by EMMA VOLONTE
(Translated by Puneet Dhaliwal)
On January 24, Don Samuel Ruiz Garcia died aged 86. Thousands of people, especially indigenous people from the communities from the most forgotten corner of the country, as the Zapatistas defined it in 1994, have filed past the coffin of the man who was the bishop of San Cristóbal de las Casas for forty years (1959-2000).
“We want bishops on the side of the poor!” shouted the faithful in the plaza in front of the city cathedral during three days of ceremonies. Bishops on the side of the poor like Tatic Samuel (Father Samuel in the Mayan language tzotzil), a politically progressive religious figure, but who, it must be said, always followed the position of the Vatican on moral questions like abortion and homosexuality.
Ordained a bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas in 1959, during his first years of his episcopate Don Samuel saw the world through the conservative and paternalist lens of the Roman Catholic Church.
“The indigenous converted me”, the Father has stated many times, who in the course of the ‘60s and ‘70s crossed by foot, horse, jeep or by donkey, the immense territory of his Diocese, which stretches from the mountains of the Highlands of Chiapas to the communities of the Lacandon Jungle. To see with his own eyes the reality of the Chiapan indigenous peoples, the exploitation that they suffer on the part of ranchers and their misery and hunger, profoundly changed the conscience of the young bishop.
In Samuel Ruiz, The Walker, Carlos Fazio tells of when Don Sam arrived, after days on the road by horse, near San Pablo Chalchihuitán, where he found a desperate community: all the children had died from measles and smallpox. The parents went to the city four times to ask for medical help, which never arrived.
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