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Chapter 4

Fluid Fundamentalisms

In many rural communities, the [Evangelical] churches were the only social organizations that did not dissolve, but rather resisted and stood their ground. Faced with the totalitarian, violent message of the subversive groups and the horror, the faith that animated these churches led them to elaborate diverse responses: from not complying with the call to arms, to the articulation of a theological reflection with which they lived daily life, to those who decided to fight against the terror of Shining Path by forming the rondas campesinas. In all cases, they were the response of native leadership given that the majority of the foreign missionaries had to withdraw from these areas, leaving the direction of these churches in the hands of local pastors and lay people.

—PTRC, Final Report, 2003

IT WAS ABOUT nine in the morning when I headed to the óvalo in search of a taxi to Huanta. The óvalo is a transportation hub, with taxis, vans, buses, and the occasional bicyclist departing for destinations throughout Peru. The first combis (vans) to the selva (jungle) had already left, and the crew of the next combi out was still loading passengers and cargo when I passed by. The roof rack was piled high with boxes, burlap sacks, suitcases, and backpacks, but a young man was still optimistically squeezing in a few more boxes before securing the load with rope. The passengers had opened the windows despite the brisk morning air, perhaps thinking ahead to their twelve-hour ride into the fly-buzzing heat of the selva.

Shiny streaks of gasoline floated on puddles left from the previous night’s rain. I dodged them as I crossed the street to a row of cars parked at odd angles. Children began coming by, carrying small cardboard boxes with carefully arranged rows of gum, candy, and bottled beverages for sale. Several women had cranked up kerosene stoves to the side of the parking lot, and sizzling chicharrones were sputtering in oil.

The sun warmed the streets and the puddles turned to vapor. The driver of the car stationed first in line was calling out, “Huanta, Huanta!” to the people milling about. One by one we accumulated the requisite five passengers, and the radio was blasting huaynos as we headed out to the “Emerald of the Andes.” In every direction there are valleys, some lush green and others streaked with layers of red and brown rock. Those valleys line up one after another until the sky ends.

An hour later the taxi pulled into the town plaza, and we each paid our five soles for the ride. I walked down to the Sunday market, bending over to dodge colorful sheets of plastic tied to sticks with webs of twine. This patchwork sheltered produce, cheese, herbs, flowers, and a wide assortment of potatoes. The merchants, mostly women, were sitting in their stalls on upside-down plastic buckets or old wooden crates, carrying on lively conversations in Quechua with customers as well as each other.

I had come to Huanta in search of Vidal Trujillano, one of the firstgeneration Evangelical pastors who figured into many conversations with comuneros in the highlands. I was interested in the history of Evangelismo (Evangelical Christianity), one of the most important social movements in the department of Ayacucho. From the U.S. missionaries who arrived in the 1940s, established the Bible Institute in Huanta, and founded Radio Amauta, to the local theologies developed by Quechua-speaking pastors, tracing this history adds to the familiar stories of evangelical growth and conversion by capturing the multiple theologies people have developed both during war and in its aftermath, exploring a phenomenon Joel Robbins describes as “one of the greatest success stories of the current era of cultural globalization.”¹

In 1980, on the eve of the internal armed conflict, only 4 percent of the rural population identified as Evangélico.² A mere decade later, the majority of people in the alturas of Huanta were hermanos and hermanas.³ While the Catholic churches lay in ruins, one of the priorities when people rebuilt their communities was the construction of one, two, perhaps three Evangelical churches. Some were Presbyterian, others Assembly of God, Prince of Peace, or the Pentecostal Church of Peru. However, when asked which church they belonged to, although people might point to a different rustic building, they uniformly replied they were “evangélicos.”

Friends had told me Pastor Vidal still lived in Callqui, referring to a small barrio on the outskirts of Huanta. Callqui was unfortunately well-known, its notoriety dating back to the early 1980s. In October 1981, former president Belaúnde declared a state of emergency, and in December of the following year the entire department of Ayacucho was placed under the control of the armed forces as the government escalated counterinsurgency measures. Army general Roberto Clemente Noel, the first political-military commander, was sent to Ayacucho in January 1983, and he began the deadliest phase of state violence in the region. That same year the Marina established their general headquarters in the municipal stadium in Huanta, converting the structure into a detention and torture center. This was the context in which a group of uniformed men knocked on the door of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church at Callqui one evening in August 1984, selected six members of the congregation, and took them out back to kill them.

I doubted I would find Pastor Vidal at home. In my previous experiences trying to locate evangelical pastors, I found they were almost always out preaching. I began with the church, but the padlock was closed and a peek through the cracks in the door confirmed no one was there. There were a few houses, but their calamina (corrugated aluminum) doors were also shut. Walking around, I realized there was a small store off the side of one of the houses and the door was open. As I approached, an elderly man in a red baseball cap and tennis shoes came outside, rubbing his unshaven stubble with the palm of his hand.

“Hola,” I greeted him. “My name’s Kimberly. I’m looking for Pastor Vidal Trujillano. Do you know if he’s around?”

A smile spread across his face as his eyes squinted to tone down the sun. “That’s me.”

Pastor Vidal invited me into his store, introducing me to his wife, who was standing behind the counter. A glance around the store prompted me to compliment Pastor Vidal for having founded Snacker’s Heaven. He burst out laughing, adding that maybe there was a paradise here on earth. Small metal display racks were sitting upon the glass counter, bags of potato chips in various sizes and flavors hanging in orderly rows. Beneath the glass were stacks of cookies, candies, and soda crackers. The shelves were lined with cans of leche Gloria, bottles of Kola Real, plastic bags of sugar and rice, and packages of pasta. Pastor Vidal gestured toward an elaborate armchair of deep burgundy velveteen located in the corner. The chair was covered with thick plastic to avoid wear, and I immediately demurred. “Pastor Vidal, this is a throne fit for a queen!”

He bowed deeply and his arm was my escort. “Of course … and here she is.” His face crinkled again as he laughed, displaying a sense of humor that punch-lined our hours of conversation.

Pastor Vidal asked his wife to pass him two bottles of Kola Real to accompany the chaplas I had brought with me. I explained that I was an anthropologist and was living in several communities in the alturas of Huanta. “That’s why I was looking for you. People remember you and the Bible movies you showed them.”

He nodded, clearly pleased. He suggested we go next door to the church so he could show me where so many things had happened. His wife handed him an old white shoelace tied through half a dozen keys, one of which opened the padlock on the church’s wooden doors. There was a small painted sign hanging above the doorway: Evangelical Presbyterian Church. We walked into a room filled with the light of a dizzying blue sky. The dirt floor was swept smooth, and six rows of wood slab pews lined each side of the aisle. Following him up that center aisle, I noticed a drum set, guitar, accordion, and amplifiers set up in the corner. It made me think of the children who said they went to church to dance.

At the front of the church was a simple table with some flowers. What caught my eye was a series of laminated posters on the wall. Pink roses and an English countryside were hung alongside a chart titled “Clínica del Alma: Médico Especialista” (Clinic of the Soul: Specialized Doctor). Big letters detailed the services rendered and by whom.

Honorary Degree	Son of God
Doctor’s Assistant	The Holy Spirit
Field of Study	The Heart
Experience	Unfailing and Eternal
Doctor’s Office	Everywhere
His Power	Unlimited
Specialty	The Impossible
Prescription	The Bible
Illnesses Treated	All
Guarantee	Absolute
Hospital	Anywhere
Treatment Goals	Peace and Happiness
Cost of the Visit	True Faith
Attention	24 Hours a Day
Doctor	Jesus Christ

Clinic of the Soul: Specialized Doctor

We settled in around a small table, and Vidal asked if I planned to tape our conversation: “Most people want to record what I say. I’ve seen a lot of things.” Indeed, he was such a “practiced talker” that at times I felt I was listening to his testimony, much like the testimonies evangelicals give in church as proof of God’s work.

“I’m interested in the history of these communities,” I said, “how people lived through the violence, and rebuild their lives now.”

Pastor Vidal nodded, removing his glasses to rub his eyes. “I’m losing my eyesight,” he explained. He wore thick eyeglasses that made his eyes swim as though I was looking at him through a thick window on a drizzly day. But the glasses helped alleviate the horrible headaches he had suffered from. As he explained, prior to being fitted for his coke-bottle lenses, “I walked around weaving back and forth like a drunk.” We concurred that such swerving was incompatible with his evangelical position.

“And when did you start preaching, hermano Vidal?”

“Bueno, I’ve been preaching for over fifty years,” pausing to let those five decades sink in. “I have el don de predicar [a gift for preaching].”

“And where did you learn about the gospel?” I asked, a question that led us to Vidal’s youth and his disenchantment with the Catholic Church.

“I lived with the Franciscans in Lima when I was young. We studied every morning until noon, and then we went out to work. But they never showed us the Bible. Never! They had us read a few little books—dogmas, that’s all we read. Only they [the priests] had Hail Mary, the salvation of mass, and confession.”

“Why didn’t they use the Bible?”

“It was only for them.”

I was perplexed. “But why only for them and not to show to everyone?”

“Well, we [the Evangelicals] talk straight out about the gospel, but they have no way in. They earn money baptizing, marrying people—money for everything.”

“So they didn’t want to share the Bible because of the power it gave them?”

“Exactly! Not to win souls but to earn money. The liturgy for the dead? Well, the dead were already buried so people didn’t come to them for this. They were already dead! So the priests taught people that the spirits were in purgatory, their children in limbo. So people had to come and confess their sins so they wouldn’t end up like that. Then they administered the Eucharist with little round cookies—the fruit of the crucifixion of Christ.” He rolled his eyes. “The cookies are called ‘hostias’ [communion wafers]. When people confessed, the priests gave them the Eucharist [comulgación]. But they were just cookies. They had coloring, but people didn’t know that. They had no idea everything the Franciscans did. The hostia is just a colored cookie,” he insisted, making a tiny “o” with his fingers to emphasize just how insignificant they were.

“What did people think the hostia was?”

“They thought the Father was pardoning their sins. That’s why they confessed everything. The priests asked them, ‘What have you done? What have you done? What have you done?’” Vidal drilled in an imperious tone, drawing his tiny self up and throwing out his chest in inquisitorial fashion. “So people confessed all of their sins. People believed salvation was coming because in the altar there were these imágenes [images of the saints].”

“What do you think of this practice of praying to the saints?”

Vidal shrugged. “Well, I didn’t know any better. I thought the same way back then. In your heart you’re accustomed to that. They don’t show you the Bible.”

I could see a memory flicker across his face. “You know, in the convent there was this young man. He grew grapes from Italy, and they made them into wine for the Eucharist. The priests had those grapes, but no one else could. Only them. They had so many grapes in the convent—they could have filled the streets with grapes,” he marveled. “And there were always priests arriving, leaving, arriving, leaving,” his head moving back and forth as though following their trail.

“Where were they from?”

“Spain—all of them were from Spain.⁴ I started to study with them. They told us we would be sacristans, that we’d play the organ. Several of us went to study, and we worked. We helped the masons build classrooms. Oh, we worked hard! Well, one time we were really tired and thirsty. I kept looking at those grapes. I finally grabbed some to eat.”

“Oh, I’d have done the same thing,” I assured him.

He nodded. “Of course. But inside his room, through a window with bars, someone was watching me. I didn’t even see him. He came out and asked me what I’d done. ‘So you just came to the convent to steal, or did you come to work and learn?’ He made me go with him to the boss. ‘This young man stole grapes!’ Oh, that priest scolded me so much.” Vidal held his face in his hands as he remembered how sternly the priest had spoken to him. ‘You came here to rob. You’re a thief.’ That’s what he said to me! It was so ugly the way he attacked me. My heart couldn’t stand it. They talk about love, but where was their love? I started to think about that.”

“How old were you?”

“I was sixteen. It was a parochial school and I entered to be a priest. But I couldn’t stand much of it. They played all sorts of tricks on me,” said Vidal, with an incredulous look on his face. “Once, without permission, I started to read the Bible. Well, one of the priests saw me and practically killed me.” Sitting upright in his chair, Vidal assumed a pompous, booming voice: “‘Uncivilized men shouldn’t touch this book. Only educated men can read the Santa Biblia.’ That’s how he scolded me. It was forbidden to touch the Bible.” Vidal slumped back in disgust. “So one day when we finished work, all of us students went in and Father Zaguán closed the doors behind us. Well, I had an empty sack—it was from the sand we were using. I threw all of my things in the bag and had it waiting at the door before we came in.” Vidal leaned forward, his voice lowering into a conspiratorial tone. “I had everything ready and that night I escaped. I never went back. But in the convent I’d learned to make the imágenes and firecrackers. So when I came back here, I went to the selva. I went from church to church making money from the imágenes and firecrackers for their fiestas. I was working for this one church and I got to know the priest. So one day—I didn’t ask permission—I started to read about the birth of El Señor Jesucristo. That priest saw me and almost killed me! He was angry! ‘This book is not to be touched. Only los doctorados [the highly educated] can read this book. It is the Bible.’ That’s what he said.” Vidal shook his head, as though still perplexed by the priest’s outrage.

“So it was forbidden to even touch the Bible?”

“Yes. After that,” Vidal clasped his right hand to his chest, “my heart was wandering, and I knew it was better to leave.”

Vidal’s critique of the priests and their elitism was a constant in our conversations. It is also a recurrent theme in the literature on Evangelismo. Among the attractions of Pentecostal Christianity are the promise of an unmediated, personal relationship with God and the alleged egalitarianism of a religion in which virtually anyone can learn to preach or evangelize.⁵ In his research on postwar Guatemala, Kevin O’Neill refers to the “spiritual intimacy” that characterizes religious practice for neo-Pentecostals who eschew the distancing formality of the Catholic Church and its ornate structures in favor of gathering around the kitchen table in a neighbor’s modest home.⁶

It was to his own home that Vidal returned, his heart still wandering. But then, unexpectedly, a friend’s wife died and the family found themselves preparing for the fifth day.

“Pichqa punchaw? The day to wash the clothes?”

“Exactly. I went to say good-bye to her, and because I had been with the priests, people thought I was a priest too. So on the fifth day they asked me to pray. We spent the night praying, smoking, and in the morning a friend—well, I told him the priests had their book that I wanted to read but they wouldn’t let me. He asked me if I really wanted to read it and I told him of course I did. He told me he had a Bible, so I asked him to sell it to me. ‘How much does it cost?’ I asked him. He told me to just take it, but I traded a bottle of trago for it.”⁷

I laughed at the irony. “So you traded trago for the Bible?”

“Yes,” he said, his face breaking into a big smile. “I read it, but I didn’t understand much. So I wrote a letter to my brother-in-law in Lima with the verses I didn’t understand and asked him to come and visit. He came right away. Here, I had my chacra and worked alongside everyone, chewing coca and drinking. But my brother-in-law was an Evangelical and he didn’t like that. So one afternoon we were talking about the Bible and he showed me his. I opened it to the New Testament and he started to teach me. Well, I had my chacra and had plenty of hens, duck, yucca. So we made a pachamanca and I invited all the neighbors.⁸ While we were preparing everything, he shared the word of El Señor. The time came to open the pachamanca and we started to eat chicken and meat—there was enough for all the neighbors. We just kept inviting people, but there was still more food. The food never ended.”

Vidal closed his eyes as though relishing the moment. “I delivered myself to El Señor.”

I nodded as he spoke, thinking about the transformation of the fish and loaves into an abundant Andean feast. There were numerous miracles in the life history Vidal related, and the endless pachamanca was one of them. Those miracles paved the path to his conversion.

“We decided to build a temple right there. Then people started thinking, ‘We have lots of young men and women and they need someone to marry them. We need to baptize people, and who’s going to baptize them?’ So we decided to vote and send a group to the Bible Institute. I was elected.”

“Did you go back to Lima?”

“No, here in Huanta. I came and interviewed with don Nicholas Cochran. ‘We’re starting an institute here,’ he told me.”

I had heard so much about Nicholas Cochran and Harry Marshall, two North American Presbyterian missionaries who introduced what is categorically referred to as Evangelismo in the early 1950s. They established Radio Amauta and the Bible Institute, where they trained the first Quechua-speaking pastors, one of whom was Vidal.

“What year was that?”

“’57. They started in Huamanga but they couldn’t find a place. There was no water, and they wanted a garden, fruit trees. So they came here to Huanta. Besides, they almost killed them in Huamanga.”

“What? They were almost killed?”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, they were giving out pamphlets in the street, and people tried to kill them. The police grabbed them and put them in jail—not to punish them but to save their lives. People wanted to kill them! It was against the law to preach in the open air. The government thought it was a threat to Catholicism and they wanted to stop it. The police saved their lives. They were very lucky. Back then, the missionaries were all North Americans. There were no Peruvians. The missionaries educated us.”

The history Pastor Vidal told reminded me of the Catholic priests I interviewed in the late 1990s. They remained concerned about the “invasion of the sects,” referring to the massive growth of Evangelical Christianity in Ayacucho. Numerous priests cautioned that the Evangelicals were a “threat to Andean culture” because Evangelical doctrine rejected the use of religious images and banned chewing coca leaves and alcohol consumption (both key elements in celebrating many religious fiestas). They were joined in their concerns by social scientists trained in the Weberian tradition; they feared the Protestant ethic would fuel the spirit of capitalism and erode communal forms of labor and reciprocity in the name of individual gain and salvation.

“How many people were studying with you at the institute?”

“There were six of us.” Vidal paused. “I learned about the Bible so I could see it, so I could touch it,” his voice lingering over the words. “Well, some people asked, ‘How is this drunk going to be an evangelical?’ I played the guitar, I sang, I danced.”⁹

“Wow—you did it all!”

He threw back his head and laughed out loud. “Hermana, nothing escaped me. But after that, I never was out tracking down young women.” Vidal’s tone turned serious. “I didn’t drink. I worked hard. I wasn’t fornicating—not at all. No fornication! I thought I’d just work and never touch a woman again. But I worked making firecrackers, and this young woman started talking to me. I wasn’t talking, but she fell in love with me. We got married, but not because I’d been talking to her,” he insisted.

“So you had el don de predicar, but didn’t use it with her?” I teased.

“That’s right, hermana.”

“Or maybe it was the fireworks?”

He laughed, rocking back and forth in his chair.

“Ok—I’m switching topics! How did you begin evangelizing in the selva?” I asked.

“I studied one full year and then went out preaching.” As he explained, he went out with the North American missionaries, translating into Quechua for them.

“And when you headed out to the communities to start churches, did you bring movies, pamphlets—how did you do it?”

“At first we didn’t have movies. We only took pamphlets—that’s how we worked. Then don Nicholas Cochran started the radio—Radio Amauta [in 1960]. It took him two or three years because the government didn’t want to give him permission,” he explained. “Later don Nicholas brought a thousand radios and we gave them out everywhere. They were just two band radios, Radio Amauta and Voz Cristiana, from Ecuador.”

“Evangelical programs?”

“Aha. We gave them away everywhere,” gesturing expansively with his outstretched arms. “I traveled all over, forming churches. Enrique [Harry] Marshall was here and I worked with him in the selva. There was no road then, no cars. People walked on foot and so did we.”

“You walked all the way to the selva on foot?”

Pastor Vidal nodded. “I had a mule and I’d travel to the jungle, taking the path that runs by Rasuhuillca,” referring to the highest peak in northern Ayacucho.

“And the North Americans went with you?”

He nodded. Pastor Vidal began tracing the route they followed, naming off a long list of communities in which they had founded churches from the 1950s through the 1970s. “We were always visiting. I’d work teaching them choruses, hymns, prayers. I just used a house. We would start visiting their neighbors and calling them, no? I always stayed for two or three weeks in each place. Then little by little, as they formed a group, I’d move on to the next stop. I always traveled with Enrique [Henry] Marshall.”

“And the films were later?”

“Yes. First we had Radio Amauta, and then the projector. With the films, the church grew everywhere. The first time, children came during the day and we tried it. We showed one film and they all watched. So we told them that night we’d show a free film, so they should tell their friends, their parents, everyone. Tell them there’ll be a free movie tonight—we won’t charge a cent.”

“So everyone came?”

“Uf,” he threw up his hands. “The kids ran around everywhere—‘Movie! Movie tonight!’ Hermana, the temple couldn’t hold everyone. So the next day we invited the missionaries to talk after the movies and there was no more room anywhere. Everyone came to watch the movie.”

“And what did people say after they saw the film? How did they react?”

“They just wanted more. For the grace of God, the churches grew. And people listened to Radio Amauta everywhere too.”

“I bet they’d never seen movies before?”

“Never. Such admiration. Ad-mi-ra-tion!”

“What films were they, hermano Vidal?”

“The birth of Señor Jesucristo, the flight from Egypt. Then the crucifixion, the universal flood.” He thought for a moment. “That’s why people came, to see Señor Jesucristo with their own eyes. Then they knew Jesucristo was God.”

“When you arrived how did people react? Were there ever problems with the Catholics?”

Vidal sat straight up in his chair. “They wanted to kill us but they couldn’t. Once in Rosario they wanted to kill me. They beat me up and left me bloody. Well, there were police stations then, so the hermanos got an order and they made the Catholics go to the police station. How those police looked at me! They threw them in jail—it was the comuneros themselves who’d beaten me. I spent three days in the hospital. I was all swollen up, blood, fever, everything.”

“So it was the Catholic comuneros who did this?” I asked incredulously.

He nodded.

“And why did they say they’d done this?”

“Because I was Evangelical, because I was preaching. They told me I had no right to preach because they were Catholic.”

“Did this happen more than once?”

“Oh, they almost killed me several times.”

“And the priests? The catechists?”

“They were against me too. They said, ‘Those Evangelicals are enemies. Don’t allow them in.’ They said we were condemned. Because we denied the images, they said we were diabolic men.” Vidal shook his head as he recalled those early years. “It wasn’t easy at first. That’s how it was, hermana. Later we won in spite of it all. We won against the Catholics because they became fewer and fewer in number.”

“Hermano Vidal, did they have catechists in these communities?”

“No, nobody. They just had chapels and the priests visited once a year.”

“Were there Catholic churches in the communities then?”

“Yes, in some of them.”

“But now there aren’t.”

“No, not now. The priests traveled. They would bring the priests—people would come with horses to take the priests with them. The priests rode on horses, with saddles. The horses ran and so did the men, just looking up at them. But we didn’t do that. We helped with everything.”

Vidal paused, taking a swig of his Kola Real. “It was stronger then, not like now. We still go out, but we don’t have any support. And that Senderismo … ” his voice drifted off.

“What about Senderismo?”

“Because of that Senderismo, it dropped. There was nothing to eat. And there were massacres from all three sides—from the Senderistas, the military, and the ronderos.”

“Ronderos too?”

He nodded. “Powerful massacres.”

Things began to change in the selva and the sierra. There was another group with a message to share in their own search for converts: Sendero Luminoso. As the violence spread throughout Ayacucho, traveling in the countryside became increasingly dangerous. Being an Evangelical pastor conferred no protection, in part because Senderista militants considered the Evangélicos to be one of their key ideological enemies. As the threats mounted in the early 1980s, the North American missionaries withdrew from Peru, leaving the church in the hands of local pastors like Vidal. However, it was not only the North Americans who retreated from rural areas; many Catholic priests ceased to visit as well. One Peruvian colleague wryly noted that in many rural areas, the Catholic Church was among the first casualties of war. This would be another chapter in the complicated history of a church that, in the eyes of many campesinos, had never come down off its high horse.

In Ayacucho, the growth of Evangelismo occurred against the backdrop of a historically conservative Catholic Church.¹⁰ Catholic priests had been closely associated with the hacendados (large landowners) who comprised the regional elites.¹¹ However, with the Agrarian Reform of the 1960s, the hacienda system—already in decline economically—further crumbled. The decay of the hacienda system in turn weakened the presence and authority of the Catholic Church in rural areas.¹² With the internal armed conflict, the Catholic Church further retrenched to the cities, leaving a spiritual and ritual void in rural areas.

Huamanga, the capital city of Ayacucho, boasts thirty-three Catholic churches, colonial structures so impressive they have become tourist attractions. The city is famous for its glorious celebration of Semana Santa, the crowds compressed shoulder to shoulder to celebrate the last week of Christ’s life and his resurrection. Ornate religious images are paraded through the streets, suspended on wooden beams hoisted in the air by the faithful. When Jeffrey Klaiber wrote his history of the rise of the conservative Peruvian Catholic Church, he turned toward Ayacucho and a “living church [that] looked as though it had not changed much since colonial times,” just as impervious to the passing of the centuries as those thirty-three steadfast structures.

Yet this is only one facet of the Catholic Church. At the national level, the progressive wing of the Catholic Church was heavily influenced by liberation theology and vocally denounced both armed and structural violence. The Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez of the Dominican order is widely considered the founder of liberation theology and one of its most eloquent proponents. In 1986, against the backdrop of indiscriminate repression, an escalating death toll, and the abuse of human rights—particularly those of the rural poor—Father Gutiérrez wrote:

How do we make theology during Ayacucho? How do we speak of the God of life when people are cruelly and massively assassinated in the “Corner of the Dead”? How can we announce the love of God in the midst of such profound contempt for human life? How can we proclaim the resurrection of El Señor where death reigns, especially the death of children, women, the poor and the indigenous—the death of the “insignificantes” of our society?¹³

Unfortunately for Ayacucho, the man “making theology” during the worst years of the violence in the region was Monseñor Juan Luis Cipriani.¹⁴ A representative of Opus Dei, Cipriani denounced human rights as a cloak for “terrorist organizations” and a form of “imperialism,” going so far as to post a sign on the door of the archbishopric: “No se aceptan reclamos sobre Derechos Humanos” (“Human rights complaints not accepted here”).¹⁵ He also marginalized the more progressive Jesuits and Dominicans, insisting the church should focus on mass and prayer and leave the social and political work to others. Cipriani was such an obstacle to human rights work and to progressive clergy and laypeople that he warranted individual criticism in the PTRC’s Final Report. Following a detailed chronology of the important role the Catholic Church played in accompanying and protecting people who were besieged by the violence of both the state and Shining Path, they turn to the grave exception of Monseñor Cipriani, “who repeatedly issued statements condemning the work of the Coordinadora Nacional and other organizations who worked in the defense of human rights.”¹⁶ Thus the Catholic Church presented meager competition for the Evangélicos in the alturas of Huanta, where the conversions were massive.

I was interested in hearing more about those conversions and Vidal’s perspective on the rise of Sendero Luminoso, which he had experienced firsthand.

“Oh, it must have been ’82 or ’83 because the subversives had started in Ayacucho. I was walking, forming churches in the selva when the subversives started. I was working with my son Isaías. Oh, the Senderistas were watching everything I did! Baptizing, marrying people—everything. One time this young man, a Senderista, was watching me, all curious. I could tell I was making him think, no? He asked me afterward to sell him a Bible! I just gave him one. That young man, he’d been formed by the curas de esos Senderistas [the priests of those Senderistas].”

“The Senderistas had priests?” I asked, perplexed.

He nodded. “Of course.”

I did not press him on this question, but from other conversations I had with Vidal it became clear he was referring to the Senderista ideologues. Just as a priest teaches his congregation, so did the Senderista cadres inculcate “Pensamiento Gonzalo” in their followers.¹⁷ Indeed, one term villagers used to refer to Senderista sympathizers was iñirusqaku—the “convinced ones” or “the believers.”

“I never talked against them,” he continued, referring to the Senderistas. “I talked well about them so they wouldn’t mistreat me.”

“Were you ever threatened?”

He rolled his eyes and nodded in response to my question. “Bueno, once I was in the selva and the Senderistas had sent a message to Hatun Rumi—it’s in the selva. The Senderistas had held their assemblies and drawn up Actas saying that I was a spy for the gringos and they needed to get rid of me,” dragging his index finger across his neck.

I gasped. “The Senderistas said this?”

“Yes, the Senderistas had their Actas. But some people in Hatun Rumi heard about this so they warned me. But I thought, ‘What did I do so they’d want to kill me?’ So if they kill me—well, I just kept going. Then there was another warning saying they were coming. I said, ‘Good. Let them come.’ Then a third time, the older people had a meeting and they said, ‘Hermano, please, if those men enter, how will we be free if they kill you? It’s better for you to leave.’ Only the older people knew anything.”

“How did they know?”

“At night we all met, the old people, my son, and me—we talked, but the other members of the church didn’t know anything. The Senderistas sent someone with a message for us. So we started to leave at night. It was spring,” he remembered, “three days of walking.”

“So people tried to protect you?”

“Yes, yes.”

“And what was that about ‘how will we be free if they kill you?’ What did they mean?”

“I baptized people, I married them,” he explained. “That way, if they were killed they’d be free.”

I got it, struck that Vidal had been preparing people for God’s judgment in the afterlife. This resonated with something several ronderos had said: they converted to Evangelismo during the violence, concerned that they would have to answer to God for what they were doing. Even while they were killing, they were thinking ahead to how they would someday atone for their actions.

“I was able to free many of them. I was thinking they’d all be killed,” shaking his head as he remembered.

“But did the Senderistas ever ask you what you were doing?”

“No, never,” he replied emphatically. “But from a distance they challenged me. They knew I was working there, they knew I’d formed each church and that I was preaching. They’d listened to me. So they didn’t need to ask me anything—they knew me.”

“Of course. Hermano Vidal, what did people say when they delivered themselves to God? What made them decide to do it?

“It was from watching the films, from the message. It was to find their salvation with El Señor Jesucristo. There were so many massacres, so many people were dying. But later they formed the defensa civil [rondas campesinas]. They started going after the Senderistas and killing a lot of them.”

“What do you think of the ronderos?”

Vidal shrugged. “Bueno, they knew me. But one time when I left for Rosario, they wanted to kill me. The defensa civil asked to see my documents [libreta electoral]. They had a building with a second floor, heavily guarded. I heard someone say, ‘Kill him.’ Well, my son Isaías went up to the second floor and asked for my documents. Isaías saw the president—he was a hermano. He asked him, ‘Don’t you recognize my father?’ The president was frightened when he realized who I was, and he gave me back my documents. If not for my son, they would’ve killed me. But it wasn’t my time yet. I still had work to do, work for El Señor.”

“You’ve had a lot of close calls. Senderistas, ronderos, Catholics—every-one was after you!”

Vidal smiled, and agreed that he had escaped death many times, thanks to El Señor. “It just wasn’t my time yet, hermana.”

“What do you think about the way they organized in rondas? I wonder, did it help or did it make things worse inside of the communities?”

“Bueno, they weren’t evangelicals anymore. In that hour, they weren’t evangelicals. They would just kill anybody. They just grabbed them and killed them. That’s how it was. But with the ronderos, the Senderistas started to dwindle, things calmed down. It wasn’t easy for us either. With the authorities we had to get—what do you call it? A pass. We also had to have one with the military. With these passes, they let us by. Without it, you were dead. Everything was controlled, hermana. Men, women, children—it didn’t matter.”

“But you kept visiting all these communities in spite of the violence?”

He nodded. “Yes, except for the worst part of it. I had to stop for a while. But once there were fewer Senderistas, I started working again. But in the selva,” he paused, shaking his head, “with all the killing, there were microbes. I’m not sure just what kind, but all sorts of illnesses started appearing.”

“More illnesses?”

He nodded. “Oh, there were so many dead who weren’t buried. They were just left hanging in the trees, dumped in the river. There were so many flies. Well, lots of dead who weren’t buried.”

At the sound of the door scraping the floor, we both looked up. A tall slender man with high cheekbones walked up the aisle toward us. He smiled and greeted his father. It was Isaías, the son Pastor Vidal had mentioned many times during our conversation. We introduced ourselves and realized we had seen each other before on the road from Huanta to the highlands.

Isaías pulled up a chair to join us around the table. “I’ll be heading up to Carhuahurán later this month for the Fiesta Espiritual.”

“Then we’ll see each other. You know, I was talking with your father about his experiences, and how during the war the churches were full. But now some people have said the church is enfriándose [cooling off]. What do you think is happening?”

“The problem is when there was violence there was more work. The pastor from one church would visit another church and so the hermanos were encouraging each other. But when the problems passed, this enthusiasm also decreased,” replied Isaías.

I nodded. “How old were you when you started traveling with your father?”

“I was twelve years old. I always went with my father, and I liked it. Since I was fifteen, I’ve continually preached. Now I’m contracted by the association,” referring to Llaqtanchikta Qatarichisun (LQ), an organization that spun off from World Vision.

“What are you doing with LQ?”

“We’ve been filling out questionnaires. In Carhuahurán we worked with widows. There are orphans, too. We’ve met so many widows who lost their husbands during the violence and orphans who lost their parents. We’ve also seen what happened to the harvest. With everyone we asked how much they plant, how much they harvest. We started to wonder how they could survive. They told us that sometimes they live with relatives—uncles or distant relatives who give them food. That’s how they live. Sometimes they tell us, ‘If my father had lived, if only my husband had lived—we wouldn’t be working, we’d be eating well, we’d have animals.’”

“What do people want when you talk to them? Revenge? Fines?”

He shook his head. “They don’t talk about revenge. They ask for economic help. They say, ‘If I hadn’t lost my husband—before the violence we had fifteen bulls, eighty cows, eighty sheep, and other animals too.’ And when we ask them how many they have now, they have two, three sheep.”

“This is what I’ve been told, too. People lost so much during the violence.”

Isaías nodded. “Before they would help us out so we could travel, preach—now they ask us for money.”

“I’m still thinking about the widows, the orphans. Do you address the theme of repentance, reconciliation when you preach?”

“Repentance yes, but not reconciliation. We don’t spend enough time. We’re only there one or two days. But the hermanos want to talk about this.”

“And how do you talk about repentance? What does it mean in the evangelical church, hermano Isaías?”

“In the evangelical church, repentance is how we talk about the violence. We think, as flesh and blood, as humans, that we are—if something would happen, we would seek revenge. So repentance—sometimes you think, ‘I’m going to get my revenge with such a person.’ Well, you’re already sinning. Repenting is saying to God, ‘I have thought of doing this but I won’t do it.’ You leave it to the will of God because God says ‘revenge is mine.’”

“And when you talk about this with the hermanos in the churches, are there people that can’t accept someone’s repentance? I mean, those who don’t resign themselves to having lost husbands? When you visit the communities, is there really a willingness to repent?”

“Yes, yes. They understand, until tears flow. But there could be exceptional cases—the hermanos in the communities would know this. There could be people who’re resentful,” he acknowledged.

“Hmm. Your father said so many interesting things. He talked about opening up the heart so the Holy Spirit can enter. What is conversion for you?”

“It’s the conversion to Christ, the conversion has to be born in the heart. You have to feel it inside. There are some people who have come to our church to deliver themselves but it wasn’t from the heart but just for aid, for gifts.”¹⁸

“Oh, the blankets and calaminas.”

He shrugged. “It happens. But there are some that from the heart think, feel the presence of the Holy Spirit in their hearts and continue to, even now.”

“So some have a deep faith?”

“Yes, I’ve seen it. Profound faith looks for a way to survive. They listen to the radio, they get encouragement through the radio,” emphasized Isaías.

“Absolutely—many people have mentioned Radio Amauta. They tell me they always listened, even during the violence.”

Indeed, Radio Amauta had been an important source of information for people in the campo. Amauta broadcast messages between family members, letting worried loved ones know someone had safely arrived in Huanta, making it past the military checkpoints and Shining Path sweeps throughout the countryside. The broadcasters also provided news updates, frequently lending a biblical spin to world events. It was Radio Amauta, turned down to a bare whisper, that accompanied people on cold nights in the caves, allowing them to imagine a caring international community of Evangélicos who prayed for them and assured them they were not forgotten.

But I had forgotten the time and how long we had been talking. I began thanking both Vidal and Isaías for their generosity. Rising to his feet, Vidal extended an invitation to me. “Hermana, let me show you where the martyrs died.”

Vidal led me out the front door of the church and around to the back. Chickens scattered to avoid our footsteps as we entered a small corral. Pointing to a wooden plaque hung on the side of the church’s outer wall, he explained that this was where the marinos (navy) had killed the six hermanos in August 1984.

“I am so sorry—I’ve heard about this. Were you here when it happened?”

“No. I was in the selva. But one day we woke up and were listening to Radio Amauta. They started to talk about Callqui, about how the marinos had killed six hermanos.”

“August first?”

He nodded. “There was no shortage of enemies. The hermanos were in culto (service) with a gaslight. Back then there wasn’t electricity here. The marinos entered and cornered them—they couldn’t escape. They had a list of names and started calling people by name: ‘You, outside. You too.’ So they went outside. The marinos made the rest of them blow out the light and keep singing. They told them to sing as loud as they could. And then dynamite exploded.”

“Right here?”

“In my house. The hermanos couldn’t hear because they were singing. We heard the news—my family died there. Two young men I’d educated died. It was as though I were walking in my sleep. An old Presbyterian hermano told me the Senderistas had sent the marinos. The church of Callqui is known around the world because of that.”

“What happened when you got back here?”

“When I arrived here and they’d killed the hermanos, we started a legal case [juicio]. The marinos didn’t respect anyone—not women, not men, not children. They just killed until they were tired. Their captain was Camión—there in the stadium,” Vidal recalled, pointing down the hill. “He escaped to the United States.”

“Did the North American hermanos stay here during all this?”

“No, they went to Cuzco, some returned to the United States. They left. But there was the National Council, and they helped start the juicio. And World Vision also helped us.”¹⁹

“Was there ever justice in the case?” I asked, knowing my question was rhetorical.

He shook his head. “That Captain Camión made them do it. He escaped to Quito, Ecuador, and from there they say he was kidnaped. But we know he escaped to the United States. The case is still open—it hasn’t ended, even now. It wasn’t even the Senderistas who did it. It was the marinos. Instead of protecting us, they killed us.”

“What happened to the relatives of the people who died?

“They’re still here.”

“And what is life like for them? I wonder what it’s like living with this?”

“Very difficult,” he replied, shaking his head. “The people who killed—well, they did so in ignorance, not knowing anything, like a baby.”

I was surprised by his word choice. “Ignorant?”

“Yes, ignorant. Sometimes the leaders made people kill, obligated them. They killed because that Captain Camión made them do it.”

“So the men who came here that night were obeying authority?”

“Yes. One man came here and said their boss had made them do this. He asked us for forgiveness, to pardon him.”

“When did that happen?”

“When a marino came here, one of those from that night, he came here and said, ‘We killed. I participated in it but now I’m a Christian and I want to ask for forgiveness.’ So all the relatives came here. With tears he asked them for forgiveness.”

“As hermanos, there’s an emphasis on reconciliation in the church, no?”

“Yes,” he insisted. “We always talk about that.”

“And the relatives, weren’t they resentful?”

“Yes, some were, some weren’t. One hermana, she’d lost her husband and that resentment [rencor] didn’t go away. She said, ‘Those animals killed my husband, they have to answer for that. They have to do something—they’ve destroyed me.’ Even though we try to understand, it’s difficult. Even now she’s resentful. But some of the hermanos are forgiving from their hearts. She says, ‘You can forgive because you lost sons. I lost my husband.’”

“Is it worse to lose a husband?”

“Yes, a husband is worth more—it’s a greater loss. One hermana lost two sons and she forgave. She said, ‘What am I going to do? I can’t live like her—can’t live hating.’” He shrugged his shoulders.

I nodded and followed him back out to the front of the church. We said our good-byes and I thanked him again before heading down the dirt road and past the stadium, where the shouts of the soccer fans echoed against the walls.

Reel Life

When I watched the evangelical films, I began to imagine. I imagined that life really must be that way.

—Juan, twenty-five years old, Canrao

Although individual conversion was frequently the result of revelation, in the alturas of Huanta—where the conversions were massive—the growth of Evangelismo had both individualizing and “collectivizing” aspects. Armed communities of faith were forged, and the Evangélicos would prove to be one of the most tenacious enemies the Shining Path militants would confront. Listening to Evangelical friends confirmed that the struggle between Evangelismo and Senderismo was a struggle of biblical proportions—an apocalyptic battle waged at the end of time.²⁰ How this happened becomes clearer once we go to the movies.

A few weeks after we crossed paths in Callqui, Pastor Isaías Trujillano arrived in Carhuahurán en route to the selva. He was talking up the Fiesta Espiritual that would take place the following month. He went door-to-door during the day, visiting the Evangélicos. As darkness fell, he enlisted the help of several villagers to prepare for showing the Bible movies he had brought with him. Just as his father before him, Isaías traveled with films and a generator as he made his way up and over the mountains.

After much debate it was decided the best place to show the films was on the side of Feliciano’s two-story house. Several of the ronderos helped him hang a large white sheet with nails they hammered into his wall, and this rippling screen provided the background for the images projected that night.

Other men brought piles of ichu (straw) to soften the ground. Women began to arrive with their children, nestling into the ichu in a semicircle in front of the white sheet. Farther back, long planks of wood were dragged to the field and set atop adobe bricks to form benches. I sat down on one of the planks, Efraín, Shintaca, and Yolanda crowding together beneath my poncho. The cold fluctuated with the cloud cover, rolling in and out on the wind.

Feliciano opened the padlock on his door and called Simeón and Satú over to help him carry out a rickety table and set it up on the far side of the field. The table legs were uneven and after trying several rocks, Feliciano slipped a large flat one beneath one of the legs and the table finally stopped wobbling. An extension cord ran the length of the field, hooked up to the big truck battery that sat in Feliciano’s store.

Isaías pulled two enormous reels from his backpack and opened a worn cardboard box. He had brought along a projector, the sort we used in grammar school when Mrs. Hauser threaded the thick brown coils into the machine and we took flight. He set his generator up on the table as far away as possible so the noise would not drown out the film. The crowd grew as the motor began and the white sheet came alive with Bible scenes.

I did not catch the title of the first film. I had run up to our room to bring down a pocketful of Sublimes—chocolate squares loaded with almonds. By the time we settled into my poncho again, the Virgin Mary was already pregnant. There were lengthy scenes of Joseph and Mary heading across the desert on a mule, prompting several people in the audience to remember how they had been forced to flee their homes with only the clothes on their backs. They, too, had walked for days on aching feet only to have people refuse them shelter, shouting, “Filthy chutos [savages]! Get off my land before you dirty it.”

Mary’s eyes were cast downward for virtually the entire film, thick eyelashes resting piously upon milky white skin. On the few occasions when she did look up, it was to heed the voice of God speaking to her from heaven. The films were worn, and the generator was not working at full force. Manuco suggested it was suffering from sorroche (altitude sickness) and thus the films were slow, as though a tired arm was turning a handle at too slow a pace. The soundtrack was garbled and the speed lowered all of the voices to the baritone-bass range. It was a bit of a shock to hear the Virgin Mary respond to God in the same thundering bass voice He used with her. I heard laughter coming from behind us. A group of men were standing at the back, the ronderos with both guns and blankets thrown over their shoulders.

In a few turns of the reel, the Assyrians appeared in chain metal gear, enormous men outfitted for war. As night fell upon the battlefield, two spies sneaked up outside a tent to eavesdrop and learned the following day’s battle plans. The Spanish dubbing was virtually inaudible, and most of the villagers were Quechua speakers anyway. So it was the audience that provided the script. The spies were just like the ronderos, and spying was part of vigilancia to see what the Senderistas had planned. Film viewing was improvisational theater.

When the first film garbled to a close, Isaías gave a thirty-minute lecture on family and community life. The main theme was simple: he exhorted the women to stay home and fulfill their roles, leaving the men to go out and work hard. While he preached, Feliciano carried over a can of gasoline to stir the generator out of its sorroche.

The crowd was eager for more, and Isaías threaded Heinz Fussle’s My Brother’s Keeper into the projector. The opening scene consists of three little gringos shoplifting in a large department store, gleefully stuffing merchandise inside their jackets. The boys run up and down the aisles on a spree. However, as they turn up the fateful final aisle, three security guards close in on them. As the guards tower over the boys and begin to lecture them on the sins of shoplifting, the sneakiest little gringo breaks loose and manages to escape on his newly acquired skateboard. The next scene shows the same mini shoplifter, defiantly eating an orange as he swaggers down a blind alley.

In the alley, juicy orange in hand and mouth, he encounters a tall black man. Racist stereotypes dictate his role: he is dressed in tight polyester pants, and his lunar-sized afro is straight out of Shaft. People in the audience began pointing: they recognized this man from the department store, where he had watched the scuffle between the boys and the security guards. He begins by praising the boy for his clever escape, suggesting he consider the benefits of a life of crime. Fade out to evil chuckles.

The little brother’s keeper appears in the next scene. He is the boy’s older brother, a former crime buddy of the tall black man. Big brother was recently released from prison, where he found Jesus Christ and was born again. He now raises white doves on the rooftop of their high-rise apartment building. He is determined to save his little brother, a task requiring prayers and preaching, sin and salvation.

The images of hell are terrifying. Human faces melt away in Satan’s flames, skeletal remains and teeth dropping in a damned heap. The worms and snakes eat their way through brains, slithering out of mangled ears and wailing mouths that only now—too late—proclaim the error of their ways. I looked around and every single face was transfixed, staring unblinkingly at the white sheet of hell.

Suddenly the sheet went blank. All heads turned toward the back, and we could see Isaías peering over the side of the field. The generator had gone the way of many soccer balls—it had fallen over the steep drop to the river below. We gathered around as two boys went running down the hill to retrieve what was left of the generator. Manuco shook his head and, inspired by the bottle of trago he kept tucked inside his jacket, proclaimed: “It must have been the Catholics. A Catholic must have given it a push!” Even Isaías managed a weak smile as we kept peering over the cliff.

The images that evening had awakened in the hermanos and hermanas gathered in Carhuahurán a sense of shared experiences with the actors who appeared on the screen, despite the radically different context. The audience was not passively consuming this visual feast but rather, as Michel De Certeau suggests, they were elaborating their own secondary productions.²¹ These secondary productions allowed them to imagine a Christian community that erased centuries as well as cultural and national differences and to script a world in which they as well as the Israelites traverse the same landscape—a landscape of exodus, struggle, and return.²² Arjun Appadurai has written that today the imagination plays a more important role than ever before in social life: “The new power of the imagination in the fabrication of social lives is inescapably tied up with images, ideas and opportunities that come from elsewhere, often moved around by the vehicles of the mass media.”²³ Both the Bible films and Radio Amauta have been key players in the collective memories people have about the sasachakuy tiempo. I sat in an audience that ranged from wawakuna wrapped in shawls around their mothers’ backs to elderly men and women who had first watched these films when the Virgin Mary was still a soprano. Where do the images come from that we use to construct our memories? Can “reel images” become the stuff of “real” life?

My understanding of these questions is greatly influenced by Gauri Viswanathan.²⁴ She suggests that religion is in part an epistemology, a way in which people both construct and interact with the real. If we understand conversion as not only a religious act but also a communicational act, an interpretive act, a way of restructuring relationships, then we can see religion as very much a thing-of-this-world. We come closer to the experiential and phenomenological aspects of conversion to Evangelismo. The familiar stories of grinding poverty, rural-to-urban migration, anomie, social mobility, and fostering collective identity are all plausible motives for conversion, but clearly they do not exhaust the motives people have for becoming an Evangélico or the legacies of that conversion. These motives and their legacies are innumerable and shape every chapter of this book. For now, we turn to a holy triad.

Bodies of Faith

What is it about the Evangelical message that resonates so profoundly with the experience of displacement? The exodus figures prominently in the testimonies I have heard, and forced migration was one product of the internal armed conflict. However, displacement occurs on several dimensions, not only in the spatial realm. Due to the political violence, many rural villagers were unable to reproduce their daily cultural practices: burying loved ones was frequently impossible, taking sacrifices to the mountains was dangerous, and fiestas and ferias were suspended at various junctures. Even for populations that remained in situ during the war, there was a cultural displacement that blocked the reproduction of individual and collective identity. As Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson suggest, even populations that remain on their land can experience changes so profound that the naturalness of a place is called into question.²⁵

The Evangelical Christianity villagers practice contrasts with the “popular Catholicism” that characterized these communities for a span of several centuries.²⁶ Popular Catholicism—and its emphasis on the images of the saints—was constructed on the basis of the prehispanic Andean religion, in which faith was grounded in a sacred landscape of tutelary gods, via huacas and wamanis.²⁷ However, as Vidal has explained, Evangelical pastors urged people to burn the idols, arguing that the saints were just a “pile of rags” with painted yeso (plaster of paris) faces.

Pastor Pascual made the same argument in another conversation. It was a relentlessly rainy day and I was huddled inside my room in Carhuahurán, watching the dirt and straw mixture that held the doorframe in place slowly turn to mud, large gobs thudding to the ground. Amid this dreary scene of domestic decay, I heard a familiar voice outside my door. Pastor Pascual helped force open my door, strategically using it to shove the accumulated mud to one side of the room. He gave his striped poncho a few good shakes. His brown felt hat was also soaked, but he left it on. I never saw anyone take off their hat except in church or when singing the national anthem. I ladled up a cup of miski yaku, and we settled in for a chat. At some point I asked if the Evangélicos in Carhuahurán had destroyed their saints, and he began nodding mid-question.

“Our Señor forbids it. Before, people thought they had power. We believed in them. But they’re just yeso. I also had fiestas and placed candles and flowers—kneeling I prayed to them,” Pascual recalled, shaking his head. “But they’re the work of the devil. You place flowers, candles, but nothing happens. But when you deliver yourself to the evangelio, you’re with God and the devil hates you. The devil looks at you all bothered,” he explained, making a diabolically bothered grimace. “He tries to make you fall however he can. The saints—they’re made of yeso, dirt, rags! I could make one right now,” he scoffed. “I could make a saint or a virgin! But they worship them. What power can these have?” He shook his head. “Those who trust in the saints are trusting in the devil—not in our Señor Jesucristo but in the devil himself. God doesn’t permit that.”

While the saints and tutelary gods anchored faith in icons and a defined sacred geography, Evangelismo is simultaneously “deterritorialized” and embodied. From the conversations I had with Evangélicos, it is clear the Evangelical body is occupied by either Satan or the Holy Spirit.²⁸ I think of this as “floating charisma”: the transformative power of faith is no longer “fixed” in religious images or moored to the landscape. So where does it inhere? In the Bible and in the body.

I recall one evening in culto in Carhuahurán. The rain did not keep the faithful from climbing up the hill to the Evangelical church next door to Michael’s corral. I was using my flashlight, a round ball of light bouncing along the path. I paused for a moment, remembering the curfew on flashlights that had been imposed at the Sunday formación. It was late 1999 and concerns that people were “walking again” (a reference to renewed Senderista activity) were fueled by sightings of flashlight beams in the hills. The ronderos had established a shoot-on-sight rule, but I checked my watch and it was only 7:30—the (flash)lights out began at 9:00 p.m.

I entered and took a place on one of the wooden slabs. After several hymns the pastor requested we stand to recite a passage from the Bible, and I noticed the women, each holding a tattered book in her hands. None of the women could read, but the formality of the book was important. That book appeared in many people’s stories of the war. The Bible had literally saved lives.

Dionisia was one of the women in culto that evening. I was visiting her a few days later and offered to take her photograph. She was delighted by the idea and carefully sat under a bush in her yard, smoothing a few rebellious strands of hair with her hands. When I began to focus my camera, she told me to wait a moment because she had forgotten something important. Dionisia went into her house and I heard the sounds of a search. She came out with her Bible and told me to wait again. Flipping through her book, she finally came to the page she was looking for. She held the Bible up in front of her chest, opened to a blood-stained page 127: “This Bible saved me when the malafekuna attacked. The bullets were whizzing by my head and hitting houses. A bullet came straight at me—I saw the terruco take aim. But I held up my Bible and it stopped the bullet. God saved me that day.”

Just as the Bible had the power to stop bullets, it also provided protection from the capricious mountain gods and the remains of the gentiles. In that same conversation with Pastor Pascual, I asked whether the hermanos should walk with their Bible in hand.

“Of course! You walk with your Bible because this is your weapon [arma]! It’s our spiritual weapon,” Pascual explained. “I don’t trust in guns, and I don’t carry one because my weapon is in Quechua, in Spanish. With the Bible, you follow God. If you carry this weapon, you aren’t afraid. If you pass a spring that is evaporating—well, I’ve taken a drink from a spring as it evaporated. I’ve decided ‘here I’m going to sit.’ You aren’t afraid because God is with you. You can sleep anywhere, you ask God, you say, ‘I’m with God,’ and you aren’t afraid.” Thus the Bible helped protect Evangélicos from many of the males de campo, including witchcraft and its potentially lethal effects.

In addition to charisma inhering in the Bible, it infuses the body. The Evangelical body is filled with, and testimony to, God’s power. Conversion narratives were replete with revelations in which God operated with a surgeon’s precision, removing illness and healing the body. This is a religion that ritualizes rupture and elaborates histories of discontinuity: the reborn Evangelical body testifies to the power of the Holy Spirit to effect dramatic change. The word is made body for the Evangélicos, whose testimonies underscore the felt presence of God at work in their bodies and in their lives. Numerous pastors assured me that Evangélicos who had been forced to flee carried their most important possession within them: their faith in El Señor Jesucristo.

Local Theologies

There will be world war. The people will suffer until death, but without finding death. God will take death away from them. People will want to die. From the highest peak of the mountains people will throw themselves. They’ll cut their own throats with knives, but they won’t die. Now people try to escape death, but a time is coming when they will seek it. Nation against nation, the world war will come. Now they say they’re preparing arms. I’m not sure—I think they say the arms are atomic. For the war between nations, a world war between governments. Between pueblos they’ll terminate each other. The civil war we had here in the campo—their pueblos were peaceful then, not like us. We were in sasachakuy tiempo. But war will shake their pueblos, will leave their cities desolate. Everyone will flail themselves—this will be called the river of blood [yawar mayu]. Oh, for many kilometers people’s blood will flow like a river! Their intestines will be like guano all over the ground. According to the word of God we are in the final days. It says in the Bible that nation will rise up against nation, kingdom against kingdom. All of this is happening. They talk about all of this on the radio.

—Pastor Pascual Bautista, Assembly of God, Carhuahurán, 1999

As the violence increased throughout Ayacucho, city-based pastors—Vidal included—found it increasingly difficult to continue visiting rural communities such as Carhuahurán. Vidal stopped his traveling from 1984 to 1991 due to death threats from the Senderistas: he was not alone in being the target of their violence. As the PTRC discovered, Evangélicos were explicitly considered an ideological and organizational obstacle to the spread of Senderismo.²⁹ Where the Evangélicos reigned, people’s hearts and minds were already committed, and it was Evangelicals in the Apurímac Valley who were among the first to organize rondas campesinas and take up arms against the “legions of the antichrist.”³⁰ Local pastors exercised tremendous autonomy and began interpreting the Bible according to the daily realities of war and within a narrative tradition emphasizing the cataclysmic change of “tiempos.”

When contemplating what sort of interpretive language popular religions employ to characterize the past and imagine the future, we might think in terms of narrative sedimentation. Andean oral histories are replete with millenarian, messianic imagery, and this is the context in which local pastors began “pentecostalizing” their religious message and practices.³¹ As Robbins has noted, Pentecostal Christianity has both world-breaking and world-making facets, which introduce their own cultural logics while being organizationally local and responsive to local concerns.³² The Evangelical message was blended with Andean narrative traditions, with which it resonated. My earliest conversations in the alturas of Huanta included references to the time of the plague, to the clouds of locusts that had eaten crops and blocked out the sun, blackening the entire sky. This was a world of portents that were being interpreted and given meaning: local Evangelical pastors were key figures in providing a narrative structure in the midst of the chaos of war.³³ As it turns out, it was not only Monseñor Cipriani who was “making theology” in Ayacucho during the internal armed conflict.³⁴

This was also a militant theology that allowed for arming (and subsequently disarming) these communities. There is, of course, nothing intrinsically peaceful about Evangelismo. Indeed, Christians have a bellicose track record on the world stage. In both the Apurímac valley and the alturas of Huanta, many ronderos saw themselves as Christian soldiers marching off to war.³⁵ The descriptions of the Senderistas focused on their monstrosity and their allegiance to the Antichrist. As Pastor Pascual recounted, “They were demons, worse than dogs. They did not care about life, about death. It was all the same to them. They weren’t human.” Within this framework, killing enemies was an act in the service of God. Here I part ways with Pastor Vidal, who insisted the ronderos were not Evangélicos in the moments in which they killed. To the contrary, these were Christian warriors doing God’s work in the battle between good and evil, and some groups of ronderos sang hymns as they marched off to patrol.³⁶

Yet killing also provoked ambivalent emotions for many men. Saving souls was a concern not only for pastors such as Vidal who baptized people in the midst of the armed conflict in preparation for what seemed a certain and untimely death. Individual ronderos also struggled to reconcile “Thou shall not kill” with their participation in the armed struggle. On first glance killing would seem incompatible with Evangelismo and the alleged sanctity of human life. However, the pentecostalized framing of the violence allowed the ronderos to religiously justify taking a life and anticipate standing before the “Tribunal of Christ” on judgment day. For many Evangélicos, they were preparing to atone for their acts even as they committed them.

Which leads us to the communities in the central-south that remained Shining Path strongholds. The massive conversions that characterized the alturas of Huanta occurred during the 1980s as these communities took a stance against Shining Path, formed their rondas campesinas, and became armed communities of faith. In the case of Carhuahurán, some six hundred families from surrounding communities formed a centro poblado for security purposes, and the Evangelical discourse was one resource mobilized to construct a common enemy and to suppress long-standing boundary conflicts and other rivalries. However, given the antagonistic relationship between two ideological projects—Evangelismo and Senderismo—what happened in Accomarca, Cayara, Hualla, and Tiquihua?

During the TRC, I began spending more time in these communities and was struck by a different Evangelical chronology. While people in the north were worried the church was enfriándose (cooling off) in the postwar period, in the central-south Evangelismo was heating up. New churches were being built, the number of Evangélicos was on the rise, and there was a shared discourse regarding who the new hermanos and hermanas were. In Accomarca, mama Aurelia whispered that they were “those who have a past.” In Hualla, Moises sneered in disgust as he spoke about the former Shining Path militants who were now reborn: “Before they were beasts, savages. They walked around with their weapons. Now they walk around with their Bibles—now they want to be runakuna. God may pardon them, but I can’t.” One evening in the Assembly of God church in Tiquihua, Pastor David Ipurre began the service by holding up his Bible and telling his congregation, “If we had known these commandments, we would not have killed. We would not have killed among brothers, among cousins, among neighbors.” I was not so sure; they may well have killed but with a different ideological reason for doing so.

In the context of a morally complex social world of guilt, defiance, remorse, and resentment; of losses for which there is no true redress; where determining accountability and thirsting for justice are ongoing and contentious processes; at a time when evangelical pastors are busy treating so many heridas del alma (wounds of the soul)—the role of Evangelismo in broader justice debates demands our attention.

Judgment Day

[The] religious imagination about justice reflects the state’s legal system back upon itself as an empty shell, decorated on the outside with the ceremonials of rule but devoid of the accountability that would make it just.

—James Holston, “Alternative Modernities”

I ended the last chapter suggesting we look more closely at the role community-level faith-based actors play in transitional contexts. By now it should be clear that Evangelical Christians have had tremendous influence on the course of the violence and its aftermath. Robbins notes that the reorientation of people’s moral fields is one of the most important aspects of Pentecostal Christianity’s cultural transformation.³⁷ I agree, and stress that I am not equating the legal and the moral; the gap between the two is one productive space for Evangelismo.

Transitional justice imports many elements from the liberal justice and human rights traditions with their foundations in Enlightenment principles of individual freedom; the autonomous individual and the social contract; the public sphere of secular reason; the rule of law; and the centrality of retributive justice with its emphasis on punishment, particularly in the form of trials. Some have referred to this as the “liberal peace-building consensus” and acknowledge the many contributions this approach has made to postwar reconstruction.³⁸ However, when we look beyond conflict resolution or peace-building to the daily work of social repair, the limitations of secular justice to address profound moral injuries may in part explain people’s faith in divine justice. Confronted with the burden of unpunished crime and the steadfast hope the sasachakuy tiempo never repeats itself, divine justice is not simply “peasant fatalism” but rather an alternative conception of justice and reckoning that lies outside the liberal approach to these issues. The invocation of Christian compassion and righteous wrath weaves throughout daily life in these communities—both north and central-south.

Doña Flora is a deaconess in the Pentecostal church and one of the first hermanas in Carhuahurán. She is a force to be reckoned with—someone who, as a young girl, had fought off the hacendado who tried to take advantage of her. She converted long before the sasachakuy tiempo, prompted by a revelation in which God operated on her leg and removed the black ooze that had spread up and down her thigh, itching incessantly like a hoard of angry ants. She spoke frequently about her faith, which caused her face to flush with what I can only call passion.

One afternoon I asked her about the final days and what would happen. Although at first Flora assured me she would need several days and nights to fully answer that question, she finally offered an abbreviated version of the end of time.

“In revelation I talk with Him. I fasted for six days, without water, without food, nothing. When I finished the week of fasting, El Señor appeared to me—with an apparatus as large as a recorder, shining, and He placed the apparatus in the pulpit. It was like a lantern but it was as big as a tower. It reached up to heaven, all white and I climbed up. There were many flowers—we don’t see that sort of flower here on earth. There was just a big field. So I called out with my hand, ‘Everyone who was created by God, come,’ and my echo kept repeating. I called three times, and when I came back down there were so many people waiting. It’s like sheep that we mix with other sheep, or like our sheep and goats that we can’t mix. Everyone was separating—those who were with God on one side, and those who weren’t with God on the other. To the left and to the right they were separating. When I sat down on that apparatus, Our Señor, He could see inside me. He could see inside all of our bodies, like He had cut them open.”

“Were you dead, on the ground?”

“No, but opened up. You’re not dead, but alive and you’re seeing your heart. Our hearts were shining, as if water had entered. Everyone who believed in God, their hearts were shining, some so big, and some even bigger,” using her hands to show their varying sizes. “The people who had fasted, there was a light shining in their hearts. I saw, like when we kill a sheep, it was like that. Opened up. And my heart, the right was white but the other side was still lacking—it’s black even now! But other people who don’t know God, their hearts were totally black. Those who know return with God.”

“So, people are chosen?”

“Yes, and He doesn’t make them go back.”

“So God will judge—He will look into each of us?”

“Yes, and some will be saved.”

“And what about the others—the ones with black hearts?”

“They’re sent back. They’ll be punished in the rain of fire.”

While some would argue that justice deferred is justice denied, I want to complicate that maxim. There were multiple justice systems interacting during the internal armed conflict and its aftermath: those of Shining Path, the armed forces, human rights organizations, the ronderos, communal authorities, and the divine. Each of these actors holds different conceptions of justice and reckoning, of what constitutes the individual and collective good, and which takes precedence when they come in tension. These different understandings of justice reverberate throughout these communities and challenge the supremacy of liberal models of justice and the dichotomy they construct between retributive and restorative forms of justice—while favoring the former.

In complex moral situations, judging may be fraught with challenges. In conditions of sustained political violence and militarized states of emergency, many people will have behaved less admirably than they might have wished. Some will finger a neighbor in hopes of extra food or an end to torture; some will name names to settle old accounts; others may kill under threat of losing their own lives; still others will kill for the sheer pleasure of doing so. Reconstructing a moral community in the context of many bloodied hands calls for exploring these multiple conceptions of justice. For some people and groups, legal justice—criminal justice and punishment—will be the highest priority. For others, this may be what they demand for the leaders they hold responsible for their suffering yet have very different ideas of what should be done with the local-level perpetrators with whom they live. Trials may be demanded, and legally mandated, for the Taylors, Fujimoris, and Miloševićs, and people may want the most brutal local leaders thrown in jail. However, many people are more disturbed by the neighbor down the street or the fellow that smirks at them each week at the market. Justice takes many forms—both in its demands and in its application—and asking, “Who are the victims and whom do they hold responsible for their suffering? Who are the guilty and what should be done with them?” may lead to answers we could not have anticipated.

I was told repeatedly that we cannot see into another human being’s heart, followed by the question, “So who are we to judge?” Some will find solace in leaving that task to God. This does not supplant demands for other forms of justice in this life, particularly redistributive justice, but it may provide a necessary complement to the always imperfect, always deferred ideal of earthly justice. I have been made achingly aware of the limits of secular forms of reckoning in the face of deep moral injuries—for addressing the heridas del alma that sent so many people searching in the Clinic of the Soul.