From mission to cooperation. Liberation theology and the emergence and transformation of social movements in the Andean region (1960s -1980s)

Pastoral agents and lay people have been involved in religious activism both within the Church and in a variety of religious and lay organizations. Challenging prevalent paradigms of ‘social progress’, ‘development’ and indigenismo, the Church constructed a new approach towards the ‘other’, the indigenous peasant. While strongly emphasizing the agency and self-determination of the other(s), progressive clerics experienced the dilemma of overcoming paternalism within a context where social and cultural subjects ‘in need of liberation’ had to be imagined and addressed from a religious perspective.

This project postulates that the Church had to perform in an entangled and contested space, where various representations of ‘the indigenous’ based on different perceptions and (re)constructions of the ‘other’ existed in line with the heterogeneous interests of multiple state and non-state actors. Assessing these social entanglements requires a research design that considers knowledge production as well as power relations situated in local, regional and transnational contexts.

Following a discourse analytical and actor centered approach, this research project seeks to scrutinize the dynamic processes of circulation and reception of progressive Catholicism within the respective ecclesial jurisdictions. By doing so, it aims at making a critical contribution to the understanding of (1) how pastoral agents, lay men and women, shaped and were being shaped by ecclesial reforms, local political milieus and the socio-religious environment they encountered. Furthermore, the analysis seeks to address (2) the religious approach towards, and contribution to, the (trans)formation of processes of social organization and (3) the construction and change of collective identities in the Andean region.

The project combines a general approach to Latin America and the Andean region (Christian Büschges) with case studies on Ecuador (Andrea Müller), Peru (Noah Oehri), Colombia (Marcel Burmeister) and Bolivia (Pascale Kälin).

Revisiting the «Revolution of the Poncho»: Catholic Activists and the Politics of Representation in Ecuador (1960s-1980s)

Dissertation Thesis Andrea Müller

This research project analyzes the entanglements between religious and lay actors related to the Catholic Church and the formation of the Indigenous Movement in Ecuador. Focusing on discourses and practices of actors belonging to different social, cultural and geographical backgrounds, it seeks to combine a transnational with a local perspective towards the study of social mobilizations and ethnicity.

In line with the ecclesiastical reforms emanating from the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), Latin American clerics criticized the elitist character of their institution and the many forms of repression and violence persisting on the continent. Proclaiming “the option for the poor” by the late 1960s, their orientation towards the socially and economically disadvantaged became the nucleus of a strong but contested reform project. The focus on worldly problems coincided with new pastoral practices and discourses, as well as new spaces of participation for the laity. Theologians and philosophers – mostly from Latin America – subsumed this wide range of manifestations and discourses related to Catholic activism into a theological current known as Theology of Liberation.

In Ecuador, religious actors adhering to the reform agenda were often working in rural areas where their interventions aimed at supporting the “Indians” to end their centuries-old state of oppression and at establishing a proper “Indigenous Church”. In the same period, grassroots mobilization became stronger in the area. Concentrating at the beginning mostly on issues of land rights, social movements focused increasingly on cultural rights, and more explicitly, indigenous rights. In 1990, when mass protests paralyzed the country, the Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement became internationally known as a powerful political player.

Drawing from archival research and narrative interviews conducted in the provinces of Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, Tungurahua and Azuay, I argue that Catholic activists had a significant impact on the constitution and transformation of the Indigenous Movement by actively promoting a notion of “the indigenous” as a political resource. Nevertheless, through the conceptual framework of politics of representation, I assume that multifaceted negotiations on identity were taking place within a contested space, where actors had to face and challenge their respective interests, and where grassroots organizations as well as the Church, used their own understanding of the “other” as a strategic resource.

From an interdisciplinary perspective, the dissertation project combines social movement studies with an evaluation of religious and transnational networks and seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of ethnicity. This empirical investigation also aims at questioning dominant narratives on “the Indigenous” or “the poor”, and along with that, the prominent narratives of Ecuadorian Catholics that came to call this period of mobilization the “Revolution of the Poncho”.

Keywords: Catholic Activism, Liberation Theology, Indigenous Movement, Ethnicity, Alterity, Oral History

Pastors on Pastures: Interrogating the Church’s ‘liberation’ of the Peruvian peasantry in the Southern Andes (1958 – 1986)

Dissertation Thesis Noah Oehri

A new approach towards – and valorization of – the ‘poor’ characterized the action and discourse of the Latin American Catholic Church in the decades after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. The reforms of pastoral practices and their respective impact on socio-religious and political developments have thus far, however, received limited scholarly attention. The Southern Andean Church (Iglesia del Sur Andino), renowned as a bastion of progressive Catholicism in Peru from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, is no exception.

This dissertation seeks to critically analyze the trajectories of a transnational network of pastoral agents in two ecclesiastical jurisdictions of the Southern Andes, the Prelature of Ayaviri and the Diocese of Puno. Within the context of continental and national reform processes in late 1960s Peru – the Church’s ‘option for the poor’ and the military coup d’état – prevalent paradigms of development and social progress targeting the impoverished sierra were questioned by both religious and political actors. This thesis argues that the Andean peasants were, both during and after agrarian reform, subjugated to, and involved in, processes of ‘liberation’ and ‘national integration’ that further accentuated their continuous struggle over land, identity and, ultimately, colonial legacy.

Focusing on the dialogical nature of the encounters between progressive Catholicism and local social and political milieus from the late 1950s until the early 1980s, I seek to trace how the discursive construction of the ‘other’, the indigenous peasant, reflected a renewed ecclesiastical commitment to grassroots mobilizations that challenged existing power relations. I thus reexamine the complex trajectories of missionaries who, during over two decades of pastoral work, (re)adapted and reformed their practice and discourse, to varying degrees, in accordance with ecclesiastical reforms, domestic politics as well as, in an attempt to create a ‘local Church’, the regional socio-religious environment. Based on archival and oral sources, this dissertation eventually aims at contributing to the scarce historiography on how transnational processes of dissemination and reception of progressive Catholicism framed the social and political agency of the Church in its quest for the ‘liberation of the poor’ in Latin America.

Key Words: Peru, Catholic Church, peasant movements, liberation theology, oral history

"For a holistic liberation of man" - the reception of liberation theology in mission and development cooperation of the missionary society Bethlehem in southwestern Colombia (1965-1984)

M.A. Thesis Marcel Burmeister

The project examines the connection between the changing self-image of the Swiss Missionary Society Bethlehem (SMB) through the reception of pastoral practices and discourses inspired by liberation theology from the 1960s to the 1980s. In addition, within the local context of the (arch) dioceses of Popayan and Pasto in southwest Colombia, where the SMB was active since the 1950s, the project asks how self-image and local practices conditioned and influenced each other.

Up until the mid-1960s, the SMB was a society for foreign missions par excellence and predominantly concerned with the so-called "heathen mission". With the acceptance of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the goals and the self-image of the society changed: a fundamentally renewed understanding of mission paved the way for pastoral activity regarding churches "in construction and need".

The thesis of the project is that, within the missionary society, the region of Colombia played a key role in the formation of a genuinely liberation-theologically colored spirituality and ecclesiology. The concrete local experiences of the missionaries and teams of the SMB in southwestern Colombia played a decisive role here; at the same time, the successive adaptation and processing of liberation-theological discourses and practices - both on a local and global level - was by no means linear and free of conflict. This view will be demonstrated via critical analysis of the archive sources and (internal) publications of the SMB.

From poverty to oppression. The dealing of Misereor with Liberation Theologies in public relations work and project funding in the Bolivian highlands (1960s to 1980s)

M.A. Thesis Pascale Kälin

The research project analyses how, when and to what extent the West German Episcopal aid organization called Misereor incorporated the ecclesiastical core ideas that emerged from the reform process of the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the Episcopal Conferences of Latin America in Medellín (1968) and Puebla (1979), which can be summed up under the banner of Liberation Theologies. Based on the published material destined to catholic donators of Misereor, the positioning of the aid organization within debates over development and liberation will be investigated for the period of 1968 to 1989. The reception of principles of Liberation Theologies in a concrete example of project funding in the highlands of Bolivia (1961-1978) will be traced, drawing from archival research and interviews with local partners. This two-sided approach seeks to show to what extent Misereor, due to the necessity to position itself to widespread liberationist approaches, was involved in multi-level negotiation processes between political, religious and developmental arenas as well as between Latin American and European discourses about the most favourable pathway to development/liberation.

Although message, origin and spread of Liberation Theologies in Latin America have been intensively researched by historians and theologians, their concrete implications in peripheral areas such as the Bolivian highlands have so far remained relatively unconsidered by scholars. Furthermore, there is rather a thin database on how the ecclesiastical current has influenced the thinking and working of European aid organizations, among which Misereor was one of the most influential players between the 1960s and the 1980s.

The research is based on the hypothesis that Misereor had to respond to different rules of the game and constraints in the two analysed fields of work which resulted in fragmented dealings with Liberation Theologies. In public relations work, the core question was therefore what could be said to correspond to the level of consciousness of the German donors without offending the hierarchy which Misereor depended on. In the more pragmatic project work, however, the positioning depended more on the presence and orientation of local development actors, who often pursued mutually incompatible goals. The sources suggest that, despite its conservative episcopal origins and external constraints, Misereor increasingly devoted itself to a ‘preferential option for the poor’ which resulted in a gradual replacement of the more neutral concept of development by the politically charged premises of liberation.

Keywords: Liberation Theology, Ecclesiastical Development Discourse, Misereor, Public Relations Work, Project Financing, Bolivian highlands

2018

“Liberation Theology and the Other(s): Contextualizing Catholic Activism in 20th Century Latin America.” International Conference at the University of Bern, October 19-20, 2018

• Müller, Andrea: “Imaginarios y espacios en competición: La misión liberadora y la cooperación internacional al desarrollo en Ecuador (1960 – 1988)”
• Oehri, Noah: “Mobilizations of Faith in Times of Conflict: The Voices and Images of Peace Activism in Puno”
   

América Latina en la Mira: Poder y Representación en fuentes audiovisuales, Workshop, Universidad de Berna, 21 y 22 Septiembre 2018

• Müller, Andrea: “Dibujar la ‘liberación del pobre’: Cómics entre evangelización y política en el Ecuador”
• Oehri, Noah: “(Trans-)mission and Repercussion: Religious Radio in Times of Conflict (Puno, 1980s)”

56o Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, Salamanca, Julio 2018

• Müller, Andrea: “Iglesia pobre, Iglesia indígena: Representaciones del ‘otro’ en el Ecuador”
• Oehri, Noah: “Imagining the ‘Promised Land’: The Catholic Church and Frontier Colonization in the Province of Sandia, Peru (1958 – 1972)”
• Oehri, Noah: “’Don de Dios, Derecho del Pueblo’ – Tierra e identidad en la movilización campesina del Sur Andino (1969 – 1989)

Conferencia del Programa de Doctorado en Historia Latinoamericana, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, 14 de junio

• Müller, Andrea: “Reencuentro con la ‘Revolución del poncho’: Iglesia Católica y políticas de representación en Ecuador (1960s-1980s).”

26th Conference of the Latin American Studies Association, Centre de Convencions International, Barcelona, May 23-27, 2018

• Müller, Andrea: “Caridad, justicia y representaciones de lo «indígena»: La Iglesia Católica en la constitución del Movimiento Indígena en Ecuador”
• Oehri, Noah: “Pastors on Pastures: The Church, Agrarian Reform and the ‘Liberation’ of the Peruvian Peasantry”
• Panel “Entre lo local y lo global. La teología de liberación revisitada” (organizer: Christian Büschges).

2017

Seminario Interdisciplinario de Estudios Religiosos (SIER), PUCP Lima, August 2017
Paper:

• Oehri, Noah. “Desafíos de una Iglesia en Marcha: Apuntes sobre la investigación histórica en el Sur Andino.”

Workshop “Within and Without Writing: Definitions of “Indianness” in Latin America from 1492 to the Present”, Dahlem Humanities Center, FU Berlin, July 2017 (organizer Laura León Llerena, Northwestern University, Evanston)
Paper:

• Büschges, Christian: “Ambiguities of inculturation. Liberation theology and the representation of indigenous religiosity in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia from the 1960s to the 1980s”

Retreat of the Center for Global Studies, Graduate School of the Humanities, Thun, May 2017
Papers:

• Müller, Andrea. “Beyond the myth of the ‘Bishop of the Indians’: Assessing the role of progressive clergy in the rise of the indigenous movement in Ecuador.” 
• Oehri, Noah. “¿Dónde está tu pueblo? Priests and Peasants in the Southern Andes.”

25th Conference of the Latin American Studies Association, Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, April/May 2017
Panel “La Iglesia en salida: la teología de la liberación y su diálogo con los movimientos sociales en América Latina” (organizers: Christian Büschges and Juan Miguel Espinosa, PUCP, Lima).
Paper:

• Büschges, Christian: “Pobreza, cultura y religión: la teología de liberación frente a la población indígena en la región andina (años 1960 a 1980)”

Workshop “Religion and Society” of the Swiss School of Latin American Studies (SSLAS), Bern, March 2017 (organizer: Christian Büschges)
Papers:

• Müller, Andrea. “‘La revolución del poncho’ en el Ecuador: ¿Utopía de un obispo renovador o inicio del movimiento indígena?” 
• Oehri, Noah. “¿En el Corazón de Su Pueblo? A critical assessment of Religious Intellectuals and Missionary Practices in the Southern Andean Church”

2016

Doctoral Conference on Latin American History, University of Bielefeld, December 2016 
Papers:

• Müller, Andrea. “From Mission to Cooperation. The impact of liberation theology on the emergence and transformation of social movements in Ecuador (1960s-1980s).” 
• Oehri, Noah. “From Mission to Cooperation: The impact of liberation theology on the emergence and transformation of social movements in Peru (1960s – 1980s)”

24th Conference of the Latin American Studies Association, Hilton Hotel Convention Center, New York, May 2016
Panel “Power and Passion” (organizer: Devin Finn, Georgetown University, Washington).
Paper:

• Büschges, Christian: “Religion, Class and Ethnicity: Liberation Theology and the Transformation of Social Movements in Ecuador and Peru (1960s to 1980s)”