Mennonites’ Ways Clash With Modern Debt Problems in Bolivia : Life style: Debtors are finding themselves imprisoned and ostracized from their families and clan.

The world that Abraham Groening and his Mennonite ancestors fled for 400 years has caught up with him.

The once-proud farmer, who is 45 years old and has 13 children, is confined to a squalid local prison because of debts to loan sharks.

“I sold off everything I had, but it wasn’t enough,” he said. “Now I don’t even own my own bed. And here I am.”

A borrower who falls behind on payments can be imprisoned in Bolivia, where the law equates incurring bad debts with criminal fraud.

Six brethren share both Groening’s predicament and his cellblock. Hundreds of others have managed to avoid prison but also were victimized, squeezed after borrowing at exorbitant interest rates or guaranteeing the loans of others.

“They couldn’t read the fine print,” said Menno Ediger, an overseas volunteer for the Pennsylvania-based Mennonite Central Committee. “They aren’t well-educated. They aren’t equipped to deal with the outside world.”

Such was the case of Groening. “I borrowed $4,000, but the debt grew faster than I could pay it back,” he said. In two years he owed $40,000, he said.

Groening has spent six months in the Santa Cruz jail, and has yet to have a court hearing. He could receive a sentence of several years in prison.

To keep himself busy, he cuts out wooden puzzles by hand with a jigsaw.

Some of his fellow prisoners already have been jailed for a year or more and some have found more worldly ways to pass the time. The gaunt and dazed expressions of some of the prisoners signal drug abuse. Use of bazuka, a cheap and often contaminated form of cocaine, is common among prisoners.

At the prison, in the tropical brush outside the city, the Mennonites are painfully surrounded by the trappings of modern life shunned by their creed.

Rock music blares from portable stereos. Televisions drone in the cellblocks and in the fly-infested prison canteen, broadcasting soccer games and soap operas. Wall posters warn about the danger of AIDS. There is no prison farm, no work programs.

The scandal has darkly clouded life in the 16 Mennonite colonies scattered across the sandy, scrub-covered plains outside Santa Cruz, in South America’s barely tamed Amazonian heartland.

It is inspiring some believers to move on, continuing a migration that dates back centuries to the sect’s origins.

The Mennonites arose from among Swiss Anabaptists in the 1530s and took their name from a Dutch Protestant reformist, Menno Simons. Belief in the Bible, adult baptism and non-resistance are fundamental, but within the sect currents range from extremely conservative to liberal.

Most of those in Bolivia are so-called Old Colony Mennonites, and resemble the Amish that broke away from the main church 200 years ago. They speak a Low German dialect, dress simply in overalls or frocks with wide-brimmed straw hats, and educate their many children at home. They reject most modern technology, making their livings as farmers or craftsmen and riding about in horse-drawn buggies.

They try to avoid unnecessary contact with what they call “The World.” They are prohibited from working outside their colony’s borders, and are barred from using rubber tires on their tractors--it might tempt someone to take a ride into town. Instead, they use spiked steel wheels unsuitable for pavement.

Over the centuries, their fundamentalism has forced periodic migrations--to Russia, Canada and Mexico, among many other countries.

They began flowing into Bolivia, mostly from Mexico and Belize, in the 1960s. About 6,000 to 7,000 came in all. Since then, sporadic new arrivals and births have swelled their numbers to about 20,000.

As in previous migrations, they were attracted to Bolivia by cheap land and special government exemptions from military service and public schooling. They also received an exemption from import duties for farm equipment.

Many were escaping pressure to culturally conform.

“It’s always the conservative ones who find the world is getting too close,” said Ediger, a more liberal Mennonite from Canada. “They came here because they wanted to preserve, or get back to, a way of life threatened by the advance of technology.”

Ediger and his wife, Margaretha, run a modest Santa Cruz cultural center and outreach program directed at the colonists.

Ediger is sharply critical of fundamentalism, but confesses a grudging admiration for the Old Colony adherents’ strength and independence. “You’ve got to hand it to them,” he said. “They came here and started from scratch, hacking and burning the brush and building their homes.”

Pat Gavagan, a Roman Catholic ex-priest from Britain who farms land adjacent to a Mennonite colony, called the sect’s members “absolutely brilliant” at working with their hands.

“They’re terribly confident they can go anywhere, even the middle of nowhere, and make a life at farming,” he said. “And the thing is, they can do it.”

The colonists did not arrive in Bolivia empty-handed. Many brought seed money, in the form of savings and profits from selling their land in Mexico or elsewhere. They imported new tractors, combines and other expensive farm equipment.

They began quickly turning a profit in the new colonies, first growing cotton and, nowadays, mostly soybeans in the sandy soil around Santa Cruz. They produce about 70% of the $5 million in soybeans exported by Bolivia.

The colonies, with their sturdy brick bungalows, are models of neatness. Flaxen-haired children and big farm dogs frolic on the well-tended lawns.

Their affluence attracted attention--not all of it good. Their stores and homes sometimes have been robbed by gunmen who learned that the Mennonites, because of their pacifism, don’t fight back.

Bankers sought their business, appreciating the colonists’ reputation for thrift and honesty.

In the mid-1980s, an economic crisis left most Bolivians with little cash and less credit. Lenders aggressively sought the Mennonites, who also were feeling the squeeze and, for the first time in Bolivia, were obliged to borrow against their crop.

“In 1986, the bankers printed up leaflets that said, ‘Mr. Mennonite, Come and Borrow From Me,’ ” Ediger said. “They spread them around the colonies.”

In many cases, however, the bankers did not lend the money themselves. They steered the naive Mennonites to friends who ran shady loan agencies that offered U.S. dollars at usurious rates--up to 5% or more a month.

Ediger estimates that at least 300 Mennonites were fleeced in the scheme. In many cases, the colonies are having to use common money, normally saved for buying land, to pay off the debts.

Some of the imprisoned Mennonites get visits from relatives, who must travel for hours by bus on dusty roads from the colonies. But others have fallen into disgrace, and even their wives and children now shun them.

“They don’t come here anymore,” Enrique Jiesprecht Boll, 43, said of his wife and five children. “Other people are telling them not to come.”

He has been in the prison 16 months, and has yet to receive a sentence.

Some of the prisoners even have been banned, a form of excommunication in which close contact even with immediate family members is prohibited. Among those banned was a debtor who became a trusty, driving the prison truck to town on errands. The fundamentalists’ code prohibits driving automobiles and trucks.

There are colonists who feel the jailed Mennonites were victims of their own greed or sloth. “Some weren’t workers,” said Franz Rempel, a 39-year-old cabinetmaker in a colony called Swift Current, southeast of Santa Cruz.

“When you take out a loan, you have to work to pay it back. Some didn’t know how to do that.”

According to colonists, the borrowers were naively trying to repeat the profits that could be made by borrowing pesos in the early 1980s, when devaluation outpaced interest rates. With inflation running at five digits, a loan in pesos equivalent to $1,000 in 1983 could be paid back a year later with the equivalent of just $75. A government austerity program put an end to high inflation, and the accompanying financial speculation, in 1985.

Margaretha Ediger maintains, however, that the indebted Mennonites have more than paid for any sins. “Their crimes are nothing compared to the crimes of those (the lenders) who are keeping them in prison,” she said.

One of the inmates, 28-year-old Abraham Friesen, only days away from his scheduled release after 18 months in prison, said he planned to emigrate with his wife and six children.

“I’d like to go to another country, maybe Canada,” he said. “I had to sell everything. There’s nothing left for me here.”