2. Latin American Colonialism and its Legacy
of Bondage
Just as the Hebrews in Egypt toiled beneath the yoke of Pharaoh and his taskmasters,
so did the peoples of Latin America for centuries endure bondage to colonial
rulers.
And just as remnants of the slave mentality persisted among the Hebrews in
the wilderness, so does the legacy of colonial attitudes and institutions persist
in Latin America today.
The image of Christ dying in passive agony on the cross, and the image of the
Blessed Virgin as a dolorous woman in mourning and pierced by a sword, are
common in popular Latin American Catholicism. They speak of centuries of impotence
under Spanish and other foreign masters. Even today many practicing Roman Catholics
approach carnival as a temporary relief from suffering — a
reality that was present yesterday and will be here tomorrow, always. In
this sense, carnival is escapism — for
a few days. Then real life continues.
The origins of this suffering are clearly to be found in the aristocratic system
imposed by papal bull and the armed might of Spain and Portugal, a system that
relegated the indigenous Indian population to a life of slavery, at best. In Inter
Caeteris, Pope Alexander VI designated King Ferdinand and Queen
Isabella "lords
and masters" of the New World. Thus were the treasure stores of gold and silver,
and later coffee and beef, thrown open — to a well-defined elite.
The encomienda was the basic instrument used by the Spanish empire
for settling Latin America. This was a grant of Indians to an encomendero who
assumed the obligation, in principle, of Christianizing and civilizing them.
The Indians, "in exchange," were required to provide labor and tribute to
Spain. We look back upon this epoch as a period of brutal and
cynical "pacification" of
the indigenous people by conquering exploiters. But it is important to
recognize that the encomenderos who
were charged with "Christianizing" the natives took their jobs seriously enough to allow
the clergy to move in and do their evangelical works without interference.
It may be tempting, now, to view those early missionaries as merely cynical
agents of colonial expansionism — but in fact, it could not have
been so. The enduring pervasive influence of the Catholic Church in Latin
America
attests to the success of those missionaries on the front lines. Had
they not been motivated by a sincere Christian faith, they could not
have left
such an indelible mark on an entirely different culture.
However, religious works cannot avoid their political context (an insight of
the liberation theologians). Although in theory the encomienda was not a grant of land, in practice
many of the encomienderos were also
granted mercedes, or legal title to
vast tracts that gave rise to the late estates. After the encomienda system
was abolished, this control of land allowed the economic exploitation of the
natives to continue.
Two types of large landed estates survive
to this day from the colonial period:
- the hacienda (or fazenda, in Portuguese), raising cattle and
a diversity of crops for local use or sale; and
- the plantation, raising a single exportable crop.
Initially, Indians were given as slaves to the
landholders. Later, the "freed" natives were tied to the landowners through debts
brought on by a subsistence wage system. The shortage of good land off the estate
made it easy for the landlord to
attract or coerce labor onto his estate.
This pattern continues today with an underclass
largely descended from the Indian and African slaves, along with other dispossessed
groups. The haciendas and plantations are noted for their inefficient husbandry.
Landowners face few social or economic pressures to become good managers, and
often live in the cities leaving
the estates to be run by overseers. Consequently, the landowners often
do not make large profits, but that is not their objective. Their primary concern is the maintenance
of the two paramount features of the status quo, which go
hand in hand.
- First, labor is very cheap, because workers have no alternative place to
employ themselves, even though massive tracts of good land are held nearly
idle by the land barons.
- Second, the cost of holding on to huge estates — i.e., the taxes
charged by the public for the privilege of retaining possession — are
low or effectively nonexistent.
Strong incentives for good stewardship are as absent as the landlords.
There is also little incentive to productivity;
most of the population has no share in the fruits of the land or the profits
of the estates. The colonial system of land tenure discourages the
creation of capital, with most of the surplus from the land going to purchase
luxury goods that are produced at the expense of more useful manufacture
or more often are imported, thereby straining the country's balance of payments.
The situation in the cities is no better for the poor. who are drawn there
by word of mouth, radio, television and films that present the cities as
if they are the Promised Land. Of course, the image is false. So many landless
folk seeking employment in the cities have turned them into places of great
degradation. Urban land monopoly and speculation create tremendous housing
difficulties for the poor. For example, in 1950, 36% of Brazil's people lived
in cities, in 1988, 75% do so. Thus, the city of Sao Paulo has grown from
ca. 2.2 million in 1950 to ca. 17 million in less than forty years. Of these,
we are told that one third are favelados, landless urban squatters, and
over 2.5 million are street children.
Indeed, the primary purpose of holding
vast amounts of land, as Andre Gunder Frank writes in On Capitalist Underdevelopment, "is
not to use it but to prevent its use by others. These others, denied
access to the primary resource, necessarily fall under the domination
of the few
who do control it. And then they are exploited in all conceivable ways,
typically through low wages." ...
5. Poverty in the Wasteland: The Preferential
Option for the Poor
Jesus expressed
the contrast between ownership and stewardship in the pithy
saying: "You cannot serve God and mammon" (Matt. 6:24; Luke 16:13). Again
we see the real sting of Baal worship. Possessions, understood apart from their
Creator and their usefulness to man, become "master." They become idols that
dehumanize and kill. Stewardship never entails the passive acceptance of social
mores that allow possessions
to become masters (Luke 16:1-13). Thus, being
a caretaker of God's land means having a different view of reality than is prevalent
in a world ruled by possessions.
Jesus opens his ministry by claiming as real
what Isaiah had hoped for: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has
anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release
of captives and... to set at liberty those who
are oppressed" (Luke 4:18).
Society turned upside down is the topic of Jesus's keynote address in Luke: the
poor and hungry can be happy because they will no longer be poor and hungry.
But Jesus does not stop at this announcement, he goes on to call people to stewardship.
He asks men and women to love their enemies and to be merciful as God is merciful
(Luke 6:27-49). He urges them to do no less than act as a community where God,
not mammon,
rules. These are radical demands.
Latin American liberation theologians point out that, according to the Exodus
story and to Luke's gospel in particular, God's chosen people are the refuse
of society. The reversal — the reordering of those who are on top — is
good news to the poor! The recipients of God's grace, however, are not always
poor, oppressed, or helpless. The patriarchs, the judges, the Roman centurions,
and many others blessed by God certainly were not. Why did God act on their behalf
as well? God is faithful, and acts favorably for those who respond to him with
faith,
as Paul points out (Rom. 1:16).
The church's "preferential option for
the poor" must be seen as an application of the injunction to do justice and
love mercy. As Gustavo Gutierrez has always
insisted, we must maintain "both the universality of God's love and God's predilection
for those on the lowest rung of the ladder of history. To focus exclusively on
the one or the other is to mutilate
the Christian message."
Liberation theologians and other social reformers often fall into the trap of
romanticizing the poor, as did Nicolas Berdyaev in his early demi-Marxist days:
I then thought that the proletariat, as a working and class-conscious group,
exploited but at the same time free from the sin of exploitation, possessed the
psychological structure that is
favorable to the revelation of the truth...
The temptation here is to think of God's bias
for the poor in terms of a higher spirituality brought about by poverty. Yet
involuntary poverty is scarcely any guarantee of faith. If it were, its promotion
ought to be a primary mission of evangelism, and the exploitation of the disadvantaged
a cause to make the Church rejoice. The biblical bias is rather to be traced
back to the nature of
God himself.
God, finally, is the one who rejects power and takes upon himself, in the person
of his son, the ultimate sacrifice in solidarity with all who are crucified by
the power structures of this world. God not only has compassion for the poor,
he becomes, like them, weak. God not only reverses society, he appears on the
cross as a manifestation of this reversal. He appears, Paul wrote so vividly,
as foolishness, a
stumbling block, weakness, and uses "what is low and despised in the world...
to bring to nothing things that are" (Cor. 1:18-31). God becomes weak in order
to become one with his people. He wishes to be worshipped genuinely for the sake
of his loving essence, not falsely for the sake of attributes which compel, out
of fear, a counterfeit of worship. Thus Christ, in Dostoyevsky's powerful symbolism,
spurns the Devil's temptation to make use of miracle, mystery, and authority,
inviting instead a faith that finds in Truth and Goodness their own intrinsic
validation. It is in this sense that Jesus said, "My kingdom
is not of this world" (John 18:36), for in this world predatory power assails
the innocent and must be contained and curbed by power
harnessed to their defense.
"I have overcome the world" (John 16:33) may be interpreted to mean that Truth
and Goodness are triumphant simply because of what they are and that nothing
external can affect them. But human life and freedom cannot be made to depend
entirely upon the spiritual condition of other men, society and its rulers. The
rights of the individual must be safeguarded in case that spiritual condition
proves to be a low one or not sufficiently enlightened by grace. As Nicholas
Berdyaev put it, "A society that chose to be based solely upon grace and declined
to have any law would be a despotic society.... It is impossible to wait for
a
gracious regeneration of society to make human life bearable."
As a citizen of the spiritual order, the Christian lives under grace — and
is not restrained by power or authority. But in this life he or she is also,
inescapably, a citizen of the secular order, where power must be checked by power
and political means employed to serve the ends of grace, moving the world closer
to a likeness
of the Promised Land.
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