Word: guatemala
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...alone. God is with us. He'll help us move ahead." With those words, engineer-educator Jorge Serrano Elias, 45, piously hailed his smashing victory last week in Guatemala's presidential elections. As Serrano's comments underlined, religious issues had played a significant role in the campaign. Serrano is a Protestant who, in a predominantly Roman Catholic country, converted from Catholicism to fervent Pentecostalism at age 28. Backers of his Catholic opponent made open appeals against the prospect of a Protestant President. Serrano promised he would not use presidential powers to favor his faith, and his impressive 68% win indicated...
Serrano personifies a religious shift that is steadily gaining momentum, not only in Guatemala but also across traditionally Catholic Latin America. Evangelical Protestantism now claims as much as 30% of the Guatemalan population. Throughout the region, Evangelicals, as Protestants of all types are called, have increased from 15 million to at least 40 million since the late 1960s. Catholicism, says the Rev. Paulo Romeiro, Protestant director of an interdenominational research institute in Sao Paulo, is facing "a serious crisis. As the Evangelical movement grows stronger by the day, the Catholic Church is getting weaker and weaker...
Catholic prelates, long passive in the face of creeping Protestantism, are increasingly jittery about the threat. Brazil's bishops have debated plans to halt the worrisome defections. Guatemala's Archbishop Prospero Penados del Barrio issued a harsh letter charging that the U.S. government is boosting Evangelicalism to "help consolidate its economic and political power." Pope John Paul II believes the inroads of unnamed "sects" could become "disastrous." During last year's tour of Mexico, designed in part to counter Evangelicalism, the Pontiff directed clergy to abandon "timidity and diffidence" in combatting their rivals...
...going to be a doctor no matter what--even if I have to go to the University of Guatemala," Melinek says...
Central America. With Mexico now the chief entry point for U.S.-bound cocaine, the entire region is being crisscrossed with routes for ferrying the drug northward. Smuggling is up sharply in Guatemala, whose remote mountains and vast jungles provide concealment for traffickers along the 540-mile border with Mexico. This year Guatemalan authorities have confiscated 2.5 tons of coke, a fivefold increase from two years ago. Police believe Panamanian traffickers are trying to relocate and turn Guatemala into a "golden bridge for their goods...