Allison Davenport

Nearly 40 years ago Father Luis Gurriarán left his native Spain as a priest with the Spanish Sacred Heart Order and arrived in Guatemala. His first assignment in the Santa Cruz del Quiché parish and what he encountered there would change his life and the lives of many of his parishioners forever. The extreme poverty of the primarily indigenous population made him acutely aware of the need for change. Reflecting on those early experiences in Guatemala Fr. Luis commented, "What I had learned in a seminary in Spain had no validity. The God I believed in was not the God these people needed. They forced me to change myself." His religious vocation soon became fused with activism, a combination which characterizes his life and work to this day.

While many refer to this style of religious commitment as Liberation Theology, Fr. Luis is clear that he came to these beliefs independently of any movement within the church, although he does not reject the term nor the movement. No matter what title may be assigned to it, he summarizes his approach to religious life as, "living according to the beliefs of the people." This commitment has endured nearly four decades and, beyond the work he has done with rural cooperatives, includes work in the Guatemalan refugee camps in Southern Mexico and in the secret Communities of Population in Resistance, and three different periods of exile.

Father Luis Gurriaran

Soon after his arrival in Guatemala, Fr. Luis was approached about assisting local communities in establishing their own cooperatives. For this, he spent two years in Canada studying and researching methods and approaches to cooperatives. This expertise was fundamental to the establishment of several cooperatives in the Quiché and is central to the work he continues to do. Fr. Luis commented that Maya cultural values and the tradition of communal decision making are conducive to cooperatives. While individual communities are adept at organizing themselves, assistance is needed in the more technical aspects of administration and management of the cooperative. In any type of cooperative project, he believes, training and education are essential components.

However, any discussion of the Guatemalan cooperative movement cannot ignore the impact the 36-year civil war had on the movement and its leaders. Many cooperative and community leaders were killed in the war or exiled and many of the communities which had thriving cooperatives were destroyed or taken under military control during the armed conflict. The legacy of this repression continues and Fr. Luis believes cooperatives are still not operating at the level they were in the 1960's and 70's.

Santa Maria Tzeja is an interesting and important example of cooperative organizing and the attempts to reestablish what was lost in the war. The community was established in the late 1960's as part of a colonization project the Catholic Church, including Fr. Luis, brokered with the government to turnover unused land in the Ixcan jungle to landless peasants. Community members, now with small plots of land and thus with an alternative to seasonal migration to coastal plantations, soon established the Zona Reyna Cooperative.

With the onset of the civil war, leaders of the community were targeted by the army for 'subversive' activities and many were killed or disappeared. A massacre in the village in 1982 dispersed the surviving community members throughout Guatemala, Mexico and the United States. In 1994, 12 years after the massacre, those who had been living in exile decided to return and resume their lives in Santa Maria Tzeja. Part of the rebuilding process included the revitalization of the cooperative which had been completely dormant during the years of military control. The cooperative members have been successful in their efforts at what Fr. Luis describes as "reconstructing the cooperative and a socio-economic way of life" they believe best for the community. Increased rates of literacy and higher education are a testament to their efforts to make life better for future generations.

The future seemed to hold promise until one night in May 2000. Just days after the community filed charges of genocide against several Guatemalan army officials, the community's main cooperative building was burnt and all of its contents lost. Despite this setback and the message the arsonists intended to send, community members are determined to rebuild, yet again. Fr. Luis stated that this incident reinforces the need for the international community to continue to extend solidarity to the Guatemalan people, "The political support needed in Guatemala in the 1980's to guard against the brutal repression of the military is still needed today."

While the 1996 Peace Accords officially inaugurated an era of peace in Guatemala, much work is left to be done. Repression and impunity continue to plague the country, but many Guatemalans still struggle to secure a future of justice and dignity. Fr. Luis, still hopeful after 40 years of struggle, looks at it this way, "You have to fight for happiness, fight to be free."