Witnesses of Mercy for Peace and Reconciliation

48 n 4 November 2016, at the symposium on Mercy for Peace and Reconciliation in Rome, I faced this powerful question: “What has been your personal experience of living up to the highest challenges of mercy from your religious perspective?” I come from El Salvador, the smallest country of the American continent and one of the most socially divided in terms of wealth. Eight per cent of the elite own fertile agricultural land, while the peasants subsist on and cul- tivate arid land. This situation has been the basis of two wars, the first in 1932 called The Massacre ( Matanza) , and the second from 1980 to 1992. In the first, 30,000 were killed and in the second, 80,000. In 1959, I was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome after finishing my theological studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University. I went back to my country and after pastoring the very rich, my archbishop sent me to Suchitoto, a rural parish in the north of the country, in 1968. There I discovered the peasants’ way of life and decided to devote myself to their well-being. The peasants lacked the means to acquire life’s necessities, such as land, food, education, sanitary conditions, and housing. In Quito, Ecuador, I learned about land reform that, if it is integral, meets all those needs. I started organizing the peasants to struggle for land, teaching them their human rights based on Genesis 1. God created man and woman, blessed them and gave them the fish of the sea, the birds of the heavens, the seed-bearing plants everywhere on the earth. God said: “That will be your food.” And in chapter 2:15, God commanded humans to cultivate and care for the garden, the earth. According to God’s plan, the land is for all people, not for a few. The very rich, together with the army, reacted by repressing the peasants and accusing me of being commu- nist. My answer was that the stomach is not communist; the children are starving because there is no food on their parents’ table. There was no mercy. The army started killing peasants as well as everyone who supported their struggle, students, teachers, workers, 16 catholic priests and my friend the Archbishop of San Salvador, blessed Oscar Romero, among others. In January 1970, the National Assembly convoked a land reform congress with the country’s various WITNESSING MERCY FOR PEACE AND RECONCILIAT ION José “Chencho” Alas O José “Chencho” Alas (centre) with, from left to right: Bhai Sahib Mohinder Singh, Mirna Abi Saab, Dima Tarabeine, and group facilitator Prof. Abu-Nimer