Facing the Apocalypse
The sins of the world have provoked divine wrath; global warming threatens devastating famine. The Israelite Mission seeks refuge in remote Amazonian communities, works the land, and stocks the pantry that will save the world. A religion that may seem delusional—yet also a social response to the deep inequality in the distribution of land and wealth in Peru.
A woman preaches to her fellow believers on the banks of the Amazon River, in the community of Alto Monte.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 186 of Cáñamo magazine, June 2013.
Brother Juan introduces himself with a deep, booming voice and a fearsome appearance: burly, with a white curly beard down to his chest, a large bald head, a flat nose, slanted eyes hidden behind heavy bags, and a shiny technicolor blue robe trimmed with golden filigree, like a Hollywood movie version of the patriarch Abraham. “International journalist?” he raises an eyebrow, scrutinizing me. We leave the floating house and head toward the temple. On the moonless night, the Amazon River flows silently, lapping at the shore of Alto Monte. Brother Juan, shining his flashlight left and right, spots a group of teenagers of both sexes, and then, near the temple door, he shouts: “Discipline, discipline! There are some young people in the dark—go check!” A woman bursts out yelling, “Who’s there?” causing the teens to scatter, frightened off by the rigid rules on gender relations imposed by the Israelite Mission.
From the simple temple shines a white light, and a voice amplified by loudspeakers, and a discordant uproar. Inside, amid the unreal glow of white bulbs and the din of prayers, hymns, and sermons echoing against the zinc roof, a central aisle divides men on one side—bearded and long-haired—and women on the other, wearing headscarves. Both men and women are dressed in tunics, in their particular imitation of the customs of the ancient Israelites, raising their arms to the heavens, lamenting the world’s misfortunes, asking for healing, and applauding me when, at Brother Juan’s invitation, I stand before them and explain the reason for my visit.
Brother Juan, right out of the movie The Ten Commandments.
THE ROYAL LAW
After the catharsis, a pastor devotes himself to reading the Ten Commandments of the Royal Law revealed to the founder of the church, Ezequiel Ataucusy Gamonal, in 1956, in a small town in the Andes Mountains, far from the Amazon jungle. For a year, Ataucusy received “divine instruction” from the Holy Trinity, until he was “taken up to the third heaven” and arrived at a place “of the finest and most radiant metal” where there were “two libraries and a blackboard,” and a table at which “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” were seated. The Father began to write the ten commandments on the blackboard, and when finished said to Ataucusy: “Quickly, go and bring me a card from the library.” When he had it: “Write on the card the ten words of the covenant, without adding or taking away.” Ataucusy set to it and showed the result. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit approved, saying: “It is very good.” They said farewell to him: “Go and teach all the Gentiles, instructing them to keep all the commandments I have given you.”
And the enlightened one founded the Evangelical Association of the Israelite Mission of the New Universal Covenant, a church which, half a century later, counts tens of thousands of followers in Peru and other Latin American countries, and has become a powerful religious, economic, and political organization, capable of securing two seats in the national parliament, as well as councilors and mayors in districts and municipalities across the country.
Clothing is a fundamental custom of the Israelites, who seek to emulate the way of life of the Old Testament.
“We are the True People of God because we attend from Sabbath to Sabbath, as it is written,” explains Brother Juan. “When you have believed in the Holy Spirit, which is the Ten Commandments of the Royal Law, which is Jesus himself, which is God himself, then you are sealed by the Holy Spirit, by the promise of the Holy Spirit.” He strings together Bible passages like Sancho Panza strings proverbs, without order or coherence, but with firm conviction and sometimes with a perfectly earthly meaning. “Matthew says: Flee to the mountains. Why? Because in the town or city we can no longer live; there the Beast will kill us. The cities are polluted by evil. There is prostitution, there is drunkenness, there is crime, there is theft. There are injustices of human justice, of the government. Everyone does things their own way, to their liking. Understand? So we are already apart from that.”
A day by boat from the city of Iquitos, Alto Monte was the first agrarian Israelite community created within the framework of the Fronteras Vivas (Living Frontiers) project. Ezequiel Ataucusy prophesied the imminence of a famine, divine punishment for the worldly degeneration of the cities, and urged his followers to seek refuge in the remote Amazon, the only place that would remain safe from the catastrophe. “Since the year 1978 the sun has been gradually descending, two and a half leagues per year; since then the sun’s heat has been increasing year by year,” reads a leaflet from the organization. “Because of the intensity of the sun’s heat, men will be burned,” and Jehovah will send “hunger and evil beasts to destroy you.”
Beyond this extravagant jumble of tunics and prophecies, worldly sins and divine punishments, the Israelite Mission offers a practical response to the disintegration of Peruvian society, conceived through violence and plunder during the Conquest. Incurable wounds that marked a deeply unequal society, and radical responses, like that of Ezequiel Ataucusy, the Son of Man, a catalyst of the despair of poor farmers, landless and hopeless, secular servants, subjected to state repression, the hell of Shining Path, the greed of multinationals and powerful elites.
An unjust, cruel, random world, a “nest of sins” and, logically, an otherworldly solution.
In their zeal to exploit the jungle agriculturally, the Israelites constitute a powerful vector of deforestation.
the feast of unleavened bread
The religious fervor reaches its peak at the Solemn Feast of the Unleavened Bread, which gathers in Alto Monte six thousand people from communities scattered along the Amazon and its Peruvian tributaries. With the flow of the great river as a backdrop, the faithful arrange themselves in concentric circles around a votive pyre on which rests a sacrificed lamb. After the invocation, a pastor lights the fire while the faithful raise their hands to the sky and pray for protection from Jehovah, Jesus Christ, and their now deceased leader. I photograph the colorful and affected scenes offered to me until I am approached from behind.
“Who are you?” inquires a small man whose attempt at a beard is reduced to four hairs, ridiculous if not for their severity. I disdain him with indifference because I am an “international journalist,” because I was welcomed by Brother Juan, because I introduced myself last night; but the man does not back down, steps closer, introduces himself as the president of the agrarian community of Alto Monte, and firmly demands explanations and asks for my identification. “In this territory, we are the authority and we have to know who is here, in case anything happens.”
Yes, this is their territory, their law, and it must be obeyed. Agapito Atamary, once things were made clear, smiles benevolently and becomes an enthusiastic collaborator.
Atamary’s story uniquely exemplifies the circumstances of many of the brothers. “I was Roman Catholic. I worshiped statues, wood, stones, I liked the mass. But thanks to God, I converted.” Atamary was a smallholder farmer of dry, barren soil, back in the Andes. In 1989, the “fair of agrarian cooperatives,” an agricultural initiative sponsored by Ezequiel Ataucusy, came to his town. Atamary visited the fair and in the afternoon attended the praise service. “How beautifully they prayed!” His wife was then suffering from an incurable disease. “In the Mission, she would be healed,” they told him. And indeed, the miracle: “After we gathered, we visited the central temple with my wife and my little children. We stayed for a night vigil. At the end of the feast, my wife was healed. That’s why I stuck with it. I used to be a drunkard. But thanks to the Lord, all those things left me.”
Agapito Atamary, president of the agrarian community of Alto Monte.
the humble and the sick
The Mission promises to the sick and marginalized, in its founding statutes, a “perfect, hierarchical, organized, and sovereign society of men who seek peace and spiritual perfection, with faith and morality,” imposing an unchallengeable belief system and strict ritual and moral discipline: drunkenness, dancing, and lust are repressed to the extreme by the organization. There is no room for doubt.
Humble, dispossessed people are offered unlimited land in the Amazon. People like Brother Agapito, who arrived at Alto Monte in 1996, a year after its founding, when the settlement had only three hundred hectares; almost two decades later, Alto Monte hosts twelve hundred families exploiting a territory of twenty thousand hectares. The territory, like that of all Israelite communities, belongs to the Peruvian state and has been granted for agroforestry exploitation to the Mission, which in turn allocates each family a portion of land for agricultural work.
“Here the work is very easy. You just clear the forest, let it dry, burn it, plant, and in ninety days you already have some products,” boasts Atamary, overlooking a circumstance that threatens the very existence of these communities: most of the brothers come from the highlands or coast of Peru, very few from the jungle, and they have imported a mentality and agricultural techniques inappropriate to the Amazonian soil, which is very poor in nutrients. In the Amazon, the ashes from the burned forest mitigate the soil's acidity. The first harvest is optimal but yields decrease in the next, and after three years, the soil must be abandoned to clear more. “But the Amazonian land gets tired quickly, right?” I suggest. He nods. “And can that be a problem?” “No, because we will request more from the ministry and they will grant it to us.”
The Israelites are not satisfied with producing just for their own consumption; committed to prosper materially and stockpile food for the foretold famine. “He who tills his land will be satisfied with bread, but the one who follows the idle will be satisfied with poverty,” recites Atamary, one of the brothers’ favorite verses. Their zeal has made them an important driver of deforestation, although the Peruvian state looks favorably on this migration, which helps to relieve the public services congestion in cities. And the Israelites keep coming to the Amazon, one of the last spaces on the planet where Freedom is not a word serving Power.
An Israelite family, on the remote Yavarí River, at the border between Peru and Brazil.
distrust
To rivers like the remote Yavarí, which flows into the Amazon at the tri-border area of Colombia, Brazil, and Peru, the tentacles of the Total State scarcely reach. Beautiful, wild, inhospitable, ravaged by an epidemic of hepatitis and malaria, threatened by the cocaine production business, rich in fish and meat, sparsely populated, refuge for several indigenous groups who remain isolated from Western society and live in secular autonomy. Even the Israelites have come to the Yavarí, also in search of territory and independence.
The full moon’s disk reflects on the dark surface of the river, cut by a ten-meter-long boat. Under the wooden roof, about twenty hammocks occupy the aerial space; bundles and merchandise cover the bottom. The promiscuity, “Who farted, pig?”, echoes in the night. The boat temporarily leaves the river’s course through channels crossing the flooded forest to shortcut the almost circular bends. Dawn breaks and the boat slowly sails, stopping perhaps at an indigenous community to leave a package, perhaps to buy gasoline.
Simple, well-intentioned people, but regarded with distrust by the locals who do not know these strange outsiders. Yet the truth: hospitable to foreigners, as God commands, and eager to share their story, flattered to know that an “international journalist” considers it worthy of being told.
“I didn’t like the scarves,” recalls Sister María, and that is why she didn’t listen to the brothers the first time they spoke to her. “My daughter had a stroke, and my husband was an alcoholic, my mother died of cancer.” She became Israelite and “everything changed.” She left her land, her home, and went to this remote place. Now she wears the scarf, from which a few gray strands escape, and thick plastic glasses. “In New Jerusalem, there were three hundred of us. This was pure jungle. No one believed we would hold out. They said we would last here at most a year and we have been here ten. It took us three days to build two pavilions, one for men and one for women. We immediately started clearing and planting. At six months, the first harvests arrived. At two years, we were self-sufficient. While we had no food, our Lord Ezequiel sent it to us from Alto Monte.” She offers me rice and cassava, homegrown. She boasts that thanks to them, the small cities of Leticia and Tabatinga, a day’s journey by river, can eat plantains, cassava, cucumber, beans, and peanuts.
Thanks to them, and to the receding jungle.
Baylón takes his sheep for sale from the community of Alto Monte to the city of Leticia, two days downstream by boat.
communal work
In his company, I visit the nearby plantations, some in production, others already exhausted. “Here no one owns the plot. This is the Master's land, which He got so that we, His children, could work it. Each person owns what they planted, their yucca, their rice, but not the land.” A woman spreads the harvested rice over large black plastics, letting it dry under the intense midday sun; ten percent of what is harvested, the tithe, must be given to the Mission. In a communal building, three confused men strive to fix the rice huller, a machine that separates the grain from the husk. Chainsaws roar and cut the fallen tree, turning it into planks for a house. “We work communally like the ancient Incas, in minga.” She proudly shows me when we pass a group of men dragging the long and heavy piece of wood that will be the base of a boat. Several hundred meters pulled through the thick forest.
Sister María leads me to the school, private, built with funds from the Mission, where boys and girls, in school uniform, long hair, and headscarves, form orderly and sing some religious hymn in the yard. “Since this is a religious community, we try to introduce what we consider important. For example, in Language class, instead of reading just any text, we read the Bible.” The children did not choose, I think, they know nothing else, maybe they do not like it. “Many people think this is suffering… Of course, it is, because fun is suppressed. Maybe it’s not what you want, but it is your belief that leads you, not to a life of slavery, but that one wanting to save oneself must stay away from what the Scripture forbids. What would we gain by drinking, dancing, in fornication?”
The boat goes down weekly with products for sale: bunches of plantain, various fruits, caged chickens, pigs that live among the passengers. The trip lasts twenty hours and ends at the port of Tabatinga, where resellers and intermediaries wait, boarding eagerly in search of products. Sometimes it is the Israelite women who sit under a leafy tree, on the streets of Leticia and Tabatinga, selling eggs, cheese, beans, or peanuts, unmistakably dressed in their attire that challenges the prevailing aesthetic order. I often meet them in Leticia, and sometimes I buy fresh cheese from them, and ask, as if I did not know much, about the arrival of the “punishment of God” in the cities. “Next year it begins,” an old man states without hesitation. “It can be delayed, it can pass… We can prophetically say this biblically. Now, if after that something else happens, that is the Lord’s business, because the Lord is merciful. He does not want anyone to be lost. He can give more time like in the case of Noah, not because He is mysterious but because He is merciful.”
