I have been reading extensively on Guatemalan history lately because I wanted to know why the Military/Government decided to kill Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1996. In 500 years of Central American history, a bishop had never been killed, yet in only 16 years time from 1980-1996, two Central American Bishops were martyred: El Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero and Guatemalan Bishop Gerardi.
I have read almost every book that exists on Romero. But I had never read anything on Gerardi. I had studied him somewhat when I worked in Costa Rica’s Caritas office, since Gerardi was exiled to CR in the early 80s. Honestly, I did not know much about him. So I read The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop by Francisco Goldman. The book documents and proves who killed the Bishop and their motive for doing so. It is no secret that the US supported military dictatorships of the two countries were responsible for the Bishops’ murders. At this point, all of us should know this.
What I didn’t realize is that the spread of Evangelical Christianity was ALSO a method of the military dictatorships against the Catholic Church. The war against the poor was fought by primarily spreading terror via random killings and tortures and making people disappear. But it was ALSO fought by disinformation (as they learned from their training at Ft. Benning, GA) and chaos. If the military’s enemies were split amongst themselves it would only make them weaker. So the Governments invited and encouraged and promoted the spread of Evangelical Christianity.
From his famous, ground breaking book, Daniel Wilkinson’s Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala has this to say:
In the end, it wasn’t only a matter of food, however. A major part of the army’s campaign was to blame the guerrillas. So that people hated us, so that they erased us from their minds. And that is why they promoted the Evangelical churches. The Evangelicals reject everything that’s political. They have a vertical relationship with God–’el Senor and me’–and nothing about the community. Many Evangelical churches appeared after the massacres. The preachers took advantage of people’s fear. They called the guerrilla the devil. They needled the pain of the people when they should have been more compassionate, more understanding (313). emphasis mine.
What is interesting to me is that I have spoken to many American Catholics who believed that the guerrillas automatically meant “communist.” And yet that is not what they were about. From the army’s perspective, the “guerrillas” were anyone who disagreed with the Government. Anyone. That is why the Church, union leaders, human rights advocates, indigenous peoples, and political leaders were targeted for execution and terror. The Central American Governments sure figured out that all they had to do was use the word “communist” and the Americans would support them.
And that is how US sponsored and supported regimes managed to make saints out of two ordinary Bishops and how the Church was split in Central America.
Did the military dictatorships hate the two bishops or hate the Faith?
Was it odium fidei (hatred of the faith)? Was the resentment of the powered class against the bishops Based on them being leaders of a hostile institution (odium ecclesiae)? Did the Church take sides in violent revolutions? Did the bishops (not the Faith) become feared and hated?
Just asking.
PS: Marxist apologists use similar questions to sully thousands of martyrdoms in the Spanish Civil War. IMHO, the Faith is not defined: Marx good, private sector bad!
While they are not used to murder Catholics, American evangelicals in the US and their Catholic allies are also doing their best to water down authentic Churhc teachings — just look at Deal Hudson.
T Shaw: They hated both. Absolutely without question. The Faith meant that they couldn’t annihilate people and it meant that they couldn’t allow their workers to starve to death. The Faith had consequences and the Bishops were responsible for articulating those consequences. And they were killed for it.
RCM–
I noted that a lot of this discussion is in the past tense. I have been wondering what the situation is reallyl like currently in the troubled spots in Latin America, and if the dynamics that created the problems in the past are still a factor today.
Michael, excellent question. I was going to answer here, but I think it merits a whole other post.
Michael – The dynamics are still present. For current updates, news, analysis etc. I recommend the following sites:
http://www.upsidedownworld.org/
http://crispaz.org/
http://www.soaw.org/
http://luterano.blogspot.com/
The growth of evangelical Protestantism has also intensified, as a supposedly “apolitical” alternative to Catholicism which, fortunately, has become more attentive to its socio-political dimensions and responsibilities. The growth of evangelical churches is heavily funded by right-wing groups in the u.s.
Thanks for posting on these issues RCM. Please continue to do so.
Catholics nowadays seem to be indistinguishible from Evangelicals as regards individualistic religion. See Edward A. Lynch, “The Retreat of Liberation Theology,” Homiletic and Pastoral Review, Feb. 1994,pp. 12-21: “Liberation theology has been reduced to an intellectual curiosity…For Gutierrez, and for most liberationists, there are three levels of liberation: first, liberation from unjust social situations; second, personal transformation; third, and “finally,” liberation means liberation from sin…. For traditional Catholics, “Redemption is liberation in the strongest sense of the word, since it is liberation from sin” (Ratzinger, Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation, 1986: par. 3)… The adversaries of liberation theology promote greater Christian unity by insisting on an inclusive understanding of the oft-repeated phrase “preferential option for the poor.” The response to the liberationists’ exclusionary use of this phrase is an emphasis on the Church’s duty towards all people, regardless of their social class… The hierarchies of many Latin American countries quickly joined the Vatican in the project of cultural recapture after publication of the 1984 Instruction. Responding directly to this document in 1984, the Peruvian bishops said: “Only the new heart will be capable of renewing the world because only the new heart rejects sin and all its consequences”… “Justice” must give way to charity, a far more challenging goal (John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 1987, par. 40)… In a dramatic break with the liberationists, the bishops praised the contributions of rich people, both in the form of alms and job creation. They listed Catholic saints who had been rich, but who had used their wealth “in a Christian fashion” or had renounced it… Finally, they reminded Catholics that when the rich young man came to Jesus, “He looked steadily at him and loved him” (Mark 10:21)… The Vatican and its supporters did not confine their counterattack to homilies, scholarly articles or pastoral letters. Members of the hierarchy, both in Rome and in Latin America, have taken many effective practical actions as well… Since 1978, John Paul has replaced “progressives” with conservatives in nine of Brazil’s 36 archdioceses. John Paul’s appointees have not hesitated to exercise their prerogatives. In Peru, the new bishop of Cusco has dismantled liberationist social centers. Faithful bishops have imitated such actions across the continent. The targeted use of ecclesial authority in this manner exploits one of the inherent weaknesses of liberation theology. The liberationists are determined to remain inside the Church, even if they have strong and frequent disagreements with its teachings. To remain nominally part of the Church, however, is to remain under Church authority… Once the bishops, and the Pope, began actually using their authority, it forced the liberationists to make the stark choice of defecting, and losing much of their standing with devout Latin Americans, or remaining in the Church and submitting to the loss of many of their institutional bases. Combined with the philosophical assault, the astute use of authority has confused liberationists and helped bring liberation theology to its current weakened state… In spite of the sizable retreat that liberation theology has been forced to make since 1978, its opponents would be sadly mistaken to think that the danger is past.”
Michael, there are certainly many “right wing” Christians funding missionaries in central and south America, but the missionaries I know who have spent time in central and south America — and they are many — are far from right wing. Most of them vote Democrat.
I found this to be one of the most intriguing posts I’ve ever read at VN. I buy the evangelical bit, being a disaffected one myself.
When I read this, I thought of the inauguration of First Things’ “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” program in the context of some tensions over evangelical proselytizing in Latin America. Connected? Btw, I got this from RJN’s own account of the program. But when you think about the work of certain FT writers (e.g., Weigel most prominently) criticizing the Latin American bishops, etc., it makes one wonder.
Far from being “communists” the guerillas in Guatemala, and elsewhere in Latin America, or Asia for that matter, were merely seeking, through massively circuitous means since all normal channels were closed off to them, the bread and butter goals of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, including such classic demands as land reform and the liberation of the peasantry, rather than socialism and the proletarian seiziure of state power.
Of course, whether or not in this epoch where bourgeois revolution has passed its sell by date, such quests, especially when pursued by means of the armed struggle in the countryside, against a ruthless and rapacious military dictatorship armed to the teeth by the mightiest imperialist power on earth and prepared to fight dirty upon dirty even unto the very gates of hell, was always doomed in the first place. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution would argue that turning away from the working class in the cities and fleeing into the countryside to wage guerilla war would always doom the struggle to failiure. Even where in, due to very fortuitous conjunctions of circumstances, such struggles captured state power, in China in 1949, Indo-China in 1954/75, and in Cuba in 1959, the long run results were not encouraging, not even to the peasantry themselves, who are now being ground to dust in China by the inevitable and inescable laws of motion of capitalism in its ever greater globalisation, and their Cuban counterparts await nervously their inevitable brutal pillaging from across the Florida Straits that will surely come.
For Trotsky, in the Third World, only the working class, by figthing for, and seizing state power at the head of all the other oppressed classes, not least the peasantry, could carry through the unfinished business of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, not least land reform, and then as and insofar as the revolution also broke out in the advanced imperialist centres, go forward in one uninterrputed movement to the building of socialism upon the foundations of the highest point of globalised capitalism.
The 20th century in Trotskyist terms in relation to this particular topic:
1905: Revolutionary outbreaks in Russia, followed later by similar outbreaks in Iran and China, and their failiure, (and earlier attempts in the Ottoman Empire) cause Trotsky (one of the leaders in 1905) to formulate his theory of permanent revolution: the arc of bourgeois-democratic revoltuion has petered out, (with the end of great boom and the coming of globalisation and depression in the early 1870′s), and all its unfinished tasks can only be carried out by the proletariat ; after it has conquered power, such unfinished business will be the first business in its intray, and that there is no other way in which such tasks can be accomplished, save perhaps in the most formal and purely superstructural weay, and at the cost of immense suffering.
1917: The working class at the head and the peasantry making up the rear succeed in conquering state power across most of teerritory of the former Tsarist Russia, however the revolution, despite initially promising signs, fails to spread to the advanced imperialist centres, and the isolation and encirclement of the revolution, exacerbated by the massive external intervention in the Civil War, and the general backwardness of the former Tsardom lead to a bureaucratic reaction in the now USSR.
1923-7: Trotsky desperately struggles against, and loses to, this reaction, which abandons the world revolution, asserts against Trotsky and Lenin that socialism can be built in one country after all, perverts the Comintern into merely an external bureau for securing the defence of the USSR (and pliant buffer states where possible), and worst of all, betrays the revolution in China by subordinating it to the supposedly “progressive” Chiang Kai-Shek, who subsequently butchers the Communists en masse.
Trotsky is thrown out of the Soviet Union. Most of the Communists in China abandon the urban working class of the seaboard cities where they had previusly been based, and flee into the countryside, adopting a perspective of armed guerilla struggle. In pursuit of the entirely chimerical goal of “socialism in one country”, Stalin launches collectivisation, with particularly brutal consequences. Trotsky denounces this as highly premature and doomed to brutality and waste in the absence of assistance from sucessful revoltuion in the advanced imperialist centres. The Comintern oscillates wildly, “Third Period, the SPD are social-fascists” one minute, “Popular Front, Blum/Roosevelt/the Spanish Republicans are the precursors of the Revolution” the next minute as it dances to the Kremlin tune, leading Hitler to come to power in Germany and smash the working class, before moving onto the Jews and the Gypsies. Trotsky despairs and calls his followers out of the Third International, and begins preaprations to found a Fourth.
1938: In the wake of the Great Terror, and Stalin’s more or less wholesale murder of the revolutionary genaration of 1917, and knowing that it won’t be long before the hitmen come for him too, Trotsky founds the Fourth International to replace the now hopelessly corrupted Third: denying that socialism exists in the USSR, he declares it at most a “deformed workers state” (since capitalism is clearly absent), and calls for “all power to the soviets” and a political revolution by the Soviet proletariat to seize power back from the bureaucracy, lest the bureaucracy seek to ultimately restore capitalism, with the USSR poised tightropedly between either course.
1943-1948: The end result of the events in Eastern Europe is the coming into being of another set of “deformed workers states”, established not from below as the result of a proletarian revolution, but established from above by the Red Army and various political machinations, and with greater (eg Yugoslavia) or lesser degress of room for manoevure vis a vis Moscow. These are not socialist, but clearly not capitalist either, so the same political prognosis applies as for the USSR. Some Trotskyists apostasise at this point, claiming this proves Stalinism still has progressive potential (“Pabloism”), and go on to form the United Secretariat with the Fourth International splitting in 1953.
1949: Having abandoned socialism and the working class, nonetheless due to very particular circumstances, the now Communists-in-name-only under Mao succeed in carrying their guerilla struggle out of the countryside to a more or less successful conclusion in the cities, and Chiang flees to Taiwan. Mao denies the PRC is socialist, and proclaims the “bloc of four classes”, and proceeds to cause even more death and destruction than Stalin in pursuit of even more unattainable goals. However Maosim merely represents the most extreme and voluntarist manifestation of the general Third World attempt to ignore the theory of permanent revolution and pursue the chimera of independent development without revolution in the First World. Mao pursues it most consistently, (unlike, say, Nehru), and most utopianally, and hence cuases the most suffering. His nearest analogue today is Robert Mugabe, who has never made any bones about his Maoist sympathies.
1954/1975: with much less ideology and insanity, the Vietnamese and Laotian struggles likewise seize power after a titanic struggle with French and US imperialism, Cambodia however takes a more roundabout route until the Vietnamese finally send the little Mao of Pol Pot packing. (Later in revenge China attacks Vitnam with US support). Conducting the struggle alone without proletarian revolution in the US, or elsewhere leads to 3-4 million deaths, the deathtoll exacerbated immensely of course by the barbarously excessive firepower of the US.
c.1978 etc.: After heroic sacrifices in Indo-China, and immense suffering in China under the lunacy of Mao, the struggles there capitulate to capitalist globalisation, and set out on their paths to becoming the sweatshops of the world. The US, or rather US capital, thus, after all, wins the Vietnam War, and the destruction of the comforts of the “middle class” US worker can begin with the race to the bottom.
1959: as with China, so Cuba, again in highly particular and largely unrepeatable circumstances Castro and Che march on Havana from the Sierra Madre and have power more or less fall into their lap. Che proclaims that this shows the working class is now unnecessary and that the torch of the revolution has now passed to heroic guerilla focos gyrating in the countryside. Idealistic, self-sacrificial youth turn with ardour to this guerilla persective, with predictably disastrous consequences. You know the details.
1973: The second period of globalisation begins, and time is up for both soical democratic welfarism and Stalinism.
1989-1991: The Stalinist bureaucratic nomenklatura dismantle the “deformed workers states” in the USSR, Mongolia, and Eastern Europe, restore capitalism, and turn themselves into capitalists, more or less along the lines Trotsky had feared. No longer contained by fear of the USSR, the US now operates ever more unchecked, and welfare states are systematically destroyed across the First World with the US and the UK leading the way.
Today much of the lower end of the bourgeoisie has been proletarianised, as has vast swathes of the peasantry, and the working class is bigger than ever, now a majority of the planet’s population for the first time ever. The dictatorship of the proletariat simply means the holding and exercise of state power by that majority and their representatives, in the interests also of what remains of the petit-bourgeoisie and the peasantry. The longer capitalism continues, the less there is of either of the latter.