Liberationist Christianity in Argentina and the Responses to State

Terror (1974-1983)

Thank you for the introduction and thank you all for coming to this panel.
What I want to present here is from my doctoral project on Revolutionary
Christianity in Argentina, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s similar
to movements in other Latin American countries often described as
liberation theology. But drawing on Michael Lowy, I refer to the liberationist
Christian movement, because this wasn’t simply a theology but a broad
social movement that included people from various different Christian
denominations. And the specific topic I want to look at is the different ways
in which the movement responded to state-sponsored violence that really
began in 1974 under the elected government of Juan Perón but
accelerated following the military coup in March 1976 and resulted in the
death, torture and disappearance of around 30,000 people deemed left
wing or Marxist subversives. These victims included many Christians,
including, lay members of all denominations, protestant pastors, Catholic
priests, nuns and even two bishops.

Although much research has been done on the pro-military Catholic

hierarchy in the last dictatorship in Argentina, less attention has been paid
to the revolutionary commitment and the resistance among Christians.
And while there have nevertheless been significant studies on the
Christian left, they tend to focus on the period before state terrorism
began. The few studies that have referred to the Christian left’s response
to the dictatorship have portrayed it as homogenous. What I want to do
instead is look at the liberationist Christian movement in its internal
dynamics – its organisation, divisions, inner tensions and so on – and to
find patterns in the different responses to the asphyxiating and violent
conditions of state terrorism.

[SLIDE]

I have quite a lot to get through so I’ll only give a brief contextual
introduction rather than a more comprehensive historical background.

So in 1968, the Third World Priests Movement was formed by Catholic

priests and became the central driving force of liberationist Christianity in
Argentina. These priests and began to struggle actively for revolutionary
transformation of society and some even had connections to Peronist and
Marxist guerrilla groups.

But the movement increasingly came into conflict with the traditionalist
ecclesial hierarchy, over political issues, liturgical reforms and episcopal
obedience.

I argue that the effect of these conflicts was that a basic tension was
produced within the movement: between being contained within the
confines of the institutional church, and transgressing the ecclesial
institution and its rules. This tension can be seen, for example, in the
divisions over priestly celibacy. Some priests in the country rejected the
ecclesiastical rules on celibacy and married. At the Third World Priests’
last national meeting in 1973, a heated dispute occurred over whether to
accept non-celibate clerics as participating members of the movement. It
seems to me that behind the debate lay this tension between containment
and transgression – some wanted total obedience to institutional rules;
others were more open to dissent.

Among those located on the more transgressive side of the divide, some
rejected the notion of a church institution entirely. This didn’t mean a
schism in their eyes, but rather meant recapturing the original meaning of
the Church as an assembly of people. So, for example, Rubén Dri, one of
the leading Third World Priests, told me in an interview, and I quote: ‘I feel
within the Church. But the thing is, for me the Church is not an institution.
I believe in the ekklesia, really, that is the assembly Church’.

This divide within the movement is important to bear in mind when looking
at the responses of liberationist Christians to state terror.

[SLIDE]

The first response I want to point to is a tendency towards de-politicisation

and re-integration into the hierarchical structures of the institutional
Church. These tended to be mutually reinforcing: in order to reconcile with
the ecclesial institution and reclaim the legitimacy bestowed by the Church
authorities, who were staunch opponents of the political left, a degree of
de-politicisation was required. And de-politicising required another way to
manifest the commitment to the poor.

There was no doubt an element of self-preservation in this response:

Catholic priests were quite right to believe that they would be less likely to
be targeted if they minimised their political activities and rhetoric, and
remained close to the Church. But many of those who de-politicised and
re-integrated did so not only to avoid being victimised as subversives.
Many priests who worked in poor neighbourhoods were keen to preserve
institutional church presence among the poor – in other words, they
believed that being present in the slums in a restricted way was better
than not being present at all.

[SLIDE]

This response mostly applies to Catholic priests, and essentially involved

trying to avoid being forced into clandestinity and claiming a legitimate in
the eyes of the institutional church and the military. An interesting
document from a meeting in March 1975 of priests working in the Buenos
Aires slums talks about this process quite explicitly. It showed a concern
that the Third World Priests were becoming completely detached from the
Church institution. And so the document argued for re-integration into the
institutional structures. But it made it clear that this institutionalising effort
entailed a ‘non-political’ but still a popular character. The rationale for this,
rather than simply self-protection, was to ensure that ‘fidelity to the people
has institutional expression’. Here the word ‘people’ refers to the poor,
and so this phrase makes sense when it’s noted that politically-minded
liberationist priests established a presence in slums previously neglected
by the Church. So the notes suggest that some of these slum-priests were
determined to make sure that at least a section of the institutional church
preserved this presence among the poor. And they were prepared to drop
the political aspect of their message in order to do this.

[SLIDE]

Another example of this response was Lucio Gera, a Third World Priest
whose theological work was considered to be a significant contribution to
liberation theology. But he became somewhat less political in the mid
1970s, and in fact came to be considered the acceptable side of
liberationist Christianity by ecclesial authorities, as he was able to nurture
a relatively influential role within the institution. Gera was even asked to
draft an official church document published in 1981, calling for
reconciliation, that was condemned by various liberationist Christians and
human rights leaders for appearing to endorse an amnesty law to prevent
military officers from ever being prosecuted and the lack of self-criticism
over the institutional Church’s role during the dictatorship.

[SLIDE]

The second major response was what I describe as passing into

clandestinity.
Whereas the first response involved an attempt to claim political and
ecclesial legitimacy, this second response implied a refusal to accept the
dominant notions of legitimacy. Essentially, it involved maintaining the
commitment to revolutionary change they felt was required by the
Christian faith and the refusal to perform purely religious duties. Those
that most unambiguously took this decision were forced into clandestinity,
and the risks were clear – and so to do so required a willingness to
sacrifice their own safety.

Clandestinity could mean various things: for example, many young

Christian activists joined the guerrilla struggle.

[SLIDE]

Pablo Gorostiaga, shown here, was a committed Christian who in 1973

joined the guerrilla organisation, the Montoneros. He was really on the
fringes of the liberationist Christian movement understood in the broader
sense: while he didn’t attend mass regularly, or go to confession, his
Christian faith, as his brother told me in an interview, ‘was something that
he practiced in his daily life’, inspiring his social and political work in the
shantytowns, as well as his activity with the Montoneros. The Montoneros
– on the revolutionary Peronist left – were ironically forced into
clandestinity under a Peronist government dominated by the right. In
hiding, with minimal contact with his family, Pablo Gorostiaga refused to
go into exile pointing to his responsibilities. His brother told me that he told
his family that, and I quote, “If I go, two to three hundred people under my
command will be disappeared, and I have to look for a place for them to
hide. I won’t leave them like that, I’ll die in this country”. In July 1976, still
only 19 years old, he was kidnapped, tortured and killed.
[SLIDE]

Another example of passing into clandestinity can be seen with Rubén

Dri, a leading Third World Priest who I quoted earlier talking about the
assembly church. He told me in an interview that, by 1974, he found
himself in a position in which the institutional church, above all his own
bishop in Resistencia, was increasingly in conflict with the groups that he
worked with. In 1974 he had to escape military repression in Resistencia,
and he went into hiding in Buenos Aires. At the same time, he felt his role
as a priest was no longer tenable: “when I had to escape from Resistencia,
for me, my life as a priest had ended […] my Christian commitment
brought me to a revolutionary commitment, for which I was outside what
was then the ecclesial institution”.

During his time in hiding, he tried to remain active among grassroots

movements, even working with small Peronist guerrilla groups. But in
September 1976, with many of his friends and comrades having
disappeared, he managed to escape the country and went into exile,
returning only in 1984 after the dictatorship had fallen.

[SLIDE]

The final response I want to describe here is the recourse to the politics
of human rights. A number human rights groups appeared in the mid-
1970s, often led by Christians. This was a different response from the first
two for various reasons: firstly, it didn’t involve de-politicisation, and
actually allowed Christians to remain politically active to some degree, as
human rights groups were often somewhat protected by their links with
international human rights groups and foreign embassies.

Another characteristic was that, although there were some human rights
activists within the Catholic Church institution, it tended to involve a
distancing from the Church, as human rights groups explicitly condemned
the Church’s role in legitimising state terror.

A final distinctive feature was that this response involved a qualitative shift
in political character for liberationist Christians – rather than talk about
revolutionary transformation of society, the politics of human rights talked
about the defence of life and liberty.

This option is also interesting because it was often led by Protestants,

particularly the Methodist Church, whose leadership tended to be more
left-wing.

[SLIDE]

These distinctive characteristics can be seen in the case of Rolando

Concatti, another Third World priest, who was based in Mendoza close to
the Chilean border during the 1960s and early 1970s. Like Rubén Dri, he
resigned his ministry in 1974, seeing his Christian commitment as
incompatible within the Church institution. Instead he became involved in
local ecumenical groups. Following the military coup in Chile that brought
to power Pinochet’s repressive dictatorship, thousands of refugees
escaped made the journey over the Andes to Mendoza. And Concatti’s
group worked to shelter political refugees, a particularly arduous task
when right-wing para-militaries began to hunt down the political left in
Argentina too. At the start of 1974, a new group was created, led by the
local Methodist Church, called the Ecumenical Committee for Social
Action, whose objective was to protect Chilean refugees and
Argentineans persecuted under state terror. Although these activities
made him and his group a potential target, they were afforded some
protection through international connections with organisations like the
World Council of Churches.

[SLIDE]

Another person active in human rights in Mendoza was the Methodist

pastor, Federico Pagura. When Chilean refugees began to flood into
Argentina, he in fact led the efforts to provide safe havens, emptying out
his own church in the centre of Mendoza and using it as the main refuge
for the Ecumenical Committee for Social Action. In 1976, he co-founded
the Ecumenical Movement for Human Rights, which included the
participation of seven Protestant Churches and four individual Catholic
dioceses. Human rights leaders like Pagura were also persecuted and
enough activists were kidnapped or imprisoned to prove that the danger
was real. In fact, a bomb exploded in Pagura’s church in Mendoza in 1975
in a failed assassination attempt. Nevertheless, human rights offered a
response to state terror in Argentina that allowed the Christian left to cling
onto political legitimacy, to marginally avoid passing into clandestinity.

So to quickly conclude: faced with political violence and state terror, a

divided left and a polarised Catholic Church, liberationist Christians were
faced with a choice. For many Catholic priests, it often came down to a
choice between which commitment they felt more loyalty towards: the
Church institution, or their revolutionary principles. As human rights
groups emerged in the mid-1970s, an alternative choice appeared. For
many in the Christian left, taking this option required a qualitative shift in
discourse and priorities – for some Catholics because human rights
groups condemned the complicity of members of the church hierarchy in
the dictatorship; for more revolutionary Christians, because the goal of
revolutionary transformation of society ceased to become a priority. In any
case, each response had a potentially compelling rationale. And each in
their own way was a form of resistance to violence, whether it be through
trying to make sure the institutional Church did not abandon the poor
during the most turbulent times; through continuing to struggle for
fundamental transformation of society; or through protection and refuge
for those victimised by state violence.

Thanks for listening.