The Question of Leadership

A long-standing debate in the social movement literature centres on whether political contention is the product of structural conditions or of the actions of key activists.Footnote ⁴ This sort of chicken-and-egg argument seems futile since, like the chicken and the egg, both elements are essential to the outcome: the emergence of a mass, contentious political movement requires the presence of both structural conditions and committed leaders. In this section I will not review the theoretical debate, but will point out that scholars who study contentious political behaviour have underplayed the role of leaders. It is clear that followers, collective action, opportunities, resource mobilisation, insurgent consciousness and cultural framing are all necessary conditions for the emergence and success of contentious movements; but leadership is also indispensable, and may be the key factor in helping to explain the precise moment at which contentious political action arises and whether or not contentious groups are able to gain strength.Footnote ⁵

Aldon Morris and Suzanne Staggenborg define leaders as ‘strategic decision-makers who inspire and organize others to participate in social movements’; more specifically, leaders ‘inspire commitment, mobilize resources, create and recognize opportunities, devise strategies, frame demands, and influence outcomes’.Footnote ⁶ Thus, leaders are essential for contentious movements in that they are involved in most of the factors that promote political contention, social mobilisation and rebellion. Leaders are able to motivate and organise principally because they possess certain skills or advantages – charisma, organisational acumen or official positions.Footnote ⁷ But where do we draw the line that separates leaders from followers? Those scholars who study leaders tend to focus solely on the heights of power, examining the principal leaders of a movement. Morris has warned against devoting too much attention to key leaders and argues that we must examine what he calls ‘leadership configurations’.Footnote ⁸ Additionally, as Marshall Ganz suggests, ‘Social movements are organized by identifying, recruiting, and developing leadership at all levels’.Footnote ⁹ Leigh Binford argues that the strength of the Church in El Salvador was manifested through the ‘army of lay peasant and worker catechists’ that religious leaders had trained in the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁰ Leaders in social movements, therefore, help not only to initiate a movement but also to facilitate and foment the training of other leaders, who become essential for the growth and strength of the movement. While no doubt a fountain of inspiration for the popular movement after 1977, Archbishop Romero was in fact of no support for the emergence of the contentious political movement that emerged in the early 1970s.Footnote ¹¹ The study of leadership should go well beyond examining those at the pinnacle of power and consider the behaviour of lower-level leaders, since they are often essential for the growth and ultimate strength of a movement.

For decades, a number of scholars have lamented the fact that the study of contentious politics has tended to focus on the structural conditions that lead people to challenge the status quo, rather than on the actions of leaders. Eric Selbin notes: ‘The study of social revolution has been dominated by structuralist conceptualizations that fail to recognize that social revolutions are creative acts, concrete episodes in which people pursue goals.’Footnote ¹² Likewise, Colin Barker, Alan Johnson and Michael Lavalette write: ‘There is something of a black box in social movement studies, in that leadership has been under-theorised.’Footnote ¹³ More recently, Ganz bemoans the fact that ‘social movement scholars have, with few exceptions, eschewed the [leadership] project’.Footnote ¹⁴ This structural bias has continued with the rise of theoretical frameworks that focus on opportunity structures, resource mobilisation and the framing of grievances as facilitators of contention and mobilisation. While these models do not ignore leadership, leaders are often seen as a product of movements rather than as the creators or initiators of movements.

Despite this ‘structural bias’, scholars have recognised that while social and opportunity structures are important, poverty and injustice alone seldom result in contention, suggesting that triggers, or immediate causes, are needed before people will engage in risky political action.Footnote ¹⁵ Those triggers, for many scholars, consist of revolutionary ideas that help to ‘frame’ the unjust political and economic context.Footnote ¹⁶ For others, emotions give rise to the contention process, with moral ‘outrage’ motivating people to rebel.Footnote ¹⁷ In the political process model of social movements, for example, the notion of ‘insurgent consciousness’ has been used to show that peasants and workers are motivated to rebel just as much by their conceptions of justice as they are by their objective economic or political reality.Footnote ¹⁸ Social reality, therefore, is as much a state of mind as it is an absolute experience. Consequently, the construction of an injustice frame, encouraging outrage, is essential for insurgent consciousness to emerge. We must also keep in mind, though, that without real grievances even a talented, respected leader will find it impossible to convince many people to challenge the state.

But who creates the injustice frame that convinces citizens to express their grievances? Thomas Rochon asserts that leaders turn ideas into ‘ideological frames’.Footnote ¹⁹ While members of a large social movement may not share the same ideology, leaders who helped to create that movement are much more likely to embrace a somewhat homogeneous and precisely defined set of ideas.Footnote ²⁰ By way of definition, David Snow and Robert Benford assert that movement leaders ‘frame, or assign meaning to and interpret relevant events and conditions in ways that are intended to mobilize potential adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to demobilize antagonists’.Footnote ²¹ If revolution, or contention, begins in the mind, we should try to understand in whose mind it first appears. Once we know where it is born, we can pinpoint those individuals who developed the ideological framing for the movement and are most likely to have started the process of political contention.

Doctrinal Changes in Catholicism: The New Liberationist Ideas

For religious leaders in El Salvador, the notion that the status quo was corrupt and needed to be changed as quickly as possible emanated, ironically enough, from the Vatican. But the Catholic hierarchy would not have promoted fundamental doctrinal changes if it was not confronted by a serious crisis – a crisis arising in developing countries, but most importantly in Latin America, home to the largest Catholic population in the world. John O'Malley has noted that two years before the inauguration of the Second Vatican Council, Pope John XXIII asked the world's bishops for their input about the state of the Church and they ‘registered widespread concern about Communism’.Footnote ²² In the early1960s, the pope and Vatican worried that the Church was going to lose believers in Latin America since the extant injustices in the region made secular ideologies – Marxism and socialism – and other religious doctrines – Protestantism – more appealing to the poor, who made up the majority of the population in the region.Footnote ²³ Consequently, the Vatican decided to do more to help the poor and the marginalised. Pope John XXIII called for a Vatican Council of all the world's bishops, which commenced in autumn 1962 and continued through to autumn 1965, then under Pope Paul VI. The lengthy, historic Council produced a number of documents that led to fundamental changes in Catholicism.

Much of the literature on the Church's role in Latin America has rightly labelled the doctrinal changes that occurred during Vatican II, and the subsequent plenary meeting of the Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano (Latin American Episcopal Council, CELAM), in Medellín, Colombia, a paradigmatic shift in Catholicism.Footnote ²⁴ While these changes were quite complex, the notion of the ‘preferential option for the poor’ has been identified as perhaps the simplest way to summarise them. In the 1960s, the Catholic Church chose to disassociate itself from the traditional elite and side with the interests of the poor. In a sense, the Church developed a new doctrine which generated an injustice frame that clearly explained why poverty and suffering existed in Latin America. The rich and powerful were guilty of ‘social sin’; Christ favoured the poor, fought for the poor and desired their integral – spiritual and secular – liberation. By the late 1960s, due to these revolutionary additions to the Church's social doctrine, progressive bishops throughout Latin America were promoting the ideas that capitalism was a destructive ideology, that immediate and fundamental changes were needed to bring about peace and justice, that rebellion was justified where long-standing tyranny existed, and that religious leaders should take concrete steps to assist the poor.Footnote ²⁵ These new conceptions were revolutionary, but of most importance would be the concrete actions that priests and nuns would take to implement them.

While many bishops and clergy took these doctrinal changes lightly, by either rejecting them or supporting them only superficially, others embraced them wholeheartedly and, with a new pastoral mission focused on the poor, began to quickly put them into practice. As a result, many endeavours aimed at spreading the new doctrine in Latin America, such as training centres, theological journals and research institutes, sprouted up throughout the region.Footnote ²⁶ In El Salvador, after the first National Pastoral Week in 1970, a number of clergy and nuns and two bishops became committed to promoting the ‘new pastoral’. They began to create Comunidades Eclesiales de Base (Christian Base Communities, CEBs) and training centres, and some, like Padre Rodríguez, even assisted peasants in forming popular organisations.Footnote ²⁷ Thus, religious leaders in El Salvador experienced an ideological paradigm shift in 1970, via a new doctrine inspired by the Vatican and implemented by the Latin American bishops. These ‘awakened’ religious leaders then enthusiastically spread the new, liberationist pastoral, organised the poor and trained lay leaders to promote and strengthen the new ideas.Footnote ²⁸ Without the sanctioning of these activities by the Vatican, the Latin American bishops and some local bishops, it is doubtful that local religious leaders would have had the resources and moral support to become effective political agents. As these contentious political activities began in El Salvador, the guerrilla organisations were still at an incipient stage and the repression of the Church due to Archbishop Romero's activism in favour of the poor was almost a decade away.

Why El Salvador, David Rodríguez and the Parish of Tecoluca?

If we want to understand the precise origin of a contentious movement, we need to know who did what and when in a country where a strong popular and revolutionary movement emerged. El Salvador is an excellent case study for a number of reasons. First, the popular and revolutionary movements that developed there in the 1970s were perhaps the most powerful in Latin America.Footnote ²⁹ Structural conditions for revolution were present in El Salvador, owing to the existence of a patently unjust political and economic system.Footnote ³⁰ Without doubt, if any country in the world in the twentieth century exhibited the objective conditions for the emergence of rebellion, it was El Salvador. In fact, in 1932, the country had been shaken by an uprising led by Farabundo Martí, a founder of El Salvador's Communist Party. The results were tragic: the government killed around 10,000 Salvadoreans and passed a law that prohibited the peasantry from organising, and the coffee-growing oligarchy turned political power over to the armed forces.Footnote ³¹ Key conditions for possible rebellion were present in El Salvador: a repressive, undemocratic government; a reactionary landed oligarchy; and extensive poverty both in rural and urban areas. Nevertheless, decades passed before another rebellion emerged, no doubt partly because of state control and repression. In the 1970s, state repression and control continued, yet leaders inspired the masses to contest the state. If leadership is important in the rise of contention in El Salvador, where structural conditions were primed for rebellion, then leadership is probably always important, and particularly in cases where grievances are not widespread or intense.

The economic and political conditions for Salvadoreans became particularly acute in the early 1970s, with increasing land scarcity and rising inflation.Footnote ³² Consequently, contention would most likely have arisen during that period, especially since the political opposition was also given new opportunities to contest political power in the 1960s.Footnote ³³ As the economic and political situation deteriorated in the 1970s, a number of organisations and opposition groups emerged – some calling for reforms, others for dramatic social transformation – that also greatly increased the likelihood that large-scale collective action would arise. Peasant organisations, though ‘illegal’ at the time, were formed. The ‘politico-military organisations’ (guerrilla groups) were founded, the most important being the Fuerzas Populares de Liberación (Popular Liberation Forces, FPL) and the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People's Revolutionary Army, ERP). Opposition parties contested political power, most notably the Partido Demócrata Cristiano (Christian Democrat Party, PDC) and the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Movement, MNR). And, of course, the Catholic Church instituted its ‘new pastoral’ that focused on the poor. This multifaceted scenario, conducive for the flowering of contention, allows us to examine the historical timing of the rise of El Salvador's popular movement in order to see which actors or organisations were most salient in fomenting the initial contention that in 1980 became a strong revolutionary movement. The combative social context of the late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed not only the growth and strengthening of popular organisations and political parties, but also the rise of a number of influential opposition leaders from a variety of sectors.

Padre David Rodríguez was one of these new leaders who called for change in El Salvador. Paul Almeida writes that ‘the 1967–1972 protest wave [in El Salvador] generated a number of new oppositional figures from the labour, educational, and church sectors’, and names ten such leaders, including Padre Rodríguez.Footnote ³⁴ A number of other authors have mentioned Padre Rodríguez as being influential as a liberationist priest and a leader in the popular movement.Footnote ³⁵ Phillip Berryman not only mentions him as one of the most active priests, but also points out that the ‘parishes [of these active priests] were later to become battle sites: Aguilares, Suchitoto, Rosario Mora, Guazapa, Quetzaltepeque, Zacatecoluca, Tecoluca, Arcatao, Cojutepeque’.Footnote ³⁶ In fact, the first peasant massacre in El Salvador, in 1974, occurred at a hamlet called La Cayetana, located in Padre Rodríguez's parish of Tecoluca.

In 1969, Padre Rodríguez became the parish priest of Tecoluca, an especially important parish to the Church and to El Salvador since it was geographically expansive, included large fincas and was in what Salvadoreans referred to as the para-central region, containing the most productive lands in the country. The parishes of Suchitoto and Aguilares have attracted a great deal of attention owing to the well-known liberationist work of Fathers Rutilio Grande and José ‘Chencho’ Alas; yet the parish of Tecoluca, led by Padre Rodríguez, and then jointly by him and Padre Rafael Barahona, was one of the parishes at the heart of the Salvadorean storm that commenced in 1970. This paper, therefore, not only illustrates the importance of ideas and leaders in the process of contentious politics in El Salvador, but also brings to light the prominent role played by Padre David Rodríguez in the parish of Tecoluca.Footnote ³⁷ One fellow priest wrote of Rodríguez that he is ‘a great theologian although he has no academic degree, a prophet … a joyful peasant priest, the most persecuted … the “Che” of the Bible’.Footnote ³⁸

From Complacency to Awakening

José David Rodríguez Rivera was born in 1940 to a landowning, relatively wealthy family in the department of San Vicente, where some of El Salvador's wealthiest families had cotton plantations, coffee fincas and cattle ranches.Footnote ³⁹ Although certainly not part of the oligarchy, his family grew sugar cane and had a small mill for processing sugar and other cane products. The family's plantation was in Calderas, a small community in the municipality of Apastepeque, just north-east of the city of San Vicente, the capital of the department with the same name.

Rodríguez's father, Lisandro, was a very religious man who valued education. He sent his son to Apastepeque's Agustin Sánchez Urban Boys’ School, where the young Rodríguez lived and worked at the local parish to complete his primary education. After finishing sixth grade, in 1950, he studied at the Pius XII Minor Seminary in the city of San Vicente. The conservative bishop of San Vicente, Pedro Arnoldo Aparicio y Quintanilla, had recently founded the seminary. The diocese of San Vicente encompassed three departments: Cabañas, San Vicente and La Paz (a large segment of the para-central region). The young Rodríguez remained in San Vicente until completing his secondary education at the Santo Tomás School and his preliminary religious studies at the Minor Seminary, graduating in 1955. He then entered the San José de la Montaña Major Seminary, in San Salvador, the country's capital. After his ordination, Padre Rodríguez was awarded a scholarship to study canon law at the Pontifical University in Madrid, Spain. From September 1964 to June 1966 he worked towards a degree and then returned to El Salvador to take charge of a parish. David Rodríguez had all the makings of a conventional leader: a relatively affluent background, a high level of education and a position in a respected institution. At this point, however, his leadership repertoire did not include rebellious ideas. Nevertheless, well before the rise of the new pastoral, Rodríguez had inherited from his father and mother a high level of human compassion and a bias toward justice, traits that would no doubt make him more open to the preferential option for the poor.Footnote ⁴⁰

Padre Rodríguez's first few years as a priest were calm and full of potential for advancement. Bishop Aparicio assigned him his first parish in 1966, in a small town called Santo Domingo, just north-east of Apastepeque. The bishop assigned Padre Rodríguez a number of other responsibilities: he made Rodríguez his personal secretary, chaplain of the Divine Saviour of the World School, and chaplain to the army's Fifth Infantry Brigade, headquartered near the city of San Vicente. Rodríguez recalls that at this point his relationship with Bishop Aparicio was excellent, since the prelate saw him as an accomplished, well-educated and traditional young priest. In 1968, Bishop Aparicio transferred Rodríguez to a parish in the city of San Vicente, a considerably more prestigious assignment, where he continued with the additional responsibilities that the bishop had assigned to him in Santo Domingo. Then, very quickly, Bishop Aparicio moved Rodríguez to the parish of Tecoluca, a small, provincial town, just south of the city of San Vicente. Rodríguez's new parish was geographically large and included a number of extensive haciendas and fincas; a parish that, according to him, ‘brought in a lot of money [donations] for the Church’. As he was the Fifth Infantry Brigade's chaplain, Padre Rodríguez travelled with the unit when El Salvador went to war against Honduras in July 1969. This war intensified land scarcity in El Salvador, since as many as 100,000 Salvadoreans were expelled from Honduras at the end of the conflict.Footnote ⁴¹ Rodríguez concedes that before 1970 he was ‘quite conservative’, ‘anti-communist’ and more than willing to participate in the war against Honduras, as was the Salvadorean Communist Party.

In January 1970, Padre Juan Macho, a Spanish priest who worked in the parish of Jiquilisco, adjacent to Tecoluca, invited Padre Rodríguez to participate in a unique gathering, the first National Pastoral Week, to consider the pronouncements of Vatican II and the 1968 CELAM meeting. The Salvadorean archbishop, Luis Chávez y González, sponsored the Pastoral Week because he and his auxiliary bishop, Arturo Rivera y Damas, were receptive to the progressive changes that the Church hierarchy had embraced at Vatican II and at Medellín.Footnote ⁴² This momentous meeting brought together the most progressive Salvadorean Catholics – a total of 180 leaders, including 83 priests, 30 nuns, two seminarians and 33 laypersons.Footnote ⁴³ The participants at the Pastoral Week agreed to make three principal recommendations: to work toward the creation and consolidation of CEBs; to work at promoting and training lay leaders; and to build, develop and strengthen the cooperation of parishes and priests, which became known as the ‘joint pastoral’ (pastoral de conjunto). The CBCs would become the core ideational and organisational centre of the movement's link to the people. The training of lay leaders would allow the liberationist leaders to spread their influence beyond their immediate orbit, since the lay leaders would promote the new pastoral and organise believers well beyond the reach of priests and nuns. The joint pastoral led to the strengthening of a group of progressive priests from around the country who worked together to promote liberationist ideas.

With this meeting, Archbishop Chávez y González blessed the new liberationist ideas and thus facilitated their transmission throughout El Salvador. But his actions were not of his own initiative, since both the Vatican II and Medellín documents had called for the world's bishops to carry out changes that would put the Church squarely on the side of the poor. The documents and ideas of Vatican II started the chain reaction that in just a few years had reached El Salvador, owing to the concerted efforts of many theologians, bishops, priests and nuns. All other Salvadorean bishops at the time, however, were conservative and thus not supportive of the archbishop's efforts to promote a preferential option for the poor. In fact, the conservative bishops, five of them at the time, did their best to water down the recommendations of the final document published by the Pastoral Week.

Just prior to the Pastoral Week, a number of progressive priests had already begun to hold regular, almost monthly meetings. Two foreign priests were instrumental in establishing these meetings: a Spaniard, Juan Macho, and a Frenchman, Bernard Boulang. Both worked tirelessly to bring the Church's progressive doctrinal changes to El Salvador, and both were later expelled from the country by the government. Padre Rodríguez was present at the first meeting of this group, later to be called La Nacional, for the ‘national’ group of priests. The group served as a sort of informal leadership council for those Church leaders who worked to spread the new, liberationist pastoral.

The Pastoral Week was like a volcanic eruption. As Rodríguez recalls: ‘I came out [of this meeting] charged up, very enthused!’Footnote ⁴⁴ Those priests and nuns who embraced the call for a new pastoral immediately began to set up CEBs and Bible circles, teach poor people to read using Bible verses that highlighted Jesus’ preference for the poor, and develop courses so that peasants and workers could gain skills and knowledge with which they could advance their economic and political interests. Perhaps most importantly, the progressive priests, via La Nacional, began to work together to coordinate liberationist activities throughout the country. Padre Rodríguez, as one of the priests who was ‘awakened’ by the Pastoral Week, did all of these things with unbounded enthusiasm. In just a few years, an important segment of El Salvador's hugely powerful popular movement would become a national force. At the same time that this transformation was taking place in the Salvadorean Church, seven people ‘without a cent or a pistol’ formed the first politico-military organisation, the FPL.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Communist Party of El Salvador would not embrace a revolutionary path until much later in the decade, preferring instead to participate in elections. Progressive Catholics were at the top of the contentious wave while political radicals were beginning to organise and traditional Marxists were still participating in fraudulent elections.

The New Pastoral Erupts

With the inauguration of the new pastoral, officially sanctioned by the archbishop at the Pastoral Week, many religious leaders became the advocates of El Salvador's poor. Since campesinos, the bulk of the poor, had nowhere to turn with their grievances, Padre Rodríguez and other Church leaders in rural areas began to promote their interests actively. Once Rodríguez began to serve as an advocate for the campesinos, the good relationship he had developed with the landowners in his parish deteriorated rapidly. He comments: ‘All of the problems with the landowners occurred in [19]71 … yes, it was '70 or '71.’ Thus, Rodríguez experienced serious clashes with the landowners in his parish only after the Salvadorean Church had embraced liberationist ideas, compelling some landowners to label him a ‘communist’.

After the Pastoral Week, Father Boulang visited Rodríguez's parish in Tecoluca to help with the ‘methodology of selecting the most committed lay leaders’, and with establishing the first seminar for those young leaders. A short course began on a Friday afternoon and ended on Sunday in the middle of the day with a special mass. The purpose of the course was to ‘form’ young lay leaders who would become ‘Delegates of the Word’ by helping them ‘at a deeper level’ to relate the Bible to the ‘reality’ of life in Tecoluca and El Salvador. The attendees, Rodríguez recalls, ‘left the course very committed’. These lay leaders would promote the new pastoral throughout the parish, helping Rodríguez to serve about 10,000 parishioners – a common priest-to-parishioner ratio throughout Latin America.

Owing to Padre Rodríguez's increasingly progressive actions, Bishop Aparicio, who was very close to the wealthy landowners and the other conservative bishops, attempted to transfer his priest to the town of Olocuilta, about 30 kilometres west of Tecoluca, where the bishop hoped he would become marginalised. Although Rodríguez had already experienced numerous confrontations with landowners, the last straw for the bishop came when his priest refused to welcome the new president of El Salvador, Coronel Armando Molina, to his parish in Tecoluca. Molina had acquired the presidency via the electoral fraud of 1972. In an effort to gain some legitimacy, he was visiting communities all over the country in what he termed a ‘mobile government’. Many priests were committed to shunning Molina and thus signed a letter denouncing him. Rodríguez both signed the letter and refused to give Molina the courtesy that would be due a head of state. The mayor of Tecoluca, Atilio Cañas, had written to Padre Rodríguez urging him to participate in the local welcoming of the president by saying a few words and ensuring that the church bells were tolled in honour of the head of state. Additionally, Mayor Cañas let Padre Rodríguez know that since the president had family in the region, he would be giving a sizeable donation to the parish.

On the following Sunday, Padre Rodríguez discussed the mayor's letter with lay leaders in Tecoluca. The lay leaders were in unanimous agreement that Padre David should not receive the new president. Based on the discussions, Rodríguez wrote a response to the mayor. In his letter Rodríguez stated that he would not participate in the ceremony for Molina, adding that since arriving in Tecoluca he had tried to work with the government but the government had acted, in his words, ‘hypocritically and had criticised my actions to help the poor, claiming I was an agitator and a communist’. Towards the end of the letter he wrote, ‘I will not be present at such an act.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Padre Rodríguez was now at odds with the president, and his ‘offence’ attracted national attention. In just over two years, a traditional priest had broken with landowners, broken with his bishop and broken with the government. Padre Rodríguez had become a contentious priest almost overnight; but so had dozens of other priests, nuns and, increasingly, lay leaders who were now convinced that El Salvador's status quo needed rapid and dramatic change. The new pastoral was covering the country in a wave of anti-regime consciousness and eliciting a harsh reaction from those who defended the status quo.

On 6 January 1973, Bishop Aparicio wrote a letter to Padre David stating that, owing to his ‘posture towards the authorities which will bring negative effects’, he was being transferred to Olocuilta in the first days of February.Footnote ⁴⁷ When parishioners found out that Bishop Aparicio was planning to remove their beloved priest, they decided to prevent the transfer. One of the key leaders of the move to keep Rodríguez at Tecoluca was Toño Navarro, a lay leader who told Rodríguez soon after hearing of Aparicio's decision, ‘No, you are not going, you are not going.’ Another leader who worked to keep Padre Rodríguez at the parish was Victor Hernández, the president of a peasant cooperative that Rodríguez had established in 1971. Navarro and Hernández, along with other parishioners who had been ‘formed’ by Rodríguez, organised a long march from Tecoluca to the cathedral in San Vicente, carrying the image of San Lorenzo, the parish's patron saint. This effort to keep Rodríguez in Tecoluca received national press coverage and thus got the attention of the government, the landed elite and even the nascent guerrilla organisations.Footnote ⁴⁸ The changes that had taken place in the Church and that Padre Rodríguez had helped to implement were already inspiring lay leaders to challenge authority.

Eventually, Bishop Aparicio grudgingly agreed to divide the parish of Tecoluca in two, placing Father Rafael Barahona as parish priest of Tecoluca and assigning Padre Rodríguez to the south-eastern coastal area of the parish at the town of San Carlos, in the department of La Paz. This compromise came only after a delegation of priests from the San Vicente diocese negotiated with Padre Rodríguez, lay leaders, the CEBs in Tecoluca and Father Barahona, who was hesitant to replace Rodríguez. It was certainly a step down, a strong rebuke – but organised Christians and progressive priests had challenged the bishop and prevented the transfer, and Rodríguez was still essentially on his home turf, allowing him to continue organising his parishioners.

In the town of San Carlos, Padre Rodríguez began to construct a parish by forming football teams and a choir, and organising pastorelas, or Bible stories expressed theatrically. And, as in Tecoluca, he began to identify ‘natural leaders’ to develop into catechists and Delegates of the Word, who would in turn help form CEBs and Bible circles. Consequently, his popularity in the entire parish of Tecoluca continued to grow; Rodríguez recalls, ‘I had a great deal of credibility.’ Rather than minimising his influence, splitting the parish in two allowed Padres Rodríguez and Barahona to organise their parishioners more effectively.

The two priests soon developed a formal pastoral plan for the entire parish of Tecoluca. Although they had set up a number of courses and formed Bible circles and CEBs, they felt that a ‘well-defined’ plan was needed to enhance their pastoral work.Footnote ⁴⁹ In January 1974, the two priests, along with 33 lay leaders from 17 communities in the parish, met to construct a pastoral plan. They identified some of the reasons why the pastoral mission of the parish was not progressing adequately, including ‘fear’, ‘pessimism’, ‘lack of organisation’, and ‘egoism on the part of some’. Nevertheless, they acknowledged that parishioners had developed a higher level of social consciousness and that church attendance had increased. The participants decided that they would create a plan to help the parish's organisational strength. The new plan divided the parish into two zones: the Central Zone, centred at Tecoluca, and the Coastal Zone, centred at San Carlos. Each zone was then divided into five areas. Every month, the base communities in the ten areas would meet. Every two months, four representatives from each zone would meet at the sub-parish level – Tecoluca and San Carlos. The plan also called for the parish to make contact with CEBs in the other parishes in the diocese. The general goal of the plan was: ‘To make decisions as Christians based on reality as it is illuminated by the light of the faith.’Footnote ⁵⁰ The focus was on action and not just simply understanding the reasons for poverty. Clearly, as in other parishes in El Salvador, Padres Rodríguez and Barahona were creating leadership teams and organisational networks that would greatly serve the Salvadorean Christian movement, and later the popular and revolutionary movements.

Within a year, the pastoral plan included a parish council, composed of two delegates from each area (a total of 20) and the two priests. The council's role was to evaluate the plan, as well as to ensure that it proceeded smoothly. After one year, in a council meeting to assess the plan in January 1975, the participants identified a number of problems and difficulties that had arisen. They reported that some members of their communities had expressed fear of being labelled communists and ‘fear of repression’. They also discussed the reactionary attitudes of some of the people in their communities. It is clear that the increasing polarisation in the country was beginning to have a direct effect on the CEBs and the pastoral work of the parish. The conflict that had emerged between the Church and the state was now being manifested within the communities in the diocese. So, by 1975, the state and oligarchy already distrusted the activities of progressive priests and nuns immensely – but the pastoral plan in Tecoluca, as with pastoral plans in other parishes in the country, was instrumental in fomenting peasant organisation, leadership and contentiousness.

Campesino University: The Training of Lay Leaders

Soon after his transfer to San Carlos, Padre Rodríguez developed a closer working relationship with the priests in the parish of Santa Jiquilisco, right across from and east of the Lempa River. These priests were steeped in the ideas of liberation theology, and Rodríguez recalls that he began to consider and learn about these ideas more methodically at that time. In late 1971, Padre Juan Macho, who had invited Rodríguez to join La Nacional, created a campesino training centre at Los Naranjos, close to the town of Jiquilisco.Footnote ⁵¹ An order of nuns had offered the use of a school to Padre Macho to house the Centro Naranjos. The purpose of the centre was to provide practical education and training – first aid, farming techniques and animal care – as well as Bible study, with a focus on social justice and the national ‘reality’, to campesinos from throughout the country.

Once it was ready to operate, Macho invited Rodríguez to offer classes at the centre. Padre Rodríguez taught Salvadorean history using popular, and often revolutionary, songs to inspire discussion. For example, he would sing the song I Am Latin American, and after the song would ask the campesinos, ‘What do you think of this song?’ The lyrics include the lines: ‘If we have to fight, let's fight, if that is the way to triumph.’ These popular songs would often lead to a discussion of the land tenure problem in El Salvador and the need to fight for the right to land. Rodríguez also used a common method of training with cassette tapes, called ‘El Jurado Número 13’ (Juror No. 13). The cassettes would contain debates on a particular community problem. Different people in the programme – the landowner, the worker, the mayor, the priest – would state their opinions concerning the problem. Padre Rodríguez recalls that ‘it was almost like a soap opera’, so most of the students liked the programme. After listening, the students would discuss the principal issue and the various opinions expressed about it, and finally decide, as a juror would, whose position was the correct one. These programmes, which ‘came from South America’, were developed to raise people's ‘social conscience’. Rodríguez recalls that most of the students had little in-depth knowledge of Salvadorean history. When he spoke of things such as the rebellion of Anastasio Aquino against the Spanish or the taking of property from the indigenous people by the oligarchy in the late 1800s, the response would often be, ‘I did not know that.’

The Centro Naranjos would offer these courses to campesinos whom local priests had identified as ‘natural leaders’. The individuals selected demonstrated not only leadership potential, but also a commitment to the new pastoral mission. The campesinos who attended these courses gained a ‘great deal of local prestige’, to a large extent because of the practical skills they acquired, which they then used to help other campesinos in their local area in very direct, useful ways. For example, the lay leaders would help people in the countryside with such things as first aid, organic farming, preserving the fertility of the land, and literacy. The Centro Naranjos eventually offered courses at four levels, the fourth level being reserved for the ‘most committed’ leaders. Padre Rodríguez recalls that, at the highest level, discussions were much more political – with talk of political parties – than in the more basic courses that focused principally on practical training and the Bible. The fourth-level courses also focused on developing the organisational skills of the lay leaders.

Eventually, Church leaders established a network of campesino training centres in El Salvador.Footnote ⁵² After the founding of the first centre in the parish of Santa Ana in Chinalinga, called the Centro Castaño, several more sprouted up around the country: in Los Naranjos; the Centro San Lucas in San Miguel; the Centro Divina Providencia (Divine Providence Centre) in Santa Ana; a centre in Chalatenango (Chacalcollo); and a centre in Bermuda, near Suchitoto. A joint organisation to coordinate these centres arose, called the Universidad Campesina (Campesino University), which instituted several ‘levels of formation’ at all of them. Padre Rodríguez points out that his involvement with these centres and the Universidad Campesina was a ‘good experience’ because his commitment grew and he was able to visit many parishes and communities in many parts of the country, giving him a much greater national perspective and reputation. He notes that to this day he still comes across individuals who say jokingly, ‘Because of you I became committed’, or ‘It was your fault that I got involved.’Footnote ⁵³ Rodríguez points out that the network of centres, along with the joint pastoral promoted by the Pastoral Week, generated ‘much solidarity’ among communities and ‘broke the borders between our parishes’. The network of centres created leaders who ‘were at the service of their communities’. Tommie Sue Montgomery has noted that in the 1970s over 15,000 lay leaders were trained at these centres.Footnote ⁵⁴

Padre Rodríguez asserts that ‘the methodology of popular participation was implemented by the Church’ instead of the politico-military organisations. He recalls that the lay leaders had ‘a good perception of what was happening in the country even if they couldn't read and write’. Consequently, the Church, in just a few years, via the work of progressive priests, nuns and lay leaders, created a large army of political activists, with a clear injustice frame in their minds, in a country steeped in poverty, exploitation and political exclusion. Willingly or not, the Church helped to create the subjective, leadership and organisational conditions – that is, the opportunities – for a volcanic social eruption. The Church had accomplished this contentious mobilisation by 1975, when the politico-military organisations were still finding their way and carrying out limited attacks against the state.

Perhaps the most important evidence that the Church had become a vital force to be reckoned with is the fact that in late 1974, the FPL (the largest politico-military group) sent out a letter to progressive priests, and Christians in general, welcoming them to join the organisation. As one FPL leader recalls, the letter stated that ‘between Christians and revolution there was no contradiction, since they were two tributaries of the same river’.Footnote ⁵⁵ One priest, Benito Tobar, has suggested that the letter was written, at least in part, by a liberationist priest.Footnote ⁵⁶ The FPL's decision to accept Christians was an astute move. Padre Rodríguez points out that, if an FPL leader had said ‘I am an atheist’, campesinos would most likely have rejected the message. Almost all Salvadorean campesinos were Christians first and foremost. Certainly, some of the campesinos who became ‘incorporated’ – in other words, joined the FPL – eventually accepted Marxist ideology and even gave up their faith; but for most of them, Christianity was so strongly ingrained in their being that they would not reject it. The overwhelming majority of the country was Catholic, so if a revolutionary movement was going to triumph in El Salvador, it had to be at least partly Catholic. By 1974, it was clear to the Marxist leaders in the FPL that the incipient revolutionary movement in El Salvador, if it was to succeed, needed to align itself with the burgeoning Christian movement that had been inspired by the liberationist Church.Footnote ⁵⁷ One former FPL leader asserts that without the association with the Church, ‘it would have been impossible to link ourselves to the peasant movement’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Certainly, this unlikely alliance would not have been possible if progressive Church leaders and secular revolutionaries did not share some key goals and ideas, principally a desire for land reform and social justice, and an aversion to capitalism.

The Radicalisation of a Priest and a Movement

At first, liberationist Church leaders like Padre Rodríguez were committed to working within the system to achieve basic, limited changes in El Salvador. These included objectives like land reform, fair wages and better health care – what they referred to as ‘redemptive demands’. Liberationists hoped that increased political participation on the part of the poor, with the help of the Church, would convince the state and the oligarchy that reform was the only way to preserve the peace of the nation, keep communism at bay and help the poor to achieve at least a modicum of well-being. However, a few watershed events convinced Padre Rodríguez, and others, that change would come with difficulty and perhaps only with the use of force. The electoral frauds of 1972 and 1974 convinced the opposition leaders that elections had been and would continue to be a farce, though they fielded candidates as late as the 1977 election. In August 1974, national guardsmen killed six peasants from the hamlet of La Cayetana, in Padre Rodríguez's parish, after they tried to keep farming the land that they had cultivated for decades.Footnote ⁵⁹ The landowner convinced the government to send in the national guardsmen, and in the ensuing struggle six community leaders, mostly catechists and Delegates of the Word whom Padre Rodríguez had ‘formed’, were gunned down. Thirteen other men were ‘disappeared’ but were eventually found naked but alive in a nearby community. At one point during the day of the massacre, guardsmen captured several men, forced them to take off their clothes and humiliated them, saying: ‘Let Padre David save you today; you are subversives listening to that priest.’

The massacre at La Cayetana was a defining moment. Several parties crossed the line: the government embraced repression, some campesinos embraced rebellion, and Padre Rodríguez and other priests began to consider how to deal with a government that killed Christians when they demanded their constitutional and economic rights. Rodríguez remembers that after the massacre, ‘the situation became tense and demonstrations occurred in Tecoluca and other communities … denouncing the government, denouncing the guard’. The massacre received national attention and was debated in the Legislative Assembly, where the Christian Democrats called for an official investigation. Even Bishop Aparicio issued a protest to the legislature, writing a biting, telegram-style note: ‘bloody, barbarous events Tecoluca, with unequivocal signs religious persecution iron curtain style … profound bitterness … energetic protest’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The MNR issued a statement on 6 December, suggesting in a prescient way that ‘the governmental violence could provoke a blood bath in El Salvador’.Footnote ⁶¹ Padre Rodríguez points out that instead of putting out the fire by terrifying the people into submission, the massacre only served to create intense ‘indignation’ and to generate ‘greater opportunity to organise the people’. Without the strong Christian movement that was already in place, however, a strong, unified popular reaction would have been unlikely.

The brutal government repression against his parishioners convinced Padre Rodríguez that campesinos had the right to use force and that he himself should ‘accompany’ them in their struggle against the oppressive and exploitative state. At the end of 1974, he made the difficult decision to ‘incorporate himself’ into the FPL, which started his clandestine life.Footnote ⁶² He took this bold step along with a handful of other priests. Once the state began to repress on a wider scale, radicalisation spread quickly within the political opposition, including organised Christians. At that point many priests and nuns who had not left the country began to take a lower profile, while the lay leaders they had trained ended up joining the popular and revolutionary movements, providing those organisations with experienced leaders who had a clear injustice frame in their minds and strong organisational skills. No doubt many of them also joined the opposition as a form of protection, a factor which partly explains Rodríguez's motivation since so much of the repression was being directed against religious leaders (particularly progressive priests) and those who read the Bible or possessed any sort of religious literature.Footnote ⁶³

Conclusions and Implications: Context, Leaders and Contention

Although Padre David Rodríguez was just one priest, in just one parish, his experiences are representative of what many priests and nuns went through after the 1970 Pastoral Week let loose a revolutionary, liberationist pastoral mission in El Salvador. The organisational work of Fathers Rutilio Grande and Chencho Alas is already well documented, but they were only two of a small army of priests and nuns who also formed base communities, trained leaders and promulgated liberationist ideas. In El Salvador, 183 Church leaders attended the Pastoral Week and those leaders then influenced other leaders, organised CEBs and trained many peasants as lay leaders. The result was a network of leaders that fuelled the growth of the popular movement in El Salvador. Consequently, when radicalisation began to spread in 1975 due to increased government repression, many lay leaders and even some Church leaders, like Padre Rodríguez, joined the revolutionary movement or supported it indirectly. In a sense, the Pastoral Week of 1970 represents a tipping point for El Salvador, since, as Malcolm Gladwell suggests, ‘Ideas … and behaviours spread just like viruses do.’Footnote ⁶⁴

The experience of Padre David Rodríguez in the parish of Tecoluca helps us to draw several conclusions about the rise of the popular Christian movement in El Salvador. First, the doctrinal changes that came to the Salvadorean Church in 1970 to a large extent emanated from abroad. Church leaders in El Salvador were ‘awakened’, or galvanised, by the new ideas that bloomed from Vatican II and the CELAM conference of Latin American bishops. At first just a few local priests, nuns and bishops, as well as some foreign priests like Juan Macho and Bernard Boulang, promoted these liberationist ideas, but once El Salvador's archbishop had sanctioned the new ideas at the first National Pastoral Week in 1970, increasing numbers of local religious leaders embraced and promulgated them with enthusiasm and vigour. Even with several bishops, like Pedro Aparicio, in strong opposition to the new pastoral, a small army of nuns and priests put them into effect with resounding results.

Second, progressive Church leaders were vital for the emergence of El Salvador's popular, mostly Christian, movement. Once they embraced the new pastoral, Catholic leaders enthusiastically promoted a new injustice frame, trained lay leaders and organised the poor. Church leaders were particularly successful since they came from a respected institution that was well trusted by El Salvador's poor. While emotions may have been at work, the poor people of El Salvador were completely rational in their decision to listen to a liberationist priest, who represented the Church, rather than a well-educated Marxist.

Third, the actions of Padre Rodríguez and others suggest that Church leaders began mobilising significant numbers of Salvadoreans well before other opposition and revolutionary groups, at least in the early 1970s. Liberationists promoted a palatable injustice frame, mobilised the poor and trained lay leaders during the years 1970 to 1975, when the politico-military organisations were still small and weak, and the political parties, even the Communist Party, were still hopeful that they might come to power via elections. Although some opportunities had existed for opposition parties in the 1960s, those political spaces were nearly obliterated in the early 1970s owing to electoral fraud and then repression. When the opposition parties began to contest the legitimacy of the state in 1980 and joined forces with the FMLN, the Christian contentious movement had been around for a decade.

Fourth, the Vatican's doctrinal changes, the Medellín conference's call for a preferential option for the poor and the new pastoral adopted by progressive priests and nuns arose from the injustice that reigned throughout Latin America. These doctrinal changes, beginning in the early 1960s, were precipitated by the crisis that the Church was experiencing in the region in that decade – the economic injustice suffered by parishioners, and the challenges from Marxism and Protestantism. More specifically, economic injustice in El Salvador intensified in the late 1960s and early 1970s, making widespread contention increasingly likely. Once the Church had embraced the new ideas, some priests and nuns in El Salvador, aided by Archbishop Chávez y González, fully endorsed a new pastoral that quickly (within five years) led to the formation of thousands of lay leaders who in turn mobilised thousands upon thousands of poor Salvadoreans. This popular mobilisation provided the organisational strength that the FMLN employed in the 1980s to almost bring down the Salvadorean state. But it was the prevailing injustice in the region that started the paradigmatic change which shook the Church in the 1960s and spread all over Latin America in the 1970s. Good, moral leadership alone would not have mobilised so many peasants in so little time.

Although this paper is principally a case study demonstrating how one progressive priest in one parish helped to organise and mobilise the poor after embracing a new, Church-inspired injustice frame, and much more research is needed to determine the generalisability of the conclusions listed above, we should consider the importance of ideas and leadership in a broader, comparative context. The liberation theology that spread in Latin America in the 1970s did not affect all countries to the same extent. While the new pastoral shook El Salvador to its core, in some countries the effects appear to have been much more modest. How can we explain this variance in the degree to which liberationist ideas penetrated particular countries? A useful starting point to attempt to answer this question is to consider the other, comparable countries of Central America. It was in this region that rebellion and civil wars erupted at precisely the same time that the liberationist pastoral washed over Latin America.

With regard to structural conditions, most countries in Latin America had experienced some kind of land reform prior to 1970. In El Salvador no reform had taken place and consequently the ground was fertile for peasants to embrace political contention. Additionally, as noted above, the 1970s were a particularly difficult time for the Salvadorean peasant, owing to scarcity of land, large numbers of Salvadoreans returning from Honduras and high levels of inflation. In the other Central American countries that had not experienced land reform by 1970 – Nicaragua and Guatemala – powerful revolutionary movements emerged as well.Footnote ⁶⁵ In the countries where revolutionary violence did not emerge – Costa Rica, Honduras and Panama – land reform had taken place prior to 1970, when liberation theology began to spread in the region.Footnote ⁶⁶ In general, therefore, a large number of ‘grievances’ existed among the peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, no doubt heightened by the authoritarian political systems in those countries at the time.Footnote ⁶⁷ Reforms were needed, but the autocratic politics in those three countries denied opponents the right to contest power or even to propose reforms; in all three countries, there was no option but contention and rebellion. Once political opponents, including progressive religious leaders, began to challenge the status quo, the regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua chose repression rather than reform, thus radicalising even the Christian opposition.

While economic and political injustice produced the necessary structural conditions, the new pastoral, along with the actions of progressive Catholic leaders, helped to convince the poor, particularly peasants, to make demands upon the state. Priests and nuns achieved this by helping to create a highly palatable injustice frame, by helping to form lay leaders and by organising and mobilising the poor. But religious leaders were not able to diffuse the new pastoral effectively in all countries of the region. We have seen that in El Salvador Archbishop Luis Chávez y González and his auxiliary bishop, Rivera y Damas, facilitated the spreading of liberationist ideas. This suggests that while priests and nuns were of vital importance as the local disseminators of the new doctrine, a ‘blessing from the top’ was crucial for liberationist ideas to spread more freely throughout the country. Bishops, then, served as gatekeepers, some of them promoting the ideas and others restraining them. Even with resistance coming from five of the seven Salvadorean bishops, the fact that the archbishop and his auxiliary bishop gave a green light to liberationist ideas made a world of difference to how easily and quickly those ideas were spread. In Nicaragua and Guatemala liberationist priests also worked to organise the poor, but it was in Nicaragua that the Church ‘hierarchy's gradual distancing from Somoza [the country's dictator] developed into an open break after 1973’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The result was a successful revolution. In Guatemala, however, conservative Archbishop Mario Casariego, later to become a cardinal, staunchly opposed the liberationist movement that emerged in the early 1970s.Footnote ⁶⁹ No doubt other factors are important for understanding fully the strength of a popular movement, but the evidence from the case of Padre David Rodríguez in El Salvador suggests that the Salvadorean popular and revolutionary movements of the 1970s owed a great deal to the doctrinal changes embraced by the Catholic Church in the 1960s, and to the actions of two key Salvadorean bishops that helped local religious leaders to promote an injustice frame which awakened the poor and strengthened their ability to challenge the Salvadorean state.