1991 — Peru • Iran • Cyprus • Portugal
In late January 1991, the first cases of an epidemic cholera outbreak appeared in Chancay, Peru; within ten weeks the outbreak had produced over 97,000 cases and more than 600 deaths, per contemporary UN and CDC records. Texas Baptist Men (TBM), a Dallas-headquartered Southern Baptist disaster-relief institution led by Executive Director Bob Dixon with Dr. John LaNoue as Disaster Relief Director, received word of the epidemic through a HAM-radio relay from a Foreign Mission Board missionary in Cajamarca, Peru. Within days, TBM assembled 450,000 pounds of medicine and IV fluids through its partnership with the BGCT Human Welfare Department and a network of Texas Baptist hospital administrators.
After an initial Pentagon refusal, a fax composed by Dr. Ken Dupuy of Longview, Texas and sent directly to President George H.W. Bush secured a military airlift; within 24 hours the Pentagon called LaNoue to arrange pickup. The Peru response established institutional credibility that led the same Pentagon contact to ask LaNoue weeks later, “How are you Baptists at getting blankets together?” — the opening of TBM's parallel mission delivering 14,400 blankets and water purifiers into Iran for Kurdish refugees fleeing Saddam Hussein's post-Gulf War crackdown, using a LESEA Ministries C-130 and becoming the first American civilian team to enter Iran since the 1979 hostage crisis. Amigos Internacionales did not yet exist in 1991; the chapter documents the institutional culture and operational vocabulary — multi-partner network mobilization, prayer-grounded decision-making, field-improvised logistics — from which Amigos would later emerge.
Chapter 15 documents the institutional pivot through which a Texas-based Southern Baptist disaster-relief institution became, in a single calendar year, a humanitarian-airlift partner of the Pentagon — a discovery of the ecclesial relief sector's operational capacity whose institutional ratification appears a decade later in post-9/11 federal faith-based-partnership policy. The chapter also documents how civilian humanitarian access to Iran, sealed since 1981, was reopened in May 1991 through a missionary's improvised credentials at the Iranian Embassy in London.
For the institutional historian of Amigos Internacionales, Chapter 15 is the documentary anchor for the seven-partner network — TBM, the Foreign Mission Board, the Brotherhood Commission, Global Partners, the Iranian Christian Fellowship, LESEA Ministries, and Beacon Manufacturing Company — within which Dr. John LaNoue's disaster-relief operational vocabulary was forged, years before Amigos Internacionales itself would apply that same vocabulary to medical-mission and church-development work across East Africa.
Dr. John LaNoue — Texas Baptist Men Disaster Relief Director; orchestrated the Peru medicine airlift and led the civilian mission into Iran.
Bob Dixon (1927–2018) — Executive Director of Texas Baptist Men, 1969–1998; LaNoue's direct supervisor and institutional partner through both the Peru and Iran phases.
President George H.W. Bush (1924–2018) — 41st President of the United States; recipient of the Dupuy fax that secured the initial Pentagon airlift for Peru.
Dr. Ken Dupuy — Longview, Texas resident and former Nixon-era Bureau of the Budget official; composed and sent the fax to President Bush that unlocked the military airlift.
Dr. Lester E. Sumrall (1913–1996) — Founder of LESEA Ministries in South Bend, Indiana; his organization's C-130A Hercules, purchased in 1988–89, carried the TBM team and cargo into Iran.
Mike Stroop — Foreign Mission Board missionary to the Kurds working out of England; secured Iranian Embassy approval for the mission under the improvised “Global Partners” humanitarian-aid name.
Lt. Col. Jim Furgerson, USMC (Ret.) — Disaster Relief Director for the Brotherhood Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention; led the second TBM team into Iran.
Col. Cal Jones, USAF (Ret.) and Warren Hart — Retired Air Force officers on the second team; Hart's dead-reckoning navigation guided a cargo flight safely to Sanandaj Airport through overcast mountains.
Mafa Barzani — Dallas-based Kurdish-American interpreter and DFW Airport taxi driver, identified in the record as a nephew of the Barzani family that led the Kurdish independence movement; joined the TBM team as its in-country interpreter.