BOLIVIA: Murder in the Vineyard

The 20 workers of the Canadian Baptist Mission have spread good works across the windswept barrens of the Bolivian altiplano. The mission has built schools and hospitals for the poverty-haunted tin miners to whom it ministers, given out free medicines, taught converts to speak

Spanish and English in addition to their own staccato Aymara or liquid Quechua.

Bolivia’s Roman Catholic clergy tends to regard such activity as an intrusion into its vineyard. Many an Indian miner has been told that the Protestants are “messengers of the devil”; more sophisticated Bolivians have been warned that the evangelistas are advance agents of Yankee imperialism. From the sowing of such seed came evil fruit last week.

In a convert’s home in the mountain village of Melcamaya, Baptist Missionary Norman Dabbs was holding a Bible class. When 300 drunken Indians began to stone the house, Dabbs and 40 terrified converts tried to escape in a truck. The Indians cut across a dry river bed, intercepted the truck, laid about with sticks and stones. When they had finished, Norman Dabbs and seven Bolivian Baptists lay dead.