Death and
resurrection in the rainforest as bishops meet for Amazon summit
One of the synod’s organisers, Father Peter
Hughes, said the three-week gathering would set out a new view of ecology based
on Christian faith in God as the creator of a ‘common home’. Photograph: Getty
Images
Indigenous
tribes see the Catholic church as a key ally in the ecological fight – and an
unprecedented synod is focused on how to stop the destruction
by Dan
Collyns in Puerto Maldonado
Sun 6 Oct
2019 07.00 BSTLast modified on Sun 6 Oct 2019 07.01 BST
A hundred
years ago the Harakmbut people were nearly wiped out.
Inhabitants
of a vast jungle region where Peru intersects with Brazil and Bolivia, the
tribespeople were enslaved by rubber barons and murdered en masse, only
surviving thanks to the help of Dominican missionaries.
Now a new
threat of extinction looms, and once again they are appealing to the Catholic
church.
As
wildfires and deforestation drive the Amazon rainforest towards a tipping point
beyond which it cannot recover, Yesica Patiachi, a Harakmbut leader from Peru,
is heading to Rome to take part in an unprecedented synod of Catholic bishops from
across the region.
Although
she is not a practising Catholic, the 32-year-old schoolteacher sees the church
as a key ally to save the rainforest.
“Eden is
here in the Amazon and we are destroying it,” she said. “We cannot pray to God
when we are destroying his creation.”
Harakmbut
indigenous leader Yesica Patiachi, 32, will travel to Rome for the Amazon
synod.
Starting on
Sunday, bishops from the nine South American nations that share the Amazon will
meet in the Vatican to try and muster the spiritual and earthly forces to pull
the world’s largest rainforest back from the brink of destruction.
One of the
synod’s organisers, Father Peter Hughes, said the three-week gathering would
set out a new view of ecology based on Christian faith in God as the creator of
a “common home”. Hughes said the Catholic church should firmly place itself
alongside the region’s indigenous people and defending their territorial rights
and way of life.
“The life
of the [Amazon] people is intrinsically, inherently part of the territory. If
the territory is injured, the people are injured,” he said.
Stretching
from the Andes in the west to Brazil’s Atlantic coast, the Amazon basin
ecosystem faces a host of threats.
Fires –
many ignited deliberately – have surged across the region this year. In Brazil,
whose territory includes the largest portion of the Amazon, blazes increased by
84% in August compared to the same period last year, and deforestation spiked
in July to a level not seen in more than a decade.
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Rains in
September have helped efforts to control the fires, but the aggressively
anti-environmental rhetoric of Jair Bolsonaro continues to emboldenland
grabbers, loggers and miners to invade indigenous or protected land. Brazil’s
far-right president has repeatedly promised to open up indigenous territories
for mining and development.
The
situation is equally dire in neighbouring Bolivia, where up to 4m hectares in
the Chiquitano dry forest, Amazon and the Gran Chaco ecosystems have gone up in
flames in the past two months. Environmentalists blame the leftwing president
Evo Morales for legalising slash-and-burn fires to open up pastureland for
cattle farming and beef exports to China.
“The Amazon
is witness to death and resurrection right now,” said Hughes in the Peruvian
capital Lima, where he has lived and worked for nearly 50 years.
“It is a
place of beauty, a place of immense marvel, providence, abundance of life on
every level. But it’s also a place of death, destruction, violence, ransacking,
plunder and tremendous chaos.”
A fire
burns out of control after spreading onto a farm along a highway in Nova Santa
Helena municipality in northern Mato Grosso State, south in the Amazon basin in
Brazil.
A fire burns out of control after spreading
onto a farm along a highway in Nova Santa Helena municipality in northern Mato
Grosso State, south in the Amazon basin in Brazil. Photograph: Joao
Laet/AFP/Getty Images
The
Catholic church has had troubled history in Latin America. It was the
ideological force for imperialism that brought death, disease and slavery. But
Catholic priests have often side with indigenous people against invaders.
Both sides
of that history are palpable in Puerto Maldonado, which grew from a frontier
rubber settlement during the 1902 rubber boom into a sprawling city powered by
a modern-day gold rush.
Looming
large over the city is the most ruthless of all the rubber barons: Carlos
Fermín Fitzcarrald – the inspiration for Werner Herzog’s 1982 film
Fitzcarraldo.
His name
adorns the town’s main avenue, schools and monuments; his memory is still vivid
in a region where entire ethnic groups were decimated during the rubber boom.
Harakmbut
elders still tell how Fitzcarrald tricked thousands of tribespeople to meet on
a river islet, where they were massacred.
Bodies
clogged the river, and sickened entire villages downstream. Survivors fled into
the forest, emerging only after generations of their peers had died from
violence and disease.
“Fitzcarrald
is no longer here but his spirit is in every oil company; it’s in the logging
and the illegal mining which destroys our forests,” said Patiachi.
Salvation
came in the figure of a Dominican missionary, Father José Álvarez, who arrived
in Madre de Dios in 1917, two decades after Fitzcarrald died. The Spanish
priest helped protect the Harakmbut from rubber tappers, and came to be known
as Apaktone, or ‘old father’ .
“We recognise Apaktone as the one who came to
prevent the total extinction of the Harakmbut,” said Patiachi.
Álvarez’s
pastoral work in the 150,000 sq km Apostolic Diocese of Madre de Dios left its
mark on Dominican followers including Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of
the founders of Liberation Theology, a distinctly Latin American movement,
which teaches that Catholics must revive the biblical commitment to the poor.
Puerto
Maldonado was also the setting for Pope Francis’s 2018 encounter with indigenous
leaders, where the first Latin American pontiff warned that the Amazon was
facing an unprecedented threat.
Yet the
church is rapidly losing followers as evangelical Protestant groups expand
across the region. Fifty years ago nearly everybody in Latin America lived and
died a Catholic; by 2014 69% of Latin Americans belonged to the church.
One of the
proposals the synod will consider is a change to the Catholic church’s
centuries-old requirement that priests must be celibate in order to allow the
ordination of married men in remote areas of the Amazon.
But
organizers insist that the church is not simply fighting for its share in the
market of souls. Cardinal Claudio Hummes, the president of the synod, said this
week that the Amazon was facing a crisis in which ecological problems were
inseparable from social issues.
To find a
solution, the world must hear “both the cry of the earth and that of the poor”
he said.
Xavier
Arbex, a Swiss priest who has spent close to 40 years in Madre de Dios, said
what the pope is proposing is “socially and politically revolutionary”.
But half a
lifetime defending human rights in the Amazon makes the 77-year-old cleric
pessimistic the synod can impede the “savage capitalism” driving the
destruction.
“The synod
will shine a light but it won’t be enough to drive away the darkness,” he said.
Sixty miles
west of Puerto Maldonado, storefront evangelical churches sit amid wooden
shacks and bars in La Pampa, a frontier boomtown which sprang up around a
recent gold rush.
Since a
government crackdown earlier this year, illegal miners have pushed deeper into
the jungle, and the local economy is grinding to a halt.
Sitting
outside his roadside motorcycle repair shop, Samuel Tecse Barrios put it
simply: “There’s no work.”
Tecse
Barrios belongs to the Israelite Mission of the New Universal Pact, a Peruvian
doomsday sect that is just one of the Catholic church’s competitors in the
Amazon.
Male
members of the evangelical group grow long hair and beards while women cover
their heads like nuns. With their colourful, flowing robes they look like
overgrown cast members of a nativity play.
It is 36C
in the shade, but Tecse Barrios, 57, does not accept that rising temperatures
are driven partly by Amazon deforestation.
“It is
God’s punishment. He told us we would destroy ourselves,” he said.
“We’ve
sinned worse than in Sodom and Gomorrah. What comes next will be seven years of
drought, famine, torrential rains and floods, as it says in the Old Testament.”
Back in Puerto
Maldonado, Zully Rojas, 53, tends a grotto to the Virgin Mary in the airy home
shared by the Missionary Dominican Sisters of the Rosary. It is dotted with
Amazon plants and baskets of Brazil nuts on a typical Kené patterned blanket.
“Some thing
we will never agree on,” says Rojas of dialogue with other churches. “But
caring for the forest is synonymous with life, on this we have to come to an
agreement.”
Beneath the
shrine there is a verse from Exodus 3:5: “Take your sandals off your feet, for
the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”
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