Archive: Methodists Split In Bolivia

by Roy Howard Beck

Editors’ note: In October, Good News sent Roy Howard Beck to La Paz to observe and report on the turmoil in the Bolivian Methodist Church. Beck, an award-winning journalist, accepted the assignment after he and Good News agreed to an arrangement that guaranteed his full journalistic integrity, regardless of his findings. A more extensive report is available on request. Send $3.00 for postage and handling to Good News.

LA PAZ, Bolivia—Overthrowing the government is common in this country, which has averaged one coup a year since independence in 1825. But when Marina Ramirez arrived for work at the Methodist office building on August 18, she quickly realized it was her church that was in the middle of a full-blown coup.

The 12-story building’s lobby was filled with 40-50 Methodists demonstrating before TV cameras. Ramirez, secretary to Bishop Carlos Huacani, soon discovered they were from a large faction of Bolivians backed by the New York-based UM Board of Global Ministries (BGM). They had occupied the building all night, attempting to claim it for their faction and to oust all supporters of Haucani (pronounced Waw-caw-nee).

Still holding them off that Tuesday morning were 11 employees of the church’s ICHTHUS Bookstore on the ground floor. Juan Javier, bookstore manager, said his faction (pro-Huacani) and the one in the lobby (BGM-backed) had clashed with shouted insults, shoving and some fisticuffs during the night, both sides successfully appealing for help from friends in the police force.

Ramirez quickly slipped into the store to avoid the lobby: “I was afraid one of them would try to get the keys to the bishop’s office from my purse.” Javier wanted to keep church financial records out of the hands of the BGM-backed faction. For almost a year Haucani and his deputies had talked of uncovering examples of past church leaders (now in the BGM faction) who had misused church funds to provide unethical perks for church officials. Javier insisted the overthrow of Bishop Huacani was being orchestrated to cover up those and other past misdeeds.

The pro-Huacani forces told me they were broken-hearted and angry that American Methodists had thrown their money, personnel and power behind the usurpers. For Marina Ramirez and many other members of the large and long-oppressed Aymara Indian minority in Bolivia, Huacani stands as an admired Aymara pioneer in breaking barriers. His position as leader of the autonomous Bolivian church has been a source of fierce pride among many Indians—one which they would not passively allow the New York mission board to help take away, they said. Huacaru, 57, has been married for 28 years, has two adult sons and has spent most of his career as an educational professional after being the first Aymara to graduate from the Methodist school.

Huacani and top church leaders suggested the attempt to depose them was related to their opposition to liberation theology, their resistance to paternalistic control from the New York mission agency and their recent, secondary relationships with the Atlanta- based Mission Society for United Methodists, an unofficial agency rejected by most U.S. bishops.

Dissidents’ View

Out in the lobby, however, all issues looked different. Leaders of the BGM-backed faction told me that they agreed with Javier that the financial records were very important. They wanted to seize them so they could prove Huacani had been mismanaging funds since being elected bishop in January of 1990. They were moving to prevent him and his supporters from a church coup.

According to them, Huacani had (1) abolished various boards of directors to give rum direct control over church institutions, (2) diverted money into a bishop’s discretionary fund which had questionable accountability, and (3) improperly engineered expulsion of more than a dozen lay and clergy leaders on grounds of disloyalty and disorderly conduct.

On June 29, 1992, the church’s five-member Judicial Council (created just five months earlier) had voted to suspend Huacani for three months on the basis of a sexual harassment charge lodged against him. Coming to no conclusion, the council ordered Huacani to go to civil court to prove his innocence.

Huacani denied the harassment charge and refused the implication that he was guilty until proven innocent. His supporters said the council—filled with people who themselves had unanswered financial charges pending against them—had no authority under church rules to suspend.

But many other of the denomination’s leaders said the bishop had forfeited his right to head the church by not having the humility to accept the suspension and answer to another body in the church. This further confirmed their dissatisfaction with what they believed was a far more authoritarian style of leadership than any previous bishop had exercised. They began to organize to topple Huacani.

Within days of the suspension decision, ora Boots, head of BGM’s Latin American operations, flew to La Paz with an auditor (he found records of BGM fund use to be in order). Boots consulted with other U.S. leaders and made the determination that the dissidents represented the true line of authority in the autonomous church. The board cut all BGM funding to people associated with Huacani, providing its $30,000-a-year support to those associated with the effort to wrest control of the Bolivian church’s institutions. In addition, the much larger revenues of Advance Special giving were kept out of pro-Huacani hands. A key BGM missionary to Bolivia, who had been sent back to the United States in June by the Bolivian church’s executive council, was returned to take power of attorney away from Huacani and to exercise control over missionary-started institutions.

Faction Replaces Huacani

On August 15-16, with Huacani and another top church official in a remote Bolivian city, the BGM-backed faction held a meeting in La Paz. It chose a committee of five to replace Huacani until a church-wide election could be held, said Mario Oretea, an anti-Huacani lawyer and member of the Judicial Council. Sunday night the assembly asked the committee to lead efforts to take over all Methodist institutions, Oretea said. Large amounts of money, by Bolivian standards, were at stake. The downtown office building—with the bookstore on the ground floor and the bishop’s office on the 12^th—may earn a profit of $80,000 a year, said Eugenio Poma, Bolivian bishop 1986-90. The public and private high schools run by the Methodists in La Paz probably earn just as much, as does the school in the city of Chochabamba, Poma said, suggesting that Huacani cares far more about the money-making institutions than the approximately 180 congregations with their 15,000 members.

On Sunday night the group determined that the church’s financial documents must be seized, Oretea said.

Monday morning a few dozen BGM-backed Methodists entered the central church offices (part of the La Paz schools compound) and ordered pro-Huacani officials to leave. The anti-Huacani faction soon had control of central offices, the schools and their records. That afternoon the faction lay siege on the downtown office building.

On Tuesday morning pro-Huacani forces still had control of the office building, bookstore and the bishop’s offices—and the records.

Marina Ramirez believed it was only a matter of time before the BGM-backed forces would obtain support from police and court to take over. She climbed to the 12th floor where anti-Huacani leaders and two policemen were arguing with the bishop’s security guard that BGM-backed forces now controlled the offices. Ramirez, (only 26, and standing no taller than 5 feet), unlocked the door, maneuvered the security guard into the bishop’s suite and quickly locked the door. For hours, the police pounded on the door, asking her to open up. Without the security guard knowing it, Ramirez hid the inside door key in a potted plant and told the police she had thrown the key out the window. She said she did that to prevent the guard from being tempted to open the door for a high-ranking police officer, and to protect him against police recriminations. Meanwhile, Ramirez copied all computer records onto disks and erased the computer memory. Late in the afternoon while police and opposing Methodists yelled from the hall, Ramirez tossed two boxes of disks and paper records out a back window. She said they landed 12 floors below without breaking and were picked up on cue by pro-Huacani Methodists whom she had called to drive by at that moment.

Responding to a lawsuit by the anti-Huacani faction, a Bolivian court soon ordered all Methodist offices sealed. “We had to close the hospital down for 24 days,” said Freddy Crespo, its director. “The loss to the hospital was about $200,000, and our image was greatly damaged.”

Huacani Calls Assembly

On August 22-23, Huacani called together an emergency session of his church’s General Assembly. It expelled from church membership some 75 members—clergy, teachers and laypersons—believed to have participated in the coup. And it unanimously voted to “withdraw permanently” from relations with the Americans’ Board of Global Ministries which “has interfered in totally internal matters … and sided … in supporting the dissidents that have divided the (church).” The Huacani General Assembly also voted to negotiate a 10-year agreement with the Mission Society, which had given $10,000 in October. When news reports began to surface in U.S. church communications, the battle over the institutions appeared to have been wonby the anti-Huacani faction.

Court Rules for Huacani

But early in September that switched dramatically. A civil court of the Supreme Court canceled all previous moves to seal the institutions from Huacani. Donald Reasoner, a BGM official who spent more than a month in Bolivia investigating the situation, claims the ruling did not technically name Huacani as the rightful authority over all institutions, but “symbolically, it recognizes Haucani’s leadership.”

In effect, squatters’ rights took over. Pro-Huacani forces resumed control of the office building, with its book store and bishop’s suite, the hospital and the school in Cochabamba. The BGM-backed faction continued to hold on to the central church offices and La Paz school complex.

Local newspaper and TV accounts have been full of BGM statements that the Americans hold deeds to all properties the missionaries established in Bolivia before the church became autonomous in the late 1960s. Ironically, Reasoner notes, Nora Boots had been in Bolivia earlier this year to help Huacani begin to transfer the properties to the Bolivian church. Some of the BGM money sent to accomplish that task was used for other purposes, apparently by some of the anti-Huacani faction.

After the courts ruled in favor of Huacani’s suit, BGM’s Reasoner toured a number of congregations across the country, urging them to send delegates to the October 2-4 General Assembly being organized by the anti-Huacani faction. Many members of those churches who refused to be a part of that faction hiked and rode trucks for days to come to La Paz to attend a pro-Huacani meeting. I talked to several of them who said that they were protesting what they saw as a hostile intrusion by New York in their local affairs. Some claimed they saw anti-Huacani leaders offer congregations and their leaders money to join the anti-Huacani faction. On close questioning, I found nobody charging that any BGM personnel were involved.

In October, the Board of Global Ministries sent a former school administrator to assume leadership of the large Methodist school in Cochabamba. But the pro-Huacani faction has repelled all efforts for takeover. The former administrator has returned to the United States, a BGM official said.

Many court challenges are sure to come. The outcome is unpredictable.

Entrenched Sides

When I arrived in La Paz in early October, the coups and counter-coups had settled into a kind of trench civil war. Both camps had succeeded in finding police to help patrol entrances to the institutions they controlled.

At the pro-Haucani-held office building and the anti-Huacani-held central offices, large numbers of Indians packed the hallways and rooms. Many had left their primitive farms on the 13,000-foot-high Altiplano plateau and traveled long hours down into the volcano crater that holds La Paz.

The indians and a few mestizos (from the mixed European-Indian class that controls much of Bolivia) were encamped in the offices—cooking, bathing, sleeping and acting as defensive warriors against potential raids by the other Methodist faction. Both camps had stories about the other engaging in property vandalism and physical violence. Both sides had photos—some of them bloody—to back up their assertions.

Most people with whom I talked on both sides referred to their fellow Methodists in the opposite faction as corrupt, greedy liars. Virtually every charge leveled by one side—vote-buying, bullying—could be heard from the other side. There was little sign of middle ground or hope for reconciliation. The church was imbued with the tragic schism of a civil war.

Key Issues

Where does that leave American United Methodists? Key questions arise over whether Americans acted wisely in siding with one faction or the other. Has the American presence moderated tensions or enflamed them into this public spectacle of intractable church warfare?

Following are some of the key issues in assessing the situation:

• Validity of Huacani’s Suspension. United Methodists who respect foreign denominations’ autonomy do not take sides in a local conflict without clear understanding that one side is the true, lawful and sole representative of that church, and without an urgent need to take sides.

BGM officials saw that clarity coming primarily from one pivotal event—the Judicial Council’s June 29 vote to suspend the bishop. Once the bishop refused the suspension, he was outside the recognized processes of the church, BGM officials say. Thus, they accepted as fully valid later gatherings of Methodists that systematically excluded Huacani and his supporters from deliberations. The urgency was in the fear that Huacani was consolidating power so that soon he would be untouchable.

But if, as pro-Huacani officials claim, the Judicial Council did not have the power to suspend the bishop, it would appear the true line of authority in the church runs through the gatherings in August, September and October, presided over by Huacani and the church’s leadership.

Both factions have had several church-wide gatherings claiming hundreds of representatives from the majority of the Methodist congregations. Emotional, sincere and gripping testimonials from common Bolivian Methodists filled the gatherings on both sides.

My perusal of information on the gatherings suggests that the anti-Huacani faction has had at least an edge in drawing the more impressive representation from throughout the country, and certainly from international colleagues. But I do wonder how many Bolivians decided which faction to support based on the public pronouncements that one side was being backed by the full power and resources of the Americans’ mission board, which had planted the denomination and still lay claim to most of its institutions. “The question here is, ‘What is autonomy and what role do these outside agencies have?’” said the Rev. Luis Palomo, director of the Methodist Seminary in Costa Rica, who met with both Bolivian factions in October, but was a guest speaker at a large pro-Huacani women’s federation assembly.

• Charges Against the Bishop. Most of the accusations against Huacani are that he is dictatorial and improperly has consolidated power over institutions and funds. Almost nobody who looks carefully disagrees that the psychology-professor-turned bishop has a domineering, authoritative—if not authoritarian—management style. But his allies say the style is understandable considering his crusade to clean up operations and make them run more like a business. Reasoner said BGM officials recognize that some of the accusations made by Huacani against people on the BGM-backed side are valid and will need to be handled once the newly constituted church stabilizes some.

The Judicial Council took no action against Huacani on the basis of any charge of financial mismanagement.

Mario Oretea, the Judicial Council member, explained to me that the suspension was recommended only in relation to a charge made last January by a former woman district superintendent that the bishop had sexually harassed her. “If she (the superintendent) had a charge, she should have proved it in court,” Huacani told me. But she never filed the charge of harassment which “I reject completely; it is a big lie,” Huacani said. The Judicial Council found the charge beyond its competence to make a determination, Oretea said. But it still suspended Huacani for the purpose of his clearing his name in civil court by successfully suing the superintendent for slander, and proving his innocence.

• Unresolved Old Issues. BGM’s Reasoner spent several weeks looking at documentation and listening to both sides in numerous interviews. His recommendation was that the anti-Huacani faction’s charges were stronger than the pro-Huacani faction’s. He acknowledges, however, that “these problems did not originate with Carlos Huacani.” Deep problems and unresolved conflicts within the church, going back decades, are behind a lot of the fighting. Huacani’s aggressive style in dealing with some of those problems, as well as other issues, were a catalyst for the unfortunate divisions of the last few months, Reasoner concluded.

When I talked to Reasoner a week after I returned from Bolivia, he named two major underlying “fault lines” exacerbating tensions. I already had written down the same ones on the basis of my interviews.

1. Continuation of a lay-clergy fight. A lay movement has dominated the church almost since its autonomy. In the anti-Huacani faction, clergy power has reasserted itself. Bolivia only had 26 ordained clergy before the schism. All but one of those—and all 11 district superintendents—are allied with the anti-Huacani group which is upgrading the status of clergy. Bishop Huacani, like Poma before him, is a layman.

2. Long-standing ethnic tensions. The Aymara Indians constitute the majority of Methodists in a church that was mestizo-dominated before church autonomy. Since then, the Aymara unity has preserved almost total control of the church in the hands of the Indians. But the Aymara have been split in this year’s struggle. The Aymara are highly visible in both factions, although mestizos are disproportionately influential in the anti-Huacani group.

And then there is the question of culture. Bishop Lloyd Knox, outgoing president of BGM’s world missions sections, complains that people in the Bolivian church have picked up the worst aspects of the culture, in terms of accumulating perks with positions and propensity to bribe and misuse police connections. A former U.S. State Department official spoke of the same problem. And Jorge Panteliz, pastor and seminary professor with the BGM-backed faction, complains that everything in Bolivia is tinged with corruption, especially the courts, which he charges were bribed by pro-Huacani forces (which vehemently deny the charge).

Freddy Crespo, the pro-Huacani hospital director, suggested that an international auditing firm agreeable to both factions be brought in to review all records—those seized by the BGM-backed group and those thrown out the back window by Marina Ramirez. Then let everybody who owes the church money, regardless of their faction, pay up, Crespo said.

It’s a challenge worth considering by any church group interested in being a channel of peace in this crater of distrust, fear and brokenness.

Roy Howard Beck is former associate editor of the United Methodist Reporter and was the first recipient of the UM Communicator of the Year award (1983). He is the Washington editor of the Social Contract, a quarterly journal.