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
