Looking ahead: church groups seek new models of solidarity

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 26, 2004 by Barbara Fraser, Paul Jeffrey

Part Ten: Solidarity

The same religious groups that once were responsible for highlighting human rights violations and government repression in Latin America are now highlighting "the economic issues that gave rise to the wars." Acting in solidarity with grass-roots groups throughout the region, religious organizations are bringing renewed hope for economic justice and development.

La Oroya, Peru

Ellie Stockton's first visit to this bleak mining town high in the Peruvian Andes is engraved on her memory.

"It was like I'd read about--the smokestacks, the barren hills, the streams that were deep chocolate, the sense of your throat burning and your eyes watering, and a complete disregard for the people," she said.

Although Stockton is the pastor of a Presbyterian Church (USA) from St. Louis, the problems she saw weren't far from home. Doe Run, the U.S.-based company whose smelter was spewing lead and sulfur dioxide into the air of La Oroya, was facing sanctions in Herculaneum, a town not far from St. Louis, because of lead emissions from its smelter there. Activists from the two communities had been brought together through a church-based network called Joining Hands Against Hunger.

"It's a new model for mission," Stockton said. "It's people on both sides of a partnership working on similar issues and working together to strategize and help each other address problems and create solutions. We're giving, receiving and working together, recognizing the gifts of both."

For residents of La Oroya, a trip to Herculaneum, sponsored by the Joining Hands Against Hunger Network, was an eye opener.

"The company is using more appropriate technology to control the contamination there," said Dora Santana, an obstetrician in La Oroya who works with the network. "We're asking them to use the same technology in La Oroya."

Joining Hands Against Hunger is just one example of the forms that the solidarity movement has taken since the 1970s and '80s, when faith-based groups in the United States joined forces with churches and base communities in countries from Guatemala to Chile, providing sanctuary to refugees and pressuring the United States to end support for repressive regimes.

Just as he has warned of the dangers of economic globalization, Pope John Paul II has called for the "globalization of solidarity."

"A culture of solidarity must be promoted that is capable of inspiring timely initiatives in support of the poor and the outcast, especially refugees forced to leave their villages and lands in order to flee violence," the pope wrote in Ecclesia in America, the papal exhortation issued after the 1997 Synod for America. "The church in America must encourage an economic order dominated not only by the profit motive but also by the pursuit of the common good, the equitable distribution of goods and the integral development of peoples."

Throughout the hemisphere, people of faith are answering the call.

"After the end of the Cold War and the peace processes [in Central America], there was a period of rethinking what solidarity would look like and what we needed to be paying attention to," said Marie Dennis, who heads the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns. "Very quickly, there was a move to focus on economic issues."

In many ways, that was a natural shift.

"The wars ended, but the underlying issues, particularly the economic issues that gave rise to the wars in the first place, remained," said Scott Wright, co-coordinator of the Washington-based Ecumenical Program on Central America and the Caribbean (EPICA). Many of these issues go beyond national borders, "so what we've seen in the past decade is a movement away from country-specific solidarity to a more regional-based solidarity with emerging grass-roots organizations," he told NCR.

Hemispheric solidarity

As the movement of solidarity with Latin America has matured and expanded, it has taken on new forms and moved into new areas. Countries that were in the spotlight in the 1970s and 1980s--such as Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua--still receive a great deal of attention. But there is also a growing network of groups looking at broader issues that affect the entire region. And while human rights and U.S. policy are still significant issues, activists are addressing matters ranging from external debt to free trade to immigration.

Increasingly, groups in the United States link up with organizations based in Latin America that are working on those issues in their own countries. The U.S. groups help their Latin American partners get their message heard in a U.S. forum through both grassroots education and policy advocacy.

"Sister" parishes date back several decades, and some U.S. dioceses have established relationships with dioceses in Latin American countries, especially in Mexico and Central America. The "sister" parish relationship encourages a closer bond between people, one hallmark of faith-based solidarity.

Churches and faith-based groups "have been the backbone of the solidarity movement in Latin America," said Lisa Haugaard, executive director of the Washington-based Latin America Working Group, a coalition that includes religious groups of various denominations. The solidarity movement "isn't exclusively the faith community, but that's a very strong part of it. And that makes it very deep, because it goes beyond the issue of the moment to a connection with people that persists."