The padre then launched into a description of his work in the campo and how he was training a small number of campesinos to administer Catholic rites in the countryside. As he told me of his confidence that with a bit of work Catholicism would have a firm grip on the countryside, I felt a question inside of me itching to get out.
Looking the padre straight in the eye, I asked, "What do you think about people who come from another continent and interfere with the beliefs of the people living in a country, trying to convert them to another religion?"
He hesitated a moment. "Well, the Catholic Church came to Latin America together with the Spanish State. The two can't be separated. So whatever the State did, the Church did, too, and had some responsibility for it. When Spain invaded with force, killing off the natives, the Church was part of this movement. Some of the Church staved apart, and worked with the Indians, but still the Church was partly responsible."
His long-winded answer angered me. He had completely dodged the question. I decided to put it more bluntly, though keeping my tone soft so as not to sound antagonistic. "But what about a group like the Catholics who come into a country that was completely non-Catholic, mostly pagan, and force those people to become Catholics and give up their original beliefs?"
"If the conquering belief is superior, it's justified."
"And in this case it is superior?"
"Yes, I think so." With that he finished his beer, pushed his plate aside, and got up from the table.
*****
The Bolivian people are players in a drama that is developing slowly but that moves inexorably to an unmistakable conclusion. Little by little the tentacles of Western society creep further from the cities into the countryside, strangling off the traditions inherited from the Indian past. It is because of its geography that Bolivia has eluded the grasp of modernism for as long as it has. Its brutal altiplano in the west, its gaping valleys in the center and its impassable jungles in the east have made efficient communication and transportation almost impossible until very recently. But, with economic progress and the importation of technology from abroad, the once-isolated countryside is becoming increasingly exposed to the Western life that flourishes in urban centers like La Paz and Cochabamba.
Once the road to modernization has begun, it will not stop. The integration of the campesinos into the national society began in 1952 and cannot be averted. The only variables are the amount of time it takes and the suffering it causes. The standard of living of some parts of the nation will rise, but it is likely that the gap that now separates rich from poor will broaden. And as the campesinos see the new cars and private swimming pools of the wealthy, they will be less willing to bear the increasing pressures that modernization exerts on their traditional lifestyle. Then, perhaps, the pain of that pressure will become the energy that moves them toward justice.
I remember an afternoon I spent in Viedma Hospital, the chief medical facility in Cochabamba. The buildings that make up the hospital had been converted from the manor house of a plantation owner at the time of the Revolution. Now its plaster walls looked as though they might crumble momentarily. I sat in one of the examination rooms as a doctor was setting a cast on a broken leg. I watched as he examined the bandaged leg of the girl on the bed in the center of the dimly-lit, sullen room. She was young, about 19, and her pretty face was distorted with the effort to repress the groans that sprang from the pain shooting through her leg.
The girl was from the campo, the doctor told me as he carefully unrolled the bandage. Her village was located about ten miles out on the road that leads to La Paz. The girl, barely able to speak between her clenched teeth, told him that she had waited two weeks after the fracture before coming to seek medical care in Cochabamba. The doctor, his hands working rapidly, removed the moist bandage and, with a professional sweep of the arm, dropped it into a basket by the bed.
When he looked at the exposed leg, a broad grin crept over his clean-shaven face. Oblivious of the girl's tortured movements, he beckoned his assistant over to the bed. "Mira," he said, and began to laugh. "El trabajo del brujo." The work of the witch. He pointed to the streaks of tobacco dye that covered the bruises on the girl's leg. An expert in herbal medicine in the girl's village had applied the tobacco in line with an ancient tradition that prescribes herbal cures for injuries of all kinds. The girl, her leg still swollen with its two weeks of fracture, clutched the edge of the bed and closed her eyes as the doctor lightly touched the tobacco stains. Still joking with his assistant, he put on his white gloves and prepared to apply the plaster cast.