BROTHER JULIO HERNANDEZ
(EDITOR’S Note: As stated in the article on the previous page, the legacy of the Hernandez’s family has been phenomenal for God’s Kingdom. The following testimony was first published in the THE NEWSVINE in the February 1994 Issue. Both Brother Julio and Sister Ana were interviewed, and since then, Sister Ana has passed into eternal life. Even though this is the testimony of Brother Julio, it is also enriched with the history of his wife and children. The sheer drama of lives delivered from drugs and alcohol, with the exception of his daughter Miriam, makes this testimony one to be shared. )
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A BEGINNING OF POVERTY AND DESPAIR
rother Julio Hernandez was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala, in 1952. His mother, Blanche Lucy Garcia, was converted from Catholicism to the Assembly of God Pentecostal Church when she was 13. She was very religious and faithfully attended the local church. His father, Alfonzo Hernandez, was a man who followed no religion at all and spent much of his life in the bonds of alcoholism. Although Alfonso Hernandez came from a wealthy family, he became the black sheep and was irresponsible. His family forsook helping him and his numerous children and wife. Julio was a mixture of Mayan and Spanish ancestries. He was the oldest of 18 children-15 sons and three daughters-and due to his father’s drinking, he had to work hard to help support the family. “I never had the joy of childhood,” he laments as he remembers the years he spent raising goats on the family farm on the outskirts of Guatemala City. “My mom suffered much because of my father’s alcoholism,” he recalls. “We were very poor.” “My mom,” Julio says with great love, “was a saint, always faithful.” His mother fought hard for her children to know there was a
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God and compelled them to go to church every week with her. She had received the Holy Ghost when she was 13, a time when the Assembly of God movement believed you had to receive the baptism of the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in tongues to be saved. “She prayed all the time, especially for us,” Julio remembers. His sisters received the Holy Ghost, but not Julio. One day when Julio was 16, he was praying at the altar and a minister asked him, “Are you praying to Jesus? Do you love Jesus?” Julio said, “Yes, please pray for me.” The minister said, “God is going to use you. You must be humble to God and God will use you.” Julio remembered these words all his life. But he still did not receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit after the minister prayed for him. In Guatemala, primary schools are free to attend, but back then, if a family wished to send their children to secondary school, they had to pay tuition. Julio attended one year of secondary school then had to drop out because of the cost. He became a farm worker and later was trained to be a butcher. That is when the drinking began. At age 16 he started following in his father’s footsteps. “Drinking was my only escape from the poverty and misery,” he explained. When he turned 17, Julio left the church along with some of his friends. “Going to church was a part of my life,” he explained. “But I did not have a relationship with God.” He drank heavily, lifted weights, and fought with knives out in the streets. He fathered a son and daughter from two of his girlfriends, one who was in the church his family attended. But then an event occurred which would change his life and lead him to the United States. For the next several years, the nation of Guatemala in the 70s had a vicious civil war between civilians and the military. Many civilians wanted a more democratic government and used guerrilla tactics against the military supporting the dictatorial regime. The military and the government responded with a brutal counter-insurgency campaign that resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths and disappearances. The U.S. government suspended all military aid to Guatemala because of human rights atrocities. When Julio was 23 the notorious Death Squad came pounding at his family’s door. The family was terrified when the soldiers entered the house and demanded to see Noah Jacob, Julio’s younger brother. They accused Noah Jacob of being a communist rebel, and Julio’s mother and sisters were horrified when they dragged his brother out of the house. For three days they heard nothing about Noah Jacob. Then the family was informed that they had found a body in a vacant lot. It was Noah Jacob. His mother screamed when she saw the brutal evidence that Noah Jacob had been tortured. There were deep cuts in his flesh, his teeth had been pulled out, his fingers and toes were missing, and they had poured acid on him. He had been shot 17 times. “We prayed that the first bullet had ended his suffering,” Julio says with much grief. His brother was only one year younger than Julio. “It was common to find 10 to 13 dead bodies left in empty lots throughout the city at any given time.” Brother Julio was very angry for his brother. “I wanted revenge,” he says, for he had loved his brother very much. “I wanted to get even! But revenge was a death sentence.” That is when Julio decided to leave Guatemala and never return.
A NEW BEGINNING Julio obtained a Visa to come to Mexico and then rode up in a bus to the U.S.-Mexican border. America was his real goal. He came through under the water, running through the fields from Tijuana to Chula Vista. He made his way to Los Angeles, but this was only tem-
