Ex-fighter pilot on mission to bring change to Juárez
http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_16239433?source=most_emailed
By Marty Schladen
10/03/2010
JUAREZ -- You might not agree with James Hinde on everything, but it
is hard to doubt his sincerity.
Known now as "Father Peter," Hinde has gone from World War II fighter
pilot to a member of Veterans for Peace who comes to El Paso every
Friday to protest U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And as a priest, Hinde lives among and ministers to some of Juárez's
poorest residents. And he argues that U.S. policies help keep them poor.
After experiencing the civil-rights movement while living in
Washington, D.C., and the beginnings of the movement known as
liberation theology while living in Peru, Hinde plans to end his days
in Juárez trying to demonstrate what he sees as the effects of trade
policy on Mexican workers.
"Christ challenged the authorities of his day, and that's what is
going on here," Hinde said in a recent interview.
Even though he's 87, Hinde's end seems a long way off.
One Sunday last month, the slight priest walked a mile up and down
steep, unpaved streets in the western outskirts of Juárez, past loose
dogs and kids playing soccer outside cinder-block shacks.
Then he donned his vestments and celebrated Mass in a sweltering
chapel on a hill. He had to speak loudly because thieves stole the
public-address system a month earlier.
After Mass, he hiked another mile to a humble bazaar held by two
other chapels. Hinde stopped repeatedly to hug parishioners, many of
them maquiladora workers. He bought a hamburger from one of the four
booths in the rocky street and kept trying to give away half. And
after he ate standing up, he busied himself finding chairs for his guests.
It was a long way from where he started.
Born in 1923 in Elyria, Ohio, Hinde grew up in Chicago. He attended a
Catholic High School run by the Order of Carmelites and vaguely
thought of becoming a priest. But he pursued a more worldly
profession when he started college at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
"I was setting out on an engineering career," Hinde said.
But war broke out, and in 1942 he volunteered for the Army Air Corps.
Hinde is as modest about his service as he is about every other
aspect of his life. Based on an island off of Okinawa, Japan, he flew
three combat missions, but he says there was little danger.
"They were almost milk runs, as they used to call them."
But one mission took Hinde over the Japanese city of Nagasaki just
days after an atomic bomb leveled it.
"We saw where the city was," Hinde said pointedly.
It was not that, or any other searing experience in the war, that led
Hinde to the priesthood and pacifism. They came gradually, he said.
After the war, he thought of becoming a priest, but he also wanted to
keep flying and to play baseball. After he was ordained in 1952,
Hinde taught math and science and then spent three years in an
Austrian monastery.
Upon returning to the U.S., Hinde was placed in charge of 60 seminary
students in Washington, D.C., between 1960 and 1965 -- the height of
the civil-rights struggle. He encouraged students to go into the
urban areas and to work with young black activists. Hinde formed a
close friendship with activist Stokely Carmichael that lasted until
Carmichael's death in 1998.
Hinde says the seminarians and the activists confronted and then
helped the all-Anglo Washington police department prepare to
implement provisions of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
"We learned how racism is structural," Hinde said. "And the system
conditions people who go through it."
The experience conditioned Hinde for the Peru he saw in 1966, when he
went to work in a new Carmelite community. The Peruvian government
was embroiled in a fight with Standard Oil of New Jersey over oil
leases that vastly underpaid Peru, Hinde said. The U.S. government
was threatening to cut foreign aid if Peru interfered with the leases.
In the midst of the fight, in July 1968, Hinde saw the Rev. Gustavo
Gutiérrez of Peru give a speech in which he articulated the idea of
liberation theology -- that Christians have a responsibility to see
life through the eyes of the poor and ask how social institutions
help or hurt them.
Some conservatives called liberation theology a Marxist ideology, and
Pope Benedict XVI criticized parts of it before he became pope. But
to Hinde, it is a way of life.
"God is speaking to us through Latin Americans struggling for a fair
wage," Hinde said.
Since 1995, he has lived among the poorest people in Juárez,
celebrating Mass at whichever chapel the archdiocese asks him to. He
has no television, and he hasn't had a car since 1978.
Just about all the families he preaches to have at least one member
working in the maquiladoras, making $50 to $55 a week, he said.
As he preached recently, in front of a padlocked tabernacle, Hinde
likened the economy to a boat in which millionaires upset the
balance. The more millionaires, he said, the more poor people are
needed to balance the boat. The message seemed to resonate with his audience.
"I've watched as NAFTA has impoverished the great majority of
Mexicans," he said later of the trade agreement that has helped
foster the maquiladora industry.
Many on both sides of the border would disagree. Outgoing Juárez
Mayor José Reyes Ferriz counts retention of the industry as a major
achievement in an administration marred by epidemic violence.
But Hinde means what he says and has devoted his life to proving it.
And he has no regrets about choosing his humble life.
Doing "otherwise would have spiritually been a disaster to me," he
said. "I would have ended up with my head in the same bubble as so
many people."
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Marty Schladen may be reached at mschladen@elpasotimes.com; 546-6127.
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