Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga is a tiny, slightly-built man with a husky voice and a sense of humour; a fervently religious man who burns with indignation when he talks about injustice, and shines with compassion when he talks about the sufferings of his people. He is also a poet, whose verses on liberation, the poor and the guerrilla struggles of Latin America have been translated into many languages.

Now 55, Casaldaliga was born into an ultra-right wing Catholic family in Catalonia. In 1952 he became a priest in the Claretian order, inspired to a great extent by an uncle — also a priest - who was murdered by anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. In 1968, following Vatican II and the Church's new ‘option for the poor’, Casaldaliga came to Brazil to take charge of a vast abandoned region on the edge of the Amazon, the Prelacy of São Felix do Araguaia. He found a land where ‘money and a .38 pistol were the rule of law’. Huge cattle farms, many owned by transnational companies, drove peasant farmers off their land, and employed labourers in slave conditions. There were no schools or hospitals, and Casaldaliga and the priest who arrived– with him soon discovered ‘the multiple, devastating presence of illness and death’. He recalls that, ‘In our first week in São Felix four children died and were carried past our house down to the cemetery in cardboard boxes which looked like shoeboxes. We were to bury so many children there – each family loses three or four dead infants – and so many adults, dead or killed, many without even a coffin, and some without even a name’.

But in these people, exploited and cheated by the rich and powerful, and ‘swept backwards and forwards by the tide of poverty’ Casaldaliga saw the people of God. In 1970 he published a pastoral letter denouncing feudalism and slavery. Immediately banned by the authorities, this was the first warcry in a battle which continues today. Men have been hired to kill him, and attempts have been made to expel him from the country (see Index/Index 2/1981). The Prelacy has been invaded by the military, and priests and lay-workers have been arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. Another priest was shot dead beside him when they tried to stop police torturing two women. A systematic campaign of lies and distortion is waged against him on the official radio and TV. He is hated by the landowners and by the military. For years he has expected assassination.

One cannot help being reminded of the life of Jesus Christ.

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The Araguaia Guerrilla War (1972–1974): Armed Resistance to the Brazilian Dictatorship

Interview with Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga