BROTHER SANTIAGO MILLER
 On the fourth day of February, 1976, Guatemala awoke to find itself in ruins because of the terrible earthquake that left more than 20,000 dead, thousands of wounded, many families without a home and uncountable material damages. Some months afterwards, the Bishops in their Pastoral Letter, “United in Hope”, manifested that this natural phenomenon had exposed for all to see the sinful reality of the country. Among other things they affirmed:
“This nation, that has been so valiant, has for centuries been the object of constant exploitation and today struggles in a life both unjust and inhumane. Guatemala lives under the sign of underdevelopment and dependence that deprives our brothers not only of the enjoyment of material goods but of their own realization as human beings.”
“We are unafraid to state that Guatemala lives in a situation of institutionalized violence, that is to say:
• That unjust social structures are the norm
• Oppression is found at all levels
• The marginalization of the vast majority is a fact so that the people live under
unbearable tension”.
“ But repression follows hard on the heels of this and we have entered for many years now into what is being called the terrible “spiral of violence” in which oppression reacts to subversion, and subversion, to repression so that, little by little, the climate has become more desperate and the bloodbath that our nation is suffering has taken on insufferable characteristics.”
A victim of this bloodbath in the year 1982 would be our Brother James (Santiago) Miller who, together with fourteen other religious and priests gave their lives in service of the Gospel and the poor in the years between 1979 and 1982.
Brother Santiago worked nine years in Central America. The first seven of these were spent in the missionary works that Brothers from North America had on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, with the last one in Guatemala after a brief stay in his District of St. Paul and Minneapolis. In one of his last letters he expressed the following thoughts:
“I am personally weary of violence but I continue to feel a strong commitment to the suffering poor of Central America. God’s ways are not men’s ways, as the Bible says. God know why He continued to call me to Guatemala when some friends and relatives encouraged me to pull out for my own comfort and safety. I pray to God for the grace and strength to serve Him faithfully through my presence among the poor and oppressed of Guatemala. I place my life in his providence; I place my trust in Him.”
 He was to die on the 13th of February, about four in the afternoon, a victim of the senseless violence that was scourging the country. The declaration made by the Brothers of Huehuetenango affirmed: “The death of Brother Santiago was no accident. Brother Miller died for what he was and what he stood for, a Christian educator, an apostle to the poor and underprivileged and a worker for justice and for social change.”
Two letters impressed me after the death of Brother Santiago. The first, from his own hand, was written to an older retired married couple in the United States. They had been paying for several scholarships for the young men of the Indigenous Center where Santiago worked. He wrote it just a few days before his death. He spoke of a young man that the community of the Brothers had decided to expel. Santiago asked that they would continue to pay into the scholarship because he would make himself personally responsible for this boy. He planned to call him to his side each night to speak to him and give him the counsel he would be needing to complete his studies. This was Brother Santiago, incapable of losing faith in the young, always disposed to give of himself unstintingly. We are reminded of the Good Shepherd.
The second letter is from a former student of the Indigenous Institute “Santiago”, written on the 17th of February, 1982, scarcely four days after the murder of our Brother, from the small city of Sololá, in the largely indigenous western part of Guatemala. I treasure it. “The purpose of this letter is simply this: SANTIAGO MILLER, a man who will always be alive in our midst, who gave himself to the poor and died among them. Truly, Brothers, I share my sorrow with all the Lasallian Brothers. As a former student of the Indigenous Institute, I know well and can never forget the love of the Brothers for the children, the youth and the poor. I want to join my prayers to yours to ask of Jesus, our God, and our Patron, St. John Baptist de La Salle, that they help us and that they would bring down blessings upon the Brothers. May there be more Brothers and may they not become disheartened. If a seed dies it will bear fruit. One leader has died but more will be born.”
 Twenty-five years after his martyrdom, we remember once more the great gift that God has granted us in the person of Brother Santiago and we offer his life and death to the Lord. His years of service in Central America, his work with the young men of the Indigenous Center, his labors on the farm, his blood shed unjustly while he was repairing the exterior of the house. It was a death while doing manual work, the work of our laborers and campesinos that he loved so much.
And we offer all this to the Lord, not with resentment and bitterness, but with joy and hope because we know that for the Christian, the paschal mystery does not end with death, because we know that if the grain falls on the ground and does not die, it will not bear fruit. Because we believe that the very best that we can offer to the Lord from the life of Brother Santiago is exactly this, his contagious joy, his love of life and of the soil, his capacity for friendship, his words of encouragement in those late hours of counseling with the boys.
And from heaven may he help us to be:
• Visible signs of the love of the Father;
• Persevering laborers in the saving work of Christ, especially among the Indigenous people and the most needy youngsters;
• Men full of the Spirit, who live and assist others to live of that Spirit that is love, peace, joy, generosity, understanding, goodness… (Galatians 6, 22).
 If we live like this, we will be prepared to give our very life, as Brother Santiago has done, for in the words of our Founder: “The only gratitude that you have a right to expect for having instructed the children, especially the poor, will be insults, calumnies, persecutions and even death itself. Such was the reward of the saints and the Apostles as it was of our Lord Jesus Christ. Do not expect anything else, but only to work for God in the ministry that He has confided to you” (Meditation 155, 3).
Brother Alvaro Rodríguez Echeverría,
Superior General
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lasallew@lasalle.org