Guerrillas of Peace

Book excerpt: Blase Bonpane has lived and worked with the realities of liberation theology for more than a quarter of a century. In Guerrillas of Peace, Bonpane takes the reader from the high country of Huehuetenango in Guatemala to intensive grass roots organizing in the United States. He shows that we cannot renew the face of the earth and coexist with the torturing, murdering governments of Guatemala and El Salvador, and their accomplices in Washington. We cannot say the Lord's Prayer and fail to do the will of God on earth. A new person is being formed. This person, this revolutionary person insists that human values be applied to government. This leads to a ruthless and revolutionary conclusion...children should not be free to die of malnutrition, no one should be allowed to die of polio or malaria, women should not be free to be prostitutes, no one should be free to be illiterate. The loss of these freedoms is essential for a people to make their own history. This is the Theology of Liberation, the kind of theology that made the early Church an immediate threat to the Roman Empire. --from the IntroductionBlase Bonpane, former Maryknoll priest and superior, was assigned to an expelled from Central America. UCLA professor, contributor to the L.A. Times, N.Y. Times, commentator on KPFK, and author of many publications, he is currently Director of the Office of the Americas, a broad-based educational foundation dedicated to peace and justice in this hemisphere.