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Because they defied the authorities, two French Catholic missionaries languished last week in federal police headquarters in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, while they appealed eight-and ten-year sentences for alleged "incitement to kill." Father Aristides Camio, 41, and Father François Guriou, 40, got into trouble in the jungles of the Amazon basin by advising the impoverished natives that, under the law, they had a claim on land in a rain forest. When the natives hacked out villages, clearing the tangle of trees with machetes, they were attacked by gun squads hired by absentee owners of the forests. According to the priests, 47 people died in the skirmishes.
On Aug. 13, 1981, the squatters, as the government calls them, killed one of the gunmen and wounded four federal agents. Though the two priests were not involved, police burst into their rectory and arrested them on the charge that their sermons the previous Sunday had stirred up the rebellion. The two fathers deny the accusations; their defense lawyers say that police used torture to persuade nine peasants to testify against the two men. The priests are warmly remembered back in the jungle. Says Josias de Silva, 37, the head of one of 36 families guarding their makeshift village in the rain forest: "Father Aristides showed us the church is on the side of the poor."
In Guatemala, the Catholic hierarchy remains staunchly conservative. Mario Cardinal Casariego, the Archbishop of Guatemala City, says he knows of no murdered clergy in his country (there have been at least ten, according to most accounts). Says the Cardinal: "If you mix in politics, you get what you deserve." Although Guatemala is desperately short of priests, Casariego wants troublesome missionaries to leave. The Cardinal is equally perturbed by the growth of Protestant churches, which now claim 21% of the population, including the head of the government, General Efraín Ríos Montt. The general, whose brother is a Catholic bishop, is a born-again Christian who found his new faith in 1978 at a tent church run by Pentecostals from California. Some of the evangelists were converts from the drug culture.
When Ray Elliott, 50, and his wife Helen, 56, came to Guatemala in 1953, Protestants were a scorned and despised minority. After arriving in the remote village of Nebaj, nestled in a steep valley 165 miles northwest of Guatemala City, the Elliotts learned that a priest was warning the people that Protestants were devils and kidnapers who should be refused all goods and supplies. To this day, Helen Elliott has trouble acknowledging Catholics as fellow Christians.
The young couple, who had been high-school sweethearts in Independence, Kans., settled with their three children into a two-room dirt-floor sharecropper's cabin. The Elliotts had been sent to Guatemala by the Wycliffe Bible Translators of Huntington Beach, Calif., who dispatch teams around the world to create the first written form of languages or dialects that exist only in a spoken form. Experts then translate the New Testament into the language—in the Elliotts' case, a difficult Indian