Between the Saint and the Sicario
Fernado De Haro - No tradition will help the boy say no to the hitman when he arrives to turn him into a murderer; no tradition will prevent him from becoming a rootless man without a soul. Only something in the present will help: someone who challenges him to be himself, to speak the language of free men.
The boy dozes, his face resting on his mother's back as she carries him tied there, while the priest celebrates the Mass of St. John the Baptist in the Tzotzil language—a language preserved thanks to the efforts of Spanish Dominicans in the 16th century.
The mother prays attentively, sitting on the floor, her eyes fixed on a baroque altarpiece with saints whose Indian features are framed by colored lights like those on a Christmas tree. It is a big day in Zinacantán, one of the indigenous villages in the Mexican state of Chiapas. There has been a procession, and later there will be a party with places of honor for the “presidents,” the community leaders who decide everything by assembly.
As the boy dozes, he has no idea that large mining companies want to control his land. He does not know that the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel are fighting over his world and are no longer just involved in drug trafficking.
Now, kidnapping, human trafficking, arms trafficking, and the exploitation of migrants trying to cross from Guatemala to the United States are more profitable. The boy does not know that in his land, tens of thousands of people have been murdered and tens of thousands have disappeared, their bodies dissolved in acid.
The boy also doesn't know that in a few years, a hitman will come looking for him and offer him a good salary—money to celebrate his wedding and to pay for a doctor. He doesn't know that the government will be with the drug traffickers and the drug traffickers will be with the government. The boy's great-great-grandmother believed in the goddess of the earth, the god of the sun, and the goddess of the moon.
Then, the Spanish Dominicans arrived and taught her that God had become flesh, that God was mercy. Now, the boy's grandmother, who is still young, has the company of the saints, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus to accompany her in life. She also has good priests—though there are some who are not so good—who defend her from the powerful, from the Indian chiefs, and from the political bosses. The boy does not yet know that older boys like him kill priests who confess his grandmothers, acting at the behest of hired assassins.
In a few years, the boy who now sleeps on his mother's back will no longer eat corn tortillas cooked over a wood fire. He will eat junk food at a fast-food chain that has replaced the flower market, spend hours watching videos on TikTok, and forget the Tzotzil language, for which no AI app of the moment will offer a substitute. The colonial church where the boy's mother celebrates the big feast will surely be empty and turned into a museum.
There are those who fight to preserve the indigenous culture that existed before the arrival of the Spanish. While admirable, this culture has both good things and bad things that should be forgotten. There are those who fight to preserve the great synthesis created by the Spanish Dominicans—a great work, an immense work.
But that won't help the boy either. There are those who naively believe that secularization is only a European and Latin American phenomenon and that Africa and Asia are safe, that they will always be religious. There are those who speak of the Dominican synthesis as if it were an eternal category.
But no tradition will help the boy say no to the hitman when he comes to turn him into a murderer; no tradition will prevent him from becoming a rootless man without a soul.
Only something present will help: a teacher, a priest, a good Mason, a friend who challenges him to be himself, to speak the language of free men—a language spoken in Tzotzil, in Spanish, and in all the languages of the world. A present reality is needed for the boy to defend his land and his water, but above all, to defend the infinite land of his humanity.
