One of the challenges of contemporary Latin American scholarship is to understand the disjunctures and continuities between an authoritarian past when democracy was an unmitigated good to be contrasted with the violence of authoritarian states, and a present in which democracy is showing its frayed edges. Many democratic governments in the region fail to provide security to their citizens; other democratic governments have become authoritarian, facilitated in part by the frustration of citizens over this lack of security. In the current context, violence has become pluralized, and a burgeoning literature has come forth with remarkable studies of violence by scholars such as Desmond Arias, Daniel Goldstein, and Javier Auyero. Yet it is still not easy to come to a clear portrait of how we got from there to here, or what the way forward is. Alexander Wilde’s edited volume provides an essential contribution to our developing understanding, looking at religious responses to violence in the region.
The first half of the book provides a significant revision of scholarship on the role of religion in addressing violence from the 1960s to the 1980s in its focus on human rights. While we know the importance of the Second Vatican Council in the reorientation of the church’s pastoral attention to a preferential option for the poor, it has long been apparent that many of the church’s most important contributions came not directly from liberation theology and pastoral action from below, but from broader, more institutionalized challenges to authoritarian states. In this book, Wilde and a number of other contributors reveal the importance the concept of human rights had in this process.
As developed in the 1960s, liberation theology focused on structural causes of injustice and did not reject violent struggle. It provided an important motivating ideology for many radical priests and even some guerrilla movements, but it was rejected by more conservative priests and hierarchies. Nevertheless, the broader concept of human rights, which worked with a more individualistic, less structural conception and carried with it a commitment to nonviolence, provided a metaphor for the struggles of broader sectors of religious professionals and institutions. Daniel Levine shows how this commitment to rights had a long lineage in Catholic theology and Latin legal tradition, but also argues that its coming to the fore depended on the work of groups on the ground and was not just an outflow of theology or the work of institutions. Multiple chapters on Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Central America trace this process.
A chapter by Robert Albro looks at how violence has pluralized in the region. He starts with the state violence of the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, works through the period of democratic transitions, and describes the increasing nonstate violence of the past 25 years. Looking at the growing phenomenon of lynching, whereby communities exercise their own (in)justice, he notes the growing gray zone in which victims and perpetrators merge, complicating understanding and policy. States have been unable to provide security to their citizens or are actively involved in the continuation of violence.
The second half of the book provides new case material for thinking about the differences in Catholic and Pentecostal responses to violence. Most of this material is consistent with what we know but also pushes the edges in revealing ways. Catholic groups have a stronger presence of religious professionals who can confront secular powers, licit and illicit, and protect those who cannot protect themselves. Evangelical groups provide discourses and rituals of disjuncture, which create safe spaces where people can step away from conflict and violence. Neither refuge nor escape is the right term, as these are spaces where identities, practices, and social networks are actively reworked and reorganized.
Elyssa Pachico looks at the very hands-on way Jesuit priests faced violence in Magdalena Medio, Colombia, where guerrilla and paramilitares fought for control. The Jesuits put together a very typical formulation of practical action. In the 1970s, they created a research institute called the Center for Research and Popular Education, which has focused on understanding the Colombian conflict. They also created the Development and Peace Program (PDP), which engaged in community organizing, creation of economic co-ops, and coalition building as a way of creating peace from the ground up by providing individuals and communities with alternatives. These initiatives focused on practical action, but always in a context of religious discourse. This allowed the PDP to transcend the conflict and work with actors across multiple cleavages in a way that other NGOs were not able to. Of course, this transcendence of conflict is only partial. Multiple Jesuits were killed over the years by both paramilitaries and the guerrilla.
In the southern Colombian province of Putumayo, parish priests likewise are involved in secular development projects focusing on popular education and human rights. Winifred Tate describes Catholic priests who are influenced by the reform movement in the church but do not necessarily focus on theology or on “base communities” as an organizational form. As happens in other contexts, priests who are relatively more distant from the central parishes and the conservative national hierarchy actually have more autonomy to carry out progressive projects. But being part of the Catholic Church in areas with scarce state presence gives the priests political legitimacy and makes them the immediate point of contact for international organizations that can provide people with educational and funding opportunities, as well as international solidarity groups that reduce the anonymity of human rights violations in the region.
Amelia Frank-Vitale provides a careful case study of Catholic responses to violence against Central American migrants traveling through Mexico, which can help us understand the nature of Catholic responses. Fleeing violence in their home countries, migrants seeking to get to the United States must travel weeks, even months, riding on top of freight trains, under constant threat from “coyotes,” gangs, and other forms of organized crime who charge, tax, or outright rob them, in addition to police and armed forces who can arrest them, demand bribes, or otherwise abuse them.
In this context, migrant shelters have emerged, many of them associated with Catholic priests and churches. Running such a shelter is not simply a matter of putting together funding and logistics, for a successful shelter will attract not only migrants but all those violent actors who seek to illicitly profit from them. Frank-Vitale looks at two successful operations and one less successful. In each of the successful opperations, priests and Catholic activists have used their religious position and discourse to develop social networks and leverage with both local communities and the local authorities who are key to providing security. One of the priests refers to this support as “social armor” needed to confront violence. The shelter that has been less successful in providing migrants with security from licit and illicit actors is run by activists with religious motivations, but who have not succeeded in developing this social armor.
Yet developing a “social armor” and exercising local leadership is not the only way Catholic leaders confront violence. Javier Arrellano-Yanguas shows how Jesuits in Peru accompany people fighting against extractive industries. While they sometimes exercise leadership, their more important role is “accompaniment.” They accompany locals in their monitoring, public declarations, and protest. This accompaniment is not simply a projection of liberation theology, but is based on an idea of the agency of the poor and the preferential option for their struggles. This accompaniment provides a degree of public legitimacy to the people’s struggles against the environmental destruction wrought by extractive industries.
Three chapters looking at Evangelical responses to violence present a clear contrast. Kimberly Theidon looks at Evangelical pastors in the northwest of Colombia facilitating the social reintegration of demobilized guerrilla and paramilitaries. Catholic churches were key in protecting noncombatants in “territories of life” carved out amid the conflict. The church also played an important part in negotiations between paramilitary groups and the government of Álvaro Uribe. The church excelled at the macrolevel peace negotiations and at protecting victims but did less well in the reintegration phase. And it is reintegration that perhaps poses the biggest challenge for men who have spent most of their adult lives in some form of nonstate combat. Evangelical pastors and churches provide ex-combatants with a new “sacred self” that can adopt new discourses and networks that provide new identities. Theidon shows that one of the biggest obstacles to reintegration is overcoming the desire for revenge, as most of these fighters have lost close friends and family. For this reason, grappling with the past is often not the best direction for healing. Instead, building a new identity often requires actively forgetting the past, which Evangelicals’ discourse of transformation can help with.
In his research on Pentecostalism in Rio’s prisons, Andrew Johnson breaks from the stereotype of Pentecostalism as a dramatic innovation and argues that one reason for its solid presence among prisoners is that it is prevalent in the favelas where they grew up. In many of Rio’s favelas, there are significant relationships between Pentecostal churches and criminal gangs. Gangs will often provide Pentecostal churches with logistical support, clearing out space for their outdoor services, bringing chairs and sound equipment, and making sure drug deals do not take place close by. The same thing happens inside the prisons, where visits by pastors lead prisoners to be on their best behavior. Pentecostal groups openly present themselves as an alternative and form of exit for gang members, but they do not challenge prison gangs’ existence or their drug trade. Nor do they take sides in prison gang conflict. (This reveals their focus on the self rather than taking on powerful collective actors.) Nor do Pentecostal pastors focus on improving conditions in the prisons.
Robert Brenneman looks at urban gang ministries. Brenneman contrasts the state-centric violence of the 1980s and 1990s with what he calls the private violence of this century. The Catholic Church directly confronted the former, publicly criticizing the state and questioning its legitimacy in the face of human rights abuses. But the private violence that is more characteristic of contemporary Central America is less susceptible to these strategies, insofar as violent actors are not so concerned with legitimacy as with profits and maintaining their own power network, which has much to do with their reputation for violence.
Pentecostal gang ministries provide gang members with one of the only possible exits. When a young gang member becomes Pentecostal, it is one of the few ways to convince other gang members that he has really stepped outside of the gang identity. Thus, while the Catholic Church addressed violence in the 1980s and 1990s by withholding legitimacy from violent actors, Pentecostal congregations effectively provide legitimacy to gang members who are trying to change.
Brenneman shows how these two patterns crossed in the recent attempts to craft a gang truce in El Salvador. President Mauricio Funes attempted to get the Catholic Church’s blessing. The latter eventually demurred. Instead, government officials got a Pentecostal pastor to endorse the truce. This embroiled the Pentecostal pastor in precisely the public controversy that the Catholic Church sought to avoid.
Both Johnson’s and Brenneman’s chapters show how the Pentecostal Church moved beyond a focus on the self to greater connection with the social environment. But so far, the results of these moves do not show clearly successful Pentecostal engagement of communities and public institutions. Perhaps the inclusion of some neo-Pentecostal cases, for example Brazil’s Universal Church, which clearly have more significant aspirations for public prominence, could have developed this issue further.
Religious Responses to Violence is an excellent volume to think with, whether that thinking has to do with religion or violence or both. It provides an important revision to our understanding of the impact of the church in the period of authoritarianism and state violence, focusing on the importance of human rights. It also presents a series of cutting-edge case studies that push our understanding of the social and political insertion of religious actors in contemporary Latin America. In the process, it renders a clear portrait of the changes in violence in the region over the past 25 years.
