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.