Fernando & Ana Stahl

Fernando and Ana Stahl arrived in Peru from the United States in 1909 and remained in the country for the next three decades, founding Adventist chapels, clinics, and schools in the region of Lake Titicaca. They are widely credited by sociologists, historians, and anthropologists with helping to empower Peru’s indigenous people and shatter an oppressive alliance of white landowners, politicians, and corrupt Catholic clergy. In the 1990s, the great Peruvian Catholic theologian Gustavo Gutierrez paid tribute to the Stahls as precursors to his own liberation theology. A 1923 article in the Lima newspaper El Heraldo testifies to the Stahl’s radical commitments. “They spread doctrines of the most crimson communism,” the paper charged.  “They attempt to destroy patriotism and the spirit of the nation by inculcating the most extreme and dangerous socialist concepts of social organization, class and racial equality, and unbounded liberty in the ignorant masses.”

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