in Caracas, having applied
for a visa that would permit them to go to a different Yanomami
community.

“We’ve prayed about it and we think that’s what the Lord wants, that we
keep helping these people,” he said.


By Chris Kraul
The Los Angeles Times