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
