With Lopez gone, new emphasis on human rights - Colombia's conservative Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo - Cover Story

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 24, 1997 by Leslie Wirpsa

BOGOTA -- Crisis and conversion often accompany one another, and those two elements may be at the heart of the movement of the Colombian bishops' conference to the national forefront on peace and human rights issues.

For years, under the influence of political and ecclesial hard-liner Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, Colombia's bishops were noted for being among the most conservative in Latin America. But renewed violence in the wider culture coupled with an easing of tensions in the church that occurred when Lopez departed for Rome is transforming the ecclesial leaders, church and secular sources say.

In 1989, Pax Christi Holland issued a human rights report on Colombia criticizing the bishops for not making a public defense of human rights despite deep commitments by religious and laity, many of whom died working for justice and the poor.

Today, however, many Colombians consider the Catholic church one of the few institutions with broad enough credibility to help mediate an end to the country's bloody conflict.

Bishop Jorge Ivan Castano Rubio of Quibdo, said, "Life is endangered in this country. We cannot stand with our arms crossed and remain silent. Our worst risk is to fail in making a sincere commitment to solving this.... No bishop today can say, `I choose not to drink from this cup.'"

More than 10,000 people were displaced from Castano's region in February by military bombardments and paramilitary squads. Castano said that confronting the violence and the internal displacement of more than one million Colombians in the last decade has galvanized the bishops.

"Internal displacement was the final shout," he said. "This violence went beyond the kidnappings and killings of government officials, of politicians, of soldiers. This violence was against the defenseless poor, the marginalized, who began to die absurdly."

Key to the bishops' new activism was the 1995 publication by the episcopal conference of a detailed investigation of the displaced.

Bishop Gutierrez Tulio Duque of the diocese of Apartado in the violence-riven region of Uraba said that with the report the bishops "jumped forward prophetically on a huge problem."

The bishops subsequently analyzed the factors that force people to flee and prevent their return: guerrilla violence, paramilitaries, political exclusion, abandonment and impoverishment in the countryside, economic inequity and the repercussions of neoliberal economic policies on the poor.

One episcopal conference insider who asked to remain anonymous said, "There are about 10 bishops from conflict zones who get together to reflect on the reality their people live. I sat in on one of those conversations, and they speak in ways that years ago would have been described as revolutionary."

The bishops have played key roles in mediating explosive situations, like the freeing June 15 of 70 army soldiers held hostage for nine months by guerrillas from the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, FARC, in the southern Caqueta department. The success of that negotiation was attributed largely to the low-profile pastoral work of Bishop Luis Augusto Castro Quiroga of Cartagena del Chaira.

"The FARC have controlled this zone for years. This is a zone that has been marginalized and forgotten by the government," Castro said shortly after the soldiers" release. "The FARC has filled a political void here; drug trafficking has filled an economic void."

The bishops have also given impetus to a national reconciliation commission seeking advice on peace initiatives from Central American counterparts such as progressive San Salvador Auxiliary Bishop Gregorio Rosa Chavez.

For years Hector Torres, editor of the Christian monthly Utopias, was disillusioned with the response of the Colombian bishops to violence and poverty. During an interview in June, however, he lavished superlatives on the conference.

"They've become involved in human rights, in working for peace," he said. "They now raise their voices in favor of the impoverished sectors. They criticize the political elites, state corruption.... They criticize paramilitary groups, promote justice work. Last February, their plenary assembly focused on the impoverishment of the Colombian people."

The Lopez appointment to Rome in 1992 contributed to the shift in the conference. A bishop, speaking off the record, said, "Under Lopez Trujillo, the bishops did things in silence. Now there is a great deal more freedom," he said.

Episcopal Conference President Alberto Giraldo denied Lopez's influence. He said the changes in the conference "have been germinating for 30 years, since Vatican II, (the Latin American bishops' meetings in) Medellin and Puebla, through reflection and thanks to lessons learned."

Church sources said that the pastoral leadership of Giraldo, archbishop of Popayan, and of Archbishop Pedro Rubiano Saenz of Bogota, Giraldo's predecessor as head of the conference, helped to create an ecclesial climate of renewal.

However, Fr. Fernan Gonzalez, assistant director of the Jesuit Center of Investigation and Popular Education, said that with Lopez Trujillo in Rome, the Colombian bishops began to "speak out without a big cloud hanging over them."