Intimate Enemies. Kimberly Theidon
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religion, in which faith was grounded in a sacred landscape of tutelary gods, via huacas and wamanis.27 However, as Vidal has explained, Evangelical pastors urged people to burn the idols, arguing that the saints were just a “pile of rags” with painted yeso (plaster of paris) faces.
Pastor Pascual made the same argument in another conversation. It was a relentlessly rainy day and I was huddled inside my room in Carhuahurán, watching the dirt and straw mixture that held the doorframe in place slowly turn to mud, large gobs thudding to the ground. Amid this dreary scene of domestic decay, I heard a familiar voice outside my door. Pastor Pascual helped force open my door, strategically using it to shove the accumulated mud to one side of the room. He gave his striped poncho a few good shakes. His brown felt hat was also soaked, but he left it on. I never saw anyone take off their hat except in church or when singing the national anthem. I ladled up a cup of miski yaku, and we settled in for a chat. At some point I asked if the Evangélicos in Carhuahurán had destroyed their saints, and he began nodding mid-question.
“Our Señor forbids it. Before, people thought they had power. We believed in them. But they’re just yeso. I also had fiestas and placed candles and flowers—kneeling I prayed to them,” Pascual recalled, shaking his head. “But they’re the work of the devil. You place flowers, candles, but nothing happens. But when you deliver yourself to the evangelio, you’re with God and the devil hates you. The devil looks at you all bothered,” he explained, making a diabolically bothered grimace. “He tries to make you fall however he can. The saints—they’re made of yeso, dirt, rags! I could make one right now,” he scoffed. “I could make a saint or a virgin! But they worship them. What power can these have?” He shook his head. “Those who trust in the saints are trusting in the devil—not in our Señor Jesucristo but in the devil himself. God doesn’t permit that.”
While the saints and tutelary gods anchored faith in icons and a defined sacred geography, Evangelismo is simultaneously “deterritorialized” and embodied. From the conversations I had with Evangélicos, it is clear the Evangelical body is occupied by either Satan or the Holy Spirit.28 I think of this as “floating charisma”: the transformative power of faith is no longer “fixed” in religious images or moored to the landscape. So where does it inhere? In the Bible and in the body.
I recall one evening in culto in Carhuahurán. The rain did not keep the faithful from climbing up the hill to the Evangelical church next door to Michael’s corral. I was using my flashlight, a round ball of light bouncing along the path. I paused for a moment, remembering the curfew on flashlights that had been imposed at the Sunday formación. It was late 1999 and concerns that people were “walking again” (a reference to renewed Senderista activity) were fueled by sightings of flashlight beams in the hills. The ronderos had established a shoot-on-sight rule, but I checked my watch and it was only 7:30—the (flash)lights out began at 9:00 p.m.
I entered and took a place on one of the wooden slabs. After several hymns the pastor requested we stand to recite a passage from the Bible, and I noticed the women, each holding a tattered book in her hands. None of the women could read, but the formality of the book was important. That book appeared in many people’s stories of the war. The Bible had literally saved lives.
Dionisia was one of the women in culto that evening. I was visiting her a few days later and offered to take her photograph. She was delighted by the idea and carefully sat under a bush in her yard, smoothing a few rebellious strands of hair with her hands. When I began to focus my camera, she told me to wait a moment because she had forgotten something important. Dionisia went into her house and I heard the sounds of a search. She came out with her Bible and told me to wait again. Flipping through her book, she finally came to the page she was looking for. She held the Bible up in front of her chest, opened to a blood-stained page 127: “This Bible saved me when the malafekuna attacked. The bullets were whizzing by my head and hitting houses. A bullet came straight at me—I saw the terruco take aim. But I held up my Bible and it stopped the bullet. God saved me that day.”
Just as the Bible had the power to stop bullets, it also provided protection from the capricious mountain gods and the remains of the gentiles. In that same conversation with Pastor Pascual, I asked whether the hermanos should walk with their Bible in hand.
“Of course! You walk with your Bible because this is your weapon [arma]! It’s our spiritual weapon,” Pascual explained. “I don’t trust in guns, and I don’t carry one because my weapon is in Quechua, in Spanish. With the Bible, you follow God. If you carry this weapon, you aren’t afraid. If you pass a spring that is evaporating—well, I’ve taken a drink from a spring as it evaporated. I’ve decided ‘here I’m going to sit.’ You aren’t afraid because God is with you. You can sleep anywhere, you ask God, you say, ‘I’m with God,’ and you aren’t afraid.” Thus the Bible helped protect Evangélicos from many of the males de campo, including witchcraft and its potentially lethal effects.
In addition to charisma inhering in the Bible, it infuses the body. The Evangelical body is filled with, and testimony to, God’s power. Conversion narratives were replete with revelations in which God operated with a surgeon’s precision, removing illness and healing the body. This is a religion that ritualizes rupture and elaborates histories of discontinuity: the reborn Evangelical body testifies to the power of the Holy Spirit to effect dramatic change. The word is made body for the Evangélicos, whose testimonies underscore the felt presence of God at work in their bodies and in their lives. Numerous pastors assured me that Evangélicos who had been forced to flee carried their most important possession within them: their faith in El Señor Jesucristo.
Local Theologies
There will be world war. The people will suffer until death, but without finding death. God will take death away from them. People will want to die. From the highest peak of the mountains people will throw themselves. They’ll cut their own throats with knives, but they won’t die. Now people try to escape death, but a time is coming when they will seek it. Nation against nation, the world war will come. Now they say they’re preparing arms. I’m not sure—I think they say the arms are atomic. For the war between nations, a world war between governments. Between pueblos they’ll terminate each other. The civil war we had here in the campo—their pueblos were peaceful then, not like us. We were in sasachakuy tiempo. But war will shake their pueblos, will leave their cities desolate. Everyone will flail themselves—this will be called the river of blood [yawar mayu]. Oh, for many kilometers people’s blood will flow like a river! Their intestines will be like guano all over the ground. According to the word of God we are in the final days. It says in the Bible that nation will rise up against nation, kingdom against kingdom. All of this is happening. They talk about all of this on the radio.
—Pastor Pascual Bautista, Assembly of God, Carhuahurán, 1999
As the violence increased throughout Ayacucho, city-based pastors—Vidal included—found it increasingly difficult to continue visiting rural communities such as Carhuahurán. Vidal stopped his traveling from 1984 to 1991 due to death threats from the Senderistas: he was not alone in being the target of their violence. As the PTRC discovered, Evangélicos were explicitly considered an ideological and organizational obstacle to the spread of Senderismo.29 Where the Evangélicos reigned, people’s hearts and minds were already committed, and it was Evangelicals in the Apurímac Valley who were among the first to organize rondas campesinas and take up arms against the “legions of the antichrist.”30 Local pastors exercised tremendous autonomy and began interpreting the Bible according to the daily realities of war and within a narrative tradition emphasizing the cataclysmic change of “tiempos.”
When contemplating what sort of interpretive language popular religions employ to characterize the past and imagine the future, we might think in terms of narrative sedimentation. Andean oral histories are replete with millenarian, messianic imagery, and this is the context in which local pastors began “pentecostalizing” their religious message and practices.31 As Robbins has noted, Pentecostal Christianity has both world-breaking and world-making facets, which introduce their own cultural