Peru | Tim Høiland

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Repaso: Mayan apocalypse, LatAm’s economy, faith predictions, Alabama & immigration, Anne Lamott on writing, 16th century social media

January 6, 2012 — Leave a comment

1. Mayans weigh in on the end of the world
We’ve all heard about the supposed ancient Mayan prediction that the end of the world would come in 2012. Kevin Rushby with the Guardian has an interesting piece taking a look at the Mayans of today, and how rumors of an impending apocalypse have been greatly exaggerated. Rushby focuses largely on the Mayan religious landscape, including a look at the historical roots of their religious syncretism born out of a survival instinct:

The Mayans have had to survive for a long time as underdogs and they have done it by accommodation. When the Spanish came in 1523, plotting total cultural destruction, the indigenous people (Mayan is a catch-all term for several related languages and peoples) responded with guile. Images of Catholic saints were stuffed with old Mayan gods; parts of temples were incorporated into churches; at Nuestra Señora de la Merced in Antigua Guatemala you can see how Mayan masons carved symbols of maize and hummingbirds into the church facade.

2. The rise of Latin America’s economy
Al Jazeera English has a 25-minute feature on Latin America and how it has fared remarkably well in the midst of our current global economic woes. The show touches on mining in Peru and the rise of middle-class consumerism in Brazil. It’s encouraging to see much of the region rising out of poverty, but obviously the situation is not 100% rosy, and it will be interesting to see how these trends shape the region in non-economic terms:

3. Faith/religion trends for 2012
CNN’s Belief blog asked 15 faith leaders to offer their predictions for the coming year. Among them is Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, representing Latinos/Hispanics in the US:

America’s evangelical community will have its hands full addressing both a presidential election and offering a biblical response to “end of days” Mayan prophecies surrounding 2012. With the economy emerging as the primary issue for the November election, America’s born-again community will have an opportunity to contextualize an alternative narrative to the polarizing elements from both the right and the left by reconciling the righteousness message of Billy Graham with the justice platform of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. By offering compassionate, truth-filled solutions and focusing on the message of grace, love, reconciliation and healing, evangelicals will demonstrate that the greatest agenda stems neither from the donkey nor the elephant but rather from the lamb.

4. Churches and the problem with “welcoming the stranger”
The Los Angeles Times has a lengthy feature on one particular Southern Baptist Church in Alabama, which is seeking to navigate the difficult tension between anti-immigrant legislation in the state and its responsibilities as a faith community. The Get Religion blog also has an interesting analysis on the piece’s coverage of the religious angle in the story.

5. Anne Lamott on writing
Legendary writer and memoirist Anne Lamott had an essay in Sunset a couple of years ago (HT Michael Hyatt) with her best tips for writers, including how we use our time:

I’ve heard it said that every day you need half an hour of quiet time for yourself, or your Self, unless you’re incredibly busy and stressed, in which case you need an hour. I promise you, it is there. Fight tooth and nail to find time, to make it. It is our true wealth, this moment, this hour, this day.

6. 95 theses & 140 characters
The Economist has a fascinating take on Martin Luther and how earlier forms of “social media” had a lot to do with the success of the Reformation:

It is a familiar-sounding tale: after decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters’ message spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed. That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform.

Repaso is intended as a thought-provoking compilation of news and commentary from the past week related to the intersections of faith, development, justice and peace. As always, I welcome your thoughts on any of the links and ideas in this roundup!

[Photo credit: Datadirect.com]

Repaso: Letter to OWS, transparent church, mission & culture, powerful photos of 2011, global financial mess, spiritual theology & relevance, blessing & cursedness at Christmas

December 9, 2011 — 2 Comments

1. A Letter to OWS
Makoto Fujimura, head of the International Arts Movement, has written a letter to the Occupy Wall Street Movement. He has a love/hate relationship with movements, he says, and encourages and implores those involved with OWS to remember a few essential things:

The value of your movement is in spontaneity, diversity, and flexibility. Do not let extreme ideologies hijack your movement. Do not let the media define who you are. Avoid every temptation to name a spokesperson or a leader, no matter how charismatic that person is. Keep pressing into raising questions more than giving answers. Be generous, mysterious, and enigmatic. A movement is organic and generative, and your passion must be carried into the conversation for the next generation, from Wall Street to dining room table discussions. Above all, do all things out of love.

2. The transparent church
Skye Jethani blogs about a public art installation in Belgium resembling a see-through church, and what it can teach us as Christians:

The architects said they were motivated by the growing number of abandoned churches in Belgium, and the declining role of religion in the highly secularized country. They have titled their structure “Reading Between the Lines” because it “extends this idea of transparency onto the church and equally onto the observer who must learn to read between the lines even among things that are seemingly transparent. Just because you can see something doesn’t make it real, neither does something not exist because it can’t be seen.”

3. Do missions destroy cultures?
This one by Jordan Monson, a church planter in Spain, has sparked a good conversation at RELEVANT on the role missions and missionaries play (or don’t) in changing other cultures. Monson says, in effect, that missionaries have great power for good and for ill in the cultures to which they are sent:

Christians—and missionaries—can be at times the best and at other times the worst representatives of Christ. They’re not perfect. They will make mistakes, and they will take some cultural presuppositions with them no matter how much they are trained not to. Missionaries will unapologetically keep campaigning against female mutilation, deceivingly referred to as female circumcision; they will fight against cannibalism, witchcraft and human sacrifice. But they will also miss the mark sometimes and carry their Western values too far. Missionaries are still sinners, but when they follow Christ and make His glory their chief end, they elevate culture and follow the call of Jesus.

4. Most powerful photos of 2011
This collection of photos is stunning and sobering. It’s been a rough year for many in our world, and I was struck by just how many photos of natural disasters and mass protests were included.

5. Who owns this mess?
In this New York Times Magazine piece, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto (who I’ve blogged about here and here) weighs in on the global financial crisis (see also his bio at the end of the piece for why he’s to be taken seriously):

Once it is clear that this recession is about the organization of knowledge or, more precisely, the lack of organization, Western governments can step in to get the facts. That will allow them to target the disease without getting stuck in the left-versus-right controversy about regulation and government oversight. We need increased truth-telling; increased recognition of what exists and who owns it.

6. Eugene Peterson, spiritual theology and relevance
Patton Dodd writes for freq.uenci.es on Eugene Peterson’s important and counter-cultural legacy within North American evangelicalism (and the irony that the world’s biggest rock star admires him):

When Peterson set out to make the Bible relevant, he didn’t mean to make it hip, or even successful. He meant to make it ordinary—to make it spiritual. He meant to show people that spirituality is nothing special as we normally understand “special.” It’s the quotidian quality of Jesus. In Peterson’s straightforward words, “life, life, and more life.” Peterson is straining to help Christian believers to understand that that message is the message of God.

7. “Far as the curse is found”
Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Seminary, writes a wonderful reflection based on the lyrics of “Joy to the World”:

There certainly is a lot of cursedness around these days. There are the “macro” curses of homelessness, poverty, political oppression, the sexual slave trade, religious persecution, whole populations devastated by war and disease. But there are also the “micro” curses that afflict many individual lives in highly personal ways: grief, abandonment, loneliness, abuse, fear of the future, difficult illnesses—and much more. The good news of Christmas is that Jesus has come—born a baby in the manger of Bethlehem… God chose to experience the curse in a very intimate way, experiencing our cursedness from the inside by becoming one of us. The final “conquering,” of course, came at the end, when Jesus was crucified, buried, and rose victoriously from the tomb. But it had to begin with his utter helplessness in the Bethlehem stable. “God with us”—in the cursedness of our helpless estate.

[Photo credit: Randy L. Rasmussen/The Oregonian via Buzzfeed]

Oxfam: Torture settlement in Peru and the need for mining reform

July 26, 2011 — Leave a comment

From Oxfam’s Politics of Poverty blog:

Last week, British mining company Monterrico Metals agreed to pay compensation to 33 farmers from Peru’s northern Piura department for torture and other human rights abuses suffered after a 2005 protest at the Rio Blanco copper mining project. The farmers alleged that the company, now a subsidiary of Chinese conglomerate Zijin Mining, was complicit in the violence carried out by Peruvian police. The company denies any wrongdoing (indeed, there’s no mention of the settlement on the company’s website). Oxfam produced a video which can be viewed below on the incident in 2010. The video tells the moving story of Cleofé Neyra a farmer who participated in the protest and was beaten by police.

You can read the full post over at Oxfam’s blog, which spells out what all of this means for Peru’s incoming president, Ollanta Humala, who I blogged about a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the video from before the settlement was reached.

In Justice environment, human rights, justice, mine, mining, Monterrico Metals, Oxfam, Peru, settlement, torture

What would Jesus do… about mining?

July 18, 2011 — Leave a comment

Photo by Diocese of San Marcos, Guatemala

When I was researching the Marlin mine in Guatemala and the indigenous anti-mining movement, it quickly became clear that the local Catholic church was the key player in leading and organizing the opposition. When I interviewed a guy named Roberto in San Marcos, who was heading up the Diocese’s anti-mining initiatives, he said that it just made sense for the church to be leading the way, since no other institution or entity was better placed or more connected to the people. I’m less familiar with the varying roles that local and national churches are playing elsewhere in anti-mining movements throughout Latin America, but Catholic News Service has a piece on a conference of bishops in Peru grappling with the issue:

When Archbishop Pedro Barreto Jimeno of Huancayo first considered the high lead levels in the blood of children living in the Peruvian highland city of La Oroya, he asked himself, “What would Jesus do?”

Five years ago, the U.S.-owned mining company Doe Run was running a minerals smelter complex that was mainly responsible for the poor air quality in the fifth-most polluted city in the world, the archbishop told delegates at an international Latin American bishops’ council seminar on extractive industries. The archbishop told delegates he answered his own question by beginning an ultimately successful campaign to close the complex.

Now, as the new president of the Latin American bishops’ council department of justice and solidarity, Archbishop Barreto has a four-year mandate to encourage the Latin American church to consider and act on the question at the root of his ministry.

They’re going to be reaching out to North American bishops to see if they can get their counterparts in wealthy nations to join them in their efforts. The timing is urgent too, as delegates at the conference “noted an accelerated expansion of extractive industries fed by ‘a fossil-fuel energy model, the pursuit of profit at any cost and a surge of materialistic greed.’” The piece continues:

The CELAM conference committed the church to playing a role in informing communities about the benefits and disadvantages of extractive industries, using church radios and other media.

“In this way, the church wishes to contribute to the population being informed and taking a well-founded and critical decision, offering alternative proposals to defend its rights via arguments and dialogue,” the document said.

It’s encouraging to see bishops in the Catholic church stepping up in this way. I’ve yet to see any sort of concerted effort among Protestant clergy in Latin America doing likewise. And Christians of all sorts here in the US and Canada have been very slow in waking up to what mining is doing to our neighbors to the south. I remain hopeful this will change, but at times that hope wears thin. Stories like this reignite that hope just a little bit.

In Justice anti-mining, bishop, Catholic, CELAM, church, conference, development, diocese, Guatemala, indigenous, justice, mine, mining, Pedro Barreto Jimeno, Peru

President-elect Humala on the future of mining in Peru

July 12, 2011 — Leave a comment

Last week, Peru’s president-elect Ollanta Humala was in Washington, where he met with Secretary of State Clinton and, unexpectedly, with President Obama. Humala described the meetings as “starting the relationship with the United States on a good foot” before his term begins.

While in DC he did an interview with the Washington Post, in which he sought to explain his political shifts over the years and how his experiences have shaped him. Interestingly, a significant part of the interview focuses on Peru’s mining sector. A couple of weeks ago I blogged with an update on Peru putting a halt on new mining concessions after massive protests in the Puno region. It will be interesting to watch how all of this plays out.

Here’s the excerpt of the WaPo interview related to mining:

The mining sector in Peru has been enormously profitable. You talked about a windfall tax on the mining companies in your campaign. What do you intend to do?
What we want to do is to get on well with the mining companies, but we also want them to get on well with the country.

What does that mean?
Today, a large part of Peru’s revenues come from mining. Many big mining companies only pay income tax, but they extract minerals, they pollute the water. They don’t give any form of compensation to the regions where those minerals are extracted and where they do the damage, forcing the state to help those regions. What we are stating is that the mining companies will have to pay that compensation, that is called a royalty.

How much?
The state is paying for the mining companies; it is doing a favor to the mining companies for the last 10 years, equivalent of half the income tax the companies pay. The income tax is 30 percent of the profit. The state collects that amount, and half of that returns to the region. That is why we have 12 states that are rich in the sense that they receive money from the state, another 12 states that are poor.

Because there are no mines?
They have no mines, and also because the state has to spend 50 percent of the income tax on compensating the regions for the damage done by mining companies, instead of building hospitals and schools. The windfall tax is different. That consists of seeing the level of profits that they have and having a technical conversation with the mining companies so as to preserve their competitiveness.

As president, will you have that conversation yourself?
Yes, yes. I am going to meet with the owners of the mining companies to have that conversation. It is one thing to talk to the managers of the mines, who are not the owners and it is not their money. It is quite different to talk to the people who are the owners. It is easy to speak to them because they understand. They have investments in Africa, Asia — they understand cash flow. It’s an issue of corporate social responsibility.

Read the whole interview here.

In Justice economics, economy, environment, free market, Hillary Clinton, human rights, interview, justice, mining, Obama, Ollanta Humala, Peru, Washington Post