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The most colorful scene was at the village of Mosquera, 13 miles from Bogota, where the Pope was set down by helicopter before 50,000 campesinos. Leaving his copter, Paul boarded a white Jeep and, for half an hour, drove through a multitude of awed faces. Present in the crowd were "typical" peasants from 21 Latin American coun tries, selected to attend the confrontation with the Pontiff. Bolivia sent the head of its National Peasants' Union.
From Peru came an Indian who an swered all questions with "Cuzco," meaning that was his home town. A Uruguayan peasant, Roberto Rodriguez, wore bombachas (Gaucho-type bloomers), and there was even a black peasant-delegate from Haiti. During the Pope's speech, the honored peasants sat behind him on a flag-decked platform. Afterward, they received his blessing and gave him gifts, including a bottle of chicha (corn beer) from Chile and a Peruvian wreath of alpaca, llama, and vicuna known as a chopo.
Education over Violence. Everywhere, Paul tried to sound a call to reconciliation and reform. He advised the new priests to "be able to understand men's concerns and to transform them. not into anger and violence, but into the powerful force of constructive work." At Mosquera, he told the campesinos: "We know how, in the great continent of Latin America, economic and social development has been unequal. It has passed over the multitude of the indigenous peoples, who have almost always been abandoned to an ignoble level of life."
The Pope added: "We will continue to denounce unjust economic inequalities between rich and poor. We exhort all the governments of Latin America and also those of other countries, as well as the managerial and well-to-do classes, to persevere in facing the reforms necessary for a more just and efficient social arrangement." Facing up to Latin America's social ills, Paul declared, demands "progressive advantage for the classes today less favored and fairer imposition of the fiscal burden on the more well-to-do classes, especially upon those who own vast estates and on those classes who, with little or no real toil, realize huge incomes."
Concluding his address, the Pope warned his leathern-faced listeners:
"Do not place your trust in violence and revolution. That is contrary to the Christian spirit, and it can also delay instead of advance that social uplifting to which you lawfully aspire. See to it rather that you support undertakings in education, that you seek to organize yourselves under the Christian banner and to modernize your agriculture." On the final day of his visit, Paul inaugurated the annual meeting of Latin American Catholic bishops by defending his encyclical prohibiting Catholics from practicing artificial birth control.