The Testimonial Voice of Ignacio Ellacuría and the Convergence of His Critical Thinking from Central America in Salvadoran Literature

Home , Atlacatl Battalion, Enrique Dussel, Jon Sobrino, Roque Dalton, Rutilio Grande, Salvadoran Civil War

Beyond Martyrdom: The Testimonial Voice of Ignacio Ellacuría and the Convergence of His Critical Thinking From Central America in Salvadoran Literature.

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Bradley Robert Hilgert

Graduate Program in Spanish and Portuguese

The Ohio State University

2015

Committee:

Dr. Ileana Rodríguez, Advisor

Dr. Ulises Juan Zevallos-Aguilar, Co-Advisor

Dr. Laura Podalsky

Bradley Robert Hilgert

2015

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the philosophical, theological, and political thinking of

Ignacio Ellacuría, SJ. In it, I read Ellacuría’s work as a cultural text, or more specifically, as testimonio. In that light, Ellacuría’s work can be seen as resulting from and responding to the historical reality within which he was situated. In reading his work as cultural text,

I place it in dialogue with a form of writing that is more widely considered to be a cultural text: literature. Doing this creates a dialogical relationship between Ellacuría’s writing and Salvadoran literature that allows the different texts to inform each other and us in a horizontal manner. I begin by comparatively reading Roque Dalton’s Clandestine

Poems and Ellacuría’s philosophy of historical realism. The combination of these revolutionary and utopian projects move us toward a historical praxis that positions itself with those oppressed by the dynamic system of reality and attempts to go against the grain of history. I then move from Ellacuría’s philosophy to his theology in conjunction with Manlio Argueta’s One Day of Life. When read with his articulation of liberation theology, the subversive potential of the Christian-Jesuit spirituality that Ellacuría embodied emerges as both a basis for an alternative intersubjectivity and as an existential threat to the established order. In exploring Ellacuría’s philosophy and theology, the first half of the dissertation signals the potential contributions of a thinking geographically/epistemologically located with and from Central America. The second ii half of the dissertation centers on the years leading up to the Salvadoran civil war and the public debate around agrarian transformation. Two post-war novels, Horacio Castellanos

Moya’s El arma en el hombre and Lucía Cerna’s La verdad register the need to historicize the concept of private property. Ellacuría’s political writings pose a methodology that responds to that need and reveals a necropolitical and parasitic system that produces violence and has its foundations in the colonial period. Finally, Claribel

Alegría’s They Won’t Take Me Alive suggests that this ideologized notion of property was an active agent in the civil war and the text’s collective voices converge with Ellacuría’s to imagine alternatives to the unjust system structuring their reality. The primary objective of this work is to argue for the inclusion of Ellacuría’s intellectual production into the field of Latin American cultural studies.

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For Lissette and Emma Luciana

Acknowledgments

Several years ago there was some controversy around a speech given by President Barack

Obama when he spoke the words “You didn’t build that”. Without getting into the politics, I would like to acknowledge in this section that although I may have put the pieces together, I certainly did not build this dissertation by myself; countless people have helped me along the way. For the past six years I have had the great pleasure of working with Ileana Rodríguez, whose contributions to my own critical thought are immeasurable. For her guidance, support, and care, both intellectual and affective, I am profoundly grateful. I am also thankful for the help, encouragement, and inspiration I have received from my dissertation committee: Laura Podalsky and Ulises Juan Zevallos

Aguilar. They, along with all the professors with whom I had the privilege of walking this path, aroused in me an interest in academia and a desire to constantly revise my own positions and beliefs. In addition to my professors at The Ohio State University, I would like to thank the Latin American Council of Social Sciences and the professors of a wonderful course on the social thought of Ignacio Ellacuría; the knowledge they imparted had a fundamental impact on the structure of my dissertation. I am indebted to the contributions of my colleagues in the “Colectivo de pensamiento ex/centrO” and the group at the Institute of History of Nicaragua and Central America for the formative conversations and exchanges. In particular from that group, I would like to thank Jared

List for being my university and life mentor and Juan Pablo Gómez for always pushing me a bit further as a person and an intellectual. My family has been absolutely instrumental in arriving at this stage in my academic career, especially because of their patience, understanding, and emotional support. For my daughter Emmylou, I am so thankful for the way you have changed my perspective on life, which has already begun to show, even in this dissertation. Finally, for my wife, Lissette, who has stood beside me through this entire process. I thank her for the tremendous sacrifices she has made so that

I could achieve this dream, because without her this would not have been possible. She has fought with and for me for this goal every day.

Vita

2003 ...... Watkins Memorial High School

2007 ...... B.A. Spanish & Philosophy, Ohio Wesleyan

University

2012 ...... M.A. Spanish, Ohio State University

2013 ...... M.A. Latin American Studies, Ohio State

University

2009 – 2015 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of Spanish, The Ohio State University

Publications Hilgert, Bradley. “Pensar contra la lógica del centrO: Martín-Baró y Ellacuría desde la UCA de El Salvador.” Revista de historia 29 (2014): N. pag. Print.

Hilgert, Bradley. Rev. of “Romper las cadenas”. Orden finca y rebeldía campesina: el proyecto colectivo Finca La Florida by Juan Pablo Gómez and Gustavo Palma Murga (AVANSCO). Revista de historia 29 (2014): N. pag. Print.

Hilgert, Bradley and Juan Pablo Gómez. “Escrituras subversivas: pensamiento critic desde Centroamérica” Encuentro 98 (2014): 6-29. Print.

Hilgert, Bradley and Juan Pablo Gómez. “Razón y pulsión de muerte: violencia política en el pasado reciente de Guatemala” Encuentro 97 (2014): 6-23. Print.

Hilgert, Bradley and Juan Pablo Gómez. “Nicaragua, Intervention in (1926-1933)” Encyclopedia of U.S. Interventions in Latin America. Ed. Alan L. McPherson. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013. 435-39. Print.

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Hilgert, Bradley. “Desapareciendo al otro. Tierra bajo la cruz y libertad hecha carne.” Revista de historia 27 (2012): 59-73.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Spanish and Portuguese

Concentration: Latin American Literatures and Cultures

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... v

Vita ...... vii

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: Roque Dalton’s revolutionary poetry and Ignacio Ellacuría’s historical realism: a thinking from Central American historical reality ...... 17

Chapter 2: Manlío Argueta’s One Day of Life and the contributions of Ellacuría’s subversive theology from Central America for a critical praxis of liberation ...... 73

Chapter 3: Historicizing Private Property with Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre and Lucia Cerna’s La Verdad: A witness to the Salvadoran Martyrs: Thinking from Central America to Undo the Colonial Legacy ...... 132

Chapter 4: Claribel Alegría’s They Won’t Take Me Alive and Ignacio Ellacuría’s concept of the common evil: imagining alternatives ...... 180

Conclusion ...... 236

Bibliography ...... 247

Endnotes ...... 260

Introduction

The people will break your heart. Dean Brackely, cited in Burke, The Ground Beneath the Cross, xv.

The Gospel saying that the truth will make you free has a unique explanation for philosophy: the search and announcement of the truth when faced with what impedes it is what will bring freedom to the people. An operative truth, but a truth. It is true that our people need transformation, but a transformation full of truth; otherwise, we are not headed toward man’s liberation, but rather his alienation. Philosophy as the search for the fullness of truth—that is, not merely the absence of error, but rather the full presence of reality—, is an indispensable element for the integral liberation of our people. When these people have the real possibility of thinking for themselves in all spheres of thought, then they are on the path to liberty and the full possession of themselves. This is the why of philosophy. Ignacio Ellacuría Filosofía ¿para qué? p. 14.i

A few years ago I taught a class called “Spanish in Ohio”. The course was both a service-learning and an immersion course, and as such my students were required to volunteer 60 hours to an organization that served the Spanish speaking people of

Columbus and to have another 40 hours of “contact” with Hispanic culture. My goal was to provide the students with the tools and skills for their volunteer positions—practice with interpreting, translating, professional etiquette, etc. Inside my teaching objectives was also the task of giving them some historic and cultural knowledge about Hispanic 1 immigrants in the U.S. and in Ohio. Going beyond the objectives that were given to me, I also wanted my students to be able to think critically about their service hours and projects, to question whether they were really serving the immigrant communities or if they were serving the same system that was oppressing them.ii For that reason, I included in my syllabus a close reading of selections of texts by Gloria Anzaldúa, Paulo Freire,

Enrique Dussel, and Anibal Quijano, and I included in my lectures decolonial theories from the likes of Ileana Rodríguez, Nelson Maldonado Torres, Walter Mignolo, Silvia

Rivera Cusicanqui, Catherine Walsh, and Ignacio Ellacuría.iii Looking back on the experience, I wonder if I should have better prepared myself for the possible outcomes of the combination of being exposed to these decolonial ideas and coming into contact with real, living, oppressed and subaltern people.

For many of my students, the experience was a difficult one; as the quote by Dean

Brackely in the epigraph states, these people “broke their hearts”. One particular student’s story sticks with me.iv He was a wealthy student who had grown up in a very affluent section of the Midwest. He had not spent much time questioning his own privileged position in the world, something that he later said my class forced him to do by literally putting him face to face with the “underside” of his own reality.v Somewhere around the mid-semester break, he wrote me an email in desperation. He asked how I was able to continue living a “normal life” after seeing that the structures of our world oppress the majority while privileging a small minority—white, masculine, heterosexual, etc. His email said that now that he had seen these problems, they had suddenly become his problems and it was no longer possible for him to pretend that they were not.

Being a graduate student teaching my first upper-level course, my first thoughts were a mix of “Success!” and “Wow! What have I done?” I knew firsthand the weight of the sort of experience my student was having—it’s a foundational experience we will visit again in this dissertation with Eugenia in They Won’t Take Me Alive. It is that moment when you begin to see the contradictions and purposeful inequalities of the system that structures our globe. It was a difficult question, but my answer was actually right in front of me. As the long quote by Ellacuría at the beginning of this introduction illustrates, it was also my response to questions that I had so often heard from my family and friends since deciding to major in philosophy as an undergraduate and then later when I decided to get a doctorate in Latin American literatures and cultures. My motivation for this was precisely because I wanted to understand the cultural aspects and literary reflections/refractions of what I take to be an unjust world-system in order to contribute in some way to undoing it. Likewise, my desire to be an educator is also related to wanting to expose young people to alternative perspectives and other historical realities in order to foster in them a critical thinking that will—to borrow from Ellacuría’s vocabulary—begin to deideologize the concepts that uphold that very system. All of this is to say that, like my student, the problem had become mine and my approach to chipping away at it was through education—that of myself and of others. The unpleasant experience my student was having was actually a desired outcome, painful as it may be.

My own personal response to the modern/colonial world-system is a search for truth and justice in the intellectual and epistemological realm.vi And in that sense, I have found a grand companion and a tremendous inspiration in the life and work of Ignacio Ellacuría,

3 who constitutes the center of this dissertation.

***

Reading Ellacuría as testimonio

Ignacio Ellacuría was born in 1930 in Portugalete, Spain. At the young age of 17 he joined the Society of Jesus. He was not considered by the order to be a particularly promising young student, but he volunteered to be sent to Central America in 1949 to open the new Viceprovince for the region. That decision proved to be life changing, especially because it put Ellacuría in contact with the poor of El Salvador, a country that officially and legally became his own in 1975. This past November marked 25 years since Ellacuría—along with five of his colleagues, a university employee, and her daughter—was brutally assassinated by a division of the Atlacatl Battalion that was ordered by the Salvadoran State and trained by the U.S. military.vii It has been exciting and moving to see the attention that has been given to the work of the martyrs and how they have been remembered on this anniversary, especially in my U.S. context. In this country, there were many events scheduled at different Jesuit institutions to give tribute to the martyrs, including a talk by survivor Jon Sobrino at the Loyola University Chicago that coincided with the release of a set of “The Ellacuría Tapes”, a virtual exhibit with video-recordings of Ellacuría’s visit to the university in 1986 to receive an honorary doctorate. Another Jesuit institution, Loyola Productions, also released a new and compelling documentary, Blood in the Backyard, on the events of November 16th and the implications of the event in the United States. Finally, in 2014 alone, Orbis books published three books related to the UCA martyrs: Robert Lassalle-Klein’s Blood and

Ink, Matthew J. Ashley, Kevin F. Burke, and survivor Rodolfo Cardenal’s edited compilation A Grammar of Justice, and Lucía Cerna’s testimonio, La Verdad, co- authored with Mary Jo Ignoffo. All of this is testament to the importance and legacy of

Ignacio Ellacuría and the UCA martyrs.

Despite this recent attention, Ignacio Ellacuría still remains a bit of an enigma in the English-speaking academic world, even within Latin Americanist programs. There may be an awareness of his assassination and a general idea as to why, but that has not compelled enough scholars to delve into the actual intellectual and public work left behind for us in his texts. In fact, the sleeve of Kevin J. Burke’s book, The Ground

Beneath the Cross, published in 2000, states that it is the first comprehensive analysis of

Ellacuría’s thought in English. Robert Lassalle-Klein’s introduction to a compilation of articles on Ellacuría published in 2006 reiterates this lack of circulation of Ellacuría’s ideas in English and gives two possible reasons: 1) “the breadth and complexity of

Ellacuría’s vast corpus” and because 2) his written reflections “present uncomfortable moral and intellectual challenges to the devastating impact of First World policies and patterns of consumption on what Ellacuría called the ‘vast majorities’ of the less developed countries” (Love that Produces xiii-xiv). In my own research, I certainly found both of these aspects to be challenges to my work, but they are challenges that are worth the effort, especially when we consider that the discomfort that Lassalle-Klein is referring to is a product of our own complicity to the system that Ellacuría is criticizing and that ultimately had him murdered.

Though there are several comprehensive studies that explore the events

5 surrounding Ellacuría’s death and give a partial biography of his life, academic texts that analyze his contributions with respect to the field of cultural studies are much harder to find.viii Kevin Burke’s book, cited above, focuses specifically on Ellacuría’s theological texts and their contributions to a new theology in the 21st century. Robert Lassalle-

Klein’s recent publication brings us much closer to the field of cultural studies by looking at the way Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino influenced the development of the Central

American University and how that institution, in turn, inserted itself fully into the

Salvadoran historical reality and presents us with a new model for the university-state- citizen relationship. The leading academic in Spanish on Ellacuría’s thought is a

Salvadoran philosopher, Hector Samour, whose book Voluntad de liberación is a fundamental text for understanding Ellacuría’s liberation philosophy. Others, such as

Ricardo Ribera, Carlos Molina Velásquez, Antonio Senent de Frutos, and Luis

Alvarenga, approach Ellacuría’s work from the fields of history, ethics, human rights, and critical theory, respectively.ix Several compilations of essays on Ellacuría’s thought reflect the wide variety of topics that Ellacuría covered during his life in his several published books and over two hundred articles, ranging from rigorous, philosophical debates to situational, political analyses, position papers, economic treatises, pedagogical explorations and strict theological texts.x In this dissertation, I hope to not only underscore the important claims of these thinkers in locating Ellacuría in their respective fields, but I also hope to enter his work into the discipline of cultural studies.

In order to consider Ellacuría’s thought from the field of cultural studies, I begin with a reading of his writing as a cultural text, or more specifically, as testimonio. The

6 strategy of the Salvadoran State that is revealed in the political assassination of the UCA martyrs was to create omissions and erasures in the official and popular cultural memory.

In the field of memory studies, testimonio serves to combat this politics of forgetting.

Pilar Calveiro, for example, proposes that testimonio should be seen as a form of resistance that questions the official history and that opens a space for dialogue.xi This dialogic space compels the subject of memory to participate not only in a construction of an alternative representation of the past but also of a better and more just future: “it implies an articulation with those other knowledges instead of opposing them, recognizing the enormous value of the works of memory for the construction of a historical account in which the density of the lived past permits a sort of ‘illumination’ of the future” (Calveiro 223).

In order to read Ellacuría’s texts as testimonio, we must approach them with what

Cristina Rivera-Garza calls the ethnographic method.xii She proposes reading historical texts by interviewing them, thus establishing a dialogical relationship with information that comes from the past. To read Ellacuría this way differs from a more traditional academic approach. Whereas the rigid academic’s task is to interpret the text and give a singular version of the text, thus choosing only one of all the possible versions, Rivera-

Garza’s ethnographic reader opts for a representation that departs from a plurality of versions. Reading a text this way and then representing it as a sort of “collage” allows me to employ the same narrative strategies of the texts I am reading and to make the written text speak and be heard.

In attempting to read Ellacuría’s texts ethnographically and as testimonio, it

7 immediately became clear to me that it was not just his voice that was speaking to me from the pages of his writing. In a book published in remembrance of the UCA martyrs,

Jon Sobrino claims that their lives “function as a ‘concrete universal’ of a whole people of the poor, of a whole crucified Third World, and especially of those who lovingly and freely devote their lives to the liberation and salvation of others” (viii). Likewise,

Rodolfo Cardenal suggests that the people of El Salvador may have actually been

Ellacuría’s final and greatest teacher.xiii The dialogical relationship that Ellacuría establishes with the oppressed Salvadoran people and the love he had for them, even until death, is one of the most essential elements to understanding his project and his life. The connection he had with the subaltern groups also allows us to read his texts as testimonio of not only Ellacuría’s voice, but also of the over 70,000 killed during the armed conflict.

Indeed, upon interviewing Ellacuría’s text, the voices of the “crucified people” begin to speak. My proposal, then, is that we can find in Ellacuría a registering of the memory of the subaltern and abject citizenships of El Salvador. Therefore, we should consider

Ellacuría’s writing—philosophical, theological, and academic as it may be—as a cultural text that archives the experience of oppression by speaking directly of that experience and, when possible, from that experience.xiv

To make this argument, in each chapter I read Ellacuría’s thought in dialogue with a form of writing that is more widely considered to be a cultural text: literature. Except for the cultural texts chosen for my third chapter, all of the texts reviewed in this dissertation are cotemporaneous with Ellacuría and his writing. It is for this reason that I affirm that they should be read together, as two examples of texts produced by a culture

8 in a given historical reality. In a sense, I am following a line of thinking similar to that articulated by John Beverley in his book Against Literature. First, Beverley highlights that once literature—as an elitist, bourgeoisie, colonial, and nationalist institution— comes into contact with cultural studies, a dialogical relationship is born in which both disciplines learn from each other and also “challenge the integrity of disciplinary boundaries per se, ‘infiltrating’ into them—the metaphor is Gayatri Spivak’s—a trans- rather than interdisciplinary practice” (20). This sort of dialogic relationship allows the poetry, novels, testimonio, and essays in this dissertation to inform each other in a horizontal manner. It allows me to read both Ellacuría’s writing and the more properly labeled ‘cultural texts’ simultaneously as primary and secondary texts, as both my object of study and my theoretical framework. I am attempting to go beyond Beverley’s intention of “produc[ing] a negation of the literary that would allow nonliterary forms of cultural practice to displace its hegemony” by also negating the place that theory and philosophy previously occupied through reading these differing texts as theory that produces knowledge and cultural texts that archive culture, subjectivities, and historical reality. Beverley’s slogan “against literature” is meant to foment an agnostic attitude toward literature and its disciplinary location, an attitude that Beverley also proposes as being necessary for cultural studies. I am taking up that challenge and declaring myself for literature by including it in my study as an archive that can inform my own reading of

Ellacuría’s texts. For this task, I rely heavily on Ileana Rodríguez’s arguments regarding the weight of the cultural text and its contributions to the fields of cultural studies, critical thought, and social sciences.xv

In my first chapter, it is Roque Dalton’s poems from the collection Clandestine

Poems that dialogue with Ellacuría’s philosophical thought to move my notion of cultural studies toward the construction of a critical thinking that will liberate society, especially the marginalized and oppressed. Luis Alvarenga says that Dalton is exemplary of an intellectual open to the social and political problems of his times and whose work is sustained by a political project for his country.xvi His writing from his own locatedness in the historical reality of El Salvador anchors me in my approach to Ellacuría’s development of his philosophy of historical realism. Both thinkers converge in presenting an oppositional thinking that should ideally result in an optative mode of living and emancipatory praxis. What we see emerging in this combination of their texts is an alternative approach to history that ultimately allows us to construct a critical thinking that for Ellacuría permits us to “overturn history, to subvert it, and send it in another direction” and for Dalton is a cure for the “historical hangover” that plagues Central

America (Ellacuría “The challenges” 173; Dalton 183). In part the power of their proposals lies in their moving the epistemological place of their respective fields to a thinking with and from El Salvador and Central America.

With respect to this last point, my argument is that Ellacuría’s intellectual project should be included in the (anti)discipline of Latin American cultural studies, especially in that it advances the current emphasis for a thinking in and from Latin America. Catherine

Walsh, for example, proposes Latin America as a privileged place for deconstructing what Eduardo Restrepo calls intellectual colonialism and constructing a decolonial theory.xvii In that light, she moves us away from the cultural studies of the United States

10 towards a Latin American (inter)cultural studies as an (in)discipline that promotes “the inter-epistemic and inter-cultural as methodological and political positionings that signal towards a thinking from, among, and with instead of a study on” (218). Ileana Rodríguez also signals the emergence of this trend within the field in her article “Tiempos Locales-

Tiempos Globales: En, desde, sobre la América Latina/Estados Unidos”, a text in which she uses Nelly Richard’s notions of international academia and epistemological justice to explain this intellectual wager for privileging the thought produced in and from the geographical/epistemological place that has historically been perceived as an object useful for knowledge production but not as a subject that produces. Despite Ellacuría’s roots in Spain, his philosophical and theological writing represents an excellent example of the epistemological shift that privileges the microexperiences lived in and from Latin

America. More specifically, Ellacuría’s proposal is to take this project to an even more excluded geography/epistemology: that of Central America. Ellacuría’s project imagines

Central America as “a region whose great potentiality and wealth of resources contrasts with the state of destitution, injustice, oppression, and exploitation imposed upon a great part of the people” (“Utopia and Prophecy” 50). He goes on to explain that “this provides an objective basis for the contrast of utopia found in its rich potentiality, with prophecy, already present in the negation of utopia by the everyday reality” (50). My position is that if one core interest of Latin American cultural studies is to build a more just epistemology, then we should include Ellacuría’s proposals for a liberation philosophy and theology as a critical thinking that moves that project forward.

This thinking from the place of Central America is especially present in

Ellacuría’s theological writing and the cultural text for my second chapter, Manlio

Argueta’s One Day of Life. This text registers the transformative power of a theology thought from the place of the Central American poor in the context of the beginning of El

Salvador’s civil war. In this light, Argueta’s novel provides us with a unique lens through which to view Ellacuría’s particular theology and spirituality. We will see how this subversive and revolutionary notion of Christian theology constitutes a rupture—both in terms of the theology dominant in the region at the time and in terms of the peasant subjectivities that had been shaped by that theology—, which activates the violent repression of the Salvadoran State. My hope in highlighting these aspects of Ellacuría’s thought is to explain his theological foundations and also to signal toward the potential contributions of a critical Christian theology for the fields of cultural studies and cultural analysis.

My third and fourth chapters build upon this thinking from Central America and move us into the application of Ellacuría’s methodology of historicization. If we are to read Salvadoran cultural texts that are produced from the armed conflict of the second half of the 20th century, a common message that we find is that the country’s agrarian regime should be considered an active agent in the war. I trace how two post-war texts—

Horacio Castellanos Moya’s novel El arma en el hombre and Lucía Cerna’s testimonio

La Verdad: A Witness to the Salvadoran Martyrs, written with Mary Jo Ignoffo—imply that the ‘liberal’ notion of private property operative in El Salvador was a negative, structuring force for the lives of the country’s abject citizenships. In that light, the protagonists of these texts—one fictional, one historical/living—embody the need to

12 historicize the notion of private property, a task through which Ellacuría guides us. A first step in this historicization is to trace the coloniality of the agrarian structures that were in place in El Salvador in the 20th century. What the cultural texts and Ellacuría’s political writings make clear is that this colonial legacy has resulted in five centuries of a necropolitical system of parasitism founded upon a culture of inequality and violence.

In my final chapter, I return to the literature of the period of the conflict and find in Claribel Alegría and D. J. Flakoll’s They Won’t Take Me Alive: Salvadoran Women in the Struggle for National Liberation another articulation of the impacts of an unjust system of property ownership, but also a historicizing approach to the national reality in which Eugenia lived and died. Reading the collective testimonio of Eugenia found in these pages with Ellacuría’s texts on human rights and the 1976 proposals for agrarian reforms calls into doubt the supposed liberal nature of the Salvadoran governmental model. The same contradictions found in the local history of El Salvador are also found in the modern/colonial world-system, at large, thus making the illiberal aspects of

‘liberalism’ visible on a global scale. Ellacuría’s thinking is useful here because he provides us with a new theoretical concept to characterize this system: the common evil, as in that which actively negates the common good. Ellacuría argues that the concept of common evil requires action to negate this negation and we can find the seeds for this in

Alegría’s cultural text. I read Ellacuría and Alegría together in order to speculate on the possibilities and ways of overcoming a ‘liberalist’ world-system that serves the common evil in order to historicize—a verb that implies that the action is incessant and never complete—utopian alternatives. Both Ellacuría and Alegría highlight that critical thinking

13 and consequently the university, though not enough in themselves, have an important place in that project.

My hope with this dissertation is to have participated in the act of remembering— not only the life and work of Ignacio Ellacuría but also the lives, dreams, and voices of the subaltern and abject citizenships with which he placed himself in solidarity and from which he thought. However, in this act of memory, I hope to go beyond a simple commemoratory piece in order to contribute to a re-potentialization of Ellacuría’s subversive and radical utopian thought.xviii In that light, I want to go beyond his martyrdom. In an online blog for the Salvadoran digital newspaper El Faro, a philosophy student from the very department that Ellacuría founded criticized what she called a

“banalization of martyrdom” with respect to a celebration of the anniversary of

Archbishop Romero’s assassination.xix There, she analyzes how projects like Romero’s in

El Salvador and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s in the United States have been absorbed and assimilated by the very system that produced their assassinations, thus reducing their subversive projects to what she calls “a kumbaya level”. In this way, they no longer represent a threat to the status quo or to the power structures. The cultural texts I analyze here, especially Argueta’s novel, underscore the revolutionary nature of Ellacuría’s thinking and the threat it represents for the established order. His assassination must be understood as the reaction of a power structure that was profoundly threatened by the social, political and theological projects that Ellacuría was articulating. If his proposals for a critical thinking that encompasses both prophecy and utopia were considered an existential threat to the world-system in the 1980s, I aim to show that they are still

14 transformative today. In arguing this, I hope to de-banalize his sacrifice, to “take him off of the cross”, to borrow from his vocabulary, by recovering and making visible the dissident, Christian project that he dedicated his life to realizing. Ellacuría’s is a

‘heresy’—both radical and alternative—that I strive to reconstruct and reproduce.

Unfortunately for us, the system that Ellacuría desired to change could not accept his project and used its necropedagogical methods to send a message to anyone aligned with the authentic liberation of the oppressed. His project, then, was left unfinished.

Ellacuría openly recognized that critical thinking alone was not enough to change the structures that maintain the injustices of our world; however, he was murdered before he was able to fully develop some of his more concrete solutions for these problems, especially that of the civilization of poverty, a response to the civilization of capital.

Whereas our current global civilization can be characterized as a parasitic world-system of death and dehumanization, Ellacuría imagined a trans-national political system of justice that produces abundant life for all.xx We can be sure that the university plays a central role in the development of this civilization and so as members of the university,

Ellacuría’s ideas and concepts are useful in moving us toward justice.

Because of his immense capacity to produce, understanding the totality of Ignacio

Ellacuría’s thought, if possible, would take a lifetime. My hope with this dissertation is to have introduced three of Ellacuría’s essential ideas that can contribute to the field of cultural studies, especially in terms of the construction of a decolonial theory. First, his philosophy of historical realism not only overcomes the coloniality present in dominant historiographies such as those that come from Hegel’s lineal, progressive

15 conceptualization of history, but also opens up history as a dynamic system or systematic dynamism that can be re-directed through human praxis. Secondly, this basis for a philosophy of liberation and Ellacuría’s Jesuit spirituality direct him towards the need to think from the perspective of the “crucified people”, which we can understand as the subaltern and abject citizenships of the world. This epistemological shift makes the double gesture of decolonial thinking possible, denouncing the current structures and imagining alternatives from exterior or at least ex-centric epistemologies and geographies. This situated thinking from outside the center of power also allows us to imagine an ethical intersubjectivity that can advance cultural theories of interculturality.

Finally, Ellacuría’s methodology of historicization—both in terms of judging concepts in their given historical realities and of realizing ideas in those same realities—provides us with the sort of critical thinking that is necessary in order to go beyond idealism and to begin to construct concrete proposals for alternatives. These are the tools necessary to continue Ellacuría’s project of understanding the current manifestations of the modern/global world-system in order to deconstruct it. In highlighting these aspects of his thought, I am thinking with and from Ellacuría and the oppressed people of El

Salvador in order to provide water for the “seeds of hope” that have been covered by conquest and colonization and are in need of being uncovered “to enable the resurgence of the ‘new world’, not as a repetition of the ‘old world,’ but in its true ‘newness’”

(“Latin American Quincentenary” 33).

Chapter 1

Roque Dalton’s revolutionary poetry and Ignacio Ellacuría’s historical realism: a thinking from Central American historical reality.

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music. His fate is like that of those unfortunates who were slowly tortured by a gentle fire in Phalaris’s bull; their cries could not reach the tyrant’s ears to cause him dismay, to him they sounded like sweet music. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ – that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.’ And the critics come forward and say: ‘That’s the way, that’s how the rules of aesthetics say it should be done.’ Of course, a critic resembles a poet to a hair, except he has no anguish in his heart, no music on his lips. So I tell you, I would rather be a swineherd at Amagerbro and be understood by the swine than a poet and misunderstood by people. - Søren Kierkegaard, Either/or 42.

This rather long epigraph gives us much to think about when putting the

Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton in relation to the Salvadoran-Spanish Jesuit priest Ignacio

Ellacuría. We can begin by their shared characteristic of being impacted by the anguish of the poor majorities of their country.xxi In the philosophic, political, and theological writings of Ellacuría—as I will signal throughout this dissertation—and in the poetic and intellectual texts by Dalton, we can find an affective register of the impression that the suffering of the Salvadoran poor had on these writers. In the case of Ellacuría, this is 17 translated into a denunciation of the historical reality of his people through prose and essays, a writing that is largely rejected by the centers of power.xxii Dalton, at least early on, was celebrated for his poetic skill, the “lovely music” he was able to create from his soul, which was “tortured” by the state of injustice. The way in which both Ellacuría and

Dalton reflect on this reality that is obscured by official histories converts them both into what Salvadoran philosopher Carlos Molina Velásquez considers the “legitimate sources” of the “constitutive past” of the country (182).xxiii In part, this is because both thinkers produce, in their respective fields, a critical reflection of the historical reality of their country. Despite Dalton’s partial acceptance because of his poetic ability, eventually his criticism, much like Ellacuría’s critical thought, reached the level of heterodoxy. The dedication and commitment of both Ellacuría and Dalton to using this criticism to move their society towards structural transformations of liberation and life eventually resulted in their being labeled heretics—by the Christian centers of power for Ellacuría and by the very left for which he had been fighting in the case of Dalton—and their consequent assassinations.

For Molina, the category of heretic allows him to trace a continuity between the poet, eliminated by his own political party in 1975, and Ellacuría, murdered by the U.S.- supported, Salvadoran armed forces in 1989, with Archbishop Oscar Romero, also assassinated by the armed forces, constituting a nodal point between the two. Molina

Velásquez argues that the three share an even more important characteristic than having died because of their ideas: “the three could see the fruitfulness of a key for interpreting reality (the poor are the place from which to judge) that was also inseparable from their

18 transformative, revolutionary commitment (new world, new man)” (183). In this chapter,

I will be discussing the ways in which Dalton and Ellacuría coincide in this tendency and the ways in which it is articulated in their works. Molina also describes these three

‘heretics’ as “critics who dared to question whether the place from which they made their reflection was suitable or if the ends that they should pursue and the corresponding means were correct” (183). In that light, they represent a challenge to dominant thought, especially in their questioning with respect to the place of their reflection. My position is that both intellectuals provide us with models for a thinking from Central America.

One of the primary objectives of this dissertation is to highlight Ignacio

Ellacuría’s theoretical and historical justification for why we should shift our center of knowledge production from the global North to the peripheries of Central America. He himself converts this into his mode of living, something which ultimately cost him his life. As Molina points out, we find a similar movement in Dalton, who rejects the sort of dogmatic, imported socialism and instead directs his artistic production toward the search for an authentic revolutionary project that responds to the particular historical reality of

El Salvador. Like Ellacuría’s case, this proved to be too much for the ERP (the People’s

Revolutionary Army), and he was internally charged with treason and eliminated.xxiv The book of Dalton’s poems that I am analyzing in this chapter, Clandestine Poems, is especially important for studying the rupture of Dalton’s thought with his party because this book contains many of his direct criticisms of Stalinist dogmatism. In fact,

Salvadoran philosopher and historian Luis Alvarenga points out that the Committee of

Propaganda for the National Resistance did not want to publish these poems for that reason.xxv

One way of seeing this is through the heteronomy of the poem; Dalton is the author, but the book of poems is presented as though it were written by five authors in hiding. Each of these ‘poets’/poetic voices pronounces a slightly different variant of Latin

American Marxism. This is part of why Luis Alvarenga locates Dalton within the plurality of Marxisms in the continent: “Thus, Dalton belongs to a stage of Marxist, Latin

American thought in which the dogmas of Stalinism are refuted and a search to configure an emancipatory thought that departs from the Latin American reality is begun. This thought is deeply sacrilegious and heterodox, because it is not afraid to read Marx or

Lenin from Christianity, poetry, or vanguard art” (“La crítica” 391). Because of his own personal contact with the socialism of Eastern Europe, Dalton accused this form of socialism of being guilty of the same sort of alienation that he saw in capitalism; that is, he saw in it the same dependence on instrumental reason that capitalist dogma imposed.

The heteronomy of his Clandestine Poems signals Dalton’s attempts to construct a more integral solution to the central problems of El Salvador’s historical reality, especially of alienation and injustice. In that light, it represents a criticism of the fragmentation that capitalism promotes. Whereas capitalist-modern thought would call for the construction of a solution from a single, expert voice, Dalton’s poems here present us with five different voices with incomplete solutions, a collage of Salvadoran socialist approaches to the crisis. In relation to this, it is important to highlight that Dalton includes in this poetry a biographical note for each of his heteronyms. From those notes,

20 we learn about their academic disciplines. Vilma Flores and Timoteo Lue were law students before joining the revolutionary cause. Jorge Cruz was a student at the Catholic

University and has published studies on the thought of Paulo Freire and Camilo Torres.

Juan Zapata is a sociology student who also writes short stories. Finally, Luis Luna was an architecture student and then a sociology student and has published both political and literary essays. This collage implicitly underscores Dalton’s criticism of the fragmentary nature of capitalism and presents us with the need for an interdisciplinary, multipositional, and plural approach. If we are to understand Dalton’s work as his proposal for an authentic cultural criticism, then we should consider the meaning of the inclusion of the poetry of these ‘voices’, and especially the decision to give us their personal and academic backgrounds. Luis Alvarenga would argue that this is a part of

Dalton’s argument for interdisciplinarity:

cultural criticism should draw on the contributions of other disciplines. Otherwise,

we would have a perspective of culture that can easily fall prey to the

reductionism of any sign […] To undertake a work of Marxist cultural criticism

meant for this author to draw on the perspectives that other disciplines open, such

as anthropology, theology, psychoanalysis, and history, among others. (“La

crítica” 398)

Dalton represents the need for an interdisciplinarity with these poetic voices, but he also employs this perspective of cultural criticism in his work, as the various citations and references to various disciplines clearly demonstrate.

In this chapter, I propose to take up this call for an interdisciplinary approach by putting Dalton’s poetry into dialogue with the Ignacio Ellacuría’s philosophy of historical realism. As I laid out in my introduction, this allows the cultural text to inform critical theory, and vice versa. It puts these two forms of knowledge production on a horizontal plane and opens up space for dialogue in order to deepen our own understanding of both their historical reality and our own. My contention is that when we put these two particular intellectual articulations together we find a doubly argued need for a thinking that is situated with and from the historical reality of El Salvador. For Dalton, we have already shown that this means seeking an authentic Salvadoran response to the problems of injustice and alienation in lieu of the Stalinist socialist dogma. For Ellacuría, this entailed building a philosophy that combined classic, modern, essential, and existential philosophy. He finds a model in Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri, who had developed what Ellacuría called a ‘philosophy that is pure’ without being ‘pure philosophy’. In other words, it was a philosophy that did not remove itself from the realm of historical reality, but rather placed itself in the middle of it. It is this model of philosophy that Ellacuría will radicalize in his own work.

We see, then, that a philosophy of historical reality is the foundation for

Ellacuría’s thinking, a necessary step for us in order to build up to the topics in the subsequent chapters. This emphasis on historical reality is also the point in which his thinking converges with Dalton’s poetry. In order to understand Ellacuría’s political writings that we will be analyzing in chapters three and four, we must first understand these philosophical foundations. Dalton’s poetry and Ellacuría’s philosophy historical

22 realism together move us in the direction of an emancipatory cultural criticism (Dalton) and a liberation philosophy (Ellacuría). For the purpose of this chapter, I will look specifically at three aspects that stand out from this dialogical reading of their projects: a criticism of the exclusionary reason that emerges with modernity, an alternative proposal for understanding the movement of history and its relationship with reality, and a move toward an alternative thinking and praxis.

***

Dalton and Ellacuría as against modern Reason

In his doctoral thesis on the poetry of Roque Dalton as a criticism of modernity,

Luis Alvarenga maintains that one point of contention between Dalton’s poetry and modernity has to do with the fragmentation that modern thought and capitalism entail.

Jürgen Habermas characterizes this fragmentation as being proper to modernity in his article, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project”. There, he shows that modernity, which proposes a liberation from the past, separates “substantive reason […] into three moments, now capable of being connected only formally with one another” (45). He goes on to show that the results of this Enlightenment project:

scientific discourse, moral and legal enquiry, artistic production and critical

practice are now institutionalized within the corresponding cultural systems as the

concern of experts. And this professionalized treatment of the cultural heritage in

terms of a single abstract consideration of validity in each case serves to bring to

light the autonomous structures intrinsic to the cognitive-instrumental, the moral-

practical, and the aesthetic-expressive knowledge complexes. (45)

This ‘autonomization’ of the different spheres of knowledge is precisely the sort of fragmentation that Dalton works against, as I have already mentioned. This is the very justification of his unique combination of poetry and politics, which also delves into the moral-praxical structure. But what is more worrisome about the modernity project is that once the different types of knowledge are separated, they are then hierarchized.

In the particular case of Latin America, this hierachization causes what Julio

Ramos calls the fragmentation of the lettered city.xxvi In the communicative system of the region, reason begins to be seen as against the activity of literature. Ramos quotes the pedagogical plan of Eugenio María de Hostos in the Dominican Republic as an example:

Hostos’ pedagogy “radically opposes the activity of literature from rationality” and considers writers to be “vagabonds of fantasy”, “dangerous social influences”, and

“corruptors of reason” (qtd inx Ramos 54). Instrumental reason begins to emerge as the dominant rationality and we begin to see what Walter Mignolo calls a subalternization of forms of knowing. Once knowledges are hierarchized, anthropological binaries such as civilized/barbaric, rational/irrational are made to justify ‘civilizing’ projects that reify the

Western, capitalist-Enlightened imaginary as the only correct option.

Given this opposition of literature and reason, as seen with the example of Hostos,

Dalton’s work can already be situated in opposition to the modernity project. Dalton’s politically committed poetry defies the fragmentation that modernity attempts to impose and proposes that the poet, like any other human being, is a political being and his poetry is a political act. We can read this as being part of the meaning behind one of the poems penned by Vilma Flores in Clandestine poems titled “Poetic Art 1974”. It reads:

Poetry

Forgive me for having helped you understand

you’re not made of words alone. (35)

The message is clear. Poetry is more than just words; more than simply an act of rationalization. In his introduction to the second volume of the complete collection of

Dalton’s work, Alvarenga claims that in order to understand what this ‘more’ of poetry is, we must go to one of Dalton’s earlier poems, “Con palabras” from Taberna y otros lugares. In that poem, Dalton writes about the impossibility of arriving at a universal notion of words. He explains that the word blue, which can be red or brown, depending on mood, climate, or even political needs. The infinite number of connotations that can be attached to a word and the almost infinite number of interpretative communities makes it impossible to arrive at a complete knowledge of the world of words. Given this, what

Dalton proposes is that words become not just something used to name things in the world, but actually a way of being in the world. Alvarenga interprets Dalton this way:

“The human being is the only one that makes itself with words. It is also the only being that can close its possibilities with those same words. We have here a concept proper to a certain hermeneutics: the world is constructed with words and outside of the word, there cannot be humankind” (“Prólogo” 16).

Given that words come from reality, this conceptualization of words signals toward a reality that, like the word itself, exceeds the exclusively rational. This constitutes the first point of convergence in Dalton and Ellacuría’s criticism of modernity. For both, there is more to reality than its formality. Let us turn to how

Ellacuría develops this idea. He begins by adopting Xavier Zubiri’s notion of sentient intelligence. It is from this concept that Zubiri, and later Ellacuría, constitutes his critique of what Robert Lassalle-Klein calls “the evasion of reality in the West” (204).xxvii

Ellacuría himself explains the concept in his Filosofía de la realidad histórica, when he states: “intelligence and sensibility constitute a unique habitude in man. Intelligence and sensibility are essentially irreducible, because the proper formality of each one of them is irreducible to the other” (Filosofía 322). This represents a radical shift from the sort of mind-body divide that has been so widely accepted since Descartes’ philosophy, which has been considered by many to be the foundation of modern philosophy and Western thought. What Zubiri and Ellacuría are claiming here is that sensation—considered to be the impression caused by exterior objects on the mind of the human subject—and intellect—the understanding of that impression by the human subject—are actually a differential unity. That is to say, philosophies that maintain the distinction between the apprehension of reality and the ordering or understanding of it are upholding a false and unhelpful dichotomy. Modern thought has posited that sensible and intellectual apprehension of reality must be considered separate moments in a sequence, but Zubiri and Ellacuría posit that they are actually a single process. This is not to say that sensing and intellection are identical, but rather that they are two dimensions of the unity that is sentient intelligence. Reality is more than just the formal; poetry is more than just words.

Ellacuría explains how this is so by explaining the three moments of intellection.

The first moment, he explains, is the first function of intelligence and is strictly biological: “it consists of apprehending the stimulus (and therefore the organism itself) as

26 stimulating reality” (Filosofía 322). This primary apprehension is what will later lead

Zubiri and Ellacuría to understand reality as having a physical characteristic, though not limited to only materialism, because the primary apprehension is a result of a physical and real impression. This first apprehension of reality leads directly to the second moment, because it is what permits the human subject to choose an adequate response.

Robert Lassalle-Klein tells us that we can consider this second moment to be an act of the logos, the naming, ordering, and categorizing of the object or reality apprehended.

Finally, the last moment of intellection moves us into the realm of reason. As Ellacuría puts it, “located by stimulation in the field of the real, intelligence is forced by the things themselves to transcend in the stimulating reality to the entire field of reality” (322).

Lassalle-Klein interprets this to mean that intellection moves us toward recognizing that which was apprehended as a “worldly reality” and “developing provisional models, hypotheses, and postulates about the reality of things as they exist outside of sensible apprehension” (215). This last moment underscores why intellect and sensing constitute a unity. Lassalle-Klein quotes Zubiri to explain this feature:

Moving toward the real that exists outside the perception is something inexorably

necessary, an intrinsic moment in perception of sensible qualities. Every quality is

perceived not only in and of itself as such and such a quality, but also as a

pointing toward. The reality of the qualities that are only in the perception is

exactly what constitutes their radical insufficiency as moments of the real. They

are real, but they are really insufficient. In their insufficiency, however, these

qualities…are…pointing toward the real that is outside the perception. (qtd in

215-16, ellipses and italics in text)xxviii

This notion of sentient intelligence as the way of apprehending reality moves

Zubiri and Ellacuría away from the positivism and log0centrism that are characteristic of modernity. For one, this is true because the notion of sentient intelligence unveils the falsity of the mind/body dichotomy that departs with the ego conquiro and is solidified in

Descartes’ ego cogito.xxix But the notion of sentient intelligence takes us even a step further by uncovering modernity’s reduction of knowledge production to the function of logos and Reason.

By replacing the mind/body divide with the unity of sentient intelligence,

Ellacuría and Zubiri allow for other forms of knowledge production, including knowledge produced more strictly by the body. Dalton’s poetry also opens us up to this possibility, especially in opening space in the political for knowledge that emerges from affect. We can understand this to be a dismantling of the knowledge hierarchies that have contributed to the justification of colonization and our violent, exclusionary world- system.xxx I do not want to argue here that sentient intelligence represents a thinking from

Central America just yet, but I do want to highlight how it opens up space for a horizontalization of knowledges, thus removing the positional superiority that European

(mind) thought has traditionally enjoyed over that produced from Central America

(body). We can begin to imagine the radically different reception of Las Casas’ or

Guamán Poma’s arguments from the perspective of a philosophy based on sentient intelligence rather than one that had presupposed the supremacy of logocentric Reason.

Ellacuría and Zubiri’s criticism of modern Reason, then, center around two tendencies: the logification of intelligence and the entification of being. Together, they constitute what Ellacuría imagines as the limitations of Western thought. I find this portion of Zubiri and Ellacuría’s thought to be a more eloquent and earlier reiteration of the coloniality of knowledge, and one that shows that the roots of this subalternization of non-logos-based knowledge actually precede Europe, thus highlighting the need to revisit the claim that the coloniality of knowledge is Eurocentric.xxxi Zubiri traces the origin of this “idealist reductionism” to Greek philosophy, and both he and Ellacuría concur that this reductionism impoverishes our ways of knowing by reducing sense-based or corporeal data to the status of mere data.

Returning to the case of colonization, this conceptualization of sense-based forms of knowledge production as being inferior to logo-centric ones is precisely the sort of positional superiority that allowed the colonizers to portray the Amerindians as animals/bodies in need of civilization. Lassalle-Klein explains that for Ellacuría and

Zubiri this logification of intelligence is the result of a reductionist idealism that reproduces the mind/brain-body divide and an empiricism that reduces the mind to the brain. In order to denounce this position, Zubiri claims that the primogenital location of intellection is sensation. This contradicts those philosophies that posit reason and logos as being the primary forms of intellection. In part, this is true because of the unification of sensation and intellection, as we have already explained. But it can also be explained by the way in which objects in reality are apprehended by the sensing subject. Zubiri tells us that the apprehension of a real object implies that the object exists as something “of its

29 own” (de suyo in Spanish). This existing of its own then points toward what Zubiri calls the phenomenological reality of the thing because he defines reality as the way things actualize themselves when they are apprehended. The actualization of the thing in human intellection then, implies first an act of sensation, thus locating the primary location of intellection in sensation. Ellacuría explains that this shift moves Zubiri away from any possible critiques of engendering a naïve realism because he is not referring to the way things exist outside of human apprehension.

With the concept of the “entification of reality,” Zubiri and Ellacuría accuse

Western philosophy of reducing reality to being. While it is true that the object that is being intellected through sentient intelligence is a form of being, Zubiri maintains that it is also more than that. The consequence of this reduction of reality to being combined with the logification of intelligence is that the meaning of reality takes priority over reality in terms of thinking and knowing. The logification of intelligence and the entification of reality converge in the dominant Western philosophical tradition, as Zubiri explains:

[In] Classical philosophy […] intellection is ‘understanding’; and understanding

is intellection that something ‘is’ […] both Plato and Aristotle continued to

subsume the act of intellection to the work of the logos. This was what…I have

called a logification of the intelligence. But it is something else as well, for it is

assumed that what has been intellected is ‘being’ [ser]. And this implies that

reality is just a form of being, though certainly its fundamental form… it is ease

real (real existence). In other words, …reality has the character of an entity. This

is what I call an entification of reality. And in this way, the logification of

intellection, and the entification of reality, intrinsically converge. The ‘is’ of

intellection consists in an affirmation, and the ‘is’ that is conceived by intellection

has the character of entity. This convergence (between the act and the object of

intellection) has largely framed the path of European philosophy. (qtd in Lassalle-

Klein 210-11).

Both Zubiri and Ellacuría, however, reject this European path by prioritizing reality itself—rather than the intellection of reality or reality as being—in their philosophical search for the true and the good. Lassalle-Klein affirms that Ellacuría’s thought appropriates Zubiri’s asseveration for the necessity to return to the reality of things rather than to things as being or things as meaning. That is to say, Ellacuría builds his concept of historical reality on Zubiri’s notion of the primacy of reality. In this way, he moves beyond reality as a mere formality. Once again, we return to the convergence with

Dalton: reality is more than being and meaning alone and poetry is more than words.

Ellacuría also adopts Zubiri’s notion of the philosophical primacy of the formality of reality in that he determines reality to be both the end and origin of existence. This becomes evident when we accept that all meaning, being, existence come from reality. If we return to Dalton’s poetry, there is a parallel here between reality and his notion of words, signaling toward the second part of the differential unity that is sentient intellection. If the world is constructed from words and without words there would be no human, then words are an essential part of reality. Without words, there would be no reality—not in the abstract sense, but in the historical-human sense of reality. Ellacuría

31 would argue that we are able to know there is reality through the capacity of sentient intellection. When reality is apprehended in the senses and then in the intellect, it becomes transcendental in nature, and in a double sense. This is because in the sensible apprehension of the object, reality transcends itself and makes itself present to the sensing subject. Likewise, in apprehending the object, the subject is extended and expanded toward the real. Not only is the sentient-intelligent subject located in and open to reality, but it is also bound to reality. This boundedness is similar to Dalton’s idea of the human closing its possibilities with words. Lassalle-Klein understands it to mean that reality makes certain demands on us, namely that we self-actualize our own reality once a real object is apprehended. This idea is simply the integration of any new apprehension into the subject’s own constructed totality. This demand also implies an option, because the subject must decide how it will integrate said real object into their reality, how they will live with the new truth of formal reality that was enriched through sentient intelligence.

The opening of reality through this sentient intelligence—a capacity that exceeds mere rationalization—and the demands reality makes on the subject bring us back to

Dalton’s poetic proposals on words. Following Alvarenga’s suggestion to go back to

Dalton’s poem “Con palabras”, we find that he writes the following: “One of the most abominable crimes of Western civilization and Christian culture has consisted precisely in convincing the broad popular masses that words are only signifiers” (qtd in Alvarenga

17). Alvarenga also quotes the poet stating that the only two historical people who understood the problem with words were Jesus Christ and Lenin, which Alvarenga takes to mean: “words are life. They have the power to change life, to see it in another way and

32 to decide the destiny of a person” (17). What all of this means to me is that there is an intimate connection between words, as Dalton understands them, and our own reality.

Words come from reality, reflect reality, and can change the human relationship with reality. Words and language are a vital part of the human capacity of sentient intelligence; they are the way the human subject integrates what is apprehended sensibly into its constructed totality. In that sense, words must also go beyond the merely rational and are more than just signifiers. Words, Dalton’s poetry suggests, are life itself.

Alvarenga points out that Dalton’s poetry affirms that there are live words and dead words; thus, “we recover the word as a vision of the world. Words are not innocent: they reveal the way someone interprets the world, from where and against what they are interpreting it” (Alvarenga 17, my emphasis).

Dalton’s conceptualization of words provides us with a poetic representation of how Zubiri’s philosophy intricately links the primacy of reality with the sentient intelligence of the human being. Reality is the end and origin of everything, including meaning and being. Reality only manifests itself to the human being through its faculty of sentient intelligence. Ellacuría eloquently summarizes this in the following way:

“Sentient intelligence: here is the radical habitude, properly human in its confrontation with things. The formality in which things remain in this habitude, that is, the formality in which things remain in sentient intelligence is reality. The unity of action of this sentient intelligence is the impressive apprehension of the real” (Filosofía 322, my emphasis).

Reality, and not in the abstract sense of the real, and sentient intelligence dialectically constitute one another through the idea of transcendence mentioned above. Modern

33 linguistic and critical theory would interject with Dalton that language and words play a central role in that dialectic. In the next section, we will see that Ellacuría’s notion of sentient intelligence allows him to build a philosophy not based on the abstract idea of the real, but on a historicized conceptualization of it; that is, historical reality.

***

Historical reality in Dalton’s poetry and Ellacuría’s philosophy

Both Roque Dalton and Ignacio Ellacuría coincide in their notion of reality as entailing both formality and materiality. Take, for example, “Watchtower”, one of

Dalton’s poem articulated by the heteronym/poetic voice of Jorge Cruz, the Catholic

University student:

A religion that tells you there’s only pie in the sky

and all earthly life is lousy and vicious

and that you shouldn’t be too concerned

is the best guarantee you’ll stumble at every step

and break your teeth and soul

against absolutely earthly rocks (45).

Reading this in dialogue with Ellacuría, we see how a conceptualization of reality based on the human capacity of sentient intelligence necessitates a revision even of our theologies. This will be the topic of our second chapter, but we can already begin to see the many implications of Ellacuría’s notion of historical reality.

The implication that we will be analyzing in this section of the chapter has to do with how Ellacuría’s particular application of Zubiri’s intramundane reality actually

34 opens up a space for a thinking from Latin America, or more specifically in Ellacuría’s case, from Central America. In exploring how Ellacuría radicalizes zubirian metaphysics we will focus our attention on three key components. They are: 1) the need for a new conceptualization of history, one that refutes the idea of history as progress, dominant even still in many approaches to “World History”; 2) the need for a new philosophy grounded in historical reality that moves away from homogenizing discourses. Ellacuría develops this philosophy in his conceptualization of historical reality and its relationship to the concepts of possibility and capacitation. We will see in the final section that in the context of historical sin (a concept Ellacuría uses to characterize his context) this translates into an ethical imperative to think from the oppressed, which, given his personal, biographical historical reality, meant thinking from Central America. Finally,

Ellacuría promotes a philosophy that 3) locates itself within historical reality in order to center on the importance and emancipatory potential of historical praxis.xxxii

Let us begin by defining the concept of historical reality. Dalton already begins this task in the poem cited above. There, the poetic voice of Jorge Cruz asserts that when a theology is centered exclusively on the spiritual realm, it becomes a stumbling block for the human subject in terms of his historical relation with reality. In a later poem, Jorge

Cruz accuses this sort of religiosity of being Marx’s “opium of the people” and proper to

“the heirs of those who crucified Christ” (55). This circumvention of the material aspect of reality leads to a theology that speaks “of deciding between Good and Evil / when the people need to decide / against oppression and hunger” (55). Dalton calls for a new religion that has revolution as its horizon, a vision to which we will return in chapter two.

The important point now is that Dalton is proposing that reality be considered in both its material and formal aspects.

This coincides with the first of the five primary theses that Ellacuría develops for understanding historical reality, namely that the unity of reality is physical—that is to say it is material. The remaining four theses are: 2) the unity of reality is dynamic and in process, that it is constantly changing; 3) the reduplication of the real does not imply a concept —such as Hegel’s Absolute, for example—, but rather is the accepting that before becoming a formality of (sentient) intelligence, the object was a formality of reality. That is to say, that reality is reduplicated when we accept that before an object can be apprehended by the sentient subject, it must exist as a formality of reality. This is why the apprehension of an object as being real implies the object existing “of its own”;

4) reality is respective. The real object that is reduplicated through the actualization of intelligence —the apprehension of the object as real— is respective, meaning that it is in function with all other real objects. This respectivity is part of what allows us to sensibly apprehend the object in the first place; finally, 5) only philosophies that take into account the respective, structural, and dynamic nature of reality are acceptable. Dalton might tell us that words that do not respond to these notions of reality are “dead” in that they respond to something outside of the realm of life. Given these theses, Ellacuría maintains that historical reality is the proper object of philosophy.

Historical reality, as explained by Ellacuría, is where the totality of reality (again, not in the strictly abstract sense) is manifested. Historical reality is the concept that encompasses all other forms of reality, because it is in and through historical reality that

36 we have access to all other forms of reality; that is, all other forms of reality (material, biological, natural, etc.) converge in historical reality. The structure that Ellacuría is drawing on is one built upon the assumption that Reality (now in the abstract sense) does exist. However, we only have access to that reality through history. There is a distinction, then, between reality and Reality, and it is the former that is the object of Ellacuría’s philosophy, though the former is actually just one manifestation of the latter.xxxiii The dialectical dynamism that Ellacuría is describing leads him to conclude that historical reality is the most recent stage of reality in history—it is the totality of reality in its qualitatively highest form: “this form of reality that is historical reality is where reality is

‘more’ and where it is more ‘of itself’, where it is also ‘more open’” (Filosofía 43). It is in this stage where reality has become more and more of itself and is in the process of continually becoming more and more of itself that reality is most open, precisely because it is in process. Given that historical reality builds upon previous moments, it is always the most open moment of reality, given that there are greater possibilities availability for the real to manifest itself in new ways.xxxiv Ellacuría’s adjustment to Zubiri’s intramundal metaphysics, then, is to say that the totality of reality evolves and realizes itself dialectically through its process, which we know as history. Historical reality is the most recent moment of reality, which encompasses all types of reality and all previous moments of reality and is also open to the further giving more of itself. This inclusion of the historical principle of reality is the element through which Ellacuría radicalizes

Zubiri’s thought.xxxv

What Luis Alvarenga identifies as one of the structuring elements of Roque

Dalton’s poetry, an element especially salient in Clandestine Poems, can serve as an example of Ellacuría’s historical reality. Alvarenga argues that there is a categorical imperative in much of Dalton’s work that responds to the urgent need of his times but is also rooted in his country’s past. In that sense, he argues that Dalton’s poetic and intellectual production should be read as a cultural criticism aimed at assuring that “the massacre of 1932 is something that should stop repeating itself in Salvadoran history”; in other words, Dalton’s is a “thinking and acting so that 1932 is not repeated” (396). There are several ways that the peasant slaughtering of 1932 is present in Clandestine Poems.

The first example is the poetic voice of Timoteo Lue. Alvarenga points out that this is the name of one of the indigenous leaders who was killed during the peasant uprising: “Now,

Dalton makes him reincarnate in a law student, ‘born in Suchioto in 1950’” (370). The result of this is that the present is built up from the past. That is to say, there is a past- presentness in Dalton’s poetry. Alvarenga draws this parallel: “If in the historic moment of 1932, the indigenous of the west of El Salvador were the driving force of the uprising, in the present it is the middle class, the students, that bring with them the force of their indigenous ancestors, massacred by the Salvadoran army” (370). This relates to

Ellacuría’s notion of historical reality because it is an uncovering of how the present has been built upon the past. Dalton is making the processual nature of historical reality visible and simultaneously denouncing the direction that this process has followed.

Dalton’s poetry also suggests that capitalism attempts to alienate the Salvadoran youth from their past, but his revolutionary poetry, his words announced from the historical reality of the country go against this and attempt to awaken the reader to the power of the

38 past-presentness. Two of the other heteronyms of this book of poetry fulfill a similar function. Alvarenga reveals that the names Juan Zapata and Luis Luna are references to the historical figures of Mario Zapata and Alfonso Luna, university students who were executed beside Farabundo Marti in 1932. According to Alvarenga, Dalton’s message is clear: “the revolutionary energies of the present should find themselves in the plight of their massacred ancestors” (373).

Dalton goes on to trace the past-process that has negatively structured the present even further beyond 1932. In a poem titled “Ultraleftists”, Dalton uses the poetic voice of his heteronym Juan Zapata in order to revise Salvadoran history and to determine which historical figures really were revolutionary and which allowed themselves to be coopted or actually worked against liberation. One of the figures that Dalton upholds is the Pipil people:

The pipiles

who didn’t understand the cross and more advanced culture

and didn’t want to bow down before the Crown of Spain

and rose up in the mountains

with weapons in their hands

against the conquistador

Those who nourished the flame

of native rebellion for 300 colonial years

and died hunted in the mountains or by the

vile garrot or on the gallows

and refused to peaceably co-exist with the feudal lord

on the refuge of estates and land allotments. (99)

The poetic voice of Zapata begins the work of tracing two separate genealogies here: first, that of the ultraleftists, which is synonymous with the oppressed who resist their oppression. This line begins with the Pipil and goes through to those who continued to resist colonization even after the Spanish were settled. Dalton’s idea is that the present revolutionary movement should find inspiration in that past and continue their resistance, thus connecting the genealogy to the present. On the other hand, he traces a line that begins with the oppression by the Spanish Crown and continues through to the feudal colonial system, to military authorities, to the national independence leaders, up until the bourgeois landowners of his present. The continuity of the colonial structures in El

Salvador’s present will be the topic of chapter three, but what we are seeing with this poem is the articulation of a present that is constructed dialectically from the past. This helps to illustrate Ellacuría’s notion of historical reality as being the most recent moment of reality that encompasses the previous realities and is built upon them.

This particular vision of historical reality as provided by Ellacuría and Dalton provides us with two possible criticisms of modernity. The first has to do with the way in which modernity understands history and historiography, or at least the dominant notion of history that has been passed down from the Enlightenment ideals developed by the likes of Hegel and Marx. Let’s take a look specifically at how Ellacuría presents an alternative conceptualization of history that both resists homogenizing discourses and opens up a theoretical space for a thinking from Central America.

We should begin by recognizing that Ellacuría explicitly differentiates history from historical realism. I would argue this is also reflected in Dalton’s poetry. Ellacuría puts it this way: “‘historical reality’ should not be understood as that which happens in history nor as the ordered and explained series of historical discourse. Consequently, its philosophy should not be said to be what has been understood as the philosophy of history. Precisely in order to avoid this misunderstanding, we speak not of history but of historical reality” (Filosofía 42). However, despite his emphasis on historical reality as the ultimate object of philosophical inquiry, it is within history that historical reality is actualized and evolves, and so it is imperative that we have an adequate understanding of the concept.

For our purposes here, a first point for our consideration of history is that it entails an essential relationship with the human being. This brings us back to Dalton’s argument on words once more, given that he maintained that without words, there could be no humankind. The inverse is also true: without humankind, there would be no words, given that it is humans that construct themselves with words. In terms of history, Ellacuría argues that human life and history have a mutual relationship, which is encompassed in the concept of historical reality. It would be false to consider human life as the totality of what he calls the summum of reality, but any consideration of that totality that puts human life to one side would likewise be incomplete. It does not make sense to speak of history without including the human, nor to speak of the human without a consideration of the way it is located in history. This is one of the central postulates of historical realism. The benefit of this perspective, as Ellacuría explains, is that one can begin to see

41 the opening and creativity of both reality and humankind, seeing how they mutually effect and construct each other, both limiting and making human praxis possible, a concept to which we will return later in this chapter.

That humankind and history mutually shape each other reaffirms Ellacuría’s notion of history as a dynamic process that changes with time. For this reason, Ellacuría posits that historical reality derives from history. Consider, for example, the fact that the end of history through the cosmic end of the earth (climate change) or due to human advancements and use of military technology were not historic possibilities even as few as 100 years ago. Ellacuría’s notion of possibilities, historical notes, and capacitation are central to understanding these historical differences in a way that differs from the evolutionary view of history. He argues that is not as though humankind has developed a new faculty to destroy human life, but rather that history has moved the appropriation of these possibilities from the realm of the conceptual and into the realm of the possibly real. That is, those possibilities have been historicized. Both natural and material elements combine with the human to make this possibility a real possibility, and even a capacity of history.

Many of Dalton’s poems in Clandestine Poems signal toward this processual nature of history, as well. The example cited above that traces a genealogy of certain aspects of the past-present is one example. Another can be found in the poem written in the poetic voice of Timoteo Lue, titled “Life, Works”. There, Lue’s voice speaks about the “new life” that dawns in him, requiring that he “water deeply” and “push to fight their own battle / against the weeds” (41). This is precisely the sort of historical process that

Ellacuría imagines, one in which new possibilities emerge but then must be appropriated in order to enter into historical reality to affect history. Take these verses, from the same poem, as another example:

And against melancholy, faith; against

desperation

the people’s voice

vibrating in the windows of this secret house.

Discovering,

deciphering,

articulating,

setting in motion: the old works of liberators and martyrs

that are our obligations now. (41)

Here Lue is poetically describing the painful process through which historical change occurs, signaling how the times change and the work of the past—which brought death— is now an obligation of the present.

It is important to underscore that Lue/Dalton does not imagine this processual march of history as being either pre-determined or toward some sort of superior state. My argument is that the processual characteristic of Ellacuría’s historical reality, represented here by Lue, moves us away from the epistemological violence that evolutionary notions of history like Hegel’s entail. We can best see this distancing in Ellacuría’s appropriation of Zubiri’s concept the height of the times.xxxvi This concept explains the difference between the same action carried out in the 5th century and today. In looking at history,

43 then, one must use the height of the times in order to situate any given historical action as an action of its given historical age. To situate the action with respect to the height of the times is to historicize. By considering the height of the times, we avoid dangerous abstractions of history. Ellacuría gives us an example of how this concept might be applied to our historical analyses:

it is not that a determined action should have only one distinct ‘understanding’—a

colonial encomienda deserves a different judgment than a concentration camp in

our days—, but rather, more radically, it has a real character that is different

because it is an action-of a determined time, since the full and concrete reality of an

action is only given from the system within which it is inscribed. (Filosofía 445).

Ellacuría is not arguing for a perspective that forgives horrible actions like encomiendas or concentration camps because of the historical age within which they occurred, but rather that our understanding of said actions should be constructed based on a consideration of the historical system of possibilities from which they were carried out. If we recall, this is the historical understanding that we see in Zapata/Dalton’s poem

“Ultraleftist”. What we see in that poem is Zapata’s locating different historical figures within their historical realities and historicizing the idea of being ultraleftist for each figure given their own height of the times.

Ellacuría differentiates the notion of height of the times with another characteristic of history, historical age. The former is the process that gives rise to different possibilities while the latter is the figure of historical reality as it becomes realized within a system of possibilities. The combination of these two concepts inside Ellacuría’s historical reality

44 allows him to avoid the sort of homogenizing discourse we see in Hegel’s notion of the process of history. That the two concepts are intertwined does not imply that a given historical age will produce homogenous heights of the times in all social groups or civilizations. This affirmation takes us to the problem of co-evalness. Ellacuría states that the idea of historical age has serious consequences, including the fact that it makes all individuals, groups, classes, nations, etc. that exist within the same historical age coetaneous. His way of understanding this co-evalness opens up history to the possibility of a plurality of times or temporalities even within a given historical age—or rather, a plurality of historical ages even within the same historical period as determined by calendar time.xxxvii

At first glance, this vision of historical age and the height of the times seems to coincide with Hegel’s notion of world history. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel develops his notion of history, or rather his notion of World-history. What Hegel describes is history as a progression toward a higher or more developed state of existence. He begins this progression in the shift from poetry to prose, which entails the use of abstract reasoning and a move away from individuation and toward universality.

Prose, he tells us, is a condition of language and being and is the first stage of development of Geist, or Spirit, which reaches its culmination in Absolute Knowledge. In a more primitive state, Geist exists in what is known as the prose of the world, the emergence of self-consciousness that constitutes the human condition. This stage implies a sort of mutual recognition of the existence of the other, but is immediately surpassed by

Hegel’s prose of history. In this stage of the development of Geist, the Spirit begins to

45 free itself from Nature and allows Reason to guide history to overcome the problem of contingency. Hegel considers his final stage, World-history, the expression of the Spirit in time, because it is the actualization of the Spirit. From this vantage point, Hegel is able to hierarchize civilizations, identifying the Germanic and Western cultures —those that have separated themselves most from Nature and attached themselves to Reason— as the highest possible forms. Likewise, the more ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric’ Others represent a more primitive, less-developed form of humanity because in them the Spirit has not been fully actualized. Hegel exiles these others who have not cast off the chains of Nature to become fully self-conscious to the realm of Prehistory. Hegel effectively identifies different historical ages, but the criteria for judging those ages is the development of the

Spirit.

In his book, History: At the Limit of World History, Ranajit Guha is critical of this way of understanding history and development. Beginning by announcing his locus of enunciation as a subject from outside Hegel’s limit of World-history, as one of Hegel’s history-less subjects, Guha unveils the way that this particular vision of history is entangled with colonialist attitudes. He argues that this evolutionary perspective, a fruit of the Enlightenment period, uses the Rubric of Reason to drain the concreteness of man’s existence in the world and converts historicality into a philosophy of history which has justified “the rape of continents, the destruction of cultures, the poisoning of environments” (4). The results of proposing that one culture is superior to another in that it is more historically advanced have been quite serious for the ‘positionally inferior’ countries, given that the “so-called civilized nations [are] entitled to treat the barbarians

46 as peoples whose rights are not equal to theirs and whose independence is ‘merely formal,’ hence not worth respecting” (42). Colonialism and conquest become moral obligations for those civilizations in which the Spirit has been actualized. World-history, then, becomes a device of subjugation.

This discussion of World-history and universal history, then, leads us to the question of whether or not Ellacuría is contributing to this justification of a colonialist mentality or offering us an alternative. On one hand, he is imagining history as having a universal characteristic. He argues that a primary unity for history exists in the fact that all human groups are immersed in the same material unity of the cosmos. That is to say, that all history occurs on the same planet does imply a certain universality of history. We also know that Ellacuría’s notion of history can be used to deny the co-evalness of different cultures. This is why he distinguishes between being contemporary—existing in the same extrinsic time as determined by science—and being coetaneous—being contemporary and sharing the same historical age and height of the times. Could we not say, then, that he is also contributing to justifications of domination and colonization?

The primary difference is that Ellacuría is not placing any sort of weight or judgment on the existence of different temporalities or cultures existing in different historical ages even in the same contemporary period. This is because history does not develop toward an actualization of the Spirit, as Hegel would have it. While we should periodize the different histories that result from different cultures’ historical ages and heights of the times—that is to say, the different possibilities made available to them and the process by which they appropriate those possibilities—, Ellacuría argues that it does not make sense

47 to speak of a universal history or to periodize a universal history. Ellacuría’s assertion is that Hegel’s notion of World-history comes close to the concept of historical time, but it does not fully grasp the concept of time as historical age because of the following:

it supposes the development of the Spirit in successive stages, of which the

previous are an internal principle of the subsequent ones just as these are the

integrative overcoming of them. In this way he can speak of a height of the times,

although that height is attributed to the moment of development of the Spirit rather

than to the mode of reality that makes up history through its biological aspect.

(Filosofía 455)

The premise that history is the development and actualization of the Spirit as a progression toward a more complete state of existence makes Hegel’s phenomenology incompatible with Ellacuría’s historical reality. Like Hegel, Ellacuría does imagine history as evolving and as being in process, but he does not understand its finality in the same way that Hegel does.xxxviii History is simply the realm within which reality manifests itself, a reality that is itself dynamic and in process. Different historical ages within the same contemporary period, then, become nothing more than different ways of being in reality. Dalton might refer to this as simply a use of different words. In any case, the end result is that this notion of history places different cultures and their respective temporalities on a horizontal rather than hierarchical plane.

I would argue that this represents a move away from a conceptualization of history that permits the naturalization of historical and cultural differences. In other words, it makes racist and eurocentric discourses that imply white supremacy due to their locus of

48 enunciation and positional superiority impossible. Ellacuría makes this point more or less explicit when he analyzes the differences between the Cro-magnon man and the contemporary man:

The historic, in as much as it implies an age and a procedural height, does not

happen through biological maturation. The difference and the growth must be

situated in another field, because the Cro-Magnon man and contemporary man have

the same psycho-organic structures, which can be considered equally developed in

both cases. Those structures are not different nor are the exercises of those

structures different, in as much as they are exercises of the same powers

[potencias]. There are big differences between the Cro-Magnon man and

contemporary man, but they are historic differences and not natural ones. With this,

the path between germination and maturation, the formal problem of history

remains untouched. (Filosofía 534-35, my emphasis).

To better understand Ellacuría’s argument here, let’s replace Cro-Magnon with the notion of the racialized-colonized other. Whereas Hegel’s phenomenology of Spirit would explain the differences between the colonized subject and the colonizer as being fundamental, natural differences related to how the Spirit developed in each subject— and, in part, due to racial and natural differences—, Ellacuría’s historical reality reduces the differences to merely the different historical age and height of the times between the two. The question becomes less one of superiority and more one of explaining the difference through different historical possibilities and processes of appropriating those possibilities.

While this move does not yet represent a thinking from Central America, I am suggesting that it does begin to make that a theoretical possibility. What Ellacuría achieves here is essentially a de-localization or a virtualization that uproots cultural analysis, which has traditionally been euro-centered and based on a position that assumes the positional superiority of European (Germanic) civilizations —as is the case with both

Hegel and Marx— and moves it to a virtual center located in historical realism. In this way, we are no longer viewing cultural differences as being results of the difference in the realization of the Spirit or in the chain of rational progress in terms of modes of production, but rather we are seeing different social groups and cultures as being the result of history, in terms of historical age and the height of the times.

Once the cultural and temporal differences between different groups has been denaturalized and reconceptualized horizontally, we begin to see that those differences are actually also structured by power relationships. Dalton makes this point explicit in his poem “The Bourgeoisie”, using the voice of his heteronym Luis Luna. Let’s read a few of the verses:

Those who vote in El Salvador

for the president-elect of the United States.

Those who propagate misery and malnutrition

producing tuberculosis and blindness

and then build

tuberculosis hospitals and rehabilitation centers for the blind

to be able to exploit them

in spite of tuberculosis and blindness. (171-173)

We see here how these two groups, the oppressed and the oppressors, dialectically constitute each other. They are mutually dependent, though only the oppressors benefit from the relationship. If we are to read this poem in light of an earlier poem in the book, also in the voice of Luna, then we see that he is avoiding converting the historical reality of the Salvadoran oppressed into a sort of abstraction. Rather, it is a concrete problem with lived and daily effects and concrete causes. Let’s read his poem “Little Letter”:

Dear philosophers,

dear progressive psychologists,

don’t fuck around with alienation

when here the most fucked up

is the other nation. (115)

What these two poems illustrate is the manner in which Dalton and Ellacuría’s ideas converge into a criticism of modernity. With respect to Dalton, Luis Alvarenga summarizes his criticism with the following:

In Dalton there is a radical criticism of Modernity, expressed in the Salvadoran

and Latin American reality in an economic system articulated as the capitalist

“world-system”, with which the military tyrannies that El Salvador and the Latin

American region suffered can no longer be seen as “eccentricities” of said world-

system, but rather as logical consequences, just as Horkheimer and Adorno saw

Nazism as the logical consequence of Western rationalism. (“La crítica” 390)

Indeed, when cultural differences are denaturalized and put into dialogue with the power

51 relationships that constitute them, we begin to see the perversity of the world-system.

In the sense that Ellacuría’s theory makes this visible, I would argue that what we see is an early articulation of the modernity/coloniality argument. According to this group of thinkers, modernity in one area of the world is only possible because of the colonization and exploitation of another part of the world. This binary unveils the developmental fallacy that Western thinking has tried to uphold, which in large part depended on Hegel’s notion of history as progress. Ellacuría expresses a similar argument with three affirmations. First, he notes an increasingly unitarian characteristic of humanity, thus making the system of possibilities available to any given group increasingly dependent on a global system.xxxix Given power differentials, this means that the dominated groups constitute a force that contributes to the possibilities/possible modes of existing in reality for the dominating groups, even when those possibilities are not available to them. He explains it this way:

That this is unjust from an ethical point of view does not mean that from a

metaphysical point of view one can really speak about a same history, with all the

possible sub-histories within it. In any history of domination, for example, the

dominated and oppressors not only form one same history […] but also this

contrasted difference constitutes a single history. Whenever there is one single

corporeality of alterity, a single social body, that is realized as such, we may

speak of a single process and of a single history. (Filosofía 448)

We can take this to mean that the oppressed and the dominant groups dialectically constitute each other while also mutually constructing a singular world-system or one

52 unique history.

To say that we are moving toward one unique history, however, is not to say that it is a homogenous history. In fact, the sort of philosophy that Ellacuría is articulating avoids homogenization. I take this to be one of Dalton’s intentions in writing Clandestine

Poems from the perspective of five young poets, as well. As Hector Samour explains in his book Crítica y liberación, Ellacuría’s philosophy of historical realism actually necessitates plurality and diversity because historical reality is structural and according to the zubirian definition of structure it must be composed of notes that are qualitatively different but that determine each other mutually. History, then, which is also structural, must likewise be made up of qualitatively different components that mutually determine one another—this is what I have been signaling with the dialectic relationship between the oppressed and the oppressors. Ellacuría holds this to be true and it is those different notes that allow for the emergence of different cultures and cultural systems. While there is unity in the structural characteristic of reality, plurality is not reducible to a homogenous abstraction of humankind or human history.

In his work, Ellacuría explores the different forces that contribute to history, but let us turn now to what he calls the appropriation of possibilities. Nature and any other concrete, real thing are historic, but they do not become a part of history until they are converted into an actualized possibility. The historic, then, has to do with possibilities and what Ellacuría calls possibilitation while history has to do with the appropriation of those possibilities. At the crux of this explanation of history as the appropriation of possibilities is Zubiri’s notion of traditive transmission (from transmisión tradente in

Spanish). This concept explains that history inherently involves both transmission and tradition. Transmission implies the passing on of contents and reality (social, natural, personal) from one generation to another. Tradition is the passing on of forms of being in reality from one generation to the next. The necessary combination of these two elements is what makes history, as Ellacuría explains. Given this characteristic of history, the subject of history –the human phylum, or the human social body— is faced with a concrete set of possibilities that come from this traditive transmission. History is no longer some substantive reality that floats above the human (such as the case with the development of the Spirit), but rather becomes something that is done with humankind and in humankind. Humankind, then, is open to the distinct possibilities that it receives through traditive transmission and it must opt for one or some of the options it has before it. History, then, is defined as the appropriation of possibilities.

This affirmation entails two consequences and a problem. The consequences are that 1) humankind is open up to a plurality or a freedom to appropriate possibilities and

2) humankind as a social body becomes an important co-author of history —this points toward the concept of historical praxis, which we will take up in the next section. But let us begin with the problem. If we define history as the appropriation of the possibilities surrendered by traditive transmission, then history appears as something strictly personal.

This is a problem because Ellacuría maintains that history is impersonal. On the other hand, if we describe the historic as being simply the system of transmitted possibilities, then we cannot say history is the appropriation of possibilities. The way to solve this problem, according to Ellacuría, is to focus not just on the appropriation of the

54 possibilities, but also on the fundamental presence of ways of being in reality, which constitute in themselves the possibilities. Those possibilities, he tells us, are impersonal because they are appropriable by many. Likewise, the system within which human beings must live their lives is also impersonal. Seen this way, history is the occurrence of the ways of being in reality, ways of being that only historically enter into reality because of the optative appropriation of what makes those modes possible.

Humankind is not completely free because it is limited to the possibilities it has before it, but it is open to a plurality of ways of accepting, rejecting, or modifying those possibilities. This openness and pluralism, when combined with the traditive transmission of history, is the reason why I argue that Ellacuría’s philosophy of historical reality is antithetical to homogenizing discourses. At the same time, because humankind is free to choose how it appropriates the possibilities before it, Ellacuría’s is a philosophy that locates the human-social subject as co-creator of historical reality. In the next section, I will describe how Ellacuría proposes this creative process and the ethical consequences it entails.

***

Towards a praxis of liberation

This opening up to plurality that is made possible because the subject of history becomes the co-author of history in its acceptance, rejection, or modification of possibilities moves us toward the concept of historical praxis. Historical praxis is found in the limited liberty we have recognized above, but begins with this process of appropriation and continues with what Ellacuría calls capacitation. Before defining this

55 new concept, Ellacuría makes a basic distinction between human power and human faculty. Human faculty does not give completely of itself in historic power, but rather there is a separation between historic possibility and pure potential. Ellacuría explains what he means with this by returning to the example of the Cro-Magnon man that I explained above. I have already said that both men share in their individual faculties, but the faculties of the Cro-Magnon’s social body differ radically from the contemporary social body. In that sense, despite having the same individual faculties, they do not have the same power. It is important to note that this difference in faculty, in Ellacuría’s conceptualization, does not result in any sort of criteria of judgment upon which to say that one culture is more advanced than the other, although we can compare the different faculties that each social body contains and see the way contemporary man has built upon the possibilities surrendered by the preceding generations. That humankind has a given faculty does not guarantee that it will or can be realized. It does not even mean that it is possible. For a given action to be realizable —that is, for it to be possibly converted into historical reality— the social body must possess the faculty and the power to realize the action. The action being possible in both terms of power and of faculty mean that the action has been possibilized —lo posibilitado, as Ellacuría expresses in Spanish.

The possibilization of an action actually enriches historical reality, as Ellacuría asserts. This is not because it adds new components to reality, but rather because it actualizes elements that were already intrinsically possible from and in reality. Likewise, the subject is enriched in that its reality opens up to more reality in the actualization of possibilities. The enrichment achieved by the actualization of possibilities then is that

56 there is also an actualization of historical faculties and powers. Reality in the strictly conceptual sense is not expanded, but historical reality can be said to be moved and to be manifesting more of itself. Once again, we must remember that this movement may represent a processual change and a progression, but it is not necessarily a progression toward a superior state of existence. For example, that today we possess the faculty and the power to destroy the planet is not necessarily an indication that our social body has become superior to social bodies that only had this possibility as a faculty.

The enrichment of reality that Ellacuría is referring to underscores the double role of possibilities in reality. On the one hand, the possibilities configure the opting subject.

On the other hand, when the subject appropriates those possibilities, they in turn configure historical reality by transforming the reality of the subject. In order to illustrate this double effect of the appropriation of the possibility, Ellacuría uses the example of primitive man discovering fire. When primitive man decided to actualize this possibility, his reality was changed —it became endowed with a new power. This new quality of reality is then incorporated into the social body and will be transmitted ‘traditionally’ to the next generations. Given this, the possibilities of the next generation are also expanded, because certain possibilities require the prior actualization of others. Heating meat over a fire is made possible only with the actualization of the possibility of starting a fire, for example.

What I am explaining here is what Ellacuría calls capacity. He tells us that capacity is the formal principle of possibilitation that determines the realm of the possible. The notion of capacity once more helps us to overcome homogenizing discourses, because

57 capacity explains the differences between a doctor in the pre-conquest era and a doctor in our contemporary period, to borrow from another of Ellacuría’s examples. The early doctor may be more skilled and talented than today’s doctor, but the capacity of each is determined by the distinct system of possibilities within which he/she/they are inscribed.

We could use the same logic to describe the difference between first and third-world doctors, thus de-naturalizing these cultural differences. Upon doing this, however, it would also be necessary to show how the first and third-words mutually (though not evenly) affect their respective systems of possibilities. Capacity, then, allows us to speak about the historical process in terms of progress or regression. I am repeating myself but we must remember that Ellacuría is not talking about the progression toward any particular end, but rather in the development of particular types of humanity. He still has not proposed history as giving us an idea of superior and inferior social bodies, but rather of showing what formally occurs in history in the maturation of distinct types of human existence. History, then, far from being the development of the Spirit through time, is not even properly a process of maturation or unveiling, but rather “history is a physical and metaphysical process of capacitation” (Filosofía 550).

This new addition to the conceptualization of history as a process of capacitation links us directly to historical praxis. Ellacuría says that history as a totality is in flux with the appropriation of certain possibilities over others because it is that appropriation which determines the existence of certain capacities and the non-existence of others. Ellacuría refers to Zubiri’s notion that our modern society’s appropriation of science and mathematics negates other capacities that may be equally beneficial to the social body.

Certainly we have gained many capacities with this appropriation but we must also be aware that there are capacities that are closed off from that praxis, other knowledges that are made impossible from that appropriation. Ellacuría characterizes the process of historical praxis as one that is open, especially in relation to the openness of human reality through sentient quality of human knowledge. He then goes on to explain that it is this openness that makes the process of history a creational one and that makes the human action of the production and appropriation of capacities a cuasi-creation of historical reality.

Historical praxis and the creational process of the historical realization of reality, however, is of an ambiguous nature. Unlike Hegel or Marx’s understanding of history,

Ellacuría affirms that there is no determined direction for history. While we can speak of a sort of development in the production of capacities, this ‘progression’ does not necessarily imply an actualization of the perfection of humanity. Ellacuría is willing to accept the claim that humanity is more powerful today in the sense that it has more capacities than in the past, but this does not annul his suspicions about the direction of that historical movement. In fact, he finds that history has been travelling down the path of dehumanization, rather than humanization.

If we are to measure Salvadoran reality from the perspective of Dalton’s poetry, there is no doubt that the dominant powers have directed the country’s history toward dehumanization. To use Ellacuría’s terms, we could say that the possibilities that have been appropriated have benefited only a small minority while negatively affecting the majority of the population. Examples of this abound in Clandestine Poems. Take, for

59 example, the situation of the cops and the guards. Though “they too were once people”, a system that provided the poor only with “hunger and unemployment” leave these subjects with no survival choices except to “accept a weapon a club and a monthly salary / to defend against the hungry and out-of-work” (23). This abject subject-citizen is essentially used as a tool to protect the wealthy and powerful from other abject subject-citizens.

Dalton’s poetry communicates that the possibilities that have been appropriated and that structure the historical reality do nothing more than imprison the majority of Salvadorans.

For this reason, he writes that violence is the midwife, the dustwoman, the garbage truck and the driver of the bulldozer of History in El Salvador (141). This oppression is multiplied in the feminine subjectivity, as Vilma Flores points out with her poem “On the

Profit Margin or the Boss Who Robs Every Worker Twice Over”:

The woman’s social functions

create time for the man

for socially necessary work

that he doesn’t get fully paid for,

(the capitalist himself robs him of

the better part of his value)

just enough

to live on and be able to continue working (11)

These poetic representations of historical reality dialogue wonderfully with

Ellacuría’s articulation of the “constitutive risk of history”:

powers can be used to construct, but they can also be used to destroy: this is the

constitutive risk of history. The dangers signaled by the environmentalists and the

lamentations of the evils that arise in overdeveloped countries represent a warning.

And, above all, they constitute a serious wake-up call about the tremendous social

costs implied with the development of power in the hands of those who stimulate

the vanguard of history, the spearhead of historic progress. (Filosofía 563)

Understanding this danger of the openness of historical reality, Ellacuría coincides with

Dalton’s characterization of reality and determines that history has been moving in the direction of what Ellacuría calls historical sin.xl Historical reality can only be good or bad in its relation to humankind and it is historical praxis that determines the path of historical reality. What we see represented in Dalton’s poetry—a reality with which

Ellacuría also came into contact through his pastoral work in El Salvador—is that the historical praxis that has dominated Salvadoran (and global) reality has moved in the direction of the bad, at least in terms of the impact on the totality of the population.xli

Historical sin, as described by Ellacuría, comes from historical evil, and refers to the historical, concrete ways that this ‘sin’ affects the social body as a whole and becomes constitutive of the possibilities and capacities within a given historical reality. He describes this as something more than just a possibilitating power; it is something that takes over life itself as it pertains to a given historical moment, an aspect of historical sin that is quite salient in Dalton’s poems. There are two aspects of historical sin that are worth underscoring. First, it may seem as though the concept is proposing some sort of universalization in determining what constitutes historical evil, and in a way this is true.

Ellacuría does suggest that historical evil is that system of possibilities that moves

61 historical reality toward alienation and oppression, while the historical good would be that which moves history toward humanization. While this affirmation is universal in nature, Ellacuría also warns against any sort of abstraction of these concepts, a point we have already seen reiterated in Dalton’s poem about the abstract use of alienation. We must historicize these concepts within each given context of historical reality. The second point of interest in relation to Ellacuría’s definition of historical sin indicates that historicization, in order to avoid ideologization, must come from a situatedness that is outside of the place of real, historical power, given the relationship to that place and the system of possibilities that results from historical evil. In order to identify the historical sin that structures our current historical reality, it is necessary to begin thinking from the theoretical place of the majority for whom the dialectical unity of historical reality has been painful. Only thinking from this privileged space will allow us to subvert history and to change its course. This final move is what necessitates a new locus of thinking and constitutes Ellacuría’s project of thinking from Central America in order to move toward an overcoming of historical sin.xlii

Once again, Dalton’s critical text registers this need for a shift in the place from which we think. In the poem on the National Guard, the poet implores the Guards to think from their location with the people, rather than with the powers:

The fact is the cops and the guards

always saw the people from there to here

and the bullets only traveled from there to here.

Let them think about that a while

let them decide whether it’s too late

to seek the people’s side

and shoot from there

shoulder to shoulder with us. (27)

What Dalton is calling for is a shift in the place of thinking that will make a historical praxis of liberation possible, one that will foment a capacitation that benefits the majority of the population and move history in the direction of humanization.

The particular poetic strategy that Dalton uses in this book of poems is also connected to this promotion of a praxis of liberation. If we return to the epigraph that opened this chapter, we will recall that the second part of Kierkegaard’s quote has to do with the reaction of the critic to the poet’s song. In the introduction to the chapter I mentioned that Dalton was mostly well-acclaimed for his poetic ability; however, literary critics were not so kind with the collection of poems I have been analyzing. In his dissertation, Luis Alvarenga cites a few critics who consider this collection of poems to be an “aesthetic regression” for the poet, a reduction of his skill to a strictly “political- revolutionary writing”, and even a “propagandistic pamphleteering” (qtd in “La crítica”

364-65). These perspectives put too much emphasis on the autonomy of art and ignore

Dalton’s own artistic and epistemological shift, in solidarity with the very subjects who he believed would bring about revolution—subjects represented by the five heteronyms.

Alvarenga maintains that Clandestine Poems should be read as a new stage in Dalton’s poetry in which he began to experiment with a new type of poem that would ‘disappear’ his voice in order to open up space for heteronomy. On the one hand, this allows him to

63 present a more integral approach to the problems facing El Salvador at the time. But this decision goes beyond representing a plurality. Following Alvarenga’s argument, I propose that this poetic-political act should be read as a form of historical praxis of liberation. Alvarenga describes it as: “a deliberate intention of the author that consists in not writing as Roque Dalton would […] but rather as a militant revolutionary who comes from a university background, as a law student involved in union work, or a member of the Christian communities would” (366-67). The reason he does this, according to

Alvarenga, is to “give voice to the revolutionary subject he wants to construct” (367).

The heteronomy of this stage of Dalton’s poetry is simultaneously an example of historical praxis toward liberation and a call for the petty bourgeoisie to join him—and his heteronyms, also from that socio-economic group—in that same historical praxis.

In that same line of thinking, Dalton’s poetry-praxis toward liberation is explicit in the form that it should take. Let’s go back to the poem “Poetic Art 1974”, which reads:

“Poetry / Forgive me for having helped you understand / you’re not made of words alone” (35). I have already mentioned that words become more than just signifiers here, but also become a structural part of historical reality itself. Words, and consequently poetry, have the power to shape reality in the same way that praxis does. If we turn to the

“Declaration of Principles” of these poets, they make their version of poetry explicit. In his creative capacity, the poet is able to serve as servant, clown, or enemy. These poets reject the first two roles and take on the identity of the enemy poet:

The enemy poet is above all else the enemy poet. He who claims his wages not in

flattery or dollars but in persecutions, prisons, bullets. And not only does he lack a

uniform or tails or a suit, but every day he ends up with fewer things until the only

thing he has is a pair of patched shirts but clean as unparalleled poetry […] the

enemy poet cannot even think of accomplishing his task […] without direct

participation in [the working class’s] struggle. (3)

The poet-enemy that Dalton presents in this book is enemy of any type of dogmatism, as

Alvarenga points out. We can find criticisms not just of capitalism but also of Stalinist socialism, of academic abstraction, dogmatic atheism, and conservative theology. Dalton proposes a break from any external ideas that will separate the poet-revolutionary from the historical reality he is intending to change. Rather than academic disciples of

Aristotle’s, Dalton is calling for “fighting poets” that “are more peripatetic than those

Aristotelian peripatetics / because we learn the philosophy and poetry of the people, / while traveling / through the cities and mountains of our land” (131). The enemy poet who is firmly located in the geographical and situated historical reality of his land and people is able to convert his poetry-praxis into a weapon for change “by helping me serve in / this long and difficult struggle of our people” (31).

It is important to note, though, that in order to realize this ideal of poetry-praxis,

Dalton poses the need to also revolutionize art. That is, art must be converted and attuned to historical reality. Alvarenga says the same in his text: “Poetry is not a form of daydreaming, but rather of waking from the alienated pre-history of capitalism to the truly human history, consciously constructed by men and women freed of reification”

(371). Dalton’s revolutionized poetry must descend from its lofty perch of high culture in order to walk with the revolutionary subjects like the heteronyms presented here. This

65 idea is expressed in “Meeting With an Old Poet”, in which a poet-representative of the rearguard turns “pale under the red neon light […] and headed for the other side of the street like one who’s suddenly thirsty” upon meeting with the enemy-poet in a chance encounter (165).

The clearest example of Dalton’s call to revolutionize poetry, however, comes from the poem “History of a Poet”. In this poem, Luis Luna tells the story of a national poet who begins writing poetry for the people every Saturday. Suddenly, a national crisis causes the cost of paper to skyrocket and the poet’s supply of paper is rationed. The poet recognizes that this is a plot against poetry and begins to write on the walls. However, he soon realized that his “sonnets did not look good on garden walls / and phrases that earlier had made him giddy, like / ‘Oh, abysmal sandal, honey of the mosses’ / all looked shitty on the peeling walls” (179). What we see here is the poet recognizing the clash between high culture and artistic autonomy and the sort of poetry for which the situation called. Though he falls into “a crisis of creative conception”, the poet continues to adapt and change his verses. In the end, “the poet once and for all wised up / and involved himself in the urban guerilla” (181). Thus, we have a model for the sort of historical praxis for which Dalton is advocating. This praxis requires the poet and his art to change to meet the historical reality, beginning with high-art and sonnets and ending by painting

“Viva la Guerilla” on the crumbling institutional walls (181). This is the same trajectory that we see Dalton following with his own poetics in this book. Finally, he ends the poem with a sort of rebuttal to the very criticism that he must have known he would receive for sacrificing the aesthetics of his poetry for the political aspect of his historical praxis:

And if anyone says this story is

sketchy and sectarian

and the poem that tells it is

bullshit since it fails

“precisely in the magnification of the motivations”

let him eat shit

because the story and the poem

are nothing but the quintessential truth. (181)

If, as both Ellacuría and Dalton have argued, historical reality has been moving in the direction of historical sin, then the only way to change historical reality is by a historical praxis that creates capacities and appropriates possibilities that will move it in another direction. The sort of enemy-poet that Dalton outlines in this book of poems coincides with Ellacuría’s definition of historical praxis. This praxis must be understood as the unity of theory and action. In fact, given the sentient intelligence of the human being, it does not make sense to separate the concept of theory and action. Intelligence, the first step of theory, already implies a sensation, which is a part of human action. The human opening to historical reality, then, which is sentient, is one that requires some form of historical praxis, even if that praxis is nothing more than a negative or omissive praxis that seeks to avoid the responsibility inherent in praxis through abstraction. Given this, historical reality imposes on the subject a moment of option that is simultaneously translated into a moment of creation of historical reality. Ellacuría refers to this praxis as the threefold action of realizing the weight of reality (“hacerse cargo”), shouldering the

67 weight of reality (“cargar con”), and taking charge of the weight of reality (“encargarse de”).xliii

Dalton and Ellacuría also coincide in their proposals that critical thinking is essential for realizing this tripartite act of historical praxis. For Dalton, that praxis is his revolutionized and radicalized poetry that positions itself firmly as a cultural criticism of the historical reality from which it is produced. Ellacuría approaches the problem from his field of philosophy. According to Ellacuría, the role of philosophy is to be the principle of deideologization.xliv Although some philosophies serve to justify the dominant order, Ellacuría argues that not all philosophies have done this and that this is not the objective of philosophy. Rather, philosophy should serve to safeguard against modes of knowing that hide their ideologizations.xlv Ellacuría points out that the ideologizing element of any thinking consists not in the content of thought, but rather in the relationship of that content with a given situation or action. In history, examples abound of cases where philosophy has been used as a principle of ideologization, though this goes against the nature of the sort of philosophy that Ellacuría is trying to construct here.

As a deideologizing force, Ellacuría argues that philosophy has a particularly important function in El Salvador. He argues that it must be the entire social body that philosophizes in order to move toward the summit that is possible for the Salvadoran people within their given historical reality. However, he positions himself against the way in which this social task has been carried out, specifically criticizing the imported nature of philosophy in El Salvador:

Philosophy is also needed in its constructive and systematic dimension. But it

should not be imported or repetitive. Cultural isolation is not good or possible, but

neither is the mere repetition of imported theories that are dominantly imposed on

those who are defenseless against them. An imported thinking that is taken as a

comprehensive representation of reality or as a prescription for political action is, in

this case, pure ideology that can have its immediate and practical advantages, but

that ultimately leads to proper depersonalization and proper de-historicization.

Philosophy and science condensed in prescriptions immediately become

unsatisfactory catechisms. (Filosofía ¿para qué? 13)

What Ellacuría is calling for here is a Salvadoran philosophy that steps outside of the limits of the ‘totality’ constructed by the global dominant philosophies. In a later article,

“The Liberating Function of Philosophy”, Ellacuría explains that this philosophy, thought from the historical reality of El Salvador, represents a particularly adequate philosophy for the task of deideologizing.

First, a proper Salvadoran philosophy is useful in providing an alternative to dominant European philosophies. He sees these philosophies as being the “nourishing soil” that serves as the “justifying elements” of the lived situation of oppression- repression for the popular majorities. He accuses this dominant way of thinking of having a dogmatic and even tyrannical function and of impeding freethinking for individuals and the social body. The first step, then, to deconstruct this philosophy is to situate thinking from a specific place. Much like Dalton’s poetry, his philosophy situates the liberation of those popular majorities as the critical horizon and the principal objective of his

69 philosophy. In order to achieve this objective, Ellacuría says this philosophy must be thought from, with, and for the Central American popular majorities that qualify the

Central American historical reality.

Why is it important that this thinking come from Central America? Ellacuría tells us that the theoretical proposal that seeks the ultimate reality should situate itself in the terrain of the principle contradiction. This is Ellacuría’s dialectical method. According to

Ellacuría and this method, we have to understand concepts and their contradictions as being dialectically related. For example, poverty is only possible because of the accumulation of wealth. The inverse is also true: wealth only exists because of impoverishment. When the modern/colonial world-system ideologically presents itself as a system that moves toward humanization and self-realization on a global scale through idealist notions of equality and freedom, then the Third World (in general) and Central

America (specifically) —with the majority of their population living in dehumanizing conditions— become the principle contradiction that serves to deideologize the system.

In other words, it is in thinking from Central America that we can critically denounce the ideologized ideologies that are presupposed as natural and are used to uphold the current world-system. Given this, Central America becomes the epistemic and ethical place from which to potentialize philosophy in its liberating function. This, in my opinion, is the specific contribution that Ellacuría makes with his philosophical project.

Ellacuría goes on to explain that there are two valorizations that justify this thinking/philosophizing from Latin America: the ethical and the theoretical. He points out that there is an ethical decision that should make us consider Central America as what he

70 calls a “lugar-que-da-verdad” (place-that-gives-truth), because of the lack of justice and the lack of freedom that, as primary facts, constitute the Central American historical reality. But he also notes that there is a theoretical valorization of Latin America as a place of privilege because the injustice and lack of freedom can be seen as fundamental repressions of truth. The combination of these two valorizations result in the optative decision to philosophize from Central America, a decision that Ellacuría tells us will determine the principal questions and the overall horizon of the philosophical duty. Both in the ethical and in the theoretical sense, Central America continues to be a place that we can consider privileged for constructing the sort of philosophy Ellacuría was seeking to build. Even as trends in Latin American cultural studies move us toward discussions of thinking from the South, the alarming indices of violence, hunger, and exploitation in

Central American countries continue to constitute it as a place of central importance among the peripheries that are today’s principle contradictions.

Ellacuría proclaims that a philosophy from Central America could strengthen philosophy in a more general sense. This brings us to a productive tension in Ellacuría’s work. If we recall that Ellacuría highlights the situated nature of knowledge and that he claims that for philosophy to comply with its liberating function it must be thought from the specific historical reality of the subjects it is attempting to liberate, then we might consider Ellacuría’s ideas to simply be a form of relativism. Nonetheless, Ellacuría ends his article signaling the universal contribution that a Latin American liberation philosophy could have, a contribution for which we could also look toward Dalton’s poetry as a model:

If we in Latin America are able to do authentic philosophy at the formal level, in

relation to the historical praxis of liberation and from among the oppressed who

make up its universal substance, it may yet be possible to build a Latin American

philosophy, in the same way that others have built a Latin American theology and a

Latin American literature, which by being Latin American are also universal. (119)

How should we understand the distinction between the particularity that the

Central American popular majorities represent and the universality of philosophy to

which Ellacuría imagines them contributing? Understanding the dialectical structure of

reality is key to reconciling the particular and the universal as a structural unity in

Ellacuría’s philosophy. In this way, the local and the global go hand in hand. Ellacuría

adopts a global framework when thinking about problems, but rather than arguing for a

philosophy that abstracts and universalizes, Ellacuría seeks one that is in favor of the

oppressed in each individual historical reality. The part serves the whole, then, only when

it is presented as such and in its capacity to unmask the way a distinct part has been

disguised as a totality. Given all of this, we can say that Ellacuría’s contribution to

philosophy is his proposal of Central America (and especially the place of the popular

majorities) as a privileged place from which to think in order to historicize and

deideologize the specific discourses that have maintained and made possible our

oppressive and repressive world-system. An ellacurian thinking from Central America is

one example of the epistemic shift that is necessary in order for the particularities to

dialectically improve our philosophical conceptualization of the universal because of its capacity to deconstruct the supposed universality of the dominant, ideologized ideologies.

Chapter 2

Manlío Argueta’s One Day of Life and the contributions of Ellacuría’s subversive

theology from Central America for a critical praxis of liberation.

When revolution is outlined on the horizon the old cauldron of religions gets stirred up.

In normal times religion meant going to Mass paying tithes for God’s house baptizing children and confessing sins to keep one’s account in order.

When revolution is outlined on the horizon churches remember the masses and come down from the clouds and mysteries and saintly tranquility. “Two Religions”, Roque Dalton

In his book Señor de los tristes: sobre escritores y escritura, Nicaraguan writer

Sergio Ramírez writes about the power of literature in terms of registering the past, as a source that creates both history and memory. Ramírez holds that literature reflects not just the imagination of the novelist, but also reality itself; this is characteristic of the work of an ecumenical writer. In a sense, Ramírez claims that this sort of literature can replace written histories, with certain conditions:

In order for imaginative literature to substitute written history and to occupy its

spaces, the novelist must first have the conviction that she is also acting as a

chronicler of an era, or of the whole history of her country, or of the history of a

whole continent, acting on the page in a critical manner with merciless accents,

but knowing that no view on history and on societies can be given if it is not

through the most rigorous and imaginative of artistic renditions. This is the role of

the ecumenical novelist, to know how to see like a historian, always dissatisfied

with the story’s outcomes, and dissatisfied with its characters, but to write with

the power of invention, to make the characters portray the times so that their

names become more powerful than that of their creators (Ramírez 137).

Ramírez wrote this passage in reference to Carlos Fuentes and his writing with respect to

Mexico and Latin America. Nonetheless, although they are less studied than the canonical writers from Mexico and the Southern Cone, in this dissertation I am highlighting writers from El Salvador who fulfill this role of the ecumenical writer.

Manlío Argueta is one such writer. I will be analyzing his novel, One Day of Life, in this chapter. In her book Women, Guerrillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central

America, literary critic Ileana Rodríguez claims that the Central American narrative reaches its peak with this novel by Argueta. She argues that it gives us a model of what it meant to write literature during times of war. A sense of urgency fills its pages and it complies with the need to represent the oppressed, subaltern people of El Salvador.

Published in 1980, it chronicles the cultural transformations and tensions that the decades of the 70s and 80s brought to El Salvador. Rodríguez stresses that Argueta’s politics of writing is one that gathers the voices-lives of marginalized women in a way that

74 establishes them as something more than mere masses; this, she argues, distinguishes his novel from the revolutionary texts of the period that were written from the masculine perspective. While these latter texts betray the revolutionary ideals, Argueta’s text redeems and unites different subalternities and opens up space for the construction of solidarities that belie and go beyond the dominance of the masculine, liberal bourgeois episteme. That is to say, it is a politics of writing that seeks co-existence and subjectivities founded upon notions of liberation and not conquest. In that light, we can connect this example of literature with the sort of critical thinking found in Ellacuría’s project of liberation as outlined in the previous chapter.

In following Ramírez’s proposal for the ecumenical writing, I would argue that

Argueta acts-writes as a chronicler of his times, of his country, and of his region. His voice is critical of the history that is playing out before him and the depth of his characters reflect that reality while allowing us to activate our own imaginations to conjure up alternatives and to envisage ways of going against the grain of history, as

Walter Benjamin would have it. We are able to read both Argueta and Ellacuría together as cultural texts because both are produced from and register the historical reality of El

Salvador in the 70s and 80s. While Argueta fictionalizes the tensions of this time period,

Ellacuría translates them and works through them in the field of Catholic and liberation theology. The confrontation between the sort of theological thinking that he produces and the dominant, more conservative Christian thought played an important role in the revolutions in the region.xlvi This tension is especially salient in Argueta’s novel, especially in that it registers the fundamental shift that occurs in the Salvadoran

75 countryside when Catholic priests—especially young, Jesuit priests, aligned with this emerging, new theology—begin breaking down the barrier between the pastoral and the political. Without a doubt, we can locate the work of Ellacuría and his colleagues within this group of ‘subversive’ religious figures. My argument is that cultural texts like One

Day of Life allow us to locate the rupture that Ellacuría and liberation theology represented within Salvadoran cultural memory. The novel, then, registers how religion and spirituality became an agent for radical socio-political change and for imagining a new order from a new, preferential epistemological location.

All of this is to say that reading Argueta and Ellacuría together provides us with a unique approach to understanding the historical reality and the particular theology and spirituality that are being chronicled in both texts. If in the first chapter of this dissertation what we saw was how Ellacuría’s philosophical proposals established the foundation for a thinking from Central America, in this chapter we will move our focus to his theological writings and the ways in which they also push him toward an alternative epistemology, a point of departure for his revolutionary thought. My hope in highlighting this essential aspect of Ellacuría’s thought is not just to introduce his theology to a wider field of discussion, such as cultural studies, but also to signal toward the potential contributions of a critical Christian theology for that field.

***

The Central American poor as the historical place of salvation

As the title suggests, Argueta’s novel revolves around one day in the life of the protagonist, Guadalupe (Lupe) Guardado. Throughout this ‘day’, other feminine voices,

76 such as that of her daughter, María Pía, and her granddaughter, Adolfina, are integrated into the plot. All of the women have lost loved ones due to the extreme State violence, leaving the women even more marginalized at the peripheries of Salvadoran society and struggling to find alternatives that produce life and not death. The violence in the novel— the assassination of Lupe’s son, the mutilated body of her husband, José, the persecution of Adolfina—increases throughout the novel in conjunction with Lupe’s own awareness of being oppressed.

Early on in the novel, Lupe recalls the first time she meets the voice of her conscience. Coincidentally, this emergence of her conscience occurs simultaneously with her “becom[ing] a woman” (15). She is about to throw a stone onto a frog when suddenly the voice tells her to stop, because it would be a sin to kill the frog. This flashback moves her to reflect on the nature of her conscience: “The voice of conscience is a dream. Put better, it’s not a dream; it only resembles one. In dreams we see things through rose- colored glasses, but the voice of conscience is severe, absolutely unpleasant. It is a voice for scolding: don’t do that—do this. Don’t do it because it is a sin. The loss of freedom, then” (16). What we see with this meditation is an articulation of conscience—intimately linked to religion, especially here with the use of the term sin—as repression. Throughout the rest of the novel, Lupe begins to liberate herself from this repressive notion of conscience. In this same section she refers to the conscience as having two voices: the good Cadejo, who “instead of scaring people he gives them a kind of confidence” and the bad Cadejo, who “makes you feel like pissing, by just looking at you” (17). The process that the reader sees Lupe undertake is one in which she learns to discern between these

77 two voices and liberates herself from the one that represses her.xlvii

Ignacio Ellacuría’s theology not only advocates for this sort of liberation, but we can also find a similar process of transformation in his own life story. If we are to follow those who have written about his life, we might locate Ellacuría’s experience of Saint

Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises as a foundational moment for this course of liberation and transformation.xlviii Rodolfo Cardenal, for example, highlights how Miguel

Elizondo, the Jesuit in charge of Ellacuría when he entered the order and when he was transferred to Central America, used the Spiritual Exercises to inculcate a “freedom of spirit” in novitiates like Ellacuría.xlix Much like the process that the reader witnesses with

Lupe, Elizondo and the Exercises “liberated [the novitiates] from the circumstantial— customs, devotions, and rules—and confronted them with the fundamental: Jesus Christ, the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, and the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus”

(44). There are a number of parallels that could be drawn between Lupe’s process of subjectification and the sort of subjectivity that is fomented by the exercises, but in this section we will concentrate on Ellacuría’s particular understanding and embodiment of

Ignatian spirituality and its relation to Argueta’s novel.

The first point of contact between Argueta’s novel and Ellacuría’s theological reflections has to do with rupture. Ellacuría’s articulation of Ignatian spirituality and his form of liberation theology represent a distancing from more traditional Catholic theologies that were dominant at the time. For its part, Argueta’s novel does the work of the historian by registering the clash of these two different versions of Christianity, a clash that plays an important role in the violence that the reader witnesses. In her

78 remembering, Lupe locates this foundational moment of rupture for us: “After a congress was held I don’t know where, as we were told by the young priests who began coming to

Chalate and who visited our own house, religion was no longer the same” (25, my emphasis). The conference that Lupe is referring to is the Second Vatican Council, a moment of doctrinal reorientation for the Catholic Church. In Latin America, this shift continued with the 1968 Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellin, a meeting that consolidated the emerging liberation theology and culminated in the decision to propose the preferential option for the poor. Following this historical event, religious leaders begin to participate in liberation projects such as the Christian Base Communities

(Comunidades Eclesiales de Base – CEB) and the results were a sort of radicalization of

Christian thought. Gustavo Gutiérrez, who, like Ellacuría, is considered to be one of the founding priests of liberation theology, characterizes the historical conjuncture as being shaped by the shortcomings of populist politics, the failure of developmentalist policies to cover the basic needs of the Latin American poor, the growing popularity of dependency theory, the success of the Cuban revolution, and the ever increasing participation of religious figures in the political realm as being the factors that contributed to a growing consciousness of the situation of poverty and scarcity in which so many Latin American people lived. This, he says, leads to the articulation of a theology of liberation.l

Lupe’s story is testament to the significance of Vatican II and Medellín on both the new, young priests and the peasant population, but we can also read Ellacuría’s theology as a historical register of that impact. In both instances what we see is a move away from

79 a religion that is situated exclusively in the spiritual realm. Lupe immediately follows her recollection of the arrival of the new priests cited above with a newfounded recognition of the humanity of the priests serving her community: “The priests arrived in work pants and we saw that, like us, they were people of flesh and blood” (25). Compare this to her perspective on the previous priests: “We started being less afraid of priests. Previously they used to instill fear in us; we believed they were like magicians who could annihilate us with the simplest gesture […] They would speak in hoarse voices, as if from other worlds or from the profundities of God. It seemed as if they walked on air, from here to there, in their black robes” (23). The priests in Argueta’s novel come down from the heavens in order to walk among the people: “They’d descend to the Kilometer and would come to see how we’re living. The previous priests never got as far as where we lived— they took care of everything from the chapel” (25).

In the same way as the priests in Argueta’s novel “descend” to the Kilometer, we can find a call for descension in Ellacuría’s theology. In one sense, Ellacuría understands this as an imitation of Jesus coming down from the cross and into historical reality, especially the historical reality of oppressed people like those of Central America.

Comprehending, describing, and historicizing this decsension is one of the central tasks that Ellacuría takes on with his theological writing. Jesuit spirituality, informed by Saint

Ignatius’ Exercises, puts a special emphasis on understanding the historical aspect of

Jesus; that is to say, it sets out to study him as a person of flesh and blood. It is impossible to understand Ellacuría’s theology without placing the historical Jesus in the center. He himself states “Christian spirituality is of necessity a spirituality of the

80 following of Jesus” (“Christian Spirituality” 51). Ellacuría’s own focus on the historical

Jesus has a double movement. On the one hand, there is an interest in understanding the man as he existed in the historical past. In this regard, Ellacuría reads Jesus as a “sign of the times”: “In he who is hungry and thirsty, in the jailed and disappeared, in the persecuted until death for the sake of justice when injustice continues to reign, in the poor, because he has been dispossessed, in him Jesus hides and appears. In him the sign of the times is given” (“Discernir” 134). Reading him as a sign of the times allows

Ellacuría to maintain that Jesus is always continued and historicized in the crucified people of each era:

That sign is always the historically crucified people, who unite the always distinct

form of its crucifixion to its permanence. That crucified people is the historical

continuation of the Servant of Yahweh, from which the sin of the world continues

taking away any human semblance, of which the powers of this world continue

dispossessing of everything, from which they keep seizing even its life, especially

its life. (“Discernir” 134)

This is an important aspect of Ellacuría’s thinking because it leads him to assume a subaltern perspective when constructing his Christian philosophy of liberation. In his own words, he tells us that this project only makes sense if it is done “from among the poor and oppressed, in favor of their integral liberation” because this is to “walk along the same path that followed by those who work on behalf of the Reign of God, as prefigured in the historical Jesus” (“The liberating” 121). Through his contact with the poor majorities of El Salvador, Ellacuría finds the face of Jesus in the poor of Central

America. More than this, he begins to see that the poor are the place for historical salvation. That is to say, Ellacuría argues that the poor represent the theological place for

Christian salvation, which should be translated secularly to mean that they are also the political place for the salvation of society.

Ellacuría begins to unpack this last affirmation by defining what he means by theological place. With this term, he is referring to 1) the place where Jesus appears in accordance to God’s will, 2) the most apt place for living out the vital decision to follow

Jesus and the resulting praxis, and 3) the most appropriate place for theological reflection on faith. The central importance of the historical Jesus as it appears in Ellacuría’s thinking is reiterated here, as are several of the characteristics of Jesus as a historical figure. The first point is that Jesus appears to the poor. He is born in a manger in the marginalized town of Galilee. Secondly, Ellacuría identifies Jesus’ praxis as being fundamentally one from and with the poor, denouncing those that dominate and impoverish them. This historical locatedness of Jesus from and with the poor is the foundation for Ellacuría’s claim that the poor are the theological place of salvation:

“They are the place of personal conversion, of justification—to do justice and to be justified—, of liberation as the fruit of justice and of that verification that proves, after making truth, where that truth is effectively being realized” (“Los pobres” (157).

The notion of poverty that Ellacuría emphasizes here might be disputed by more conservative, spiritualist theologies. They would refer to the Gospel of Matthew and the idea of the poor in spirit. Ellacuría, however, makes it clear that while spiritual poverty is important, it is not enough in itself. The material aspect of poverty must also be included.

In a very Ignatian sort of way, Ellacuría refutes the either/or dichotomy of spiritual and material poverty as a fundamental Christian election and replaces it with a both/and:

The materiality of poverty is a real, irreplaceable element, and it is not so much

about lacking even life’s essentials, but rather of being dialectically dispossessed

of the fruits of one’s own labor and of labor itself, as well as social and political

power, by those who with that dispossession have enriched themselves and have

taken power. This real materiality of poverty cannot be substituted with any

spirituality; it is a necessary condition of evangelical poverty. (“Los pobres” 144,

my emphasis)

In this quote, Ellacuría is describing the sort of evangelical poverty from which Jesus appeared and that constitutes the sign of the times. The primary characteristic that I want to underscore here is the dialectical nature of poverty. The poor that Ellacuría is referring to are not just poor, but have been impoverished.li

As Lupe progresses in developing her consciousness, she too becomes aware of the dialectical structure of the Salvadoran society and her own poverty. She affirms this in her narrative:

They forget that without our hands there’s no sowing, no weeding, no harvesting,

no clearing of the fields. Machetes don’t move by themselves.

The hands that move most are the hands of farmworkers. Some of us barely have

the know-how to make a pair of oxen pull a cart to buy or sell something in town.

The landowners sure pass by rapidly in their jeeps and limousines so fast they don’t

even see the people travelling beside the highways. (52-53)

With this quote, we see that Lupe, like Ellacuría, advocates a dialectical understanding of poverty and wealth. The poor only exist because the wealthy produce poverty; the wealthy only exist because the “hands” of the poor produce wealth.lii This dialectical characteristic of poverty serves to further prove Ellacuría’s assertion that the poor are the theological place of salvation, because it is precisely amongst these dispossessed people that Jesus appeared.

This understanding of poverty in El Salvador as in a dialectical relationship with wealth was influenced by the economic-political theory developed by Karl Marx. The cultural text registers through fiction the real and historical consequences that those who subscribed to Marxist thought faced in Central America at this particular conjuncture.

That is to say, One Day of Life represents the anti-communist, terrorist ideology that comes from the Salvadoran state through a set of counter-voices in the novel. “The

Authorities”, a voice from the armed forces that serves in the novel as a sort of foil to the collective character of Lupe, complains about how military men are made to look bad once the “red monsignor” arrives and excommunicates them from the Church. He then launches a sweeping criticism of the Church and communism as a whole:

the gringo tells us that the only true religion is Christianity, their religion, and that

priests have been shitting on it ever since a Communist pope arrived on the scene

and they had to poison him which only goes to show how much power they have.

They’ve put in an anti-Communist pope; they say he’s among the worse, but even

so I have my doubts because Catholics are on their way to Armageddon. Perhaps

you don’t believe me, brother, because they’ve been keeping you in the dark: the

Communists and the priests have already won you over. That’s why one has to

sacrifice oneself by doing a number on so many poor motherfuckers. The poorer

they are, the more fucked up they are. (95, my emphasis)

The links between Marxism and liberation theology constituted the primary criticisms of this new religious way of understanding historical reality and faith. Not only does this character reflect the disdain of the Armed Forces toward any possible Marxist or communist influence, but he also shows that the world-system itself shared this attitude.

Within the Church itself, the anti-communist ideologies upheld by the world’s superpowers at the time resulted in the Church’s repression, to a large degree, of voices like Ellacuría’s that sought to liberate the poor from their situation of oppression.

In El Salvador, dominant sentiments like that expressed by “The Authorities” were the source of much of the violence and propaganda launched against Ellacuría and his

Jesuit colleagues. The newspaper Diario de hoy published an article in 1988 on this supposed link between Ellacuría and Marxist-inspired Communist forces, stating that

“after World War II, a sinister person arrived in the country, and it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if he turned out to be a KGB agent” (qtd. in Dogget 17-18). The same sort of criticism was voiced with respect to the UCA as a whole, given that it was seen to be “a logistical center of Communist subversion. The Jesuits who direct this center of studies are agents of the Marxist conspiracy at the service of the Kremlin” (qtd. in Dogget 17).liii

In the late 70s, concurrently with the assassination of Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, the propaganda had reached such a point that the Central American Jesuit Province saw the need to publish a six-part newspaper series titled “The Jesuits before the Salvadoran

People”. In their response, they demonstrate their awareness of the way that they are being constructed by the Salvadoran State as Marxist enemies:

We do not know the reasons for which they have waged their fiercest battles against

the Jesuits. Judging from the attacks, we Jesuits have always been liars, sectarian

and two-faced. We are very clever at manipulating people and institutions with an

eye to achieving our hidden goals. We are hypocrites. We are Marxists (that is,

monsters of the most dreadful sort). In summary, what can be gleaned from this

collection of insults and calumnies is that we Jesuits are the most terrible plague to

descend on this country. And the remedy, as with all plagues, is to exterminate it.

(qtd in Dogget 25)

Despite the State’s conflation of liberation theology with Marxism, Ellacuría and other liberation theologians made their case that their thinking was autonomous from

Marxist thought. That is, Marxist analysis is a useful tool for understanding their reality, but liberation theology is not a Marxist theology. On a very superficial level, Marx’s atheism would provide too much of a contradiction for liberation theology to fully subordinate itself, though there are many other and more compelling reasons. Ellacuría himself was quite explicit on this point:

I repeat that this has nothing to do with Marxism or with a class struggle, strictly

speaking. […] Therefore, there is no Christian justification for accusing the

dialectical interpretation of poverty of being infected by Marxism. What this

accusation pretends to do is to distort evangelical poverty. It is one thing that the

dialectical character of poverty has not increased in the teaching and praxis of the

Church and another to say that this dialectical character comes from Marxism; it

is one thing that this dialectical approach to Christian poverty is closer to the

Marxist approaches than to the capitalist ones […] and another to say that it is a

ruse of Marxism that introduces aspects that do not belong to it into the Christian

faith and praxis. (“Los pobres” 143).

In his theological writings, Ellacuría sets out to prove that his claim about the poor being the theological place of salvation is distinct from strictly Marxist theory, even if they are not mutually exclusive. On the one hand, Ellacuría underlines that a Marxist analysis, which leads us to the conclusion that the rich have become rich by dispossessing the poor—be it from their land, their goods, their salary, or their labor—, actually resonates with how the prophets and the founders of the Church had denounced wealth, inequality, and injustice. However, Ellacuría also marks a break with traditional Marxism, a point that may have served the revolutionary actors in the region. We can consider this break to be a part of Ellacuría’s thinking from the Central American reality, which offered a bit of a theoretical challenge to traditional Marxism. Ellacuría was not alone in his criticism of the Marxist ideologues that tried to superimpose an ideologized/abstract version of

Marxist-socialist projects onto Central America without considering the particularities of the region. This is why he insists that the poverty that defines authentic Christian praxis and solidarity must be understood from Central America:

Directing out attention to Latin America, what we see is that the dispossessing

function reaches absolutely intolerable limits, because it affects the very fact of

life, which cannot be sustained nor retained. And we see, secondly, that many of

those who are dispossessed in the First World, for example, the proletarian class

and their peers, are as a whole part of the system that dispossesses the people of

the Third World. (“Los pobres” 144-45, my emphasis).

The poor, then, not only represent the theological place of salvation but also serve

Ellacuría better than the Marxist concept of the proletarian in terms of understanding the violence and injustices of the world-system. In fact, this quote shows how little Marx himself considered the third-world in his writings; a thinking from Central America indicates that the proletarian is a part of the “dispossessing” system that pillages the third-world. Ellacuría explains that the utility of the category of the poor as an epistemological locus of thought is due to the fact that this category encompasses much more than the proletarian. Unlike Marx, then, the poor, and not the proletarian, become the agent for social change in Latin America: “the poor […] are becoming, in fact, a political place of revolution and they are wagered on as an indispensable force for the overthrowing and restructuring of the dominant system” (“Los pobres” 158). Given all of this, Ellacuría asserts that this thinking from the poor as the agent of revolutionary change is the most urgent undertaking of his time. I would argue that this continues to be true today, especially in a context in which the poor have been re-labeled with categories such as ‘entitled’, ‘freeloaders’, ‘illegals’, ‘radicalists’, ‘occupiers’, and even ‘terrorists’.

In the long quote in the previous paragraph, Ellacuría begins to distinguish between the dispossessed in First World countries and the poor of Third World countries. The phenomenon of poverty, he tells us, is not manifested the same in all places. That is to say, a plurality of poverties exist. In order to arrive at the truest notion of evangelical

88 poverty, Ellacuría argues that we must depart from the place of the “most-perfectly-poor”

(140). He then goes on to posit that Central America is the geographical location of these poor: “We want to show that these ‘most-perfectly-poor’ occur in an exceptional way in situations like those that the popular majorities are living today in countries and situations like El Salvador, Guatemala, and, in another sense, Nicaragua. This is what we want to affirm when we speak about the poor as the theological place in Latin America” (“Los pobres” 141).

Argueta’s novel helps us tremendously in imagining the situation that Ellacuría is describing. What we see is the disturbing disparity between two groups of people who inhabit the same national geography. On the one hand, families like Lupe’s are losing their children to easily preventable diseases and constantly suffering from hunger and thirst. On the other, the landowners are able to travel the country in their jeeps and limousines and can even afford to pay for private security forces. Argueta registers this historical reality through Lupe’s voice: “Life gets harder and harder. They say we have a lot of people in this country. And the most abundant are the poor. Hordes of poor people everywhere. But what can we do? What are we guilty of? That is why there’s so much hunger in the villages and everywhere” (51-52, my emphasis). The poverty that Argueta is fictionalizing here is a systemic poverty that has a long tradition of domination and violence that dates back to the colony, as we shall see in the next chapter. This situation constitutes the first of three key reasons why Ellacuría considers the Central American poor to be the place of Christian salvation: theirs is the maximum and most scandalous prophetic presence of God because they represent the maximum and most scandalous

89 poverty/impoverishment.

Ellacuría’s manner of referring to the situation of poverty in the region positions him against those who refer to Latin America as a conceptual category to talk about theological-political problems; instead, Latin America is an empirically historical reality, it is the concretion of poverty as a lived situation. And Central America has an especially central part in all of this, despite generally being overlooked in Latin American studies:

I would note, however, that the concretion of Latin America for me is the actual

historical situation of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and other

similar countries or situations that can compare. Because it is in these countries

and in these situations where the ‘poor’, as they will be defined later’, are made

concrete. In other words, the ‘poor’ of these countries and their situation perfectly

realize and verify that of being a ‘theological place’. (“Los pobres” 139)

Decolonial theorists today might criticize Ellacuría for not generalizing more to include the poor of other third-world realities. Their point would be valid and perhaps it would be more proper to say that the privileged place from which to think liberation would be the poor of the global South. Nonetheless, Ellacuría was writing this article not so much for a global audience as he was in reference to those who were thinking about Latin America.

To those intellectuals and theologians he is asking for a revision of their locus of enunciation. He is calling for them to locate their knowledge at the geographical and epistemological space of the Central American poor as a means of undoing the very structures that have produced them.

The second reason why Central America’s poor represent the place of salvation for

Ellacuría is also registered in Argueta’s text. I am referring to the political developments in the region and the participation of the poor in revolutionary projects. Argueta’s novel takes place in Chalatenango, a small farming town in the Northwest of El Salvador. The people we see in the novel are extremely poor and are barely able to survive. Lupe explains that everything changes when the new group of priests arrives to the town, but we are never given an explanation as to why those changes necessarily result in State repression. The population of the town begins to work together in order to improve their living conditions; the response to this is a dramatic increase of police and military presence in the area:

Well, back then something happened that had never happened before: the Guard

started appearing in our neighborhood, and when we saw them we’d spread the

word and have to watch out, because the Guard is very strict; you can’t walk

around, for example, with a machete strapped to your wrist because for sure you’d

get an ass-whipping or would be fined more than any poor person could ever pay.

(25-26)

This repressive force appears in the town despite Lupe’s assurances that “the people around here have always been peaceful; they’re not troublemakers, they’re not even heavy drinkers” (26). The Guard begins to tell the people of Chalate that the priests had tricked them and they begin using their guns to threaten them to not go to church.

This unequal encounter of forces is underscored in a chapter that Argueta dedicates to the voice of thirteen-year-old Maria Romelia. She gives her ‘testimonio’ of going to the Bank in San Salvador to demand cheaper prices for insecticides and fertilizers. She,

91 along with other peasants from the town, is forced to flee after their demonstration is broken up by eight radio patrol cars firing on unarmed protesters. She escapes only to board a bus that is followed by a helicopter and then stopped by the police. The police open fire and begin killing everyone on the bus. Maria Romelia and another girl who turns out to be Lupe’s granddaughter are able to get off the bus but they are stopped by other police officers who, after asking Adolfina her age and finding out that she was thirteen, “grabbed the girl by her hair and took her back to the bus. A little while after, he and two other policemen grabbed her by the waist and heaved her into the bus through one of the broken windows” (39). Miraculously, both survive, but the reader is left trying to understand how the peasants’ “claiming our rights, because the government has said that the Bank is supposed to make loans so one can buy seeds and fertilizer” could have possibly merited such violence (41).

Ellacuría’s text on the poor as the theological place of salvation helps to explain why the poor were considered to be such a threat to the dominant system. Given the historical conjuncture within which he was writing, he appropriately notes the force that the poor majorities constituted for social change and the restructuring of society. As

Ellacuría puts it:

It is the ‘wretched of the earth’ that are propelling, in fact, the struggle for justice

and freedom, the fight for liberation that includes freedom as much as justice in El

Salvador and in Guatemala; those who hardly anyone believed could be active

subjects in the social and political struggle are proving to be not only the carriers

and bearers of the fight – with rivers of their own blood, senates in the furrows of

the earth – but rather the objective counselors of it. (“Los pobres” 144)

In this sense, the poor are not only the place of Christian salvation, but also the optimal place of revolution. Argueta’s novel makes it clear that the system was very cognizant of this potentiality of the poor and so it sets out to squelch it through a practice of necropedagogy to which we will return in the next chapter.

The potential of the poor as social force brings us to Ellacuría’s third reason for locating Christian salvation in the poor and also brings us back to the concept of the sign of the times. Recall how in the first chapter we discussed the notion of the concept of the height of the times as the process of historical reality that gives rise to the system of possibilities. The Central American poor, for Ellacuría, become the geographical and epistemological place that can potentially announce and make possible—to possibilize, in accordance with Ellacuría’s philosophy of historical realism—the kingdom of God. Let us read how he articulates this:

A revolution made from the poor, with them and for them, scandalously becomes,

thus, a new fundamental sign of the kingdom of God that is coming, because it is

already among us; it is a fundamental sign of a kingdom of God that seeks to and

is managing to make it operational in history […] we see some active poor forcing

the rich to shed the material conditions of their incorrigible wealth. (“Los pobres”

144)

The disproportionate repression that is found in Argueta’s novel seems to suggest that the

Salvadoran State was also aware of the capacity of the poor and for that reason sought to eliminate them. But in this quote Ellacuría is also once again proposing a historicization

93 of the Servant of Yahweh in the poor of Central America. “The Son of God became incarnate again in this poverty, and a new spirit is flourishing that makes the poor of

Latin America a singular ‘theological place’ of salvation and illumination” (“El signo”

148). Latin America’s—and especially Central America’s—poor, like Jesus, are actively contributing to the construction of what Ellacuría understands to be God’s kingdom through their denouncement of wealth and the structures that have been oppressing them.

In the second half of the 20th century, Ellacuría is arguing that Central America has come to replace Galilee as the place from which Jesus is announcing his project to build a new world.

I need to pause here to emphasize that Ellacuría’s focus on the poor of Central

America should not be considered to be a use or appropriation of the poor. Rather, he is intending to construct a critical Christian thought that serves them and moves them toward their own liberation. The poor are not just objects to be used for political gain in order to promote a certain political ideology, but they are the subjects that constitute revolution and the ideal model to follow. He is explicit in this when he states that even though the poor have become a methodological resource for liberation theology, this methodology must be used to serve the poor. The only path to salvation, according to

Ellacuría, is choosing to position oneself with the poor, to think from the poor of Central

America. The poor, Ellacuría warns, should not subject itself to the historical vanguardia, then; the vanguardia should always subject itself to the poor. Literature like this example by Argueta provides us with an example of this as a politics of writing. Ellacuría once again draws a parallel with the historical Jesus when he commanded that man is not

94 meant to serve the law of the Sabbath, but rather the Sabbath was meant to serve man.

Likewise, the poor were not meant to serve revolutionary projects, but these projects were meant to serve the poor.

***

Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises from Central America

In the first chapter of this dissertation we saw how Ellacuría’s thinking and his notion of historical reality successively integrate and build upon previous stages in order to go beyond the anterior without eliminating it. His theological thinking is no exception to this model: his spirituality moves him to locate his locus of thought in Central America and that new epistemological model in turn brings him to revise his spirituality and theology. This revision of theology is most evident in Ellacuría’s public project to convince the Central American Jesuit Province to carry out the Spiritual Exercises as a collective body and as an institution. Along with that project, Ellacuría provides new readings—what he calls a Latin Americanization of the Exercises—of certain sections of the Exercises. In this section, we will analyze three key texts that constitute this synthesis of a thinking from Central America as inspired by the Spiritual Exercises and a re-located reading of the Exercises as inspired by this thinking from Central America.

In his article, “Ellacuría, ignaciano”, Juan Hernández Pico talks about the profound

‘Ignatian-ness’ that Ellacuría embodied in his life, his work, and his thinking. Hernández

Pico centers his article on the project mentioned above of bringing the Spiritual Exercises to Central America and El Salvador by asking the Central American Province to do the

Exercises as one apostolic body. It was an experience that deeply affected Hernández

Pico as one of the Jesuits who received the Exercises as directed by Ellacuría. Ellacuría thought that the Exercises would be the most efficient way for Jesuit institutions to adapt to and incorporate the radical changes found in Vatican II and the Medellin Document. It was his hope that in doing the Exercises as a collective, the entire Jesuit institution would begin the Ignatian task of discerning the world as separated into three parts—the first world, second world, and third world—and that they would choose the third world as the way to open up to God’s grace. Hernández Pico explains that the authorities of the

Central American Province accepted the challenge and Ellacuría was allowed to co-direct this collective realization of the Exercises along with his novitiate master, Miguel

Elizondo, and with the assistance of other Central American Jesuits, Ricardo Falla and

Florentino Idolate.

What Hernández Pico describes in his analysis of Ellacuría’s interventions is a clear articulation of Ellacuría’s thinking from Central America. Ellacuría’s contribution to the renovation of the Central American Province revolved around his explanation of two competing dynamics in the religious life of the Society: that of works and that of the

Christian experience of the Exercises. With respect to resolving this, Ellacuría does not propose solutions, but rather develops an experimental path for the order. It is clear to him, however, that the Province cannot accept apostolic works that contradict the experience of the historical Jesus that comes from the Exercises. In that light, the

Province must necessarily situate itself in solidarity with the poor and oppressed, in the same way that Jesus did during his life. This constitutes the cornerstone for his argument for the need to actualize the Christian faith from Central America and the reason why the

96 third world offers the best conditions for making a profound and embodied experience of the Exercises. Moreover, Ellacuría argues that it is only through living the experience of the Exercises in and from the third world that religious life can be resurrected. The first and second world, from Ellacuría’s perspective, are no longer capable of providing the seeds for the kingdom of God in the world, and so the third world becomes both the place of salvation and the place from which to follow the historical Jesus in his mission to historicize the kingdom.

In Ellacuría’s texts, the starting point for making the argument outlined above is to understand the situation of the Central American Jesuits as seen from the first week of the

Exercises.liv In the text written by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the first week is comprised of a series of meditations on the concept of sin. Ellacuría argues that in our particular historical context, the proper conceptualization of sin has been lost, and so he proposes a new Christian anthropological approach to the concept. We have already seen a representation of this in Argueta’s novel when Lupe is introduced to her conscience. That voice uses the concept of sin to repress her, which is why she characterizes it as

“unpleasant”, a “voice for scolding”, and “a loss of freedom”. Ellacuría refers to this approach to sin as a superficial understanding of the concept. Sin is not simply the violation of a moral law, although this may be a part of it. Sin should not be a concept used to limit freedom or to repress and control the believer. Rather, Ellacuría proposes that sin should be understood as the biblical interpretation of evil in the world: “the idea of sin serves as an interpretation of the concrete reality of evil” (“Nuestra situación” 185).

One step in overcoming the limited notion of sin is to expand it beyond the purely

97 religious dimension. To say that sin is simply that which offends God is to limit sin to an anthropomorphic interpretation. It simultaneously manifests the limited human understanding of sin and of God, as though God were an offendable being in the same way that we are offendable beings. But the most radical contribution that Ellacuría offers to his Jesuit colleagues for the apprehension of the concept of sin is that sin goes beyond the individual sphere. This implies that we must also talk about the notion of collective sin, which Ellacuría is explicit in justifying: “In what sense does collective sin exist? In that there is a sin that incorrigibly affects all. […] It is also collective in the sense that, in one way or another, all of us are responsible and, nonetheless, we cannot avoid it. In that sense, there is collective sin” (“Nuestra situación” 183). His development of collective sin relates directly to another concept of his that we will review in chapter 4, that of common evil.

Collective sin is born from the dialectical relationship between wealth and poverty that Ellacuría has been developing. Once again, this is registered in the cultural text.

Argueta gives special attention to the gendered aspect of this dialectic and the way that women are especially affected by collective sin:

From that point of view we peasant women are slaves, but it is not their fault. At

bottom we help produce the wealth of the landowners when we take care of the

children by ourselves, because we are also giving men the time to work in peace

from sunup to sundown. That is to say, we are giving our time to the landowners so

that our husbands can produce more, can be better exploited. (204)

Women’s work subsidizes the work of the peasant men, who are also negatively affected

98 by collective sin. Lupe’s narrative also underscores the geopolitical nature of this dialectical relationship; it is not just the third-world peasant women who are slaves but also the laborers who produce the commodities consumed in the first world: “From that point of view we are also slaves, slaves obliged to clear the fields of the plantation, to pick up the coffee on time and to make sure that the cotton is not messed up by the rains or by insects” (204). What we see Lupe recognizing is her own place in an unjust world- system.

Experiences like Lupe’s underscore Ellacuría’s contention that the third world is instrumental in proving the existence of collective sin. In that light, he extends the dialectical relationship he had previously used to explain wealth/poverty to the existence of the third and first worlds: “the third world presupposes the existence of the first, composed of the capitalist countries, essentially the United States, Canada, central and northern Europe, those which have achieved their economic development within certain determined characteristics that have given them this power and development” (“El tercer mundo” 216). The third world and the first world mutually produce each other, though the power relationships are top-down and not horizontal. The third world, then, becomes a direct product of collective sin, a result of the first world avoiding their own human responsibility. Therefore, the third world and Central America become central for the meditation on sin for the first week of the Exercises because they make the collective sin of the world visible, in much the same way as Lupe does in Argueta’s novel. Central

America is the concrete reality of evil in that it is the concrete result of evil in the world:

“Do not think that these are only my abstract and very theoretical reflections. We find

99 evil in its radical sense here in Central America and in the world, which annihilates man”

(“Nuestra situación” 184). The dehumanizing situation that the poor majorities of Central

America experience daily is caused by the very things that the historical Jesus denounces: wealth, ambition, arrogance, violence, and self-importance. The “collective evil” that

Ellacuría is outlining here can be understood as an ethics that refuses to recognize the other as a human being. Ellacuría will propose that a thinking from this situated concretion of the “collective evil” is a thinking that can move historical reality in the direction of overcoming it.

This point becomes clearer if we return to Ellacuría’s idea of historical reality as explained in the first chapter. Ellacuría does not question the existence of Reality, but he does posit that we only have access to it through historical reality, which is the most recent stage of reality, the reality that is always ‘more’ and ‘of itself’. Humankind is able to shape this historical reality through the optative appropriation of possibilities. In this way, historical reality can go in the direction of good or bad only in that they are conditions of the goodness or badness of that reality with relationship to humankind. The

Central American poor make visible and tangible the ways in which the historical reality of Ellacuría’s time—and ours as well—was structured by historical sin; that is, the

Central American poor make visible the effects of alienation, oppression, and dehumanization. This is why Ellacuría is convinced that only a thinking from Central

America is capable of overcoming that sin and moving toward liberation. Finally, much like we do not have access to Reality except through historical reality, we do not have access to the theological notion of the kingdom of God except through the historical

100

Jesus. And because the historical Jesus positions himself with the poor, we only have access to the kingdom of God through the poor. The force of Ellacuría’s argument here then is that because liberation theology departs from the desire to make the kingdom of

God a historical reality, it must think from the poor, and more specifically, from the

Central American poor.

Lupe’s awareness of this dynamic of her own historical reality and of the world- system that configures it is important in the novel precisely because it begins to move us in the direction of imagining alternatives. The sort of subjectivity and ethics that she represents, which is developed from her situation and awareness of oppression are in opposition to the dominant forces that are structuring her reality, such as the Armed

Forces and the world-system at large. Her husband, José, repeatedly tells Lupe that the sort of consciousness that we see unfolding in her is the start of the struggle to overcome their situation of slavery. Given all of this, we should pay special attention to the foundational moment for Lupe’s evolution: the arrival of an alternative Christian theology. Her own words reinforce the importance of this event: “Then all of a sudden the priests began to change. They started getting us into cooperatives. To help each other, to share profits. It’s wonderful to help someone, to live in peace with everyone, to get to know each other” (22-23).

What is different about these new priests? One critical difference is their theology of sin and how it is used with the people of the village. This represents a strict break from the theology that had been implemented in Lupe’s town before. The first priests tell Lupe that they are there “to save the souls of sinners” (22). Those priests had convinced Lupe

101 that the best solution for the peasants’ dying children would be to pray, that they should view death as a gift from God, because the poor will be rewarded in heaven. This notion of sin and this form of spiritualist theology was used to keep the poor passive and submissive in the Salvadoran countryside. These first priests are not interested in the historical and material reality of their followers; rather, they simply want to “save their souls”.

The new priests that arrive, however, coincide with Ellacuría’s conceptualization of sin and the active response that an authentic Christianity demands. Their interest is in liberating the peasants from the effects of collective sin, which structures the dynamic relationship between the rich and the poor, the first world and the third. What Argueta’s novel registers, then, is how liberation theology began to replace a strictly spiritualist theology. Ellacuría would tell us that the new priests take on the task of Jesus’ mission of historicizing the kingdom of God. In fact, this is how they explain to Lupe their new theology: “To get to heaven, first we must struggle to create a paradise on earth” (23).

The primary objective is no longer the salvation of the peasant believers in some future afterlife, but rather it is their historical salvation in their current material, historical reality.

This new perspective coincides with Ellacuría’s notion that the proper Christian response to collective sin in the world would be to construct the world so as to erase all traces of it, that is, to “create a paradise on earth”. This is what Ellacuría calls historicizing the image of Christ in the world: “The image of Christ is not abstract, but rather very concrete and historical. What the historical image of Christ does not make

102 historically visible in us is our great collective sin” (“Nuestra situación” 191). If Central

America is the place where historical sin is concretized, then it is also the place where the historical Jesus appears and where Christian action should take place. In the conjuncture of Ellacuría’s presenting these ideas to the Viceprovince in 1969, there was a divide between the younger priests and the older priests who disagreed with whether or not this action should be in the spiritual realm or the material realm—the same divide registered in Argueta’s novel. For Ellacuría, the inability to see that it should be in both is a scandal for the Church. In part, this scandal is justified by a certain paradox of the Christian faith.

On the one hand, there are those that see the world as being nothing more than that and so they dedicate themselves completely to God. On the other, there are those that surrender themselves to doing work in the world. Ellacuría argues that this paradox is incomplete on either end because it is maintained by believers that have ceased to see and feel the way that God is operating in the world. The proper response would be to see God in the world and to serve God through the world, thus overcoming the either/or with a both/and in terms of understanding Christian faith. And this should be done with an attitude of struggle and rebellion, he tells his companions. That is to say, the proper response is constant revolution. It is this revolutionary response that will renovate Latin America. In the same light, it is this new theology of liberation from Central America that can combat the spiritualist theologies and theology of development that has plagued the Church and

Central America for far too long.

For these reasons, Ellacuría calls for a Latin Americanization of theology and a

Latin American reading of the Exercises. In part, Ellacuría is arguing against the

103 supposed universality of Christian theology as an abstract concept that does not need to be historicized according to its different historical realities.lv To support his argument, he points out that both the New Testament and the Old Testament offer distinct theologies, in this way proving the need to historicize salvation. This is not, Ellacuría explains, an opening of theology to any form of pluralism or relativism, but rather is a search for a theology firmly rooted in lived experiences rather than in antiquated doctrine. Ellacuría posits that the fundamental problem for theology in Latin America is how to understand and realize both the history of salvation and salvation in history. A theology from Central

America must into consideration the socio-economic and cultural context within which it is situated. A Latin Americanized theology is needed not only to reach the excluded and oppressed poor majorities of Latin America but also in order to achieve salvation for those in the first world who participate in the reproduction of the system.

Ellacuría’s insistence on a theology from Central America in the 1960s and 70s can be understood as a sort of precursor to the South-South movement that is emerging in contemporary decolonial theories in the 2010s.lvi In his article, Hernández Pico considers this movement of Ellacuría’s to be visionary, especially in that he is already proposing a future solidarity among third world countries that goes beyond national borders.

Certainly, the way in which Ellacuría understands this third world solidarity can be useful to decolonial theory. First, Ellacuría clarifies how the idea of the nation inhibits this south-south dialogue: “The nation is a form of private property and, therefore, is a developmental stage of history that must be overcome. Nationalism is also a form of private property, which must be overcome” (“El tercer mundo” 217). The condemnatory

104 emphasis on private property is a theme we will take up again in the next chapter, but what I want to point out here is that Ellacuría rejects strictly nationalist models of change, even Marxist models, which tend to focus the struggle on social classes within a national context. Instead, he is proposing a supranational solidarity that is based on the category of humanity rather than the categories of class or national belonging. It is a superior solidarity, he tells us “to be oppressed or persecuted than to belong to a determined cultural tradition” (217). This is the sort of solidarity and the potentiality that Ellacuría sees emerging during his time in the Central American poor majorities, though not necessarily from the leaders of the revolutionary movements. We certainly see this solidarity represented in the poor campesinos in Argueta’s novel. Unlike the international ethics/politics of the first world nations that look to subject other nations to their own needs and interests, the relationships that Ellacuría is referring to are directed at liberation. We can imagine it as a sort of internationalization and historicization of

Lupe’s intersubjectivity and ethics. This supranational unity has the potential to not only redeem the third world, but the second and first worlds, as well.

The category of being human replaces the category of the citizen, then, in

Ellacuría’s imagined supra or trans-national unity. The priests that arrive to Lupe’s town allow us to see how the application of this category might work on a micro level, constructing a different relationship between priest and parish member. This is one of the fundamental changes that Lupe notes: these priests actually take an interest in the lives of the campesinos. Whereas the previous priests would only arrive every two weeks to give mass and then speed away in their jeeps, leaving the congregation with nothing more than

105 their dust, the new priests integrated themselves into the communities:

To be sure, these new, friendly priests also traveled in jeeps, but they would come

to the Detour and visit us: how are you doing? How many children do you have?

How much are you earning? And we didn’t understand their way of talking, the

words they used. They even formed the first cooperatives and we made a little

profit. They taught us to manage money and how to get a good price for our eggs,

chickens or pigs. (26).

This new model of theology reflected in these new priest-friends departs from an essential recognition of the humanity of the campesinos. They are no longer reduced to objects-souls to be saved but are alter-beings who deserve dignity. Not only that, but the interest that the priests take with the poor campesinos represents what Ellacuría calls a turn toward the poor, the only way to actualize the potential of the third world as the place of redemption.

Staying true to his style, Ellacuría uses dialectical thinking to justify the need for this turn. Capitalism has produced a human “hardening” in that it has resulted in a model of humanity and society that revolves around money. Despite any benefits that this might entail, it ultimately causes human alienation and a society that closes upon itself. This, in theological-ethical terms, is a negation of love and human solidarity: “The existence of a first world, closed on itself and that does not give more than its crumbs to others, is the negation of human solidarity in love and, consequently, the negation of the first Christian commandment” (“El tercer mundo” 218). In other words, capitalism is a system ripe for fermenting the collective sin that Ellacuría has been denouncing. This is especially so

106 given the centrality of and desire for wealth that drives the capitalist system. When we understand wealth dialectically, as Ellacuría proposes, we see that it becomes a category of destruction: “as an anthropological category, this wealth, that of having much more than others, more than what one should have, is a category absolutely destructive of man, because it breaks solidarity and puts us in a situation of abuse and prepotency, against the

Christian message” (219). Wealth is a negation in that it implies a dispossession of the many by the few, because of the exploitation inherent in it, and because of the inequality that it necessarily involves: “Moreover, above all, if that becomes a dehumanizing injustice and an impersonal exploitation that, then it naturally destroys all human solidarity. And these have been and tend to be the characteristics of this capitalist society” (219).

This negation is what necessitates the turn to the poor that Ellacuría proposes, because it combats the alienation caused by wealth. In this way, the poor constitute a place of denunciation. Ellacuría likens the third world to being the prophets of our modern world. Through its existence, the third world denounces the world-system as an unjust and inhumane system in that it even allows it to become a historical reality: “Then, the very existence of the third world is proving that the others are heartless” (“El tercer mundo” 221). The third world denounces this historical reality as an active domination of some by others. There is a need, then, for an active response and the third world must also become a place of action: “in our current historical moment, the third world should take an active part in the prophetic struggle of liberation” (91).

What is interesting about Ellacuría’s centering the third world as the place of

107 salvation is that it goes beyond the realm of the exclusively religious. In fact, Ellacuría claims that it is in the third world—as the place that demands and offers the best conditions for historicizing a truly Christian ethics—that the secular and the religious converge. This is so because the liberation of the poor implies both concrete secular and religious action. In other words, there is a political-public character to this turn to the poor. This is what Ellacuría calls the “overcoming of religionism and secularism” (78).

To explain this point, Ellacuría explains how one specific meditation of the

Exercises, the meditation on the two standards, would be realized from the historical perspective of Central America. In Loyola’s text, the retreatant is asked to imagine the world as divided under two standards, that of Lucifer and that of God, and then they are moved to choose the latter banner. When this exercise is realized from the position of

Central America, the clear parallel is that God’s cause becomes the cause of the third world, and so Ellacuría would expect the retreatant to dedicate their life to serving God’s banner by working toward the liberation of the third world. This dedication to the kingdom of God, a dedication that Ellacuría himself dies for, synthesizes religionism and secularism in that it goes beyond each. It is more than just religionism because it is more than the searching for a relationship with God at the margins of life and the margins of the historical reality within which Jesus lived. It is more than secularism because it includes a search for salvation outside of the purely secular. The surrendering of oneself to the cause of liberation, although not completely religious, implies what Ellacuría calls

“actions of an incipient Christianity”. This synthesis of the religious and the secular, according to Ellacuría’s explanation, is the pathway to a following of the historical Jesus.

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Let us read Ellacuría’s affirmation on Jesus’ secularity and religiosity:

Jesus is fully secular and within his secularity is the maximum realization of the

reign of God and the maximum presence of God to man and of man to God:

Jesus’ secularity is manifest not only because he does not belong to the religious

caste, but because his preaching on the kingdom of God spontaneously becomes a

public action […] it is in this form of historic life where he himself finds and

where he announces the kingdom of God. (“Lectura latinoamericana” 79).

We have already seen that Ellacuría argues that for the Christian to authentically carry out their mission, they must find and announce the kingdom of God from the third world, but now we can add that this work must be more than simply spiritual; it must also be secular. It must also be a public action. Serving God’s standard, as understood from this

Latin American reading of the Exercises is a secular mission: “To conclude this point, the experience of the second week should be understood as a full dedication to this Christian, secular action” (“Tercer mundo” 227).

Certainly, this last affirmation may cause dissonance between this ideal that

Ellacuría is proposing and the way the Catholic Church as institution has carried out its mission. Ellacuría himself was aware and critical of this tension with respect to the

Society of Jesus, as well. He explains that an authentic experience of the spirit of the

Exercises, especially the second week, is incongruent with the existence of the third world, an existence to which the Jesuits have at least in part contributed. Given this contradiction, Ellacuría finds a sense of complicity with the Jesuits and the unjust world- system. His theological writings and his presentations to the Central American Jesuits

109 were meant to lead to a transformation—a Central/Latin Americanization, if you will—of the Society of Jesus and the Church into an institute that understands its theology from the third world and seeks to serve that world. This is the fundamental contribution of the third world: it is the place of the resurrection of an authentic Christian and Jesuit life.

That is, the third world is the place of liberation, the location from which the politics- ethics of the first and second world—those that produce the third world—can be overcome:

Because otherwise, the third world will repeat, a bit changed, the same experience

of the first and second world and there will always be a fourth world, of which

this third world will serve itself, take advantage, and exploit, if its ideals are not

changed and its education, existence, ideals, lifestyle, etc. are not configured.

Note that we are all convinced, or we act as if we were, that happiness is in the

image we see of the first world of being rich, of having a big house, big means,

big buildings, big things […] Therefore, the experience of the Exercises is one of

the indispensable contributions of the experience of the third world, so that it may

focus its evolution in a new way. (“El tercer mundo” 229).

All of this is to say that the Exercises should be seen as a potential model for a thinking from the third world that can overcome collective sin. To put this another way, the theology that results from that particular form of thinking from Central America is one that understands the Spiritual Exercises as a fundamental principle for the historicization of Christian praxis and the kingdom of God.

If we are to read Lupe’s character as one who is influenced by this sort of theology

110 from Central America as I have been proposing, then we can also affirm that she serves as a sort of model for imagining the type of intersubjectivity that would result from this historicized Christian praxis. Her evolution in the text begins with the sort of spiritualist, abstract understanding of sin and Christianity. In her narrative, she recalls the sort of catechism that structured her life prior to the arrival of the new, young priests. She, like her peers, was afraid to even think about the concept of evil because she had been convinced that she was condemned by sin, that everything in her life represented condemnation:

For everything there was damnation. For everything there was hell. For

everything there was fire as punishment. Our tongue was always tied by our fear

of sin.

The road to Hell is paved with evildoers, they’d tell us. And the evildoers were

those who had bad thoughts. We always wanted to be good. We believed that to

be good was to bow one’s head, not to protest, not to demand anything, not to get

angry. No one had clarified these things for us. On the contrary, we were always

being offered a celestial paradise. The reward for being good. To respect one’s

neighbor was really to respect the landowner. And to respect the landowner was

to conform to his whimsy. (53)lvii

But, Lupe is liberated from this repressive notion of religion. She herself finds inspiration in her deceased husband, who becomes a model for her to follow towards the construction of a new mode of living in the world. She tells us that he was guided by the needs of others, by a spirit of solidarity that he defined as conscience: “‘This way of

111 being, it is having a conscience,’ he tells me. And, you see, it is a complicated thing, it can’t be defined by a single word. Conscience is all the things we do for the benefit of others without seeking our own interest” (173). This is precisely the sort of intersubjectivity that Loyola’s Exercises propose, especially when realized from Central

America, as Ellacuría is advocating. It is a being-for-others that also implies a transontological ethics. We see this ethics at several points in Lupe’s narrative, especially when two soldiers arrive at her house in search of Adolfina. Although she knows that these soldiers will most certainly hurt her granddaughter and despite having nothing to gain from it, she treats them well: “And if now I offered them a little water or some pineapple chicha, I did it only because giving drink to the thirsty is the most sacred thing in life. You can’t deny that even to the most wicked of people. There was not a drop of hypocrisy or servility in my offer. It’s a matter of offering what not even God would deny the devil” (137). We might liken this to Sartre’s ethical notion of being-for-others or

Levinas’ ethics of being for the other, but in any case what Lupe registers is that this life ethics of doing well for others is derived from the particular Christian tradition that was emerging in the Salvadoran countryside.

Reading Lupe as a possible outcome of Ellacuría’s project for a theology from

Central America is a powerful way of breathing life back into his work, a labor that was cut short when the very system that stands to lose the most decides to eliminate him. If we are to read his theology as an authentic expression of Christian spirituality, then we can also see how his writing demands that the Church move to the new epistemological place proposed by Ellacuría. A failure to think from this place only results in an

112 incomplete theology, such that Ellacuría even criticizes Karl Rahner, one of his five great mentors: “I never heard Rahner speak about anything that had to do with revolution, violence, or the third world, as he did not even know this existed” (“Tercer mundo”

218).lviii How can a theology that does not even know of the existence of such things possibly apply to those that live them on a daily basis? The place of salvation for the world, but also for the Church, is the third world. This is the geographical and epistemological place that requires and makes possible a praxis of solidarity that is positioned with the hungry, thirsty, and oppressed poor majorities of Central America.

For Ellacuría, this is the equivalent of a continuation and historicization of the poor, humble, historic Jesus of Galilee.

***

Theology from Central America as a model for change

As we have already pointed out, the arrival of the new priests to Lupe’s village— the arrival of a theology from Central America, as we have been describing here— brought with it negative consequences, as well. In Argueta’s novel it is clear that the military State is fearful that these priests might disrupt the established order and so they respond with repression. The guardsmen begin to question the townspeople about the things that the priests say in mass. As Lupe puts it, it was no longer enough for them to ask for the townspeople’s papers and to check them to see if they were armed with a machete; now the questioning revolved around their attendance of mass. They also began to accuse the priests of putting strange ideas in the heads of the peasants. For the established system, theirs was a subversive religion, one that had to be stopped. The first

113 steps were attempts to scare the believers away from the church: “It was only to frighten us so that we’d back away from the Church. ‘Yes, we’re going to Mass and you should see how good this priest is, Officer, he isn’t like the others.’ And were those sons of bitches here and those sons of bitches there, faggots in robes, giving us religious instruction for the purpose of disobeying them? And they’d point the barrels of their guns at us, and we’d better stay away from the chapel” (28). The guardsmen, then, begin to use word-of-mouth propaganda to threaten the church-goers and to circulate vicious rumors about the priests.

Ellacuría was always clear that his proposals would lead to his being considered a heretic. Part of the Ignatian spirituality that results from the Exercises is an actual desire for the hate and persecution of the world. And so he did want this, not just for himself, but also for the entire Central American Province. For him, historicizing Jesus’ mission also meant following the historical Jesus to the cross, just as he was crucified for heresy against the Jewish people and the Roman Empire. Ellacuría makes it explicit to the

Province that if they are to follow Jesus and side with the poor of Central America, then they will not need to seek out the contempt of the world; it would find them. The price of being a companion of the historical Jesus is high, as Ellacuría’s own death makes abundantly clear.

These priests in Lupe’s story also pay this price: “One day they dared the worst.

Something that made us feel like dying: the priest was found half dead on the road to the

Kilometer. They had disfigured his face, had brutalized him all over. Someone was passing that way and saw a naked man moaning in a ditch” (30). The verbal attacks on

114 the priests become physical, corporeal. These attacks on the priests are another sign that

Argueta was chronicling his own historical reality in El Salvador in the late 1970s; a number of priests had been murdered in the years before his book’s publication and

Archbishop Romero was martyred that same year. What is interesting about the way the novel portrays this violence is that it is founded and justified by the theology of the perpetrators. I have already mentioned that this novel suggests that the conflicting

Christian theologies in El Salvador at this time played a part in the violence and the armed conflict. If the new priests that arrive to Chalatenango represent the sort of emerging liberation theology that we have been tracing with Ellacuría, then the perpetrators of violence—the guardsmen, the military, the State—all depart from another, more dominant theology that sought the elimination of anyone associated with the former. In the case of the presence of the National Guard in Lupe’s pueblo, she points out that the guardsmen were Catholic, and she was hopeful that this shared characteristic would have been enough to save the priests from being targeted: “They wouldn’t dare touch a priest because deep down they were afraid of them. Like us, the guardsmen have been Catholics, and almost all of them are peasants; what happens is that they’ve gotten education and we haven’t” (29).

When thinking of these disputing theologies, and especially when hearing the military voices in the novel articulate their theologies, I am reminded of Marx’s condemnation of religion as an opiate to the masses. One of Ellacuría’s close companions and fellow martyrs, Ignacio Martín-Baró, followed Ellacuría’s theological leanings and published a text in 1987 in which he succinctly argues against this sort of religiosity. This

115 text by Martín-Baró corresponds with Ellacuría’s ideas on the topic. In the article, titled

“From Religion as Opium to Religion as Liberating Faith”, Martín-Baró concurs with

Marx when he says that religion has tended to serve as an opiate for the masses. In that sense, he characterizes the dominant Christian religion as a formalist, individualist, and spiritualist religiosity: formalist in that its primary focus is avoiding sin, individualist in that the subject is responsible for their actions as an individual before God, and spiritualist in that it centers on the spiritual side of reality and has little to do with the historic-material realm of the world. I have already shown how Ellacuría’s theology from

Central America challenges this version of Christianity. Martín-Baró goes on to argue that the political outcomes of this sort of religion as ideology are a high level of passivity and complicity with the violence that is inherent to the world-system. Since the economic, social, and political do not fall within the spiritual scope of this perspective, they are excluded from consideration. The personal and social emphasis of this sort of

Christianity is on what one should not do, on how to not sin. Think back to Lupe’s first encounter with her conscience.

Lupe may have been liberated, but the characters most closely connected to the

Salvadoran State in Argueta’s novel embody this notion of a religion that is complicit with a structure and system of violence. We glean this not just from Lupe’s description of the guardsmen, but also from the voices of “The Authorities” and “Them” in their own interventions in the text. “The Authorities”, for example, explains that even in questions of religion, the people of Central America have gotten things wrong: “While up there, in the United States, the real Christ arrived with those modern churches they call Jehovah’s

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Witnesses and Mormons, with handsome blond ministers who are as adept in preaching the word of God as they are in the sciences, like psychology and karate, the Spaniards brought us syphilis and the Catholic religion poisoned by pure communism” (94).

“Them”, another of the male, military voices that interrupts the plot of the novel to give his point of view, is even more explicit on the idea of how religion enters into their mission of eliminating threats to the established order:

All those perversions are going to end when we are all united in Christ, when we

all embrace Christ, destroy the Communist priests. Don’t think we have some

kind of religion other than the true one, the other, that comes from above; they

allow us to choose Latter-Day Saints, Mormons, or the Children of Faith, because

these religions bring light and hope for the eternal happiness of man. (130, my

emphasis)

While both “Them” and Ellacuría speak about embracing Christ, the differences between their perspectives could not be more marked. An essential part of these differences have to do with the place from which the theologies are conceived: “Them” tells us that his

“true” religion “comes from above”, meaning from the global North/the United States.

Ellacuría’s, on the other hand, is a theology from Central America.

The perspective that these two Salvadoran military men articulate in the novel is eerily similar to that expressed by Church Official Tom Beckott in the documentary

When the Mountains Tremble.lix Beckott, one of the leaders of the evangelical church co- founded by Efraín Ríos Montt, tells the camera that God puts rulers into authority, and so

Christian believers should simply pray for rulers: “we have a faith that extends to God

117 that he will cover the situation if we are faithful to him and pray for these men in office”.

The scene cuts immediately to archival footage of Ríos Montt telling his public that what is required in moments of injustice is not changes in the faces or walls—we can interpret this to mean changes in the structures—but rather changes in the hearts of the people. The change required is personal and interior. This part of the documentary ends by cutting back to Ríos Montt in a moment of worship in his church followed by various shots of other members worshipping. This sort of religiosity, Martín-Baró would tell us, is complicit, even when faced with the genocidal acts of assassins like Efraín Ríos Montt.

The need for an alternative theology is urgent.

One Day of Life chronicles how this complicit religiosity is inculcated throughout society. We might even say that it follows a trickle-down theory. This is first seen in the novel with the first set of priests in the community. These priests, Lupe asserts, were not horrified by the rate of infant mortality in the communities they were serving. Instead, they told their believers:

They’d tell us not to worry, that heaven was ours, that on earth we should live

humbly but that in the kingdom of heaven we would be happy. That we shouldn’t

care about worldly things. And when we’d tell the priests that our children were

dying from worms, they’d recommend resignation or claim we hadn’t given them

their yearly purge. […] The priest would tell us to be patient, to say our prayers

and to bring our little offerings, when we took our children to him, when we

brought the skeletons with eyes. One of my children died on me that way—from

dehydration and from being eaten up by worms. (20)

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This sort of theology is not thought from the historical reality within which its believers are located. It is situated in some other, spiritual realm that is completely disconnected with the historical-material reality of Central America. When Adolfina’s voice is integrated into the novel she tells us that her grandmother had interiorized this sort of theology. Her characterization of Lupe’s faith bring us full circle back to the moment in which Lupe finds her conscience: “One shouldn’t run during Holy Week because that’s kicking Christ. One shouldn’t spit because that’s spitting at Christ […] And if one throws a stone, already you’re stoning Christ; even if it’s only a lizard that you hit, in truth the one you’re really hitting is Christ” (121). This, her grandmother says, “It’s the Christian faith”, a faith that “we’re taught from childhood” (122, 121). The leaders of the Church— the top—disseminated this theology down to the level of the lay peasant, thus installing an ideologized notion of Christianity.

We have already shown that Ellacuría’s theology is not formalistic, spiritualistic, nor derived from the institutional centers, but rather it is derived from the historical reality of the most oppressed. In this sense, if the former is a trickle-down theology,

Ellacuría’s trickles up. This characteristic makes it radically different from the sort of religion that becomes an opiate for the masses. Ellacuría makes this explicit in an article on the potential of a Christian prophecy from Latin America:

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just

as it is the spirit of a situation without spirit” (Marx, 1844). But, if this is so, it

does not have to become the opium of the people, as the same text of Marx goes

on to call it. If it is more a protest than a mere expression, if it is more a struggle

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than a mere comfort, if it does not remain a mere sigh, if the protest and contrast

become historical utopia which negates the present and impels into the future; if,

in short, prophetic action is initiated, then history is made by way of repudiating

and surpassing and not by way of evading. (“Utopia and Prophecy” 48)

This sort of religiosity is a historical commitment to those who have been unjustly dispossessed of power. It is a religion as protest against the real misery of the people.

Ellacuría’s notion of religion is a political and secular revolution from the subaltern.

Ellacuría is aware that the world system produces a desire for subjects like the earlier priests in Lupe’s pueblo. What the system needs is a Christianity as ideology, not a Christianity that deideologizes by historicizing the kingdom of God:

In the first place is ever-present need: “these priests are communists or Marxists,

we can no longer help them. Let’s find other priests—because priests are always

needed—that support us in our situation, because these Jesuits do not help us.”

And then comes the scandal of the newspapers, that the Church is leftist, that it is

becoming communist. When in reality, it has not gone even half of the path that it

needs to go toward the left, but to the left, not in that cheap sense of the word, but

to the serious, evangelical [read Gospel] left of believing that what is important is

not order or freedom of a few, but something else altogether. (“El tercer mundo”

228).

This quote clearly demonstrates Ellacuría’s interest in moving beyond the Christianity that simply pacifies the masses and into one that serves the masses, especially the poor majorities of Central America. While challenging the Christian tradition, Ellacuría is also

120 criticizing the liberalist and leftist ideologies. This, in part, is the contribution we are highlighting here. The Christian task of historicizing the kingdom of God may support a given social structure in a given context, but then must immediately begin the task of deideologizing its own position, as the incessant project of historicizing and revolution requires.

The subversive and subaltern religion that Ellacuría is calling for is embodied by the newer priests in Lupe’s village. These priests move the realm of Christianity from the spiritual-individual into the material-collective reality of the villagers. They begin to learn about their rights, they begin to understand the meaning of the word exploitation:

“If it hadn’t been for the priests, we wouldn’t have found out about those things that are in our interest. They opened our eyes, nothing more” (31-32). Lupe downplays this, but it is a radical change, not just for her and her neighbors, but for the entire system. “We learned to look out for ourselves […] For us things were good; for others they were bad.

Especially for the landowners, who are the ones who suffered most when we demanded our rights. They spend more and earn less” (32) When these new priests teach the believers that being good does not signify submissiveness, the effects begin to touch the finqueros and their pockets. This new Christianity that privileges the poor goes against the interests of the center. And that is when the system begins to react with violence.

As we have already pointed out, Ellacuría’s text show that he was clear about the risks involved with what he was proposing. He demonstrates a great deal of courage to even address the Central American Province about the collective sin of wealth, the need to abandon the first and second world solutions, and to criticize the bourgeois capitalism.

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This is especially true when we consider how the Church as an institution had accommodated itself to the bourgeois lifestyle. Hernández Pico explains that the reception of this sort of language by the center was not exactly amenable: “His

‘translation’ of the Exercises to the Province had been too bold, it had caused a conflict, whose trail of letters to Rome was felt, persecution began, not with bombs or shots, but with accusations from power and from Jesuits close to power” (329). After this attempted

Latin Americanization of the Spiritual Exercises in 1969, the central powers began to take away some of Ellacuría’s power within the Jesuit institution, especially in terms of his formation of young religious men. He was essentially relegated to the realm of the university. Nonetheless, Ellacuría was not deterred from continuing to develop his program for a new and Christian society that serves the poor majorities. Twenty years after the Provincial Exercises, Ellacuría still found an immense potential in thinking from his situated place in El Salvador. Only five days before his brutal assassination Ellacuría was in Barcelona giving a speech. During that time, many new projects were opened up to him by his European counterparts, but he still maintained the need to think of these ideas from the place of the Central American poor, as Hernández Pico expresses:

there was no voice or human power that could stop Ellacuría from returning to San

Salvador and the UCA. He thought creatively and saw far beyond, but had to be in

his small place, where things can test new realities and where the people have an

unavoidable, fraternal dimension. There, the military killed him five days later.

There, the periods and times of his historical life end. There, his efficacy became a

pure testimony of love. (337)

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There is a painful parallel between the personal price that Ellacuría paid with his project and that paid by the priest in One Day of Life. What is especially perverse about the physical violence they received was the way in which it was converted into communication. As the disfigured and mutilated bodies were entered into the symbolic, their deaths became sign. Disappearances were not uncommon during the Salvadoran civil war, but corpses like those of the UCA martyrs were left in the open as messages for anyone who might have believed in their projects. Take, for example, the description we have in Argueta’s novel: “They’d stuck a stick up his anus and it was there still. The priest’s voice could barely be heard. A little further up the road, his robe was hanging all ripped” (30). Immediately, upon finding the priest like this, the message obtains its desired effect on the townspeople:

And there I realized we had become hardened, because no one grieved or cried—

only ‘poor thing’ said within and in anguish because he was a priest; something had

happened that we had never imagined. It was a nightmare. We realized that saints

could descend from heaven. After that, nothing shocked us; all that remained was

for it to rain fire and for cats to chase dogs. They found the priest’s jeep farther up

the road, burned, in another ditch. As if it had ignited itself. That’s all we needed in

this life. From that moment on, any sin was going to seem petty. (30)

These actions are the results of an ethics of terror(ism) and in part are permitted by a complicit theology from the center. What I am meaning to highlight in this section is that Ellacuría’s theology from Central America is a response to this theology and ethics; it is the construction of an alternative. What Ellacuría gives us in these texts is a theology

123 that is thought from and positioned with the periphery. In this sense, we could consider it an ex-centric theology, with Central America being what Ellacuría considers an exemplary periphery for the purpose of Christian liberation and salvation. Argueta’s novel becomes a powerful tool for moving Ellacuría’s project beyond his death because of the way that Lupe, despite her years of being taught a theology from the center, emerges as a subject who epitomizes this new theological perspective. The subjectivity that emerges in Lupe is one that is transformed during the war and moves toward the full recognition of the other as subject, as alter. This subjectivity echoes a characterization that Martín-Baró makes of Archbishop Romero, “only one among many other

Salvadorans to whom the war has given an opportunity to develop exceptional human virtues of pure altruism and love in solidarity with the Salvadoran people” (“Political

Violence” 14).

We have already highlighted how the arrival of the new priests gave Lupe’s life a new horizon; her center, like that of her neighbors, becomes the “to help each other”—

“hacer el bien a otros”, in the original Spanish— (23). Their lives become a shared experience, a coexistence. What Lupe is exemplifying is the same sort of intersubjectivity for which Ellacuría’s historicization of Jesus calls. Argentinian philosopher Enrique

Dussel would tell us that this new subjectivity, one that is actualized by the arrival of the liberation theology priests, is one based on the ethos of liberation. It approximates a metaphysics that moves from ontology to transontology based on an ethical consciousness. In his words, it is “the capacity one has to listen to the other’s voice, the transontological word that breaks in from beyond the present system. The just protest of

124 the other may question the moral principles of the system. Only the one who has an ethical conscience can accept this questioning from the standpoint of the absolute criterion: the other as other in justice” (59). This is the subjectivity incarnated in the priests and then brought about in peasants like Lupe. Lupe specifies the results: “once we learned about the existence of rights we also learned not to bow our heads when the bosses scolds us. We learned to look them in the face” (32). To look one another in the eyes, to recognize the humanity in the other, to live for the other is the foundation of the ethos of liberation. Dussel tells us that it is the alternative drive of metaphysical justice. It goes beyond friendship and fraternity. It is love: “love of the oppressed because of their real dignity as exteriority” (65).

Through the character of Lupe, Argueta shows us what this transformation towards an ethical intersubjectivity of Christian love might look like. One of the first steps in

Lupe’s transformational process is the recognition that there is a group that wants to keep her oppressed. In that sense, she begins with an awareness of her place in the world- system, which is founded upon a particular necropolitics, as we will see in the next chapter:

We were born poor and they would like for us to continue being poor or finish us

off. We see that by the way they treat us, by the way they get rid of people so

easily. We live in poverty. WE live with hunger and still they would like to

exterminate us; they don’t want us to exist, maybe. Well, who is going to pick the

cotton? Who is going to pick the coffee beans? Who is going to clear the fields so

they can sow with ease? Who is going to work those big plantations they own?

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Maybe they’re going to do it? (176-77).

But Lupe is persistent in distinguishing herself and her own ethics from that system. The dominant subjectivity becomes repulsive to her, as is evidenced when she refers to José’s death: “My body turns to ice as I see you transformed into a piece of meat bitten by dogs, because I could see your body through the rips in your clothes, looking as if they had grabbed you and growled at you, pulling off chunks of flesh, sucking your blood. These vampires, sons of a hundred thousand whores, killers of the dirtiest stripe” (191). What these scenes illustrate is how Lupe constructs her own intersubjectivity by identifying the lack of humanity operating in her others. At first glance, this may seem as though it were simply an inversion of the dominant ethics, which also proposes that subjects like José or

Lupe are less-than-human, thus justifying the poor treatment they are given. However, what we actually see is that Lupe goes beyond a mere inversion. Despite being vampire- like, she never fails to recognize the humanity in her others.

The way her ethical intersubjectivity emerges in the novel can be surprising. We have already seen how she treated the two military men that were aiming to capture and hurt her granddaughter. But Lupe takes this ethics even further. In the novel, Private

Martínez is the author of much of the atrocious violence, including the torture and death of Lupe’s husband. She has very clear reasons to consider him her enemy, but this is not the attitude she takes: “We have barely enough to get by, but we live. We don’t wish anything bad to happen to anyone, not even now to Private Martínez” (196).

What Argueta offers us in the character of Lupe is an intersubjectivity from below that coincides with Ellacuría’s project of proposing a new ethical paradigm for co-

126 existence.lx In his chapter “Sobre la colonialidad del ser: contribuciones al desarrollo de un concepto”, Nelson Maldonado-Torres talks about the decolonial turn in cultural studies and defines what a decolonial ethics might look like. Maldonado-Torres’s concept coincides with Ellacuría’s in that the decolonial subjectivity is scandalized and horrified when faced with the naturalization of war and the complicity of certain religiosities. Both

Ellacuría and Maldonado-Torres affirm that the inspiration of these decolonial subjectivities is love; Christian love for the former and decolonial love for the latter.

Despite their different nomenclature, they coincide in how that love is defined.

Maldonado-Torres defines decolonial love this way:

understood as a political expression of metaphysical desire or the desire for the

Other of which Levinas speaks—, and its principal instrument is decolonizing

justice and politics. The condemned have, thus, the potential to transform the

modern/colonial world into a decolonized, transmodern world: a world where war

no longer represents the norm, but the authentic exception. (161)

In both theories, the potential to revert and subvert the long tradition of coloniality lies in the marginalized and oppressed subjects like Lupe. Lupe, as a fictionalized model of the incarnation of Ellacuría’s theology from Central America, is a subjectivity aimed toward love and life, not death. Lupe does not desire death even for her enemies, but rather wishes they would return to life: “It’s simply a human act. With your daily killings, you’ll know when you live again, you’ll see, you’ll see. And you’ll probably laugh with us. Join us in eating a piece of tortilla and salt. We’ll exchange nice and affectionate words. All it takes is being born again. You all should live” (138, my emphasis). In response to a

127 system that has made the third world possible and thus produced misery and death,

Argueta and Ellacuría both make a wager for life.

Despite these congruencies between Ellacuría’s project and Argueta’s novel, there is one key difference that should be highlighted. It has to do with the notion of danger and putting lives at risk. In the novel, after the priest is nearly killed, Lupe reflects on the daily terror that she and her neighbors face: “If they do that to priests, without any regard for the Church, what would they do to us?” (32). This fear is made real in the novel with the death of Lupe’s son and husband. Death is a reality that permeates the novel. To the extent, then, that we imagine Ellacuría’s project as a call for the poor and oppressed to ascend in contestation to those in power, Argueta’s novel makes it clear that this is the equivalent of a call for the poor to go and die. At least in the novel, the translation into reality of Ellacuría’s idealism is death. This, in part, was one of the primary criticisms of liberation theology: priests went out to poor communities, taught them about their rights and incited discontent. But without any means of changing the structure, they were essentially feeding a fire of violence with a fuel that was made up of the lives of the poor.

What I want to signal here is the way in which the politics of Ellacuría’s project differ slightly from this vision I have traced. Ellacuría’s call to action is not a call for an uprising on behalf of the poor. His is a call for descension; he is asking for those in power—specifically institutions like the Society of Jesus, the Church at large, and the university—to fundamentally shift their places of knowledge production and theology.

He is not calling for the poor to change, to begin to demand their rights. His voice is directed at those who have been dispossessing them of those rights. This is the reason that

128 his theological project becomes political and the reason why it is dangerous. He spells this out in his Latin American reading of the Exercises:

To actively be with the oppressed inevitably puts the Christian prophet in constant

dispute with the oppressors. Danger, then, is the criteria for the authenticity of faith

and of the promise of resurrection. The announcement of the negation of the world

must be dangerous. The absence of danger is the criteria for that which is not in

opposition with the world. (“Lectura Latinoamericana” 99)

The poor are already in the right place. It is the world that denies them—and in doing so, denies the historical Jesus—that needs to move.

In my interest to revitalize and historicize Ellacuría’s project, literature like One

Day of Life is important in that it registers the particular context in which Ellacuría’s theology from Central America begins to emerge, a context imbued with revolutionary ideals and movements. Ellacuría explains the novelty of this context:

But what makes the point more novel in our situation of Latin America is that the

conjunction of faith and history, of belief and political action, is referred to from

and for the poor, from and for those who have been immemorially forgotten and

subdued. The phenomenon has precedents in history, but the way in which it is

presented today in some countries makes it a new phenomenon that should be

analyzed carefully, because in it a renovation of the people and a profound

reconversion of the Church are occurring. In seeking the differentiated and

mutually potentiated unity of the poor as a political place and a theological place

is one of the major themes of reflection and duty of our time. (“Los pobres” 159)

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Ellacuría writes that persecution does not result from the mere announcement of the kingdom of God. If that were true, Jesus would have died of old age. Rather, it comes from the force of the historical character of that announcement when it develops a denunciatory characteristic. Ellacuría’s project was inserted into the historical reality he describes above and that we see chronicled in Argueta’s novel. This reality was one in which the situation of the Central American poor demanded that structures and institutions be changed. Ellacuría’s voice, the voice of what he calls historical madness, sought to subvert the fundamental values of the mundane cultures that dominated the world and reacted to the demands of those Central American poor. In the 25 years since

Ellacuría’s death, this reflection and this work have not been completed. Although we no longer have Ellacuría present to guide us, reading his testimonial voice and the way it reverberates in the cultural text can move us in the right direction to carry his project forward.

Part of understanding Ellacuría’s project is recognizing that his death was not sought after, but found; death found him because the world could not accept this call to re-build, to re-imagine humanity, especially in a moment when the needs and demands of the poor were becoming so pronounced. Ellacuría’s theology, one directed at the center but conceived from the perspective of Central America’s poor and in response to the system of death imposed upon them, was considered to be an existential threat to the world-system, thus necessitating his elimination. His prophetic voice, like that of the historical Jesus, had to be silenced. His death was, in a sense, accepted by the world because theologies thought and structured from the center have made the world

130 complicit. The world is not structured around the dignity of human life, but rather around other concepts, as Argueta’s novel illustrates: “Evil appears suddenly. Where it’s least expected. They defend private property—that principle is sacred—because its possible for our hands to be stained with blood; but to appropriate what isn’t ours, that’s out of the question” (29). The articulation of evil and private property signals how even the religious has become subordinate to the economic and serves as a transition to my next chapter, in which I look at Ellacuría’s denouncement of how private property had been ideologized in order to maintain a system of violence and parasitism that negatively affects subjects like Lupe. Ellacuría himself asks, “What type of religion produces or tends to produce a determined agrarian structure? To what point does a radical change in the relationship between man and land and between the men of the land with the rest of the social structure have repercussions on the type of religion? Towards what mode of understanding religion should she who wants the fullness of the campesino lean? (“Un marco” 575). We should keep these questions in mind as we move into the next chapter, but I want to highlight that these questions accentuate the importance and the capacity of a theology from Central America, especially if our intent is to “overturn history, to subvert it, and send it in another direction” (Ellacuría “The challenges” 173).

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Chapter 3

Historicizing Private Property with Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre and Lucia Cerna’s La Verdad: A witness to the Salvadoran Martyrs: Thinking from Central America to Undo the Colonial Legacy.

Private property, in effect, more than private is property that deprives.

And “free enterprise” holds the Nation hostage.

Let’s save property and make enterprise truly free converting them into property and enterprise for all.

For all the Nation. “Proposition”, Roque Dalton

Along with presenting the thought of Ignacio Ellacuría, I have been arguing that cultural texts represent an important and useful corpus of knowledge for understanding the Central American context. I agree with Ileana Rodríguez about the importance of including literature as a cultural text in my research into the political, political violence, cultural studies, and decolonial thought. She maintains that it is literature and not mass media, periodicals, or social sciences that constitute a privileged place for safeguarding

“the memory not of the dead, that is already known, but of the living; of the logic of events that led to the deaths that the living remember and to which they bear witness”

(“Operación” 21). This valuation of the cultural text seems particularly appropriate for

132 the two cultural texts we will be including in this chapter: Horacio Castellanos Moya’s

2001 novel, El arma en el hombre and Lucía Cerna’s 2014 testimonio, La Verdad: A witness to the Salvadoran Martyrs, written with Mary Jo Ignoffo. Both texts register in very different ways the way in which land constituted a polemical epicenter for the

Salvadoran conflict and a foundational part of the logic that permitted more than 70,000 deaths during the civil war, including that of Ignacio Ellacuría.

These texts intersect at the assassination of the UCA martyrs. Castellanos Moya’s novel is a fictional representation of a post-war El Salvador. The protagonist of the novel,

Robocop (Juan Alberto García), is a former member of the Acahuapa battalion – a reference to the Atlacatl Battalion, the unit of the Salvadoran military responsible for the assassination of the martyrs of the UCA. Robocop suggests that his military unit had participated in the assassination of the priests, an incident which unchains a series of events that leads to his being unemployed: “It was terrorist propaganda: they turned against us because we had put them in their place. The fact that one unit of the battalion had participated in the execution of some Spanish Jesuit priests was also used to pursue us relentlessly” (11). The second text, Lucía Cerna’s testimonio, tells her story as an employee of the Jesuits and a key witness to their assassination. Like Robocop, this event is one that changes her life. Because she speaks up about what she saw the night of their murder, Lucía and her husband Jorge must flee the country and start a new life in the

United States.

That Lucía and the fictional Robocop’s lives are radically impacted by the death of the Jesuits is not their only similarity. Both Lucía and Robocop are born to the

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Salvadoran lower class. This fact is important when we consider the history of El

Salvador, especially during the conjuncture of the civil war. These texts register the way in which the hierarchies and social divisions that were established during the country’s colonial period had endured into the second half of the twentieth century—and many would say until today. The result of this continuity was a constant conflict between the notion of communal lands and private property due to an unequal distribution of land and resources, one that benefited those who had established themselves as hacendados and constituted the oligarchic class. In fact, the land reforms proposed in the 70s and 80s— the debate within which we can find Ellacuría’s work on private property that we will be analyzing here—were based on the premise that the proper allocation and use of

Salvadoran land could solve the country’s problems of poverty and misery. That is to say, the causes of poverty did not have to do with a lack of resources but rather with their distribution. The historical reality of El Salvador that is reflected in these texts is one in which a consolidation of power that favors the owning of private property by a very small group of elites results in a governmental model that serves only the interests of those same elites, the oligarchic class. One way this is made possible is through the connection between the oligarchy and the repressive military forces, as Ignoffo signals in her commentary on Cerna’s testimonio. In her study of the Salvadoran conflict, Tommie Sue

Montgomery quotes an oligarch, Orlando de Sola, with respect to this relationship: “We have traditionally bought the military’s guns […] and have paid them to pull the trigger”

(qtd on 37). The two cultural texts in this chapter present us with two very different narratives from the perspectives of two subjects on opposite ends of those guns: Robocop

134 serves the landed class in pulling that trigger and Lucía comes very close to being on the receiving end of that exchange.

The Armed Forces and soldiers like Robocop, then, were used first to consolidate the power of the dominant land-owning elites and then to perpetuate their political power.lxi Beginning with the peasant uprising of the 1930s in response to the unequal distribution of land and resources, the country entered a cycle of growing intolerance and attempted reforms that were continually met with brutal repression and a constant re- consolidation of power by the conservative factions of the society. Ignacio Ellacuría explains that this socio-political reality leaves the Salvadoran poor in what he characterizes as “limit-situation”, borrowing the term from Karl Jaspers.lxii As he characterizes it, the emergence of a limit-situation condemns the existing structure as unjust and leaves the subject with only evil choices. The cultural texts we will be studying in this chapter register Robocop and Lucía’s responses to this limit-situation.

Their differing responses indicate the sorts of subjectivities we are working with.

The fictional character in Castellanos Moya’s novel serves as an illustration of the sort of subjectivity that is shaped by the modern/colonial world-system. In that sense, Robocop accepts the values of the system even when they go against his own class interests and result in violence. His is a subjectivity produced by coloniality, one that has been structured by the non-ethics of war, a characteristic element of our modernity, according to cultural critic Nelson Maldonado-Torres:

The ethics of the ego conquiro stops being only a special code of behavior that is

legitimate in times of war and becomes in the Americas—and gradually in the

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whole world—, by virtue of misanthropic skepticism, the idea of race and

coloniality of power, a conduct that reflects the way things are (a logic of

naturalization of the socially hierarchized differences, which will reach its climax

in the use of natural science to validate racism in the nineteenth century). (139)

By operating under and internalizing this non-ethics of war, Robocop also becomes an integral part to the system’s necropedagogy, a theme to which we will return later.

Robocop presents us with a subjectification that results from the very ideologization that

Ellacuría attempts to deconstruct in the political writings that we are studying in this chapter. That is to say, Robocop personifies the necessity to historicize.

On the other hand, Lucía Cerna’s testimonio presents us with an alternative response to the limit-situation created by the inequality that structured her country. Much like Robocop, Lucía is interpellated by extreme poverty. Robocop himself, however, would be quick to differentiate himself from Lucía, both in terms of ethnicity and education: “I had advantages. I am not a dumb peasant, like the majority of the troops: I was born in Ilopango, a poor neighborhood, but in the capital; and I studied until eighth grade” (Castellanos Moya 10). Perhaps due in part to ethnic and gender differences, but also because of her own vital-life choices, Lucía is not able to align herself with the dominant system in the same way that Robocop can. She is not able to participate in the masculine violence with the sort of impunity that Robocop utilizes in order to survive.

Her narrative also makes it clear that she does not desire to participate in this system. To a certain degree, Lucía resists the values and behaviors inculcated by the modern/colonial world-system, a decision reinforced by her encounter with the martyrs of the UCA,

136 especially Ignacio Ellacuría and Ignacio Martín-Baró. This is true even to the point of risking her life so that the truth of the events of the night of November 15, 1989 would be known. The impact of these two priests is explicitly stated in her testimonio: “I couldn’t stop crying because I still missed Father Nachito [Martín-Baró] and Father Ellacu. They gave me stability in my life, confidence in myself. They talked to me as a person, even for very short time, but I missed them. It took a very long time before I could speak of them without crying and becoming very upset” (138). Lucía’s testimonio calls attention to the ways in which her life can be read as a sort of continuation and historicization of the work and ethics that martyrs like Ellacuría and Martín-Baró began but were unable to finish. At the same time, the injustices that Lucía suffered in order to serve the truth signal that there is still much more historicization to be done in order to deideologize and construct a new framework for a new society based on coexistence rather than competition and elimination.

The idea of private property is present in both of these cultural texts as a structural factor that impacts the lives of their protagonists. It is an unjust conceptualization and defense of private property that place both Lucía and Robocop in the limit-situation in which the majority of Salvadorans found themselves during the second half of the 20th century. Together, these cultural texts contribute to our understanding of El Salvador and highlight the need to apply Ellacuría’s methodology of historicization in order to critically consider the concepts around which we structure our societies.

***

Land and inequality as registered in the cultural text.

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The assassination of the Jesuit priests marks the beginning of the end for Robocop’s military career in Castellanos Moya’s novel El arma en el hombre. Shortly after that event, peace agreements are made, his military unit is demobilized, and he finds himself on his own. The plot of the novel follows the post-war struggle of this character in his attempt to re-integrate into civil society, no easy task for a subject trained to kill at the discretion of his superiors. The very thought of reaching peace agreements seems schemed to our protagonist until, after weeks of being demobilized, he begins to realize that the war was actually over. The way the State planned for the massive demobilization of the armed forces gives us some indication of the link between the military and property holders: “But now the leaders said that some of the demobilized would go to different units, others would enter into private security companies, and there was also the option to receive ‘reintegration workshops’ that would allow us to learn a trade in order to find employment. But it would be more difficult” (13). The text suggests a direct link between serving the state militarily and protecting property through private security companies.

Robocop is not selected for a different military outfit and so he must find his own means of subsistence once his severance pay —only a few months of salary— is exhausted. To address this problem, he meets with another former soldier from the

Acahuapa battalion and they begin to use the few weapons they had been able to maintain from their time in the army in order to steal from the rich. After running a few jobs, they begin to specialize their work and join with a criminal network that ‘disappeared’ luxury cars until they could be sold for profit. In this way, Robocop begins/continues to work for

138 private property, though now he is appropriating it rather than protecting it. Later,

Robocop encounters another ex-member of Acahuapa, Saúl, who had been secretly working with one of the battalion chiefs who was able to keep a position in the slimmed- down military forces. Robocop describes the sort of jobs that Saúl was carrying out as

“secret, special operations, organically unrelated to the institution, but always in the fight” (30). Saúl arranges a meeting between Robocop and his boss, Major Linares, and it is there that the major explains to Robocop that the anti-communist, terrorist fighting that had characterized the actions of the military prior to the peace accords had been privatized, but that it continued to occur. It is also in this meeting that Linares recruits

Robocop for a mission to eliminate the clandestine operations of the still functioning rebellion forces. This mission, though authorized by the high command, would be totally detached from the armed forces in order to maintain the guise of democracy in the post- war environment.

Robocop accomplishes his mission and eliminates the target. He tells us that this is the first political assassination in the country since the signing of the peace agreements and he laments the public turmoil and denouncement that it causes, but not for the reasons we might expect: “Things had changed. A few years ago nobody would have said anything because a terrorist was liquidated, but now, with this mumbo of democracy, guys like me find it increasingly difficult to do our job” (39). Because the government promises to investigate and find the people responsible for the crime, Robocop is forced to leave the country until things settle down. The chief of the operation, Major Linares, arranges for him to escape to Guatemala: “Major Linares recommended me to Coronel

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Castillo, his close finquero friend in Guatemala. I joined his escort. I passed the majority of my time in the country. The man had half a dozen fincas in Alta Verapaz, two of them in zones bordering the theater of operations for the counterinsurgency war. The coronel’s other five escorts had also been soldiers – ‘kaibiles’” (40, my emphasis). Once again, Castellanos Moya draws a link between the Central American landed class and the most lethal sectors of the armed forces, even after the war. Robocop’s Guatemalan counterparts were the soldiers who were responsible for the worst violations of human rights during the Guatemalan armed conflict. One of the soldiers, now employed as part of a private security force along side Robocop, explains the process of joining the most elite battalion in the Guatemalan army: “He explained to me the methods used to soften the population and to clean the area of terrorists: each kaibil must rape a girl and then drink her blood, he said. Indian things” (41). This quote draws a link in the cultural text between this perverse mentality and the subjectivities used to protect private property for the finqueros of Central America.

This fictional account of one soldier’s supposed ‘reintegration’ into civil society registers the impossibilities of deactivating a subjectivity that had been converted into a weapon in order to serve a particular group’s interests. Many episodes in the novel make it clear that Robocop is a subject that objectifies his other while at the same time being used as an object himself —especially by the Salvadoran state and the armed forces. As a soldier of the Acahuapa battalion, Robocop should be considered a tool for the necropolitics of the State. Robocop himself seems to express some level of consciousness about his own instrumentalization and the impossibility of any sort of reversion to a state

140 of man-not-as-weapon: “Despite the talks where the leaders explained to us the scope of peace and presented our options for the future, I knew that my life was about to change, as if I would soon be an orphan: the Armed Forces had been my father and the Acahuapa battalion my mother. I could not imagine myself converted into a civilian overnight”

(12). When the need to have men-as-weapons dissipates with the signing of the peace agreements, the abject nature of subjects like Robocop is reiterated. The State no longer needs them and so they are once again excluded from legal protection and left to fend for themselves. However, as Castellanos’ novel registers, that the State no longer needs men- as-weapons does not mean that the system cannot make use of them. Robocop’s state and ethics of war do not dissipate with the signing of the peace treaty; his subjectivity is one that exists within and for war. It is a part of him. The place that Robocop goes when the state no longer needs nor can protect him brings us back to the topic of property: he goes to Guatemala to work for a finquero who owns large tracts of land as a part of his private security forces.

What is especially telling in the novel is the way in which there is no contradiction for Robocop between his work as a soldier serving the Salvadoran Armed Forces and as a private employee working for a land baron. They are one in the same. Castellanos

Moya’s novel suggests, then, that men like Robocop had been converted into weapons — both inside and outside the institution of the State— in order to protect a particular conceptualization of private property. The notion of private property that is being defended here, what Ellacuría would call an ideologization, is one that comes from the

Central American oligarchy. As we will see shortly with Ellacuría’s texts, the power that

141 the oligarchic class wields in defending their interests and protecting this conceptualization of private property is one that is not only able to control the armed forces but is also able to coopt the State itself. In 1976 when the Salvadoran government attempted to enact a law that would transform the agrarian reality of the country, private interest groups with strong ties to the oligarchic elite put pressure on the Molina administration until it folded —after only three short months. President Molina had assured the country that the project was fully supported by the military and he had promised “to not step back”.lxiii Nonetheless, the National Association of Private

Enterprise (Asociación Nacional de la Empresa Privada—ANEP) was successful in their campaign to discredit and transform the law. Once we have analyzed the concept of property and Ellacuría’s methodology for historicizing it, we will see that the subjectivities represented by Castellanos Moya’s protagonist and the Molina government function under the same logic, informed by an ideologization of private property.

Seeing the link between the landed elite and the violent armed forces in Central

America that is registered in the cultural text should help us to understand why Ignacio

Ellacuría argues that land is one of the most essential elements to consider when attempting to overcome the extreme levels of inequality in El Salvador. He was not alone in this assertion. Many public intellectuals, especially from the UCA were speaking out about the need for an agrarian reform. The government had attempted a reform in 1970, but when the opposition parties lost vital seats in the National Assembly in the elections that same year, the measures were quickly forgotten. Four years later, the legislative assembly wrote a law allowing the government to take control of land that was fallow or

142 insufficiently used. In 1975, the government created the Salvadoran Institute of Agrarian

Transformation (ISTA) to oversee such matters. On the backs of these two laws, the

Molina administration proposed the passage of one more law called the First Project of

Agrarian Transformation.

The law itself was a conservative proposal, according to Ellacuría. The government was very careful not to anger either side of the national debate. On the one hand, they needed to address the real problem of inequality in the country; an inequality that had reached staggering levels and constituted the limit-situation to which Ellacuría refers.

There was a political need to calm the popular forces that were demanding changes. On the other hand, they had to be careful not to appear socialist in order to not alienate the dominant oligarchic class in the country and to not lose the support of the U.S. government. They were even careful to avoid using the word reform and instead called their measures an agrarian “transformation”.lxiv ⁠ The project included the nationalization of almost 61,000 hectares (over 150,000 acres) in Usulután and San Miguel and the distribution of that land to 12,000 peasant families. In her study of El Salvador, Tommie

Sue Montgomery explains that the majority of the land that was to be expropriated was being used as cow pastures or cotton production and was not particularly important to the country’s agricultural market.lxv That is to say, although the measures would not have a large impact on those who already owned land, it would represent a fundamental change for the families who would gain access to land for the first time.

While Robocop is complicit with the dominant notion of property that the agrarian transformation was attempting to address, Lucía Cerna’s testimonio in La Verdad: A

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Witness to the Salvadoran Martyrs suggests that we should consider her to be a victim of this mode of property. In her narrative, she tells us that she grew up in Antiguo Cuscatlán and the details that she mentions about her childhood indicate the way in which private property affected her life: “Now the place where I grew up is the botanical garden, but then everything belonged to Walter T. Deininger, a millionaire. This man was owner of so much, just incredible, including San Benito, sugarcane fields, and orange groves […]

This man […] owned all the houses for the people working on his land” (1). Immediately,

Lucía’s situation requires us to visualize and feel the desperation about which Ellacuría speaks. Lucía’s family fell into that former, subaltern category and their lives were essentially owned by their rich, German employer. The incredible disparity between the rich and the wealthy is especially salient in this first portion of Lucía’s story. The picture that she paints is one of a single family who owns entire cities while those who work for the family do not even own the homes in which they live. Although Lucía’s family worked on the land, but they had no ownership of it, no legal ties to it.

Lucía’s testimonio is especially helpful in understanding the context within which

Ellacuría’s political writings fit. We can certainly affirm that Lucía’s words contribute a more human and affective version of the same historical reality of El Salvador presented in Tommie Sue Montgomery’s history of the moments leading up to the Salvadoran civil war. For her part, Montgomery explains that the best way to understand the effects of inequality in human terms is to compare the distribution of income to the minimum cost of living. By looking at the numbers from a 1976-1977 Planning Ministry survey, she finds that a large percentage of the population was not earning the minimum income

144 needed to cover life’s basic necessities. Another study by the World Bank in 1969 showed that the bottom 40 percent of the population earned only 11.2 percent of the total personal income of the country. These trends continued to grow into the 80s when a 1985 study showed that 96 percent of rural families and 80 percent of urban families did not earn enough to cover their basic needs. Lucía’s story exemplifies the struggle to survive that the poor majorities of El Salvador have lived on a daily basis for centuries and puts that struggle in personal and affective terms.

This struggle is largely centered around a notion of private property. The negative impact of this conceptualization on Lucía becomes even more appalling when she recognizes her own poverty with respect to food: “When we passed the orange grove, I did not take an orange from the tree. ‘We are poor,’ I told my brother, ‘but the tree is not mine, and I do not take.’ If the orange was on the ground, I took, cut out the bad part with a knife, and gave half to Óscar, half to me […] When the guards saw me pick oranges off the ground, ones the birds knocked down, they let me, even though it was forbidden” (3).

The notion of private property operative in El Salvador during Lucía’s childhood even prohibited starving children from eating the fallen, rotting fruit that belonged to the rich landowners We might imagine Robocop as being one of those guards paid to keep the poor from picking and eating that fruit from the land of the rich. The injustice of this national reality is even further accentuated in Lucía’s testimonio when she describes the home of Don Ernesto, a member of the oligarchic elite, one of the “Fourteen Families that owned everything in El Salvador” and the employer of Lucía’s first husband: “The family had a cook just for the dogs. She made sopa de res, meat soup for those big dogs.

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Big bowls with meat! […] It was a big bowl for each! Too much! My husband had the job to brush the teeth of the dogs. They had huge, gold teeth” (21). On the one hand, a family who ate small portions of beans with lard and tortillas. On the other, dogs with gold teeth that ate big plates of meat soup.

Ignacio Ellacuría’s political writings respond to the national reality illustrated in

Lucía’s testimonio and denounce the sort of service to a capitalist, profit-driven notion of private property that is represented in the character of Robocop. Ellacuría argues that although the measures proposed by ISTA do not set out to resolve the entire problem of land inequality in the country, they do represent an important first step. He, along with the board of directors of the UCA, publically announced his faith and support in the project in an article published in the journal of the UCA, Estudios Centroamericanos

(ECA), shortly after the law was introduced in 1976. Land and its effect on labor, they argue, are essential parts of the solution for the unrest in the country: “Thereby, the university has been advocating a radical change in the structure of ownership and land tenure as indispensable to start resolving the inhuman suffering and degrading poverty of the majority of Salvadorans [and as] the beginning of a solution of structural change that leads to a new model of society” (“El primer proyecto” 560). The potential that Ellacuría and his colleagues at the UCA find in the law did not have to do with the scope of the reform, but rather with the way in which land would be conceptualized and the precedent that the law would set. Had this law passed as it was proposed, the radical change in the notion of property and labor, which would have been recognized in juridical and institutional terms, would have constituted a move toward a new social contract. As

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Ellacuría wrote, it would have been an “implementation of an irreversible process of structural change” (“El primer proyecto” 559).

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The ANEP-ISTA debate and the need to historicize.

In her testimonio, Lucía is perplexed by the lifestyle of the rich in her country.

She tells, us, “I do not understand how they have a lot of money and do not work hard”

(21). How does one justify and rationalize the difference between the two primary social classes in El Salvador. In his writings during the debate on the 1976 proposed reforms,

Ellacuría makes the argument that this situation cannot be rationalized or justified. This extreme inequality merits only condemnation and a critical thinking that can appropriately refute the claims of any theory that would uphold such a system. He characterizes the national reality in the following way: “As has been shown over and over, the situation of the vast majority is one of desperation, while that of the minority— which is very much associated directly or indirectly with landholding—is not only one of luxurious wealth, but of true domination” (“The historicization” 105). As this quote indicates, Ellacuría speaks directly to the historical reality that is registered in both

Lucía’s testimonio and Castellanos Moya’s novel. Intellectuals on all sides of the debate at the time were in agreement as to the fact that this situation was unsustainable and in need of remedy. No one was debating the fact that change was necessary. Rather, the point of contention revolved around whether or not to address the root, structural causes.

As Ellacuría was finding out, “No one seems to want the effects to last forever, although many do not want the causes to change” (“The historicization” 106).

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Among these many who did not want to address the structural causes that were affecting the country were the members of ANEP. After the 1974 and 1975 laws that laid the foundation for the 1976 proposed agrarian transformation, the country’s oligarchic class began protesting the government’s land policies and endeavored to have the laws overturned in court. When those attempts failed, they turned to mass media and launched a massive campaign opposing the proposals as they had been detailed by the new law. In its publications ANEP claims that it is not against agrarian transformation but rather it feels as though this particular proposal had been rushed and that it was “divorced from national realities” (qtd in Montgomery 69). It is in the context of this polemic and against the position of ANEP that in 1976 Ellacuría writes the text that outlines a methodology for thinking from Central America: “The Historicization of the Concept of Property”.lxvi

Ellacuría begins his article with a charge against the special interest groups that are defending the oligarchic ruling class in El Salvador. Their response to the proposed reforms, he tells us, gives an especially clear example of how ideologies can work as a false rationalization that masks actual interests. This is especially true because the agrarian reforms put so many different realities and interests into play. We should recall that in chapter one we saw Ellacuría’s particular conceptualization of ideology, which is different from ideologization. Ideology is a necessary part of rational thought because it is the manner in which the thinking subject apprehends and understands its reality. He adds to what we previously saw and explains that all thought is necessarily interested, calling this the biological and material nature of human knowledge. This characteristic of human thought accounts for the fact that the human subject does not just use knowledge

148 only to know how things are but also in its struggle to survive. The only way to overcome this aspect of human thought is to recognize it and to confront it critically, though thought can never be free of interest. Ideology becomes problematic when it is used to mask reality for individual or group interests. This, in Ellacuría’s terms, is ideologization.

The premise of Ellacuría’s article, then, is that there has been a great deal of ideologization occurring in the debate around the agrarian transformation. As a methodology to uncover and analyze this ideologization, Ellacuría proposes his historicization. Let us read how he describes this methodology: “Our overall approach is to examine the historical context of the concept of property and to show how the historical variability and the cultural context of this concept undermine its current ideological role, and thereby constitute a necessary condition for social change” (“The historicization” 106). Ellacuría justifies the need to historicize the notion of private property because other important aspects of the Salvadoran society, such as labor, power, freedom, and justice, all intersect around this concept. Given that, the concept of private property structures different modes of living and different types of social contracts.

Moreover, the idea of private property is especially helpful in revealing the two fundamentally opposing ideological perspectives that are operating in El Salvador: “that of those who are on top and see their privileges threatened, and that of those who from a condition of oppression realize that they must overcome this condition and that right is on their side” (“The historicization” 107). Although Ellacuría recognizes these two ideologies as competing in his time, he follows the thought of Marx, Gramsci, and

Durkheim when he claims that it is the ideology of the dominant class that structures the

149 collective consciousness. This, as we know, is how Gramsci arrives at the concept of hegemony. This fact makes the task of deideologizing the collective consciousness even more important in order to construct a counter-hegemony. In El Salvador, Ellacuría tells us, property is one of the primary elements that decisively constitute the collective consciousness.

The method, then, for historicizing the concept of property is a simple questioning of the concept’s relationship with the human person. This method is based on the premise that concepts like property are historical concepts, as opposed to abstract or universal concepts. To say that property is a historical concept is to say that the concept does not always refer to the same historical reality nor does it always have the same effect on the social body. Rather, property as a historical concept refers to changing histories and changing realities that depend on their given structures and contexts to give meaning to the term, a meaning that also changes according to the historical process within which it is embedded. Ellacuría gives us a few examples of this with respect to property:

Thus, it is not the same to own the means of production in the context of medieval

feudalism and in that of modern capitalism. Owning land is not the same as owning

a building or a computer; owning land in a country with 20,000 square kilometers

and four million inhabitants is not the same as owning it in a country with 200,000

square kilometers and two million inhabitants. (“The historicization 108)

Because the meanings of historical concepts change with history, we must constantly reshape and re-conceptualize them. The proof, or the truth, if you will, of the concept should be found in its realization, in the way it is made real and material in history. For

150 the concept of property, then, the historicization of the concept implies testing whether it produces what it ideologically sets out to produce in the current historical-social context: initiative, personal freedom, etc.

Ellacuría illustrates that when dominant ideologies have become ideologized, they begin to live off a fundamental fallacy that converts them into universal or abstract concepts. Once they have done this, the concepts are admitted and accepted as being true even in historical realities that would actually constitute the negation of the concept. This ideologization is at play when young people join the armed forces in order to risk their lives defending absolute concepts like the right to own private property or, as recent events indicate, freedom of expression. In El Salvador, private property had been ideologized to the point that it had been consolidated in the collective consciousness as an unalienable right. Historicizing concepts such as private property, then, can be the beginning of their de-ideologization. Ellacuría’s claim is that the First Project of Agrarian

Transformation, while imperfect, provides us with a principle to this process of historicization of an imported conceptualization of private property that does not respond to the historical reality of El Salvador.

In order to sustain this claim, Ellacuría compares the argument of ANEP and that of the government.lxvii Upon comparing the two perspectives, Ellacuría finds that the discussion between the two show how ANEP is using an ideologized, abstract, and universal concept of property while the government has begun the task of historicizing it.

The key difference between the two perspectives is that ANEP has not considered the real, historical consequences of their notion of property in the country. With respect to

151 this lack in ANEP’s argument, Ellacuría writes the following: “a form of property that produces the disastrous social effects we witness in our country, as underscored by the government and not denied by ANEP, cannot be regarded as the kind of property the situation needs” (“The Historicization” 114).

Three examples should suffice to show how the government has responded to

ANEP’s arguments by historicizing their notion of property. First, as Ellacuría points out,

ANEP claims to defend values such as individual, private initiative. With respect to this, the government has called into question whether or not the system of private property has been effective in inculcating this private initiative in the majority of the population. The government cites, for example, that only in the area to be affected by the reforms, the rate of unemployment is 54.3 percent and the labor expectations for peasants is that they will find work for only 141 of the 365 days in a year. This reality negates any argument that the actual system of private property is effective in promoting private initiative. Ellacuría also argues that ANEP has not proven and cannot prove that there is any absolute or universal connection between private property and private enterprise. Moreover, the argument that the human subject is not willing to work unless it is to gain private property, produce profit, or domination over others, although possibly true, is a situation that should be changed:

Perhaps many people are unwilling to work unless they receive certain selfish

gratifications from their work, but it should be acknowledged that this is not an

ethically ideal state of things. Salvadoran private business people might not be

willing to put their best energies to work unless they are to receive large, easy, and

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sure profits, but it should be acknowledged that such a situation should change and

that such people ought to change. (“The Historicization” 114)

We will see shortly that this sort of argument and construction of the laboring and business class has its roots in the colonial period.

Secondly, ANEP insists on the point of productivity in its arguments. However, the government shows that in the history of El Salvador the private sector has not been able to create a dignified living situation for all Salvadorans. Therefore, the system of private land ownership in El Salvador has not been able to reach the productivity levels that it has claimed to do.

Finally, ANEP articulates an argument that privileges productivity over distribution while the new law proposes the opposite. ANEP’s logic is similar to the trickle-down economic theories that imagine that once productivity is increased, distribution will also automatically increase as a consequence. Once again, the government uses numbers to show that the historical reality disproves this abstract idea. In the zone in question for the agrarian transformation one single landholder is able to collect the income of 6,968 peasant families. These numbers are the statistical reflection of the sort of reality that

Lucía articulates in her testimonio and clearly indicate that there is a distribution problem. For Ellacuría, these examples illustrate that ANEP is defending a notion of private property that serves oligarchic class interests but that does not serve the well- being of the Salvadoran population. He articulates his condemnation of their arguments and their means in this way: “Obviously, ANEP representatives are using their economic might to defend what they are at present; the arguments they use serve to justify their

153 present position. This is not a theoretical discussion seeking objectivity, but rather an abusive use of the media in order to defend themselves and attack others” (“The

Historicization” 111). While ANEP’s notion of private property is an ideologization, that presented by the ISTA is one that responds in a much more profound way to the historical reality of the poor majorities of El Salvador. In this way, the government has begun the work of historicizing private property, a process that Ellacuría very explicitly tells us must be located in and from El Salvador. His texts expound upon this situated thinking.

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A thinking from Central America: looking to the past to understand the present.

What is therefore really at stake when it is said that the right of property is being denied? The question should be answered from within El Salvador, on the basis of what property is historically in El Salvador, and on the basis of what we want our country to be. This is a historic question and it requires a historic response, not one that is abstract and universal. It does us little good to talk about the ideal advantages of one kind of property, if reality is showing us that this kind of property is leading to the opposite of what it claims to be seeking. (Ellacuría “The Historicization” 110, my emphasis)

As the epigraph above demonstrates, Ellacuría makes a call for a specific thinking from El Salvador. Chapters one and two of this dissertation have suggested that Ellacuría himself had the philosophical and theological foundations for this sort of thinking, and in his political writings, especially in his analysis of the government’s historicization of the concept of private property, he indeed gives us an excellent example of what that thinking from Central America might look like. This is especially salient in how Ellacuría accounts for the past-presentness of Central America, allowing us to situate him within a larger discussion of Central American thinkers who emphasize that the past continues to

154 structure the present in a negative way.lxviii The way in which Ellacuría articulates this image of a past-present becomes immediately evident in his public approval of the new law of agrarian transformation: “Private ownership of land has been affected in a new way in the contemporary history of El Salvador in order to rectify past damages in times of the colony and liberal reform (the usurpation of indigenous lands, laws for ending pasture lands and communal lands) that gave rise to the current concentration of property” (“El primer proyecto” 561). The basic idea we see articulated here is that the current system of land ownership has its origins in the colony. The inequalities that peasants like Lucía have known in El Salvador date back some 500 years.

Cultural critics who are familiar with contemporary Latin American thought may have already noted a similarity between Ellacuría’s understanding of the origin of the unjust system of land ownership in El Salvador and the concept of coloniality of power and knowledge, as developed by Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano.lxix Quijano’s premise is that even after the chains of colonialism were supposedly broken, its legacy has continued to live on and reproduce itself. Members of the coloniality group have further developed the concept to argue that our modernity is actually dependent on the coloniality that Quijano describes. It is the underside or the darker side of modernity, as

Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo would respectively have it.lxx Clearly, Ellacuría does not use the term coloniality in his own analysis of Salvadoran national reality, though he is speaking about the same sort of colonial inheritance and its effect on his country’s present times.

Critics of the coloniality group have pointed out that Quijano’s theory is too

155 abstract and attempts to encompass the entire world-system, thus painting with too broad a brush the many different local histories that constitute the global system. They do not dispute that capitalism is a world-system, but rather that coloniality risks covering up its unevenness, a characteristic that could be useful in its undoing. Moreover, the results of this are a normalization of colonialism, as though its thinking is uniform and universal.lxxi

Nonetheless, the concept of coloniality has made important contributions to the theoretical tools at our disposal for analyzing Latin American history and culture, as well as the geopolitics of our now global system of power. Without disputing its usefulness or its significant addition to the field, the concept of coloniality should be problematized.

Or, as Ellacuría would suggest, it should be historicized. Much like property, it is not an abstract or universal concept, but rather a historical one and so its meaning will fluctuate in different contexts and geographies. Ellacuría’s methodology of historicization allows us to overcome this problematic with coloniality by constructing a critical thought that avoids ideologizing the term, as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui seems to accuse the group of doing. At the same time, Ellacuría’s own work on historicizing the concept of private property does not contradict the notion of coloniality. In fact, it seems to reinforce it.

Nevertheless, my argument is that Ellacuría’s work on understanding how private property operates in El Salvador constitutes an important piece of the puzzle. His political writings with respect to the agrarian reforms of the 1970s in El Salvador provide us with concrete examples of how the structures, institutions, and mentalities operative during the conquest of Central America have resulted in a national reality characterized by misery for the majority of its population. Moreover, when we put his work into dialogue with

156 other important Central American intellectuals, we begin to get a better idea of how the colonial past continues to structure the present. The image that begins to emerge is one of a society founded upon a colonial ambition that produces a necropolitics of parasitism and a culture of inequality and violence. The thought that uncovers this past-presentness is what I am calling a thinking from Central America. My argument is that we should consider Ellacuría to be one of the foundational thinkers in constituting this epistemological, alternative project.

When describing his methodology for historicizing the concept of private property,

Ellacuría highlights the need to consider the origins and realization of agrarian property in El Salvador. For that purpose, he cites a 1975 publication by David Browning that shows that the current system of land ownership originated from the dispossession of

Native American land by the conquistadores. Those lands, and especially the fertile land in the country, were eventually converted into large tracts of land that permitted the owners to accumulate sufficient political and economical power to exploit those around them. The native population was left with only small parcels of land that, in most cases, was not enough for a family’s sustenance. Hunger then produces the need to sell one’s labor, even in unfavorable conditions, in order to survive. We see a double politics in colonialism, then, in which the colonizer dispossesses the colonial subject of the means to life in order to obtain control of the labor of the subject. The dispossession to which

Browning refers occurs at a moment in which various modes of property were competing to become dominant. Ellacuría summarizes the outcome: “it can be said without exaggeration that the existing forms of private property in El Salvador, especially in the

157 rural areas, are imported; ones that have been imposed through particular transformations in history, which are closer to pillage than to just acquisition—at least if we take the conquest into account” (“The Historicization” 110, my emphasis). It is precisely from this perspective of the conquest that Ellacuría and other Central American thinkers propose we understand the region.lxxii This perspective also allows us to highlight the predation that was characteristic of what Ellacuría calls the “historical avatars” that give shape to the history of the region.

Ellacuría clearly positions himself against the mode of property that was introduced to the Central American region by the Spanish colonizers and the pillaging mentality under which they operated. His thinking from this particular vantage point allows him to link together the chain of values and concepts that begins with private property, passes through the relationship between wealth and poverty, and then adheres to the notion of power. Land ownership is directly related to the dialectic of wealth and poverty in El

Salvador because it has been the historical originator of wealth. This is because from the moment of colonization wealth was rooted as the disproportionate possession of agrarian resources. This produced an inequality in terms of power: “Because the private property and wealth of the few is at a maximum and the property of the majority at a minimum, the power of the few is maximized and the current political power of the majority is minimized” (Ellacuría “Un marco” 575). A select few in the country enjoy an excessive control over the rest of the population because they dominate the agrarian structure that is decisive in the political system. For the majority of Salvadorans, this produces a situation of being not only dispossessed of land, but also disempowered: “The research hypothesis

158 proposed here is that by seizing resources, especially economic ones, a power is given that disempowers others, that is, it leaves them without power by dispossessing them”

(576). In other words, we have a dynamic of oppressor-oppressed, one that dates back to the colony.

Clearly, Ellacuría is interested in undoing this dynamic of oppression. To do this, he begins by asking what sort of subject is capable of producing this sort of system: “It is often argued that without the desire for profit and without the anxiety to have more there would be no incentive for progress. What type of man produces this assumption?”

(Ellacuría “Un marco” 575). Here, Ellacuría is reconstructing the dominant thought of the ruling class, the sort of consciousness that has installed itself on the national level in El

Salvador. This thought implies that ambition must drive progress. Ellacuría links this mentality directly back to the colonial/colonizing subject, and in this sense he coincides with the premise of Rodolfo Cardenal, a Central American historian and one of

Ellacuría’s colleagues.

Cardenal has compiled what is perhaps the most extensive history of Central

America in his Manual de historia de Centroamérica, a text that begins with the pre-

Hispanic societies of the Americas and covers the history of the region up until the fall of the Somoza dictatorship. In his text, he explains the process of conquest in Central

America. One of the primary theses of Cardenal’s text is that Central America has never been a unified region, neither in terms of geography nor in culture. Given this, conquest happened differently in different parts of the isthmus—some groups allied themselves with the Spanish while others resisted and were eliminated. Despite the heterogeneous

159 nature of this history, Cardenal suggests that there are two central factors to understanding the conquest and Central American colonization: land and ambition. These two aspects became foundational to Central American history and gave direction to the course that the region would follow. They also begin to give us the answer to Ellacuría’s question about what sort of man produces a society in which the only incentive that moves man toward progress is individual profit.

In his history, Cardenal emphasizes that we must remember that the colonization of

Central America was a private enterprise. That is, it was not carried out by the Spanish

Crown according to some plan; rather, the actions of private individuals were authorized and partially financed by the crown. Because of this, the personalities of the conquistadores, and especially their ambitions, shaped colonization. Their ambitions, as

Cardenal points out, were to get rich quickly and not to settle the region or establish any sort of colonial administration. Because it lacked the sort of possibilities that Mexico or

South America had, Central America became a sort of staging zone where the immediate economic benefits were relatively scarce. Those who did stay in the isthmus and eventually become its governors converted themselves into lords of the land and of the native populations. Their private ambitions led them to attempt to install their own political ideal, which Cardenal describes in his text: “whereby they would establish a quasi-feudal society in which they and their descendants would perpetuate as the military and hereditary dominant aristocracy” (39).

Ambition, then, in the pejorative sense, drove the history of Central American colonization: “Colonial history was determined by the intents of the conquistadores and

160 the early settlers and their descendants to get rich quickly and to become masters of the conquered territories and populations” (Cardenal 39). We can see the foundational nature of ambition with three examples. The first has to do with the sort of intercultural

(non)ethics that is established from the colonial encounter. The colonizers constructed their other through their desire to accumulate wealth, such that the native other is reduced to an object that can produce wealth. This was true on a governmental level, coming from the crown, and on the economic and intersubjective level with the colonizers actually in the region: “The crown was very interested in the conservation of indigenous people, and even in that they prospered as tributaries; but at the same time it was very interested in that the colonizers were satisfied with their expectations of enrichment. Consequently, the crown was forced to share the exploitation of the indigenous with the colonizers” (56, my emphasis). The origins of the oppressor-oppressed dynamic that Ellacuría describes is made clearer with this example, but the example is made concrete when we look at the second example that demonstrates the centrality of European ambition in Central

America: the encomienda.

Cardenal explains that the encomienda was designed to exploit the Native

Americans living in the region and to capture the tributes from the native workers. Until the passage of the New Laws in 1542, there was virtually no control over the encomiendas; the result, Cardenal tells us, is that “the encomendado was left to the discretion and ambition of the encomendero” (41).lxxiii The wealth produced by the encomiendas began to create an aristocratic land-owning class in Central America, though they did not have official political power. The crown and its functionaries

161 reserved that power, though they were all from the peninsula and not members of the newly forming criollo class. In order to make its presence felt and to defend the Native

Americans who were being virtually enslaved, the crown passed the New Laws, which abolished any form of slavery or forced labor. This law aspired to take control of the native tribute, thus eliminating the arbitrariness of the encomenderos. Nonetheless, the laws generated a political battle between the encomenderos and the crown’s functionaries. The crown upheld the passage of the laws and was able to enforce them in some instances, but overall they were only applied in as much as the particular context and interests of each locale permitted. Let’s read how Cardenal explains the impact of the application of the laws:

it did not touch the group of rich and powerful encomenderos […] It corrected the

minor abuses and returned many of the smallest encomiendas to the crown. But the

rich encomenderos were not attacked and, in fact, they consolidated their power

[…] In the long term, the encomenderos were left to their own liking, for the

encomienda survived for a long time. (48, my emphasis)

The ambition of the conquistadores, now positioned as the landed, aristocratic class in the colony, could not be controlled by what would have been the equivalent of the

State at that time. This seems to prove the statement that history repeats itself, because the Salvadoran state was also not able to control the ambition of the capitalist, oligarchic class during the proposed land transformation of 1976. When Ellacuría criticizes the failure of the state to pass the measures and claims that “the old structures are strengthened”, he is referring to structures that are rooted in this colonial ambition (629). ⁠

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The final example from Cardenal’s text that locates this colonial ambition has to do with the way the society was transformed by the crisis of power that began in 1542 with the New Laws. Cardenal posits that the institution that resulted from this crisis, the pueblo de indios—and not the encomienda—, was the most important colonial institution.

Despite the humanistic intentions for creating these reductions of Native Americans the outcome of these concentrations was quite dire. In large part, this was because the crown eventually folded to pressure from the settlers and granted them the right to obtain forced labor from the Native Americans. That is to say, colonial ambition once again structured the path that the region would follow:

If the colonial regime intended to keep the indigenous in towns, closed off from

ladino penetration, at the same time—precisely because it was about

concentrations of frightened people—it attracted the ambition and the fight of the

most energetic mestizos, who slowly configured a rural, middle-high sector that

was exploitative of the indigenous. Thus, the lives of these workers had to be very

miserable and painful, deprived of opportunities for advancement, devoid of

incentives, and very hard to bear. (Cardenal 54)

The reductions, then, become a source of wealth for the criollo subjects who take advantage of having a labor force concentrated into one area with minimal means of subsistence. Moving the Native Americans into concentrated spaces also liberated fertile lands of which the settlers immediately took possession, further continuing the dispossession of native lands that colonialism had entailed. Cardenal’s description of the pueblo de indios bears a striking resemblance to modern day concentration camps. The

163 native populations were subjugated to unjust requirements of tribute to the crown and a system of repartimiento that forced them to work for the settlers, leaving little, if any, time and even less resources for family or self-maintenance.

This history of ambition in Central America responds to Ellacuría’s call for an understanding of the origins of agrarian property in order to comprehend the reality of private property in El Salvador. What we see is that the concept of private property was born of a process of dispossession and exploitation. Historicizing the concept in this way already signals a necessary problematization. Ellacuría puts it this way: “These are operative concepts whose truth can be measured in their results, and whose content must continue to change even if their essential meaning is maintained. Demonstrating the impact of certain concepts within a particular context is what is understood here as their historicization” (“The Historicization” 109). When we put Ellacuría’s text in dialogue with Cardenal’s we see the disastrous effects of this land-ownership system that is built on a foundation of ambition; we see the nefarious way in which the concept is realized in

Salvadoran history.

Ambition and land converge in Central America’s colonial history to constitute a foundational inequality and injustice. The result is a society that is built upon that injustice, a society in which one group has dispossessed and disempowered the other, as

Ellacuría points out. Both Cardenal and Ellacuría coincide in calling out this conjunction of land and ambition in Central America for what it is: a politics of parasitism. In his text,

Cardenal suggests that it is both the settlers and the crown that exploit the native population as a means of accumulating wealth. However, just as a parasite must be

164 careful not to kill its host, these European subjects were dependent upon the work of the natives and so were careful to maintain for them the necessary conditions to be able to exploit their work without allowing them rights such as that of a dignified life. As we have seen, both the Spanish Crown and the settlers were interested in the conservation of the native populations, but only in so much as they would be able to continue to provide their labor. That is to say, their conservation was mediated by economic and not human interests. El Salvador presents a situation similar to the orden-finca in Guatemala, which did not let the brazos die, but it barely let them live.lxxiv Guatemalan anthropologist

Ricardo Falla calls these sorts of systems low intensity genocide.lxxv Cardenal himself refers to this whole structure as a “colonial terror”, a form of terrorism based on two central premises:

an indigenous population imprisoned in an economic regime that blocked any

possibility for advancement and, a complement of the former, a colonial society

that gave the indigenous only those cultural elements absolutely necessary to carry

the exploitation forward, compensating the low yield of a working mass submerged

in an enormous inferiority of material and intellectual resources with numbers and

violence. (67)

This colonial terror constitutes the parasitic system of inequality from which the dominant notion of private property emerges in El Salvador.

Though our first instinct might be to identify the State as the parasite in this metaphor, both Cardenal and Ellacuría would point us in a different direction. In the case of the polemic of the New Laws, we see that the Spanish Crown was unable to control the

165 ambition of the first colonizers; the encomendados were able to force the crown to suspend and later revoke the parts of the laws that prohibited the existence of that institution. This particular example provides us with an earlier reiteration of the ruling class consolidating its power as it did by restructuring the 1976 laws for agrarian transformation. The “sovereign power”—the Crown, which is later replaced by the

State—is subordinate to another entity; the criollo class. During the ANEP-ISTA debate,

Ellacuría affirmed that it was precisely the autonomy of the government from the criollo class that was in play with the proposal:

The assumption is that while private property and hence the present distribution of

economic power is to remain untouched, the privileges and possibility of

exploitation will not only be maintained, but the government will continually be

held in check by that manipulating ability that corrupts the armed forces and the

legislative, judicial, and executive branches. Whenever someone writes the history

of how our native capitalism [capitalismo criollo in the Spanish original] has

intervened directly in political coups, in the appointing of presidents, in formulating

some laws and blocking others, and in managing court verdicts and sentences, this

hypothesis will be abundantly proven. (“The Historicization” 117-18)

This long quote merits some unpacking. Let us begin with the idea of the government being controlled by the power of the criollo class.

The example mentioned above of the New Laws proves Ellacuría’s fear to be rooted historically; Cardenal sustains that the Spanish Crown is largely unable to control its colonists. He claims that the Crown’s actions should be understood both as an

166 insuperable impotence and an interested tolerance. As long as it could benefit economically from the corruption, it would turn a blind eye. For this reason, Cardenal calls the crown a “silent accomplice” to the violences enacted by the settlers (96). When the State fails to uphold its proposals for agrarian reforms due to pressure from groups like ANEP, it takes the place of the Crown as the accomplice to the criollo class’s interests, even when doing so has negative effects on the majority of its population.

Guatemalan historian Severo Martínez Peláez’s book on the criollo class in

Guatemala might help us to understand the position of the criollo in the necropolitical system we have been tracing.lxxvi Like Cardenal, Martínez Peláez highlights the multilateral position of the criollo, a group whose consciousness begins to emerge in the context of the new laws. On the one hand, the criollos shared the governing power with the Crown, and so it was not the dominant class at the time. Nonetheless, the Crown ceded certain privileges to the criollo class, privileges that the criollos used as leverage in order to defend their right to be the governing class in the colony. Given this positionality, the criollo class begins to use the indigenous population in order to defend their own class interests with respect to Spain. That is, the “indio” serves as a tool in order to elevate the position of the criollo. That the construction of the indigenous subject by the criollo class is mediated by their own economic and individualistic ambitions results in the reduction of the indigenous to “something that exists with the land and exists in order to work it” (Martínez Peláez 199). Given this, the criollo only defends the

“indio” if and when it can serve their ambition and their feudal ideal for accumulating wealth. Martínez Peláez charges that the criollo ideology is incapable of truly defending

167 the indigenous without betraying itself because the ideology itself was only made possible from the exploitation of that population. The consequences, then, are perverse:

“As such, the criollista defense cannot go beyond procuring that the Indians are not exhausted and that they continue to be Indians” (193). The position of the “indio” in relation to the multilateral position of the rising criollo class serves to underscore what we have been calling a necropolitics of parasitism.

My use of necropolitics is borrowed from Achille Mbembe’s 2003 article of the same name in Public Culture. There, he builds upon Foucault’s notion of biopower to arrive at his own concept of necropolitics. Foucault links biopower with racism and discrimination, especially on behalf of the State, and theorizes about how in the development of the modern, European states the notion of sovereign power shifted from that to take life away to the power to give life. Some Central American thinkers, like

Martha Elena Casaús Arzú, have based their understanding of the Central American violence of the 20th century on this notion of biopower.lxxvii Casaús uses it to conclude that the Guatemalan state has used racism as a technology of power “with the prerogative and the right to decide who should live and who should not, exercising the right to kill or eliminate the other in the name of sovereignty” (16). However, the genocide enacted on the indigenous populations by the State seems to go beyond the notion of biopower as developed by Foucault. This is where Mbembe’s notion of necropower and necropolitics corrects the idea of biopower. He determines that it is not the right or ability to administer life that is the ultimate expression of sovereignty in modernity, but rather it is the right or ability to take life away. He defines necropolitics as the “contemporary forms of

168 subjugation of life to the power of death” (39). That is to say, the political system shifts from one that administers life to one that takes it away.

Our analysis of the Central American past from the perspective of the conquest shows us that the operative politics in Central America falls somewhere between this notion of biopolitics and necropolitics. As we saw with the case of the encomiendas, the dominant powers have an invested interest in maintaining the indigenous population, though without allowing it to go beyond the category of ‘indio’. This system has continued into our present, as studies such as AVANSCO’s Romper las cadenas points out. In that exhaustive study of the orden-finca in Guatemala, Central American historians Juan Pablo Gómez and Gustavo Palma Murga explain how the system does not let its workers die, but it only barely allows them to live. If that were the extent of the system, then it would coincide with a notion of the biopolitics of parasitism. However, as we see in Gómez and Palma Murga’s study and in the recent history of Central America, the dispossessed and disempowered subject is kept (barely) alive –because the dominant subject depends upon the labor of its other—, always under the immanent threat of death.

For this reason, Mbembe’s definition of necropolitics makes an important distinction from the notion of biopolitics that coincides better with the historical reality of the region.

When this oppressed subject is able to overcome its own objectification and arise as a proper subject, it is immediately constructed as an existential threat and eliminated. In El

Salvador, the massacre of 1932 and the extreme violence of the civil war serve as examples of this. I consider these actions to be forms of necro-pedagogy. That is, we can read this excessive violence as a disciplinary act meant to educate the oppressed

169 population on adequate and acceptable behaviors. The lesson is that the subject-object should not seek to move outside of the dominant system structured to benefit the criollo oligarchy. Exploitation is to be accepted. Given this, death becomes not only a primary effect of the relationship between politics and violence, but also as a sort of social bond between the opposing groups.

The genealogy that we have just traced, then, begins from the amalgamation of colonialist and criollo ambition and racial superiority and is transformed into a necropolitical system in which violence is the social bond between different socioeconomic and ethnic groups. What Ellacuría shows in his texts on the ANEP-ISTA debate is that while the government proposal represented the principles of a thinking from the historical reality in order to undo the necropolitics that had devastated the country for so long, the version of private property that was defended by the oligarchy was one that reinforced that very system. In one of his texts from 1976 that precedes the reversal of the law, Ellacuría warns that the government’s proposals could provoke irrational and violent reactions from the dominant minority of the Salvadoran society.

When the law is radically transformed to accommodate their notion of private property, he confirms that it is an irrationality that has won: “the unreason of some remains alive”

(“A sus órdenes” 656). This unreason leads to another wave of necropedagogical violence and repression that culminates in civil war.lxxviii

Ellacuría’s recognition that the analysis of Central American societies often escapes reason connects his thought to one last Central American thinker who can round out our exploration of a thinking about and from Central America. In her text on political

170 violence in Guatemala, Ileana Rodríguez begins with the premise that politics often escapes the field of reason. Because of this, she opts for a theoretical framework from the field of psychoanalysis and a structuration of personality. This allows her to argue that

Central American states like Guatemala and El Salvador are not only failed states, as the social sciences would like to claim; rather, they are also criminal-perverse states. This allows us to more critically view the antisocial aspects of the governmental structure, much as Ellacuría has pointed out with the dominant notion of private property: “In the case of not promoting [the kind of work, power, justice, freedom, solidarity, etc. that is necessarily required to have a society], not only is it not fulfilling its social function, but rather it is simply fulfilling an antisocial function, disruptive for society and annihilating for the human being” (“La transformación” 642, my emphasis). Though Ellacuría is not employing the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, the anti-social function he is describing is characteristic of what Rodríguez is calling a perverse state.

Rodríguez’s focus on the psychosocial dimension of reality allows us to direct our attention to the violent and perverse structures of the State and the way in which the social bond imitates those structures. What can be said about a State that has been able to develop ‘sophisticated’ methods of seeking out threats to national security – threats like

Ignacio Ellacuría and his five colleagues and two collaborators—and eliminating them with impunity, but that has not been able to assure a dignified life for the majority of its population? Rodríguez and Ellacuría both affirm that it is more than just a failed State, it is a State in which unreason reigns. Ellacuría insists that the concept of private property must be based on the common good, not on the private interests of the leading minority.

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Nevertheless, the State proves itself incapable of being the guarantor of the common good. Rodríguez’s notion of a psychotic-perverse State allows us to see that the State has abandoned this notion of the common good because it has given itself into desire, into pleasure, into jouissance. Ellacuría might add that the State has abandoned itself to the whims of capital, thus stating for the whole society to hear, “At your command, my capital!”.lxxix The State’s abandonment to the whims of capitalism parallel what

Rodríguez describes as a State that gives in to impulse and lacks the NO that governs.

Like Ellacuría’s turn toward the colonial past, Rodríguez finds that “criminal States have their foundational fictions in colonization” (30). Putting this in dialogue with what we have already seen, we again underscore the centrality of the personalities of the conquistadores and their definitiveness for the construction of the Central American colonies. We can locate ambition and the drive to ambition as one of the impulses that forms the psychotic, perverse, and criminal state.

This turn to the psychosocial formation of the state does not imply an exculpation of the State and its institutions. Instead, it asks us to move our analysis of Central

American States outside of a framework that posits rule of law as the norm. Rodríguez’s contribution here is showing that the social bond that is produced from this psychic structure of perversion cannot correspond to a rule of law in which reason governs; this is confirmed in Ellacuría’s analysis by the State’s decision to serve capital rather than its people. This psychoanalytic approach to criminality and violence in Central America places even more responsibility on the State. When repression and violence become the bases for the social bond, it is the law and the State that must regulate this behavior. The

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State reveals its fragility in not providing the NO that governs desires and drives in its subjects. When a liberal State proposes to defend the common good of all its citizens but instead continues to defend a notion of private property that produces disproportionate profits and luxury for a small minority and reduces the majority of its population to laborers who cannot provide for a dignified life, that State is perverse. In the next chapter, we will take a more in-depth look at the perversity of the ‘liberal’ Salvadoran State and highlight possible responses that move us toward the construction of a state that does fulfill its social function.

***

The potentiality of the First Project of Agrarian Transformation and what is lost with its transformation.

Ellacuría’s political writing emphasizes that quite a lot was at stake with the 1976 agrarian reforms. His hope and that of the UCA in general was that the proposed law would radically transform the antiquated regime of private property that had unjustly structured the country. In order to fully understand the importance of such a transformation and to grasp the nature of those structures, Ellacuría claimed that it was necessary to write a history of the country from the perspective of the conquest. In following his suggestion and putting his analysis of the agricultural regimes of El

Salvador in dialogue with other Central American thinkers, we have traced a genealogy that points to a society built upon the ambitious, criollo desire to accumulate wealth by exploiting an inferiorized other through a necropolitics of parasitism. The result has been a culture of inequality and violence. The historical realization of all of this in the 20th

173 century in El Salvador has been a perverse, criminal, and psychotic State that is willing to eliminate over 70,000 of its citizens in order to defend ideologized concepts like that of private property and national security. This genealogy is a first step in Ellacuría’s historicization and clearly signals how private property has been used to serve the oligarchic class and big capital. The way in which the proposed agrarian transformation historicized the notion of property in order to renew its essential link with the common good also began the process of imagining a new State and a new conceptualization of citizenship, an idea to which we will return in the next chapter.

However, Ellacuría claims that the agrarian reforms were not only a political and economic problem, but also a sociological and psychological problem. The very notion of

Salvadoranness was at play in the conceptualization of private property:

What is fully at stake, then, is the form of humanity—taking the two terms ‘form’

and ‘humanity’ in all their philosophical rigor—that the Salvadoran man will begin

to take by one or another actualization of its total way of living […] It is clear that

this conformation will not depend exclusively on what the agrarian structure is and

will be, but it will in a predominant way, as much directly and immediately as

structurally. (“Un marco” 570)

In other words, the agrarian regime and the conceptualization of private property is a central element into the form that the Salvadoran subject and society will take. On the one hand, this subject and this society can opt for the long-rooted structures of ambition, parasitism, and inequality. On the other hand, a successful transformation of the unjust structures of the past could have moved the subject and society in a new direction, guided

174 by what Ellacuría calls the campesino consciousness, one that first must be made aware of itself as exploited and crucified. We already know the path the State chose, and we can turn back to the cultural texts to view the consequences of that choice.

We have already seen that land and private property are clearly fundamental parts of the lives of both Lucía and Robocop in their respective texts. However, the relationship that each of them establishes with property is different. This, in large part, has to do with their different modi vivendi. On the one hand, we have the example of

Robocop, who has an almost Darwinian concept of life and survival. He tells us at the beginning of his narrative that many of his subordinates in the military died while under his command, but “that is part of war—the weak do not survive” (11). Robocop’s primary interest in life is his individual survival.lxxx He does not construct any sort of affective bonds with any other character in the novel. The relationships he does hold in the novel are nothing more than precarious alliances that he uses in order to assure his own survival. We might liken his personality to that of the ambitious colonizers we analyzed with Cardenal’s text. But he is also a subject who abandons himself to pleasure, to the jouissance that Rodríguez describes. Take, for example, Robocop’s lack of remorse for sleeping with his cousin’s wife while they provide him a room as he tries to reintegrate into civil society. Or his cold-blooded murder of Vilma, the prostitute with whom he had what most resembled an emotional bond after they lived together for a short time: “She licked me and soon lay open: her movements were a recompense because I had so much trust in her. Later, after going to the bathroom, when she dozed off lying face down, I made a hole in her back” (102). Once Vilma is no longer able to offer

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Robocop any pleasure or means of survival, she is reduced to an abject object that is eliminated. These examples of Robocop’s relationships with others give us an indication of the sort of ethics under which he is operating, which we have already defined as the non-ethics of war, following Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ definition.

Understanding his ethics —or lack thereof— is important here because it is this

(non)ethics that is reproduced in and reproduces his relationship with property. Much like his bonds with other humans, property is something that serves for his own individual survival. As such, it can be expropriated and privatized to preserve his ability to survive as an individual. It is a very Lockean notion of property in that it has an individual function, though it leaves out the social aspect of property, which is how property links to justice. The point is that Robocop’s relationship to property as a means of survival and as an object that can be expropriated without any consideration for the survival of the other is a reflection of the very ethics that also makes him so flexible and able to move and adapt to different contexts and geographical locations. This is why there is no ethical contradiction for Robocop when he is asked to protect the private property of the finquero in Guatemala, to guard the headquarters of a narco leader in Las Flores, or to work for the

DEA in the United States. As long as his protection of that property can contribute to his own, individual well being, the notion of private property is more valuable than even the lives of others —he brutally and coldly serves this notion of private property. What is most concerning about the character of Robocop is that he shows that even if we cannot show that the dominant notion of private property operative in Western societies today is mutually dependent on the non-ethics of war, we can demonstrate that there is no

176 contradiction between the two.

Lucía, on the other hand, demonstrates a different sort of ethics that constitutes a different relationship to property. Her ethics is more similar to the transontological ethics we saw exemplified in Lupe in chapter two, a sort of being-for-the-other. In her introduction to the testimonio, Mary Jo Ignoffo suggests that Lucía’s ethics was greatly impacted by the sort of respect that she was shown by her Jesuit employers, such as

Ignacio Ellacuría. Ignoffo quotes Lucía saying “The priests appreciated my work…They offered respect. Never before did I have that” (xxiv). Lucía’s narrative suggests that her life was guided by this idea of respect for the other. In the moment that she witnessed the tragedy of the killing of the Jesuits of the UCA, that respect for the other was translated into a need to speak the truth. Of her decision, Jon Sobrino, a survivor of the massacre, says this:

When she said what she had seen and heard, Lucía became a witness to the truth

and also its defendant, since she spoke the truth against those who fought it. She

became heroic servant of the truth in highly dangerous circumstances. She was also

a faithful servant of the truth, threatened from without by powerful people, and

from within by her anguish. She obeyed a higher voice: her conscience. She risked

all that she most loved: her life, her family, the possibility of living in her country.

She did this with dignity and with fidelity to the Jesuits with whom she had worked.

(163)

While Robocop serves self and property, Lucía serves others and the truth. Her horizon is not self-profit, but rather the common good. When the service of the truth came in

177 conflict with her own property, she continued to serve the truth, losing everything she and her family had worked for, including their home and bakery in El Salvador.

Robocop and Lucía present us with two very different ethics and two very different relationships with property. Likewise, the outcomes of their actions, guided by these different principles, are distinct. Despite his being a wanted criminal, Robocop is offered a job with the DEA, implying a sort of institutional protection. Meanwhile, Lucía and her husband are abandoned, insulted, and even threatened by both the U.S. and Salvadoran government; they are then left to their own means to resolve the many problems that their exile had caused. In practical terms, it may seem that it is more beneficial to behave in accordance to Robocop’s ethics and the dominant ideologization of private property. This is primarily because his is an ethics that coincides with the world-system, with the dominant ideologies that we saw exemplified in the State’s submission to the oligarchy.

To do otherwise, as Lucía finds out, is to feel the effects of the system’s necropedagogy firsthand.

If an ideologized notion of property produces subjects like Robocop, Ellacuría had hoped that the agrarian reform might move toward the production of subjects like Lucía, subjects who construct their ideas around the notion of the common good. He had imagined that the historicization of the concept of property that he saw present in the agrarian reform might be an important step in the process of raising awareness so as to foment subjectifications like Lucía’s, though he was also conscious of the limits of this historicizing critical thinking if not accompanied by material and structural processes.

Both processes, the material and the cultural, would need to go hand in hand in order to

178 make lasting changes:

Consciousness raising should mean that the overcoming contribution of true

necessities is indispensable, the contribution of [the campesino’s] values, the

contribution of their own vision of life, which avoids converting the campesino into

a blind imitator of those whom the land has immemorially served, of those who are

responsible for the current agrarian structure. Structural change will be essential for

the shift in consciousness, but it is not able to substitute it; at the same time, the

change in consciousness has much to do in changing structures and in the

construction of a new society. (“Un marco” 581)

Ellacuría’s understanding of what was at stake in the 1976 agrarian reforms highlights a connection between the State’s decision to protect the interests of the oligarchy and the legacies of the colonial past as well as with violent subjectivities, like

Robocop’s. On the other hand, Lucía’s testimonio allows us to imagine an alternative ethics, a campesino consciousness that, if socialized, could move Salvadoran society in a new direction. In the next chapter, we will continue to problematize the perverse structures of the State that produce “Robocops” and follow the alternatives found in the cultural text and in Ellacuría’s thought that take us in a decolonial direction toward the construction of a new society that would foster subjectivities like Lucía’s.

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Chapter 4

Claribel Alegría’s They Won’t Take Me Alive and Ignacio Ellacuría’s concept of the common evil: imagining alternatives.

Sadly, in the conflict between life and property, laws have taken the side of the latter, and of its symbol, which is money. The gross fiction, disproved a thousand times every day, assumes that money is always the result of work, of one’s own honest labor, and hence that it is like an emanation from the individual…On this fiction, one of the most gross of such fictions to which the incurable idolatry of human beings has rendered worship, there has been erected the Temple of Property, where Money, the Only and All-Powerful God, is pleased to hear the moans and curses of the victims of monopolization. -Alberto Masferrer, 1928.lxxxi

When looking at the recent history of El Salvador, we can understand the State’s failure to uphold the ISTA law when confronted with the pressure of ANEP as a foundational moment for the decade long civil war that devastated the country from 1979 to 1992. The events that followed the backtracking of the government in 1976, including electoral fraud in 1977, a dramatic increase in repression and political violence, and another failed attempt at agrarian reforms in 1979, finally exploded in full on civil war and armed insurrection by the end of the decade. Certainly, we can turn to official history books in order to gain an understanding of this series of events; however, as I have been arguing throughout this dissertation, there is another sort of text that merits our attention in order to understand the social phenomenon of revolution in El Salvador: the cultural 180 text. In this chapter, we again turn to a particular form of cultural text, literature, because of the role that it played in Central American revolutions.

In their book, Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions, John

Beverley and Marc Zimmerman propose that within the context of armed conflicts in

Central America, literature became an “ideological practice of national liberation” (1).

This represents a break from the nationalist literature that emerges in Latin America in the 19th century during the independence period. During increasingly difficult-to-bear moments of social inequity—such as the one we are studying here—, and shortly after the Latin American vanguard movement, a new generation of committed intellectuals began to develop a different notion of literature. In El Salvador this resulted in the creation of the generación comprometida, a group comprised of young students interested in structural change, influenced by the Frente Ventana group in Nicaragua and the Cuban

Revolution. In a group statement generally attributed to Roque Dalton, one of the founding members, this group defines literature as a social function meant to improve society. The function of art and literature is no longer merely aesthetic, but rather it “has to perform a service, has to be useful to society, to today’s humanity” (qtd. in Beverley and Zimmerman 125). Beverley and Zimmerman tell us that this form of understanding literature not only affects the literature produced during this period but also the use given to prior literature. That is to say, there was also a shift in the way culture was consumed and received. There is a change in the marketplace as intellectuals begin to look for inspiration from “[e]ven texts or elements of the previous literary system whose intention

181 and formal configuration are not political [so that they may] be appropriated by a process of radicalization that transforms their meaning in terms of its own functionality” (49).

During this period of literature being revolutionized in order to become a literature that leads to revolution, a new literary genre emerges, one that we have already seen in the previous chapter: testimonio. John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman point out that the genre of testimonio is extremely important in the context of Central American revolutions. According to these critics, “testimonio remains one of the most important ideological weapons of the Central America revolutions” (207). In this chapter, we will study another example of testimonial literature. In contrast to Lucía’s testimonio produced after the civil war, the text for this chapter is more closely aligned with

Beverley and Zimmerman’s notion of literature as an ideological weapon.

The text I am referring to is Claribel Alegría’s 1983 testimonial novel, They

Won’t Take Me Alive: Salvadoran Women in the Struggle for National Liberation, co- authored with Darwin J. Flakoll.lxxxii This text registers the dismal outcomes of the State’s failure to liberate itself from oligarchic control and to assure the well-being of its citizens.

The narrative is a collective recounting of the story of one of El Salvador’s guerilla commanders, Eugenia (nome de guerre; her real name is Ana María Castillo Rivas).

Through many testimonial voices we learn of her childhood, her first encounters with revolutionary ideals, her entrance into the guerilla factions, her organization and responsibilities within the opposition forces, and, finally, of her assassination, which is actually the way the novel begins.

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While the plot revolves around Eugenia’s story, it is a much broader and collective history, one shared by thousands of Salvadorans. Alegría and Flakoll make this characteristic clear in the prologue to the book, where they write “The list of recognized heroes and martyrs of the Salvadoran revolution is too long to print here, but we want to acknowledge that this book is dedicated to their memory, and, in the same way, to the thousands of Salvadoran women, young and old, who continue moving forward in the fight without giving up” (9).lxxxiii In this sense, Alegría’s testimonio matches the mold of the genre in which “the narrator […] speaks for or in the name of a community or group”

(Beverley and Zimmerman 174). It is as Rigoberta Menchú states in her testimonio, “My personal experience is the reality of a whole people” (qtd in Beverley and Zimmerman

174).

This interest in connecting with and giving voice to a more inclusive community in Latin America is a continuation of the democratization and horizontalization of the vanguard movement. The literary genre of testimonio went even further than the vanguard in order to transform literature as an institution reserved for the well-educated, well-cultured oligarchical classes. We see the blurring of those borders with Alegría’s own personal politics of writing; having come from the oligarchic class, much like

Eugenia, she places herself in solidarity with the peasant struggle and strives to give voice to those subjectivities excluded from realms to which Alegría has access. In doing this, her testimonio complicates our notion of literature. If the vanguard movement had already begun to question literature as an institution with its break from the notion of high culture and its integration of the popular, it does not fully succeed with this social

183 commitment. That is, although the vanguard movement may include the language and practices from the popular majorities into their artistic creation, it does not really involve these subaltern subjects within the actual production of literature. Where the vanguard writers fail, the genre of testimonio succeeds. Beverley and Zimmerman affirm that testimonio “represents the entry into literature of persons who would normally—in those societies where literature is a form of class and/or ethnic privilege—be excluded from direct literary expression, who have had to be represented by professional writers” (175).

Despite Eugenia not being a professional writer, it is her story that we see represented, both in her own words and through those of her comrades.

In many ways, Alegría mimics Eugenia’s vital life decision to abandon her privileged position within the bourgeoisie by positioning herself on an equal ground with the national subaltern groups who also find a voice in this text. In regards to another testimonio by Roque Dalton, Miguel Marmol, literary critic Antony Higgins argues that testimonio offers us a model of a cultural politics for such a communicative interaction in that it “proposes a communicative interaction that seeks to dissolve the essential identities of the privileged intellectual and the subaltern subject” (51, my translation). In short, testimonio moves to de-hierarchize social relations through literature. We see a sort of convergence between narrator and interlocutor with the hope that the same effect will be produced with the reader, in which the literate intellectual is interpellated by and even dependent on his or her counterpart. Beverley and Zimmerman explain the political significance of this new relationship: “Politically, the question in testimonio is not so much the difference of the social situations of the direct narrator and the interlocutor as

184 the possibility of their articulation together in a common program or front” (176-177).

The very notion that this political importance exists with the genre of testimonio implies that the genre emerges in societies with systemic social differentiation. As Beverley and

Zimmeman state, it “always signifies the need for a general social change in which the stability and complacency of the reader’s world must be brought into question” (178).

Cultural texts such as They Won’t Take Me Alive, then, come from a politics of writing that imagines literature as contributing to the construction of a new society, a politics of writing that seeks to build utopia.

In that testimonio denounces social injustice and contributes to our imagining of alternatives, Alegría’s novel coincides with the double gesture of prophecy and utopia that we find in Ignacio Ellacuría’s philosophical, theological, and political writing. In one of his last written texts, Ellacuría makes the claim that prophecy and utopia must go together in order for Latin America to move out of its current historical reality.lxxxiv He defines prophecy in theological terms as “the critical contrasting of the proclamation of the fullness of the kingdom of God with a definite historical situation” (“Utopia and

Prophecy” 47). We shall see shortly the many ways in which Eugenia’s voice is a prophetic one in its indictment and revelation of the Salvadoran historical reality. The struggle, the protest, and the sigh that are born from the negation of utopia constitute prophecy. Prophecy is denunciation. If prophecy is to denounce and to respond with a firm ‘no’ to the negation that is the current system, then in negating the negation prophecy constitutes a ‘yes’. This ‘yes’ is utopia, which Ellacuría tells us is generated by prophecy. Utopia is announcing the possibility and alternative of a new world order that

185 provides abundant life for all. Eugenia’s story is a struggle for the historicization of that utopia.

In the following text, I will underscore the ways in which the cultural text of They

Won’t Take Me Alive can be read as both prophecy and utopia, as a text that both denounces the current historical reality and announces the arrival of an alternative. In doing so, I will place Alegría’s novel in dialogue with Ellacuría’s theoretical framework and critical thought. Eugenia’s testimonio forces us to raise the question of how such a world is possible and Ellacuría’s work directs us toward a thinking from Central America that aids us in constructing an answer to that question. At the same time, the revolutionary ideals embodied in the collective subjectivity of Eugenia also allow us to begin to imagine ways of undoing the structures that produced her reality, a reality that led to her death. Once again, Ellacuría’s thought provides us with a theoretical framework from which to consider how to historicize the sort of alternatives that are registered in the cultural text. When placed together, the cultural text and Ellacuría’s thought challenge us to find new ways to continue their work in our own contexts, ways of thinking from Central America with “prophecy as method and utopia as horizon”

(“Utopia and Prophecy” 45).

***

A spiral of violence

In a radio address to the nation in March of 1984, United States President Ronald

Reagan characterized El Salvador as “an emerging democracy plagued by a Communist insurgency”, trapped somewhere between “the imperfect democracy seeking to improve

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[and the] Communist dictatorship seeking to expand”. He vehemently claims that the cause for violence in Central America is communism: “The people who argue that the root of violence and instability is poverty, not communism, are ignoring the obvious. But all the economic aid in the world won’t be worth a dime if Communist guerrillas are determined and have the freedom to terrorize and to burn, bomb, and destroy everything”.lxxxv This approach to the Salvadoran conflict is a clear antithesis to the sort of thinking from Central America that we have been highlighting in this dissertation. It represents an imposition of foreign perspectives onto a historical situation and is a sort of ideologization of sorts, to use Ellacuría’s terms. In framing the conflict in this way,

Robert Lassalle-Klein argues that the Reagan administration was internationalizing the

Salvadoran civil war in order to symbolically “draw the line” against communist forces

(153).

Literature like They Won’t Take Me Alive, though it does speak to communist ideals, registers that the primary causes of the armed insurrection had less to do with international communism than they did with the Salvadoran historical reality of structural injustice. The representation of the civil war that is captured in the cultural text clearly contests the anticommunist rhetoric that we see Reagan articulating. In fact, Alegría’s testimonial novel actually makes this point explicit, claiming that we can learn more about the conflict from the subaltern voices ‘on the ground’ than we can from ‘top-down’ approaches: “If President Reagan and his advisors really want to know why the

Salvadorean people are up in arms, they’d understand a lot more from Marina González’s biography than from searching for proof of hypothetical conspiracies of Cuban or

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Russian origin” (117). In this way, her text displays an interest in disputing official history. Testimonial literature such as Alegría’s offer us a cultural memory from the vantage point of the oppressed, those excluded from the narratives that come from those in power.

In that respect, a central element articulated by the collective voices in Alegría’s text is the difficulty with which they arrived at the decision to take up the armed struggle.

They make it clear that this decision was made only when it became painfully clear that other channels of action would not work. Take, for example, the way Alegría explains how Commander Marcial came to the conclusion that an armed revolution was necessary:

[1972]’s electoral fraud clearly demonstrated that the door to political change, by

means of democratic elections, had been closed by the military and the oligarchy.

The experience was to be repeated with yet more scandalous frauds in the 1974

and 1977 elections. […] It was obvious by 1972 that Marcial and his companions

had chosen the only path leading to the prospect of change: the way of armed

struggle and prolonged popular war. (55)

This idea is repeated later in the same chapter when the author affirms that “it was impossible to alter the political situation within the country either by electoral methods or by means of a military coup. CONDECA, orchestrated by the United States, would never allow for any change within the Central American status quo” (56).lxxxvi Finally,

Eugenia’s husband, Javier, transcribes in the cultural memory of their own process of arriving at the need for an armed insurrection:

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Towards the end of 1974 […] we became convinced that no other alternative

existed. Our experience was that the most elementary demands of the peasants

would always be met by the military dictatorship’s usual response of repression

and bloodshed. We lived through a lot of that in 1974. Each legally acceptable

channel was only another weapon in the oppressor’s hands, reinforcing our theory

that the people had no other option but the armed struggle: revolutionary violence

was the only possible means to achieving liberation. This conviction ran deep in

the two of us by the end of 1974. (61)

What we see registered in the cultural text is the complexity of understanding violence in the context of El Salvador’s civil war. For some, it was a tool to maintain modes of exploitation, for others it was their response and their attempt to simply live.

Because Alegría’s text begins with Eugenia’s death, the weight of the consequences of insurrection weighs on the reader as she reads these words about resorting to armed revolution. In chapter three we began to trace a genealogy that provides us with the historical foundations of this necropolitical system that produces death, but the force of Alegría’s narrative may still have us asking why violence became necessary. Writing a few years after the publication of Alegría’s text in 1986, Ignacio

Ellacuría provides of a sort of theorization of the revolutionary violence that we see articulated in the cultural text. He does so by referring to what he calls a “spiral of violence”. The element that gives rise to this spiral is what Ellacuría calls primary violence, which he identifies as structural injustice.lxxxvii This aspect is overlooked by the

Reagan administration in their attempts to resolve the conflict by economic and military

189 means: “An economy of war and a war on the economy […] does not bring along with it respect for the endogenous causes of the conflict more than it does new difficulties, if what really is being sought is to fundamentally resolve a social problem of subsistence and not a military problem of security” (“Factores endógenos” 151, my emphasis). The concept of a spiral of violence also undermines the idea of Central America as ground zero for the geopolitical struggle between the East and the West.lxxxviii While these contrasting ideologies certainly played a part in the armed conflicts of the second half of the twentieth century, a thinking from Central America reveals that it is the situation of extreme poverty and the dehumanizing conditions that the poor majorities suffered in combination with the respective states’ repressive responses to their demands for justice that should be considered the primary motor for Central American violence. In support of this idea Ellacuría points out that one key difference between countries like El Salvador,

Nicaragua, and Guatemala – who were all experiencing large indices of violence – and a country like Costa Rica – which had largely evaded entering into the armed conflicts of the latter half of the century – was the agrarian reforms that Costa Rica had succeeded in achieving, thus alleviating their problem of social marginalization to an extent that allowed them to maintain a relatively peaceful state. He also suggests that El Salvador and the rest of Central America might have found “other, more just paths” had they been able to pass the proposed land reforms of 1973, 1976, and 1979 (“Factores endógenos”

152).

When pacific means of adjusting the structure are met with repression as both

Ellacuría and the cultural text point out, the response that emerges is a new form of

190 violence: revolutionary violence. Both the State and the dominant classes then meet that violence with their own illegal, repressive violence characterized by what Ellacuría has called “strictly terrorist practices” (“Factores endógenos” 169). The subversive violence of the popular classes that is organized only once all other means have been closed off to them interlaces with the privatized violence and the terrorist State violence to generate civil war. The need for armed insurrection captured in the cultural text and Ellacuría’s explanation is important because, far from justifying the violent responses of either group, they move us away from the superficial and simplistic approximations to the conflict, those that envisioned it as “a confrontation of communism against democracy or of the east against the west”; Ellacuría calls these perspectives both “problematic” and

“ideologized” (“Replanteamiento” 1106). What is necessary is a paradoxical conceptualization of revolutionary violence that understands it as a response to the primary violence of the State and oligarchy.lxxxix

The concept of structural injustice that Ellacuría names as the primary violence in the spiral of violence is an abstract concept; however, we can turn to the cultural text to find examples of how this structural injustice is historicized in the case of El Salvador. As cultural memory, the novel proposes that the societal superstructures should be configured as a historical subject that holds agency and responsibility in the armed conflict. Isabel, one of Eugenia’s comrades in arms, adds her voice to the collective testimonio to talk about the growth of popular organization during the proposed agrarian reforms. She explains that the final months of 1976 represented significant progress for the peasant workers because they began their first protest platform in order to demand

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9.50 colones (just over $1 USD) as their daily salary. Clearly, this is less than a family needs for subsistence. Isabel explains what this amount would mean in more practical terms: “They asked for a spoonful of rice, a spoonful of beans, a morsel of cheese and two tortillas. It ought to have come as news to the world to learn that people were still begging for food in our country. Their struggle for their rights was not just over a small wage increase, but over food and survival. It came as a shock” (71, my emphasis). In this way, the testimonio urges readers to understand the popular uprising in El Salvador, then, as a demand for life. The most despairing part of reviewing this recent history is seeing how a cry for life was met with campaigns of death.

We should understand this demand for a wage increase—more accurately a struggle to survive—within its historical context. As the country approached the 1980s, wealth became increasingly concentrated in the hands of the country’s elite. Tommie Sue

Montgomery’s history of the period shows that although the 114 families that constituted the oligarchy only owned 57% of the 3,000 corporations recognized by the State, they controlled 84.5 of the capital investment in 1979. This distribution of capital obviously had a detrimental effect on the distribution of income within the country. Montgomery presents a series of statistics and charts that highlight what Ellacuría calls the

“infrahuman” conditions that this inequality produced.xc The contrasts are striking. While

42% of Salvadoran families earned $80 or less a month, the top 6% was earning more than $400 per month or more – meaning they were earning a minimum of 500% more than the poorest families, though since $80 was the maximum for the category and $400 was the minimum, the difference was probably much higher. This extreme differentiation

192 and concentration of wealth meant that the country’s economic and political decisions were made to benefit a small minority, effectually ignoring the social needs of the poor majority. As Montgomery puts it, “the most serious cost, of course, was growing social and political unrest, which led to civil war by 1980” (71).

This social and political unrest, however, is only possible when those who suffer structural injustice become aware of their own suffering and begin to demand their rights.

This, in part, was why the Jesuits and other religious figures’ work to raise awareness among the rural poor was considered subversive by the State. Eugenia’s life trajectory as captured by the cultural text shows the possible outcome of an awareness of this primary violence by a member of the more privileged class. Before entering college, Eugenia went on a mission trip to Guatemala to work with poor, indigenous communities. The voices that reconstruct her memory recall the impact her time spent there had on her formation. One comrade, Marta Elena, explains: “What most preoccupied [Eugenia] was the astonishing poverty and exploitation, which she discovered had a political rationale exceeding its merely religious explanation” (49). Although Javier did not know Eugenia while she was on her mission trip to Guatemala, she had told him of the sort of questions that began to arise in her mind based on this experience. He recalls:

Her sense of injustice was accentuated by the poverty she encountered in

Cabricán [Guatemala], above all in relation to the racism she came across

regarding the Indians […] The question was framing itself: how come our people

live under a system of such injustice? Why do our people suffer so much

exploitation? She began to consider the inherent contradiction between rich and

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poor, between the exploiters and the exploited, between the oppressors and

oppressed. (50)

What we see in this quote is that Eugenia begins to call into question the tenets of this system of misery that Ellacuría calls the primary violence.

If we will recall, in chapter three Ellacuría pointed out that the ideologization of private property was one of the pillars that upheld this system of poverty. The ISTA law that he and the UCA supported would have represented a chipping away at that system.

When the measures proposed by the Salvadoran Institute for Agrarian Transformation fail, Ellacuría determines that it is the minority social class that won and the State—in the liberal sense of the word, as in the representative of the interests of the totality—that loses. Moreover, he argues that while the new law proposed to seek out a change in the causes of the social evil that had long plagued the country, the law that is finally approved abandons itself to that very social evil. Ellacuría characterizes the polemic between the ANEP and the legislative assembly as a sharpening of the already ongoing class struggle. The result, he writes, is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Seeming to repeat the same history that led up to the 1932 peasant massacre, Ellacuría writes “The peasant has been defrauded once again” (“A sus órdenes” 656).

With the transformation of the ISTA law, the State sends a message to the oppressed classes making it clear that their interests are not protected. This lack of protection by the State is another aspect of the primary violence that unbridles what

Ellacuría calls the spiral of violence. The effects are felt almost immediately, as we see registered in Eugenia’s testimonio. Javier explains that “1975 and 1976 were two years in

194 which the rumblings of grassroots and armed struggle brought the war in our country to some sort of climax. The repression was intensified, as was the genocide, and the situation became increasingly difficult for both of us, as for every well-known militant”

(67). In precisely the same moment as the government had turned its backs on the poor majorities by transforming the ISTA law, it also increases its violent means of repression.

This spiral of violence suggests that the State’s relationship with its citizens does not correspond to the liberal definition of this institution. In the next section, we will ask what sort of political system do we find operating in the Salvadoran armed conflict.

***

An illiberal liberalism

Given that the State has already denied recognizing the demands and interests of the oppressed classes, where do those who fall outside of the realm of the State turn? One possible answer will bring us back to the importance of the cultural text and will also signal the reason for reading Ellacuría’s writing as a cultural text, as developed in my introduction. In her article “Ciudadanías abyectas: intervención de la memoria cultural y testimonial en la res publica”, cultural critic Ileana Rodríguez explains that while social science or historical texts provide us with excellent accounts and descriptions of the guarantees and prerogatives of the citizen, the cultural text is especially apt for registering the mistreated rights or the non-rights of the citizen-subject.xci She underscores two critical aspects of the cultural text: first, its ability to communicate the “places and facts of memory expressed in popular and poetic language, archived in the cultural text because these are the only ones to register the memories and subjectivities of the

195 remembering subject” (17). That is to say, precisely because certain citizenships seemed to be denied by the State, as we saw with the ISTA-ANEP debate, the more scientific texts fail in registering their cultural memory. But where the social science text fails, the cultural text completes the task of memory. In this light, the cultural text becomes an essential place for the consideration of citizenships. Rodríguez claims that the political weight of the cultural text, then, becomes particularly radical when we are contemplating what she calls abject citizenships: “the adverse and abject citizenships serve as a bridge for a more comprehensive discussion of the social, political, and cultural facts and provide a more solid ground for proposals of public policies” (17). In other words, the cultural text registers the political, and it can and should serve in rethinking our own political systems.

The introduction of Rodríguez’s concept of abject citizenship requires that we take a closer look at the concept of citizenship itself. Given that the government of El

Salvador is intended to be a liberal democracy, we will discuss the concept of citizenship within the liberalist system.xcii According to classical liberal theory as developed by thinkers such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, the notion of citizenship implies that the subject cedes certain rights to a sovereign entity that in turn protects the common good.xciii Hobbes identifies this entity as civitas and explains that the rights that individuals cede include the right to self-determination (or self-mastery/sovereignty) in order to receive the protection that the sovereign power offers. Likewise, in Locke’s theory the primary objective of collective union is protection, principally of private property, which was considered to be an extension of the individual. According to Locke,

196 all men participate in civil society through the use of consensus, be it explicit or tacit.

That is to say, the beginning of political society for Locke “depends upon the consent of the individuals, to join into, and make one society; who, when they are thus incorporated, might set up what form of government they thought fit” (Locke 56). If we are to attempt to apply this notion of citizenship to El Salvador in light of the ANEP-ISTA polemic, we see that the poor majorities whose interests do not match with the large landowners are not protected by the State. Therefore, they are not properly citizens of Salvadoran society.

Part of the problem with Locke and Hobbes’ conceptualizations of citizenship is that individuals must enter into society in conditions of liberty and equality. The genealogy of Central American society that we traced in chapter three has already debunked any notion of equality and also indicates that liberty is not applied in the same way across class and ethnic lines. The State’s protection of the interests of the oligarchic class effectively refutes any claims of universality in the tenets of liberalism even despite the landowner and the peasant worker being legally recognized as full citizens and, as such, equal before the law. Pilar Calveiro helps us to understand these differing grades of citizenship by naming two inferior categories: second-class and denied citizenships.xciv

The concept of denied citizenships is a negative definition of citizenship and can be found in the example of the undocumented immigrant; it does not apply to the case we are analyzing here, though Ellacuría is also critical of ideologized uses of nationalism.xcv

The category that interests us here is that of second-class citizenship, which defines those poor majorities who are left unprotected by the state and whose interests are not determined to constitute part of the common good in the State’s political practice.

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However, the political violence prevalent in El Salvador requires us to think even deeper on the concept of the second-class citizen. In these instances, the State exceeds a passive negation of the citizenship of the victims of this violence and takes a more active role in order to ‘expel’ them. That is to say, the condition of a second-class citizen, as we also saw with our genealogy in chapter three, is quite precarious. When these ‘citizens’ confront the State for its failure to fulfill its part of the social contract, as the subjects found in Alegría’s text do, they may quickly move to a third category that Ileana

Rodríguez has termed abject citizenships. In order to explain this type of citizenship,

Rodríguez turns to psychoanalysis and the work of Julia Kristeva. For Kristeva, the abject is that which is opposed to the self, that which is without sign, that which cannot be named. The abject is all that must be passed and eliminated in the same way we discharge vomit and excrement – with force. Given that, when Rodríguez refers to abject citizenships she is referring to citizens of which the State wants to dispose. They are abject in that they are members of subaltern groups that the State does not want to recognize or name; they are citizens only in as far as they occupy a place in the national geography and they form, at least in legal documents, part of the social realm as subjects to be governed. When the popular classes who had been relegated to the realm of second- class citizenship decided to rise up and demand their proper place in society, the dominant powers quickly re-classified them as abject citizenships, social ills that must be eliminated. Rodríguez finds that these citizenships are recurrent in cultural texts, an affirmation proven by Alegría’s novel. Such texts reveal both the ways in which the State

198 postpones, puts off, and subjugates these citizenships and the way in which these subjects express a desire for full citizenship in the classical, liberal sense.

They Won’t Take Me Alive is certainly an example a cultural text that captures the desire of the abject citizenships. What we see in the text is a series of attempts by revolutionary figures like Eugenia to make the demands and needs of the peasant and working class seen, understood, and met by the State, which was meant to protect them but that had instead opted to protect the minority ruling class. Again, the popular uprising should be seen as an appeal for life, given that its demands were as basic as a spoonful of rice. However, Alegría’s text points out the official reaction to this demand for life: “The landowners and oligarchs, seeing the movement develop, began to demand repression”

(71, my emphasis).xcvi The State, which represented the oligarchic class and not the

Salvadoran people, give their ‘citizens’ what they want: violence.

Alegría’s narrative registers numerous other examples of the ways in which these citizenships attempt to make visible the way in which the State had abandoned them.

After the electoral fraud that resulted in Colonel Molina’s presidency a popular and military protest rose up to dispute the results.

Within hours, the sky over San Salvador was speckled with the military

aeroplanes of the Nicaraguan and Guatemalan air-forces. They bombarded the

rebel barracks and, eighteen hours later, the military rebellion was crushed, taking

a toll of 200 corpses. Colonel Molina unleashed a wave of repression against his

opponents, torturing and assassinating their leaders or, in most instances,

expelling them from the country. (56)

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This scenario illustrates the thin line between second-class citizenships and abject citizenships; once these subjects speak to the way in which the State has failed to realize their proper citizenship rights, the State then marks them for elimination. As this violent repression is occurring in the testimonio, Eugenia and her husband are going through a process that they refer to as “proletarianization”, in which they came to learn first hand about the living conditions of the peasant class: “At that time, knowing of the struggles in which our people were engaged, I was certain that it was necessary for our Salvadorean people to enter further into the revolutionary struggle” (57). Molina’s crackdown, a form of what we labeled necropedagogy in chapter three, leads Javier to the conclusion that

“the only way forward for our people was by force of arms” (57).

That large numbers of the nation’s citizens are not recognized as such by the state implies a need to problematize the notion of liberalism in the Salvadoran context. This is precisely the task that Ileana Rodríguez sets out to do in her book Liberalism at its

Limits: Crime and Terror in the Latin American Text. We can borrow from Ellacuría’s vocabulary and say that in her book, Rodríguez shows that liberalism is an ideologized concept. Let’s read her words:

My point is to demonstrate that liberalism is specifically grounded in a particular

form of historical development, and that this specificity does not seem

transferable or translatable […]. Consequently, cultures with different historical

developments do not easily reproduce it. […] The result is, at best, a skewed and

bizarre performance, an illiberal form of liberalism that all but enhances the

paradoxes of the creed. (8-9)

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Rodríguez goes on to name the three primordial tensions at the heart of liberalism, all three of them being tensions that are brought to the forefront in Alegría’s text and with the ANEP-ISTA debate. They are: “(1) those between individual and communal or group interests, (2) those between freedom and equality […], and (3) those between a strong state and a noninterventionist state (20). In regards to these tensions, if we are to read both Alegría and Ellacuría as cultural texts that reflect the historical reality of the country, what we see is a Salvadoran state that sides with individual and oligarchic interests rather than the communal, that privileges the freedoms enjoyed by the oligarchy rather than the equality of its citizens and that constitutes a weak, noninterventionist state rather than one that actively secures the common good. In Rodríguez’s study of the contradictions of liberalism in Guatemala, Colombia, and Mexico, the contradictions that she sees lead her to conclude that “[w]hat we need is a historicization of liberalism that will allow us to understand why so-called cultural minorities do not fare as well as so- called cultural majorities” (31). The collective voices found in Eugenia’s testimonial make the same claim and it is this theoretical task that Ellacuría takes up, again reflecting the outcry of the oppressed majorities.

If we will revisit Ellacuría’s methodology of historicization that we saw in chapter three then we will recall that it asks us to consider concepts like liberalism not as abstract concepts, but as historical ones.xcvii In that sense, he would agree with Rodríguez in her assertion that we must see how liberalism has been realized in historical reality in order to actually judge it against its own claims. In a sense, when he historicizes the concept of private property he is simultaneously historicizing liberalism. The State’s final decision

201 and the actions that are registered in Alegría’s text expose the illiberal aspects of

Salvadoran liberalism. Not only does the transformed law dramatically reduce the State’s obligation to assure the economic wellbeing of its citizens and to provide social justice, but it also relegates that very subjectivity from the State to the citizenry itself. The lack of any space for negotiation and the need to turn to armed insurrection in They Won’t Take

Me Alive highlights the results of this political move and the way in which the State continues to serve the interests of the minority, ruling class. Ellacuría calls this governmental model absurd and an ideologization of the relationship between the individual and the State. Members of the peasant and working class, along with those who would take up their fight, like Eugenia, are abandoned by the State; the notion of citizenship in practical terms, as we have seen, is severely limited.

If we are to understand the conflict as it is framed both by Alegría and Ellacuría— as a conflict between the interests of the dominant class and their ‘individual freedoms’ versus the common good of the whole of Salvadoran society—then Ellacuría’s approach to the case of the ANEP-ISTA polemic helps us to understand how the State exhibits illiberal behavior. Despite the ANEP’s portrayal of the original proposals for the agrarian transformation as an abuse of the power of the State against the individual, Ellacuría shows that the proper way to understand the debate is as “between the interest of the private landowner and the interest of the majority of the citizens, who are not and will not be able to be owners of land […] The person who defends the individual is actually defending this exaggerated abundance; they are not defending the individual, but rather violating the individual rights of the large majorities” (“La transformación” 645, my

202 emphasis). In his text, Ellacuría concurs with the liberalist notion that the individual needs some form of protection against the state, but that same individual also needs protection against the dominant class.xcviii His conclusion is that the sort of individual-

State relationship that exists in El Salvador is an ahistorical one. We can extrapolate on this to affirm that the form of liberalism in the country is also an ahistorical one, one that does not respond to the Salvadoran historical reality. While according to the abstract notion of liberalism the ideal would be to potentiate the society and reduce the power of the State, this is simply not the case in El Salvador: “the capacity of the State should be reinforced so that it can counterbalance its current dependency with respect to the particular interests with a great power of pressure” (“La transformación” 647). However, if we are to look at the State’s inability to liberate itself from the dominant minority as reflected in their final decision on the reforms and in Alegría’s text, then we come closer to understanding the search for a new state that the guerrilla forces undertake.

The relationship between the individual, the collective, and the State is an important point when considering if liberalism exists in El Salvador. In her approach to liberalism, Rodríguez states that in order to understand the aporias of the system we should turn to the examples of liberalism at its limits. The Salvadoran situation that is registered in Ellacuría’s work and Eugenia’s testimonio effectively places liberalism at its limits, revealing its glaring contradictions. Rodríguez refers to individualism as being the

“bedrock upon which liberalism firmly rests and to which all the other concepts of liberalism refer” (11). By focusing his attention on the ideologized use of the individual-

State relationship, Ellacuría demonstrates that this core concept is indeed flawed in the

203 case of Salvadoran liberalism, thus implying that, as Rodríguez puts it, “the whole theoretical edifice is tremulous, ready to collapse under the weight of its own tacit assumptions and presuppositions” (12). The foundational concept of liberalism does not fit the way that the State and the dominant classes treat the poor majority of the

Salvadoran population. Much like we saw with the forms of citizenships, the oppressed classes of El Salvador are excluded from the category of individual.

If we are to read both Ellacuría and Alegría’s texts as examples of cultural texts in that both are produced from the same historical reality and both register the demands of the subaltern classes, then we are urged to pass a negative judgment on the notion of liberalism in El Salvador. That is to say, despite the speaking subjects’ legal and constitutional recognition as citizens of the republic, in practical and cultural terms their interests lie outside of the scope of the State. This, combined with Ellacuría’s historicization of the concepts so intimately linked with liberalism makes it clear that it is in fact not a universal concept in El Salvador. That is not to say that some form of liberalism does not exist in El Salvador. I believe that Ellacuría would assert that a liberal democracy does exist, but that it is limited only to the landowning classes. It is against this limitation that Eugenia and her comrades were fighting; they wanted a State that included and protected the peasant class’s interests. In a text dated 1978 in which

Ellacuría historicizes the concept of the common good and human rights, he describes the situation in the following way:

The State, instead of favoring the common good, privatizes this good and puts it

at the preferential service not of the all but rather of the privileged part [of the

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social]. The State exists, then, not as an objectification of the real common good,

but rather as an objectification of the good of the minorities who appropriate the

material realizations of the common good, meaning that it is the defender of the

common good only in the sense of being representative of those who have

illegally appropriated the common good. (“Historización del bien común” 287).

This illegal (“indebidamente”, in the Spanish original) appropriation of the common good dates back to the foundational moment of conquest, as we saw in the previous chapter.

If the State actually serves the interests of the minority, ruling class while excluding the interests of the majority of its population, as we see in Alegría’s text and

Ellacuría’s analysis, it is not just the concept of liberalism that we must put in question in

El Salvador. Ellacuría affirms that from a perspective of historicization, we come to the conclusion that the common good is also a concept that is nonexistent.xcix We are not just looking at a system of unequals, but rather a system “founded on exploitation” that gives rise to an ever “growing inequality”:

In effect, the existence of well-determined economic and political mechanisms

(unequal exchange, transnationals, etc.) serves the good of those who possess the

most productive capital by negating those who do not possess that capital or

possess it in unfavorable conditions. In these circumstances, the condition of the

proper good is the negation of the broader good of others; that is, the negation of

the common good. (“Historización del bien común” 286)

***

Actually existing liberalism and the common evil

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This idea that the ‘liberalist’ government in El Salvador – and here I would agree with Ellacuría’s assertion that this judgment should also be made on the world-system, at large—actually constitutes a negation of the common good merits our attention. This idea suggests that it is not just that the system is flawed, but rather, that the system is structured in such a way that it negatively affects the majority of the population in order to benefit the ruling minority. Once again, we can turn to Alegría’s novel for an account of this. One of the historical events that is registered in the narrative is the creation and implementation of the Central American Common Market (Mercado Común

Centroamericano-MCCA) in the region. This plan followed the model developed by the experts of President Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress”. That plan underscored the need to increase the income of the rural population in conjunction with the creation of an internal market for local consumption in order to bring up the economy. That is to say, the plan aimed to serve the common good by alleviating poverty among the majority.

Despite the relative success of the plan in other Latin American countries, the attempts to

“modernize” El Salvador were blocked by the oligarchy, which was able to maintain their

‘right’ to pay “starvation wages in the countryside in order to secure their profits” (50).

The inability of the State to serve its society at this conjuncture triggered mass migration to Honduras, which then resulted in the “Football War” of 1969.c

Eugenia had been in Guatemala on a mission trip at the time of this conflict, but she saw the resulting impoverishment upon arriving back to El Salvador and immediately began working toward understanding how such misery was made possible. She enrolls in

206 the Central American University (UCA) where she decides to study social psychology.ci

Javier recalls the changes that her time at the university incited:

At university she began to obtain access to a lot of books and this helped her gain

in understanding. She began to worry herself about arriving at a more scientific

comprehension of the problem. She began to get to know how capitalism works,

the issue of class struggle, not only in terms of rich and poor but of capitalist

exploitation, and that our countries are dependencies of North American

imperialism. This was going on throughout her university career. (52-53)

What we see emerging in Eugenia’s consciousness is an awareness of the way the capitalist system is actually structured to exploit, not to benefit the many, especially those peoples and countries considered to be “dependencies” of imperialism. We have already highlighted how the collective voice of this testimonio communicates the many ways in which the State has violently negated any peaceful path to fulfilling the needs of the majority – what we can call the common good—, but with this quote on Eugenia’s time at the university, we see that this negation is not an error in the system, but rather a structural component of it.

To say that the brand of liberalism that exists in El Salvador structurally negates the common good might seem to disprove the existence of liberalism itself. However,

Ellacuría’s writing makes the claim that this affirmation does less to disprove the existence of liberalism than it does to historicize the concept in order to deideologize it.

This deideologization, we will recall, is a vital part of liberation. This historicization is meant to divert us away from the abstract and ahistorical notion of liberalism to the

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‘actually existing’ one. All of this is to say, Alegría’s cultural revelation of the contradictions of liberalism and Ellacuría’s theoretical work on the topic do not refute its existence, but they do expose the ways in which it actually exists and functions as a historical concept within the Salvadoran historical reality. In that light, this historicization does discredit the supposed relationship between liberal states and the common good.

The common good is an ideal of classic liberalism, as we have detailed above. But in Salvadoran historical reality, it has been completely distorted. In part this has to do with the way in which the economic has subsumed the political. Writing in 1927, German liberal philosopher Carl Schmitt already recognized that this was happening in what we now recognize as the world-system. His classical text The Concept of the Political gives us some indications as to the historical bases for this subordination of the political by the economic. First, private property plays a central role, especially given that according to liberal thought any threat to individual freedom and private property was considered to be a social evil. Schmitt explains that the industrial revolution of the 19th century pushed the realm of politics, which is essentially the defining of the friend-enemy distinction, into the economic. Looking at the case of Latin America, we might argue that this had been happening since the colonial encounter. Schmitt rephrases this idea later to clarify that the economic has actually become the political and so has become the destiny of society; the economic becomes the means to determine the friend-enemy distinction.cii

This economization of the political coincides with a reformulation of the common good, as Ellacuría describes it. We have already seen evidence of this in the cultural text.

Recall that the oligarchic class justifies maintaining “starvation wages” for the peasant

208 class in order to secure their profit margin. And then any citizens-subjects who protested against this dehumanization were immediately relegated to the realm of abject citizenships, a sphere that is synonymous with the category of enemy. The impacts of this are far-reaching. Ellacuría explains that the common good is confused and reduced to be the agglomeration of produced goods to the point that “the common good is identified with, in this case, the gross national product” (“Historización del bien” 288). That a large portion of the population is suffering from starvation is less important than the GDP of the country. This is a reiteration of the necropolitical system of parasitism that we traced in chapter three. This is also the sort of political regime that uplifts the freedom to own private property above the right to a dignified life, as we saw with the ANEP-ISTA polemic. Finally, this regime in which the political is subordinate to the economic is the same regime that Eugenia and her comrades want to replace and is the same that later enemizes any threats to the current economic system and through the sovereign power of the ‘liberal’ state (jus belli), justifies their elimination—as is the case with Eugenia and her comrades, Ellacuría and his fellow martyrs, and the over 70,000 victims of the civil war.

The Society of Jesus has a long history of being inserted into the communities with which it lives, and so Ellacuría was well attuned to the suffering of the Salvadoran oppressed classes that is reflected in our cultural text, as his writing clearly documents.

His contact with this misery and his philosophical inquiries into the relationship of the

State and the common good lead him to conclude that the historical liberalism that exists in his country serves not to protect the common good but rather to assure the common

209 evil (what Ellacuría calls “el mal común”).ciii That is to say, the political, economic, social, and moral orientation of El Salvador – and more generally, the world-system itself—is such that the majority of the (world/Salvadoran) population lives in conditions of poverty and misery. “Therefore, those who propel this type of ordering are not seeking the common good, but the common evil. In other words, when the majority of a population lives poorly, it must be said that common evil rules, and in no way the common good” (“El mal común” 378). In proposing an understanding of the ‘actually existing liberalism’ as one that serves to reproduce the common evil, Ellacuría provides us with a new theoretical apparatus with which to understand the Salvadoran situation.

The editors of an excellent compilation of essays both by and about Ignacio

Ellacuría point out that he while it is common for liberal thinkers, social ethicists, and moral theologians to employ terminology like the “the common good”, the concept of

“common evil” is not found within their vocabularies. Rather, the concept “was forged by

Ellacuría to present an exactly opposed diagnosis of the ethical character of our civilization” (205).civ Inside this written tribute to Ellacuría’s legacy, Salvadoran philosopher Hector Samour refers to this term introduced by Ellacuría as one that

“attempts to accent the perception of the present state of the world” and one that “has the backing of the real situation in which the impoverished and marginalized majorities of the world presently find themselves” (206).

We should pause here on Ellacuría’s need to recur to the creation of a new term to explain his historical reality and draw a parallel with it and the literary genre of

210 testimonio. Both indicate what Beverley and Zimmerman term a radical insufficiency.

With respect to testimonio, they write the following:

Testimonio implies the importance and power of literature as a form of social

action, but also its radical insufficiency. To produce testimonios, for the form to

have become more and more popular in recent years, means that there are

experiences in the world today that cannot be adequately expressed in forms like

the novel, the short story, lyric poetry, or autobiography, in other words, which

would be betrayed or misrepresented by literature as we know it. (178)

From a liminal socio-historical experience—the trauma of civil war in El Salvador—, a new type of literature emerges. This points toward the power of literature to express and register that which cannot be registered in other media—be it film, newsprint, or even previously existing forms of literature. With the genre of testimonio, literature becomes an important tool for cultural and social representation, change, and consciousness; it is an institution that can serve not just aesthetic or entertainment purposes but also to put a society in touch with itself and its own injustices. As Ileana Rodríguez so eloquently puts it, “sociological and historical texts, then, give us the technical, more complete image of the material objectivity of a social process. Testimonio offers us, so to speak, the subjective aspect, the human and vital side of that same situation” (“Organizaciones” 88).

Ellacuría’s analytical and critical reflection can be said to have emerged from this same situation and departs from this human and vital side, from the life testimonios of some subjects similar to those to whom we have access through Alegría’s text.cv Whereas in the field of literature the Salvadoran historical reality necessitated a new genre, for Ellacuría

211 it meant developing a new term that would allow him to describe the reality he was observing and, in many aspects, living. Classical liberal theory did not allow him to adequately do this and so he turned to theology and defined the notion of common evil.

I would like to highlight two aspects of Ellacuría’s conceptualization of common evil that are relevant to our work here. The first is that we can liken the use of common evil to a subaltern practice in that it pretends to measure historical reality and the historical world from the position of the oppressed. Samour quotes an unpublished text by Raúl Fornet-Betancourt in which he suggests using common evil as the name that characterizes our current times. The politics of this decision, Fornet-Betancourt tells us, implies “beginning with those societies whose impoverished majorities stake a claim to the justice owed them in order to have a dignified life. In other words, I begin with the situation of those ‘whose discomfort in the world’ represents the negation of the utopia of a just world and of a humanity that lives together” (206, my emphasis). This privileged perspective of the poor and oppressed clearly coincides with Ellacuría’s philosophical and theological inclinations toward liberation and salvation. Moreover, this seeing reality from the bottom up and linking the notion of common evil with the very structure of our current world-system also immediately demystifies any notion of benevolence and refutes those who would defend and seek to spread the dominant model of liberal democracy to other regions in the world, especially those that constitute the global South.

The epistemological move that Ellacuría makes in privileging this subaltern perspective is also a process that Eugenia undertakes, and is one that radically shapes the direction of her future. The narrative of Alegría’s novel makes it clear that her own class

212 interests were in conflict with the revolutionary ideals that she embodied. In fact, her family ends up being somewhat divided by the civil war, as some of her brothers remain entrenched in their own class ideology. Eugenia’s experience, however, is different, and it is so precisely because of her contact with those “whose discomfort in the world represents the negation of the utopia of a just world”, as Fornet-Betancourt puts it. After her experience among the indigenous poor in Guatemala, Eugenia integrates herself into the struggle of the peasants and workers in El Salvador by delving into their daily life:

“[Eugenia] did not simply work among the peasants and casual labourers but also shared their daily lives. It wasn’t a matter of undertaking a project in a spirit of paternalism, as a religious sacrifice, to help these people get on their feet, but rather one of submerging herself in their lives, in order to rise with them in a pursuit of a new alternative” (60, my emphasis). This contact with the struggles of the oppressed allowed Eugenia to both experience and understand the collective evil that was structuring her country’s reality; this perspective was foundational for her joining the armed struggle.

The way in which They Won’t Take Me Alive is structured beautifully registers that this experience of Eugenia’s is not just an individual one. The authors’ do this by constructing a polyphonic collage of voices that reconstruct Eugenia’s life. We have already mentioned that the authors explicitly advert us at the beginning of the novel that although this is Eugenia’s story, it is really a story of all those who struggle for liberation in El Salvador. Eugenia, then, becomes an archetype of sorts for the emerging consciousness of the Salvadoran people who are becoming aware of the way that common evil has structured their society. Eugenia’s contact with the experience of the

213 poor majorities is representative of that section of Salvadoran society that was coming to terms with this structuring force. In that light, the cultural text suggests that an awareness of this perspective moves both the collective and individual subject to action, or to revolution in the specific case of Eugenia.

More properly, what Eugenia’s testimonio suggests is that an awareness from the notion of common evil elicits some sort of response. The place of this concept in

Ellacuría’s thought will explain why. If we recall his notion of history as described in chapter one, then his claim that our reality is structured by common evil becomes problematic for our past, present, and future.cvi This is because his philosophy of historical realism would posit that the structural nature of common evil has an overbearing impact on the possibilities and capacities of a given society. We must recall that Ellacuría’s notion of history is not a progressive history in the same sense that Hegel posits the linear progress of the perfection of the Spirit. If common evil is a structural element of historical reality as Ellacuría has argued, then it also produces the possibilities that are available to be appropriated in order to move history in one direction or another; therefore, change is made quite difficult, though not impossible. Samour explains that this understanding of common evil includes both the anthropological aspect that we have been highlighting and a metaphysical one that relates to our discussion in chapter one:

“history is viewed as the summit of the transcendental order, that is, the specific sphere in which the totality of reality is given and reveals itself, [and so] common evil would not only be historical evil, but metaphysical evil, blocking and undermining from its depths the realization and revelation of reality itself” (209). That is to say, the structural nature

214 of common evil fundamentally impacts the direction history takes and the way in which reality (as the ideal/totality) reveals itself in history.cvii

Given this, the theoretical value of the concept of common evil is that once we begin to understand the structure from this perspective, Ellacuría claims that the notion of the common good is converted into a “demand to negate that structural and institutional injustice. Consequently, the common good, emerging as a negation that overcomes

‘common evil’, must be set in contrast as good against evil, but it should have the same characteristics that make common evil something really common” (“El mal común” 378-

79).cviii The common good, understood from a fundamental and historicized conceptualization of human rights as understood from the place of the poor majorities, becomes potentialized as a concept to negate the negation that is the common evil.

Recognizing the concept of common evil as being a structural element of our historical reality requires us to radically broaden our notions of citizenship—even to the point of replacing the category of ‘citizen’ with ‘human’, Ellacuría would say—and then to create structures and institutions that “effectively contribute to the majority of individuals – and not just privileged minorities—satisfying their basic needs and personally constructing their own lives” (“El mal común” 379). In order to reach this, Ellacuría argues for the need to first establish a state or rule of justice and only then to construct a State that follows the rule of law. That is to say, justice must precede law if we are to construct a

State that serves the common good. This would be the more just system that would replace to the ‘actually existing’ liberalism in El Salvador. But how might this be achieved? We can find the seeds for imagining the realization of this utopian idea in both

215 the cultural text provided by Claribel Alegría and in the critical thinking of Ignacio

Ellacuría.

***

Responses to the common evil: collectivism/individualism and subjugating the political to the social.

Ellacuría’s concept of common evil brings to the forefront one of the central tensions of the liberalist system, that between the individual (good) and the collective

(good). He is able to assert that our historical reality is structured by common evil because the individual good has been privileged even at the cost of the common good.

This tension is also especially salient in Alegría’s text. The way in which it is resolved by the revolutionary voices that comprise this collective testimonio gives us space to imagine an alternative political order.

Given that the subtitle of Alegría’s novel is “Salvadoran Women in the Struggle for National Liberation”, one of the central topics discussed by the speaking subjects is the role and integration of women into the revolutionary process. If we are to read this text as Alegría would want, as a literature toward the construction of a better society, it is important that the emerging subject is one that comes from the feminine. This point is taken up throughout the text in terms of gender equality and in its envisioning of a new, non-patriarchal and collective notion of maternity. Literary critic Ileana Rodríguez highlights this fact in her book Women, Guerrillas, and Love: Understanding War in

Central America. There she contrasts feminine texts like They Won’t Take Me Alive and

One Day of Life and masculine texts like those by Che Guevara, Sergio Ramírez, and

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Tomás Borges. Rodríguez finds that these feminine texts are important in exposing the contradictory principles of the revolutions of the region and in challenging the fact that the emancipatory horizon was limited to the masculine. However, the revolution as thought from Eugenia—and as represented in this text—not only encompasses the female but also proposes it as a central place of liberation. Eugenia presents us with an imaginary of what the revolution could be from the embodied, feminine subject. Eugenia, like all of the female commanders’ voices that we hear in this text, is integrated into the guerrilla forces as an equal, thus destabilizing dominant gender hierarchies. Tension does arise in the text given that gender neutrality actually corresponds to the masculine standard and consequently the female subject must enter the revolutionary unit through a form of masculinization.cix Nonetheless, I believe that Eugenia overcomes this tension and even allows us to contemplate the possibility of imagining a femininity that goes beyond that imagined by coloniality.cx

In this way, Eugenia’s testimonio begins to deconstruct the patriarchal notion of the individual by inserting feminine subjectivities and female interests. However, the place where this cultural text allows us to reimagine the conflict between individual interests and the common good is in its discussion of maternity. That is to say, the intermingling of revolutionary ideals and maternity inside the narrative transgresses dominant notions of maternity in that the notion of maternity operative for the female voices of the text is shaped first and foremost by the common good. We begin to see this in the text when Javier remembers Eugenia’s desire to have their first child: “Eugenia had her own particular opinion of what motherhood would mean to her. One of the things she

217 most often returned to was the idea of any child of ours also belonging to the organization and this filled her with happiness. She or he would simultaneously be the child of all the comrades with whom we most closely shared the changing fortunes of war” (83).cxi This first revelation with respect to Eugenia’s conceptualization of motherhood already signals her desire for a more collective childrearing environment. What we see in the text are the ways in which Eugenia and her comrades actually live out this sort of maternity, in which family becomes a much more fluid and expansive concept. The second-in-command of the revolutionary forces, Mélida Anaya Montes (nome de guerre Ana María), recalls how

Eugenia would hand her daughter and motherly duties over to a comrade when the situation called for it: “I was very moved on my first day, when she took the little girl into her arms and told her: ‘I’ve got to go away, you stay here with your mommy, because she is your mommy. And here’s your aunt,’ she indicated someone else, ‘she’ll see to changing your diapers. You can settle down quietly with your mommy and your aunts” (113).cxii Even in extremely individualist societies the old adage “it takes a village” is used to refer to childrearing; Eugenia and her comrades convert that saying from words into reality so that they can better serve the common good, understood here to be the revolutionary struggle. My contention here is that this collectivization of something that in Western societies has become so individualized such as raising children opens up space for working toward a more just structuring of society.cxiii

The collective voices of this testimonio expand upon this reimagined maternity to also break down the gender binary and gender norms with respect to children. Though patriarchal society has designated the duties of raising children to the female, Alegría’s

218 text suggests that revolutionary mothers and fathers shared in the tasks of ‘motherhood’.

This was essential for Eugenia in order for her to combine her own maternity with her role in the revolution. As Javier remembers, “It was necessary to combine the care of our daughter with our revolutionary obligations. From the beginning Eugenia was concerned that we should both share the chores connected with Ana Patricia. She had a very clear idea that both parents should split every aspect of childcare – broken nights, [diapers], the lot” (104). This shared-parenting model would allow Eugenia to continue to contribute to the armed struggle and to grow within the popular organizations. The women’s voices in this testimonio attest to this being a somewhat common practice amongst women in the revolutionary struggle, giving us a model to consider for how to more truly incorporate women’s voices and concerns into the direction our societies move, liberating them from the boundaries established by patriarchy while still assuring the well-being of offspring.

Once again, this transgression of the dominant gender logic moves us in the direction of a more just society, especially in terms of gender relationships. This sharing of domestic tasks and child care is a central part of what afro-feminist and activist Ochy Curiel calls for as a means of breaking away from the binary logic that forms the foundation for an ideology of domination.cxiv Eugenia and her comrades are not only contributing to the development of a more just theory, but they were also converting that theory into a lived praxis.

For El Salvador in the 1980s – and even still for some today— this notion of a maternity shared by both mother and father might seem radical; however, the

219 revolutionary proposal for motherhood found in this testimonio goes even further.cxv

Commander Nadia articulates the reasons for a more collective notion of maternity:

Under the war conditions and system imposed on our country, I don’t feel my

concern as a mother is restricted simply to one child, there are millions of children

in the country. I even believe that I wouldn’t have the moral qualifications to

educate my son with, if I weren’t directly taking part in my people’s liberation.

It’s an act of hypocrisy to collaborate in the way things are in the country.

It’s a contradiction, but one has to see how to resolve it. The interests of the whole

population take first place, they’re what have to prevail over all our personal

activities. For me, the costs came high in learning this because of the pain it

entailed, but I’m fully convinced that motherhood is not a merely personal but

also an historical dimension” (108).cxvi

What is it that Nadia is saying? As a parent, it seems almost unimaginable to place the needs of the countless unknown others that form the collective before the individual needs of one’s own child, but this is precisely what Nadia means when she refers to the historical notion of motherhood over the personal dimension. The common good, in her ideal notion of society, outweighs the individual good.

We can read these new proposals for a maternity imagined from an affirmation of the common good as a response to the contradictions of liberalism that we have been exploring. If we return to Ileana Rodríguez’s discussion of liberalism in Latin America, she asserts that these contradictions imply that “[i]t is thus also necessary to question the need to restrict, regulate, and control freedoms that endanger the very existence of

220 minority community or communities” (Liberalism 31). Eugenia and her comrades take on the role of the sovereign state and self-limit their own liberties and freedoms in order to promote the well-being of the poor majorities in their country. This is how and why they move from a personal/individual and abstract notion of maternity to one that considers it to be a historical concept. Can we imagine a society in which the very relationship between child and parent is mediated by the needs and interests of the collective?

If we follow Ellacuría’s writing, this response to an illiberal liberalism that we find in Alegría’s text should be considered a historicizing of the common good—in terms of a historical realization of the concept. Again, we can read Eugenia and her comrades’ actions as a converting of Ellacuría’s theorizations into praxis. Ellacuría argues that when the common good becomes the negation of the negation that is a system structured by common evil, then within that historic situation it becomes a form of doing justice: “The common good and human rights should be an active doing right and doing justice, becoming right and becoming justice” (289). He goes on to explain, in a similar light to

Rodríguez, that in order to do this we must take into consideration the historical reality from which we are departing:

what can happen is that, in a determined historical situation, it may be necessary

to prioritize the enjoyment of individual human rights: the exquisite cultivation of

some, for example, cannot have primacy over the fundamental education of the

majority of a people, even less so the enjoyment of any comfort of the right to

have what is necessary to survive. (“Historización del bien común” 290, my

emphasis)

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Ellacuría is proposing a hierarchization of rights, with a privileging of those most basic to human survival. And this is precisely what we see Eugenia and the female voices that constitute her testimonio doing. Given the historical situation of El Salvador and the immense suffering of the poor majorities, the right of the people to survive trumps their right to have families that match with the bourgeoisie ideal with which they had been brought up.

It is important to note that both the feminine voices of Eugenia’s testimonio and

Ellacuría both point out that the notion of the common good must constantly be historicized and re-conceptualized. Therefore, the notion of maternity embodied by these subjects should not be absolutized, but understood as a response to their own historical reality and its structuration by common evil. This is why Nadia begins her statement with

“[u]nder the war conditions and system imposed on our country” (Alegría 108). For this same reason some of the voices resolve the contradiction between a personal/individual maternity and the liberation of the people by deciding to postpone motherhood.

Commander Mercedes del Carmen, for example, states: “Every human being dreams of having a family. Even within a new situation, it’s natural to still hope to bear children, to build a family, though a family unit is so difficult to achieve under present circumstances.

It’s something we often daren’t even think about now, but which’ll become possible in the future” (95). The demands of the revolution and working toward the common good imply, in Mercedes’ understanding, that individual motherhood must be postponed for the good of the community.

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For me, the difficulty of even arriving at such a notion of maternity from my own personal, Western perspective underscores the alternative ethical foundation upon which the subjects in Alegría’s novel stand. We could identify this ethics as an intercultural and intersubjective ethics, one that was also exemplified by the character of Lupe in One Day of Life in chapter two. I use the term intercultural ethics by adapting Catherine Walsh’s notion of interculturality as developed in her book Interculturalidad, estado, sociedad:

Luchas (de)coloniales de nuestra época.cxvii There, she defines interculturality as a political, social, epistemological, and ethical project that intends to structurally transform society through a constant human praxis. It is, she explains, a process of horizontalization that puts different groups and cultures in relationships of equality. Rather than as parts of a system of competition, interculturality proposes a system of coexistence, respect, and co-legitimacy. By including the interests of the collective rather than their own individual interests, the women in They Won’t Take Me Alive certainly provide us with one possible praxis of horizontalization that proposes a much broader notion of equality and privileges the notion of collective well-being over the Western central axis of ‘the good life’.

If we want to read the cultural texts that emerge from El Salvador during this time as articulations of utopia, however, the problem becomes how to make that sort of ethics a structural part of society, replacing the idea of the common evil. In this regard,

Alegría’s novel suggests that we should approach this question with extreme caution.

Eugenia serves as an example of the reaction of the system to such attempts, another victim of the State and world-system’s necropedagogy. Ellacuría and his co-martyrs receive the same outcome for their prophetic and utopian praxis. Nonetheless, we can

223 find in Eugenia’s life trajectory one possible pathway toward inserting the ethics we have highlighted above into the political model and constructing a more just society, a pathway that also coincides with one of Ellacuría’s more concrete responses to the problem of common evil. This pathway has to do with her process of proletarization and her university education.

We have already highlighted the principal aspects of Eugenia’s first contact with inequality in Guatemala, then her integration into the daily life of the Salvadoran peasant and her academic formation in the UCA.cxviii Eugenia’s direct contact with the reality of the oppressed allowed her to critically view the structures that were producing this misery. We can see how this contact with a reality that is radically different from their own is foundational both in Eugenia and in Ellacuría’s life. It is arguable that they would not have arrived at this critical consciousness without this sort of contact, though we will see shortly that one particular public institution—the university—does have the potential to facilitate alternative means for this contact. What I want to underline is the central role of a critical thinking that comes from a place of the oppressed majorities.

We should remember that Ellacuría insisted in the role of philosophy and critical thinking in the process of liberation. He has already shown that very existence of a structure that benefits the common evil is made possible because fundamental concepts are ideologized. The role of critical thinking is to deideologize the concepts in order to construct a liberating theoretical-political framework that privileges life and justice. This deideologization moves us toward the construction of alternatives:

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If we therefore succeed in historicizing concepts, that is, in saying what they

mean and what they conceal here and now, we are contributing to the de-

ideologization of a superstructure, that really serves to reinforce particular social

and economic structures, and they in turn actually cause the opposite of what they

claim to want to achieve. It is here that philosophy can offer its assistance as a

principle of de-ideologization and also as an opening to areas for new action.

(Ellacuría “The historicization” 592, my emphasis)

That is to say, his methodology of historicization and the critical thinking that we see emerging in Eugenia is a first step toward deconstructing the structuration of common evil.cxix

Eugenia’s testimonio suggests that this sort of critical thinking should then be followed by the taking up of arms for a revolution; however, Ellacuría’s proposes a slower but more pacific alternative to armed insurrection. Like Eugenia, he is not under the illusion that critical thinking by itself is enough to make the changes that are needed to alter the structures that negatively affect the poor majorities. He makes this explicit when he writes “only direct action on the material structures of production even on a small scale will lay the foundation for a social change that moves from structure to superstructure” (“The historicization” 119, my emphasis). Critical thinking is necessary, but alone it is nothing more than “empty dreams and adolescent hopes” (119). When material changes are negated by a State that serves the common evil, how, then, is critical thinking to have any sort of influence on the material structures? The sort of philosophy

225 that Ellacuría is looking to build is one that “become[s] a material force through the incorporation of a collective consciousness” (119 ).

In other words, Ellacuría is proposing that critical thought must interject itself into the dominant consciousness in order to gain the materiality that it needs to institute changes. One particular phenomenon that he identifies that contributes to this process is the socialization of the concept of a new society. We can understand this to be the communicability of the idea, though he explains that socialization is more than just the ability of the idea to spread and be understood: “[It] is, the phenomenon that leads to, through the multiplication and strengthening of social relationships, to an increase in society as such and, consequently, of the social dimension of humankind. This phenomenon of socialization […] as such contradicts the individual understandings of society” (“Un marco” 582).

How might this socialization be achieved? For Ellacuría, the university holds a particular place in the creation of this critical thinking. When we remember that Eugenia is representative of a broader collective experience in El Salvador, we can read Claribel

Alegría’s text as a cultural register of the level of success that the UCA had in affecting the collective consciousness. As I have already pointed out, Eugenia was a student of the

UCA, and it was there that she received the tools to arrive at a more systematic understanding of the situation of oppression affecting so many Salvadorans. In his book

Blood and Ink: Ignacio Ellacuría, Jon Sobrino, and the Jesuit Martyrs of the University of Central America, Robert Lassalle-Klein eloquently tells the story “of blood and ink” that conveys the importance of the University of Central America. He underscores the

226 university’s “efforts to help take El Salvador’s ‘crucified people’ down from the cross by supporting their efforts to construct a society in which all would have a chance to share a future where dignity, love, compassion, and sanity might prevail” (xxiii). Ellacuría and the university confronted the violent and dehumanizing forces dominant in the country, which, as we know, proved to be too much of a threat to the political powers at play.

The reason that Ellacuría and the UCA’s work was such a threat to the established order is because the university is an institution with great ideological power in El

Salvador, even though translating that ideological power into political power is a difficult task. For this reason, he, along with the other leaders of the UCA, imagined their university as an alternative model. This university, he argues, must take sides in the clash of interests. And it is clear what side it must take:

such a university must take the side of those sectors who are not only a majority –

a majority so overwhelming that by its very magnitude it can be regarded as the

authentic representative of the interests of the whole—but also an unjustly

dehumanized majority. In this sense it is not the ruling classes but the

scientifically determined objective interests of the oppressed majority that must be

the criterion guiding the university. (“Is another university” 181)

This is true for any public institution with an ethical grounding, but it is especially so for the university because of its privileged position in generating culture. Understood in this way, the university becomes the epicenter for a cultural revolution in which new values are identified and fomented, values that negate the negation of the dominant, necropolitical system. In order to fulfill this role, Ellacuría asserts that students, faculty,

227 and administration must be well attuned to and immersed in the national reality so that they may produce a thinking from that reality. That is to say, the national reality must be the field of study of the university as a whole. Finally, all of this must be done with structural change as the overall objective of the institution. The way of affecting the national structures is through what Ellacuría terms social outreach: “Social outreach should be understood in the strict sense as that part of the university activity that reaches society directly, or more specifically and assuming the proper horizon of this university, what directly touches the vast oppressed majority in the way of ‘culture,’ or more understood generally, the university’s direct impact on the social structure” (“Is another university” 203). He goes on to explain that social outreach should be measured in terms of the impact of the university on the collective consciousness of the nation.

For Ellacuría, the objective of the university’s intervention on the collective consciousness should culminate in the creation of what he termed a “third force”, his proposed solution for the armed conflict in El Salvador.cxx Ellacuría imagines this third force as something that inserts itself as an alternative to the imposition of the State and the subversion of the revolutionary groups in terms of their being political parties that seek to become the State. The third force emerges as a response to the problem of structural injustice as the principle of the conflict in El Salvador, a principle that neither the government nor the opposition forces are capable of resolving. Ellacuría proposes the third force as a necessary movement given that the military and political situation had reached a stalemate that threatened to destroy the country both in terms of the economy

228 and loss of life. Ellacuría describes the third force as a social force more than a political one, and therein lies its power.

At this point, we should pause briefly to see how Salvadoran literature, such as

They Won’t Take Me Alive, had a similar role to what Ellacuría had imagined for the university in the creation of the third force. What we see is that literature becomes entwined with the political and actually plays a leading part in making revolution a possibility. Let us again turn to Beverley and Zimmerman for their definition of literature: “literature, in the form it assumes in modern societies, has been one of those practices, particularly in the sense that the appreciation of literature is closely bound up with the development of subject identity (through the usual processes of identification, projection, and so on we have alluded to above)” (8, my emphasis). That is to say that literature is instrumental in the development of social subjects and subject identities.

They further elaborate on this concept when they clarify that literature may not have this effect on all of society, but that in Central America “the educated classes, which are in

Third World societies the primary audience for modern literature, span a series of contradictory sociocultural locations that can be mobilized for, or against, movements for reform or revolution” (8-9). All of this is to say that literature has a very real and material impact on the collective consciousness: “literature can be a means of producing the subject position of a radicalized intelligentsia” (9). Ellacuría’s solution for the armed conflict in El Salvador was for this subject position to be strengthened until it could be consolidated into the third force, which would impose its will, of a social nature, onto the political.

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The third force is constituted by the people (el pueblo) that “is converted into a social force that recovers its autonomy and protagonism in order to become an active subject in the solution” (“Replanteamiento” 1127). Once this force becomes an active agent, it is able to place pressure on both the State and those forces aiming to become the

State. The idea of a third force as a necessary solution not only serves to reiterate that the conflict in El Salvador goes beyond analyses centered on differing economic ideologies or simplistic class structures. That is to say, Ellacuría once again highlights the need to think from Central America. Doing so reveals the contradictions of the global political structures, but it also allows us to imagine alternative responses. The third force is in essence an imagining of an alternative political model in which the political is subjugated to the social. We have already seen that the operative model in El Salvador has subjugated the political to the economic. Going back to Schmitt’s notion of the political, he also signals that the realm of the social can obtain this sort of power over the political:

“Every religious, moral, economic, ethical or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy […] It is a political entity when it possesses, even if only negatively, the capacity of promoting that decisive step” (Schmitt 37).

Ellacuría’s proposal does not call for the third force to identify and declare war on its enemy – this would be a power of the state, and his notion of third force does not seek to become state—, but he does make a call for a third force that “asserts its social power in such a way that it impinges on the political power so that it shall ultimately determine the political and not be the political that determines the social” (“Replanteamiento”

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1128). The idea of a political regime subordinated to the social forces it should represent rather than the inverse is very close to the notion of plural and radical democracy that

Chantal Mouffe proposes in her book The Democratic Paradox. In both Ellacuría and

Mouffe’s proposals, difference is not synonymous with enemy. Rather, the concept of adversary replaces the schmittian notion of enemy and dialogue becomes the tool for resolving conflicting interests. This model presupposes that relationships of power exist and does not negate antagonism, nor does it equate it with the need to result in war.

Hegemony through consensus is no longer considered universal nor exclusive because it becomes a ceaseless and constant process. The social becomes synonymous with movement and difference and, given this, the political must constantly be reconfigured in order to serve the social. We might say that the political must constantly be historicized.

Ellacuría tells us this new model is not only interested in the material struggle for power, but rather is “a social, civil action, but with all the weight and materiality that bursts forth from the vindication of real interests, negated today in multiple ways”

(“Replanteamiento” 1135). It is “a firm and active consciousness, capable of expressing itself and organizing its joint activity, that can constitute itself as a great factor political growth factor, and with it, a great impulse toward a solution for the conflict”

(“Replanteamiento” 1135).

Given Ellacuría’s ideas on the university and its role in forming the collective consciousness, it is not difficult to believe that he names the university as one of the central social sectors that must contribute to the emergence and consolidation of this third force:

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The educational sector and with it though with a certain autonomy the intellectual

sector and especially the university sector – professors and students—, because of

their number, preparation, and consciousness-raising and mobilizing capacity,

represent a specific social force, that in El Salvador’s recent history has shown its

effectiveness, though not always its independence. (“Replanteamiento” 1128)

Ellacuría explains that the idea is not to create utopic solutions, but rather to combine social forces so that they the political can begin to serve its society, rather than the inverse.

In his writing, Ellacuría is also open about recognizing the very real impediments to consolidating this third force, obstacles that represent threats for sectors that participate in its creation, such as the university itself. The assassination of the UCA martyrs should confirm for us that they were achieving some level of success on this front. Ellacuría certainly seemed to be aware of the consequences of his and the university’s part in breathing life into a social force that would require the government to alter its socio- political structure. Nonetheless, he and the university continued with their work.

If Eugenia’s testimonio serves as an example of how their work emanated throughout the Salvadoran society and trickled down into the popular classes they were trying to serve, it also serves as a real-life testament to the cost of working against structures of injustice. Eugenia and Ellacuría both pay the ultimate price. However, at least in the case of the UCA martyrs, their deaths played an instrumental role in the emergence of a social force that was finally able to put an end to the civil war. Lassalle-

Klein and many other scholars on the Salvadoran civil war suggest that the assassination

232 of the UCA Jesuits marks the end of the armed conflict. Lassalle-Klein points out that with their death, “El Salvador’s third forces had created a formidable non-aligned political force undermining the claims of the various power brokers. And El Salvador’s increasingly independent and influential civil society was now an important player in promoting a viable politics of national reconciliation” (181).

The way in which Ellacuría’s death opens up the country to the possibility of a new life is a religious trope we can also find in his writing. In a text on redirecting a divided society like El Salvador toward the common good and basic human rights,

Ellacuría explains that the building of a new society necessitates the death of the old way of life, of the old structures. He refers to this as a “death that gives life”:

a superior life to that which is overturned by death, and true love as personal

fulfillment and historical utopia, there is but one step. It is a theological step that,

above all, from liberation theology, could reveal the internal unity of history and

salvation and of the salvation of history. But Saint Thomas already attempted to

make the connection between the intramundane common good and the common

good that is God, as if, ultimately, the common good of society were one of the

preeminent ways of making God present in history. (“Historización del bien

común” 290-291)

What Ellacuría is calling for here is the death of a system of death, a necropolitical system where “[t]he death of the many is imposed so that the life of the few moves from necessity to superfluity” (“Historización de los derechos” 300). This death that brings

233 life, he tells us, is a historical prioritization of human rights, the historicization of the common good.

We can link Ellacuría’s death and his notion of death that gives life to the central role of death in Alegría’s They Won’t Take Me Alive. Literary critic George Yúdice submits that it is precisely through her death that Eugenia emerges as a new subject, as one that embodies the revolutionary ideals, especially that of solidarity with the oppressed populations of El Salvador, even when faced with death. Her work toward constructing a new society, like in Ellacuría’s case, culminates in, but does not end with her death. Death, then, becomes a symbol for new life. A life committed to justice and revolution always has death in its horizon of possibilities, as becomes tragically obvious with both Eugenia and Ellacuría. But even when this latency is converted into material reality, it still reverberates in life, and this is one of the central messages that should be taken up in remembering these fallen figures. For Alegría, it is Eugenia’s life—through her death—that is echoed through the many voices that reconstruct her life—as many as

17 different voices form the collage that constitutes this testimonial literature. And it is

Eugenia’s way of living that they repeat, not simply the fact that she dies. In one of the letters to her husband, in which we hear Eugenia’s own voice, she tells us what her ethos of life is: “It has cost our people so much suffering and so many lives, that we have to give all for all” (134). As much as this text denounces the sort of politics that resulted in

Eugenia’s death and the Salvadoran civil war, it also announces—and in this sense, it is also an act of speech and utopia—that from the ashes of the fallen emerges a new life,

234 one in which we can imagine alternatives like those personified and embodied by

Eugenia.

With their respective deaths, both Ellacuría and Eugenia take the ultimate step in their efforts to “overturn history, to subvert it, and send it in another direction” (Ellacuría

“The challenges” 173). Ellacuría’s death leaves us with a challenge: that of keeping his work alive, of adapting it to our world today, and to continue to negate the negation that is the common evil and moving toward a world that is centered on a deideologized notion of the common good that comes from places of the oppressed such as El Salvador and

Central America. In that way, we can continue to make his death one that gives life.

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Conclusion

The youth is not responsible for what has happened so far, but they are for what happens from now on. They are not yet ensnared by the economic interests and nationalist egoisms or by the political projects of domination. But, within a few years, if there is not a youth revolution, they will become a part of dominant society and with it they will be responsible for the evils of our world. -Ellacuría, “Subdesarrollo y derechos humanos” 332.

Once we recognize the problem, once we feel the compassion that this problem deserves, once we have become ashamed and confused because our parents and we have created an intolerable world, we must awaken the unbreakable decision to change it and the passion to look for effective solutions. -Ellacuría, “Subdesarrollo y derechos humanos” 331.

To conclude this dissertation, I would like to return to one of the objectives that I laid out in my introduction. There, I proposed my work as an act of memory, reading the texts presented here as testimonio not only of the thought and life of Ignacio Ellacuría, but also of the more than 70,000 Salvadorans who lost their lives in the civil war. The notion of memory that I am working with here is that developed by Elizabeth Jelin in her seminal text, State Repression and The Labors of Memory. In this text, she affirms that memory serves as a sort of bridge that connects past, present, and the future: “It is at that point of complex intersection and convergence, in that present where the past is the space of experience and the future is the horizon of expectations, where human action is

236 produced” (4). To combine this notion of memory with Ellacuría’s thought as I have been outlining it, we can understand memory to imply a constant historicization of the meaning of the past and our relationship to that past. That historicization must be done from the present, from our given historical reality. Finally, in alignment with liberation philosophy, this is done in order to better grasp the possibilities that can be appropriated in the capacitation process of historical praxis in order to send history in a different direction, that is, to construct a better future. This is the sense in which I would like have realized an act of memory with Ellacuría’s thought, though I have only taken the first step in the process. The work that I have done here only begins to call attention to the transformative thought produced by this martyr. Left unfinished is the task of positioning myself with the “crucified people” of my own historical reality and historicizing those emancipatory and utopian ideas in order to bring our world closer to what Ellacuría calls the reign of God.

In order to reflect on this important task that my dissertation leaves unfinished, and in following the notion of memory as a bridge of the past-present-future, I would like to briefly consider what brought me to this topic, what I have done in these pages, and where I might go from here. This dissertation was born of my own personal experience of having the historical poor “break my heart”, to borrow once more from Dean

Brackley.cxxi Though I followed the common trajectory of the privileged North American who travels to a third world country and then believes he can solve their problems, I want to focus here on the ethical implications of the moment in which the historically poor were first revealed to me. The affective outcome of that encounter was a full

237 comprehension—in Ellacuría’s terms of sentient intelligence; that is, an emotional and rational apprehension—of my own position within the world-system as oppressor.cxxii

Immediately, as I mentioned in the introduction, the problem of the unjust structures of the world became my problem, and it became so ethically. Indifference, then, was no longer an ethical option.cxxiii

The theme of indifference with respect to violence in Central America is the central topic of Douglas Porpora’s book, How Holocausts Happen: The United States in

Central America. There, Porpora analyzes the ethical and moral responsibility of the U.S. population during the Central American armed conflicts of the second half of the 20th century in comparison with that of non-Jewish Germans during the holocaust. His condemnatory conclusions may be surprising for many U.S. citizens: “What the United

States did in Central America was like the Holocaust in that it was a case of a government's perpetrating ongoing systematic mass murder without a sufficient outcry on the part of the public […] what the United States did and is continuing to do in Central

America constitutes a Holocaust-like event” (138, my emphasis).cxxiv Porpora goes on to explain that when a people’s government adopts an official policy of mass murder, then those people have a moral responsibility to use the means necessary to enact a change in that policy. In the case of U.S. support for the genocidal governments in Central America and of Nazi Germany, what Porpora finds is that a socialized indifference was the condition necessary to allow these atrocities to occur. The solution that he elaborates in his text is the bolstering of public education programs that foster critical thinking and the participation and cultural criticism from the citizen-subjects that make up a given society.

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On this point, Ellacuría and Porpora coincide. What we have seen in this dissertation is a theory that goes against the very indifference that Porpora finds to be the primary condition that makes politics of violence like that carried out in El Salvador possible. In the first chapter, the Clandestine Poems of Roque Dalton illustrated how a thinking aligned with Ellacuría’s philosophy of historical realism intimates a commitment to those who are oppressed from the dynamic system of reality in order to send history in another direction. In chapter two, Manlio Argueta’s One Day of Life registers how that sort of philosophy is translated into a Christian spirituality that corresponds with

Ellacuría’s theology from the poor of El Salvador. This is a theological perspective that represents an existential threat for the established order, a reality made painfully clear with Ellacuría’s own assassination. Having established the foundation for a thinking from

Central America, in chapter three we analyzed how in two post-war literary texts an ideologized notion of private property is shown to have negatively structured the lives of the Salvadoran popular majorities. Ellacuría’s methodology of historicization dialogues with other Central American intellectuals to provide us with a first step toward deideologizing this concept: developing a history from the perspective of the conquest in order to reveal the necropolitical structure of parasitism that results in a culture of violence and inequality. Finally, Claribel Alegría’s They Won’t Take Me Alive follows this same line of thinking by portraying the unjust agrarian regime in the country as an active agent in the armed conflict. With Alegría, Ellacuría’s work on private property and human rights makes the contradictions of liberalism visible and declares the common evil the motor of the Salvadoran and world-system. Eugenia’s testimonio also converses with

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Ellacuría’s political writings to assist us in imagining alternatives to a historical reality structured by the common evil.

After having spent so much time reading the work of Ignacio Ellacuría, I have developed a very healthy appreciation for the sort of public intellectual that he was. I believe that he gives us a model to follow for several reasons. First, Ellacuría was fearless in his writing. It is evident in many instances that he is aware of the danger of his denunciations, but that was not a deterrent for him. His is a subversive politics of writing.

Like many of the Central American writers of this period who were demanding justice, there is a sense of his ‘writing from the gut’, not just writing about the injustice in rational terms, but also feeling it and communicating it through an affective writing. He criticizes policies and politicians by name—again, despite being aware of the violent consequences it would bring—, thus inverting the hierarchy of power and revealing specific agents that contribute to the parasitic structures of injustice.cxxv Moreover,

Ellacuría’s attempts to go beyond his ties to the center and the established order interpellate me directly. In essence—and especially with his death—he renounces his privileged, first-world (Spanish), male, and Christian position in order to align himself with the historical poor and to produce a thinking from that epistemological/geographical place. It is this intellectual and vital gesture that compels me to read him as a precursor to contemporary decolonial theory and to assert that his work can help move decolonial theory forward.cxxvi The Christian, liberation theology that Ellacuría develops entails a constant re-positioning with the “crucified people” of history—what we can understand as the subaltern—, and as such, provides an especially appropriate method for making

240 coloniality visible by historicizing the concepts that maintain it. His notion of historicizing the reign of God—though based on Christian theology, it is not exclusive to it—and is one way of potentializing the same sort of exteriorities for which decolonial theories are searching.

This is not to say that Ellacuría’s thinking is unflawed. In the very same light that he moves us in the direction of a decolonial theory, we should also recognize that he is never really fully able to step outside of the dominant, Western episteme. In the introduction to Love that Produces Hope, Robert Lassalle-Klein points out that “Ellacuría lived his entire adult life at the crossroads of Spain and El Salvador” (xxvii). After his death, younger Jesuits called for a reduction of the Spanish influence within the Society, looking for a “Central-Americanization of the province” (xxvii). In chapter one, I referred to how Ellacuría puts his historical realism in dialogue with Marx and Hegel, but there is a lack of engagement with Latin American thinkers. Likewise, although Ellacuría does challenge the location of Western thought, he does not dedicate much time to consider the epistemologies of the native populations of his country. Even in criticizing dominant thought from the center, Ellacuría relies a great deal on its models and categories. For this reason, Lassalle-Klein argues that he is best understood as a “genuine bridge figure”

(xxvii).

One particular way in which Ellacuría represents a bridge figure that deserves to be given more attention is the way in which his thinking opens us up to a theory of interculturality.cxxvii That is, despite his own dependence on Western, Eurocentric categories, his thought is not exclusive to non-Western cultures and epistemes. Following

241 the definition of interculturality as posed in chapter four, I find that Ellacuría’s thinking moves us toward an intercultural subjectivity, especially in his development of the concept of a civilization of poverty. That concept is based on a sort of trans-humanity that entails a universalization but not a uniformization, as Ellacuría puts it:

The principle of universalization certainly is not a principle of uniformization and,

still less, of uniformization imposed from a powerful center on an amorphous and

subordinated periphery…In this way, all the members will complement one

another, and in this complementing the whole will be enriched and the parts

strengthened. (“Utopia and Prophecy” 59)

In this way, the system is opened to a sort of complementarity that does not erase difference but instead reinforces the sameness-within-difference, to borrow from Walter

Mignolo. Ellacuría describes the sort of ethics that would be behind this interculturality this way:

To see others not as part of oneself, yet to see oneself in unity and communion

with others, combines well with what is deepest in Christian inspiration and goes

along with one of the best tendencies of Latin America’s popular sectors, which

unfolds in contrast to the individualistic, separating tendencies. This solidarity is

facilitated in the common enjoyment of common property. (75-76)

What we see here is not just another example of how Ellacuría privileges subaltern knowledge production, but also the principle of an ethics that would deconstruct the sort of ideologization that upholds the necropolitical system we saw in chapter three. I believe there is much to be gained by including these aspects of Ellacuría’s work in more

242 contemporary discussions on interculturality, especially with respect to the way that concept is being developed in South American countries such as Ecuador, Venezuela, and

Bolivia.

All of this is to say that there is a need to actualize Ellacuría’s thought and to bring his ideas to concretion. Because he was assassinated before he had a chance to do so, we are left with the task of bringing his ideas into our contemporary historical reality.

I believe that the thought that he produced and particularly his methodology of historicization are uniquely important in constructing the sort of critical thinking that battles the indifference that allows for the latency of genocide to become material reality.

In fact, there are many ways in which I can imagine applying Ellacuría’s thought to contemporary problems. In recent weeks I have noticed an outcry on my social media feeds regarding the Ecuadorian government’s recent decision to implement a series of taxes on imported goods in order to try to overcome the crisis caused by falling petroleum prices. President Correa has responded to this opposition by stating that when the country is in crisis, the wealthy should invest in local production and consumption, rather than purchasing new cars and luxury appliances. Ellacuría’s notion of the common good versus the common evil and his historicization of human rights would prove a useful theoretical apparatus for analyzing that situation. Likewise, those same ideas and his incomplete development of a civilization of work and poverty could guide projects emerging from the global south that are promoting solidarity economies that compete with capitalist, neoliberal economies. Finally, a voice like Ellacuría’s could contribute to the current debate surrounding laws regarding Central American migration. Ellacuría

243 would certainly call for the U.S. government, especially the Republican party, to shift their thinking to one from Central America. The negation of basic human rights to these human beings proves his statement that “It is necessary to be a North American,

European, Russian, or Japanese to be able to have the resources needed to survive […]. It is, in fact, more important to be a citizen of a powerful and rich country than to be man; the former gives more real rights and more effective possibilities than the latter”

(“Subdesarrollo” 319-320).cxxviii In considering this ideologized conceptualization of human rights in the U.S., he might also compare the somewhat hypocritical reaction to the Charlie Hebdo shootings. Certainly he would have denounced that sort of violence, but he would have also pointed out the still-existing need to prioritize human rights.cxxix

When the message that is communicated from mass media—and conservative channels, in particular—is justifiable outrage regarding the deaths of 11 Europeans but indifference that occasionally reaches an active negation regarding the daily deaths of Central

Americans who are attempting to immigrate to the U.S. in order to survive the effects of the unjust structures of the world-system, what we see is what Ellacuría calls “a fundamental, ethical disorder” (320). Ellacuría points out that the conceptualization of human rights reveals the values of a given collectivity. The values that we see reflected in this defense of the freedom of expression and non-defense of the right to life show that

European, first-world freedoms are more valuable than third world, Central American, poor lives. My position is that we need to activate Ellacuría’s critical thinking in order to avoid this indifference that is allowing the necropolitical system of parasitism that we saw in chapter three to continue to operate.

244

The last point I would like to make has to do with my (our) own position within the university. In chapter four I touched briefly on the potential that Ellacuría saw in the university for socializing a new set of values that move us toward building an alternative system. An attentive and thorough study on Ellacuría’s Escritos universitarios, in which he writes on the ideal model of university, would move us toward the realization of this goal. This would require a total re-imagination of the institution of the university.

Unfortunately, what we see today, even within this university, is a move in the opposite direction. The corporatization of higher education is moving us toward a university that, like the Salvadoran government in the ISTA-ANEP debate, serves capital and not the people. Robert Lassalle-Klein’s recent book Blood and Ink is an important contribution to our thinking about the role of the university in fostering the critical thinking necessary to send our historical reality in another direction. The book is a wonderful analysis of the proposals and impact of the Central American University in El Salvador during the civil war. It appropriately highlights the vision that Ellacuría had and how it was realized in the UCA. However, while his carrying this out in El Salvador was important, it is even more important that we historicize his notion of university in the global North, in the centers of power. If cultural studies within the U.S. are able to institutionalize a thinking from Central America—or even better, from the oppressed of the global South—, then we might be able to contribute to the historical praxis that is capable of undoing the colonial structures that still bind us. Ellacuría puts it this way:

Only when the opulent nations see themselves in their real work, which is the

oppressed nations; only when the opulent classes see themselves in their real

245

work, which is the oppressed classes, will they know what they are. The truth is

that this will not occur until the historical praxis of these nations and these classes

‘makes’ them see what they are in reality. (“Historización del bien común” 288)

In that sense, Ellacuría calls for the university to go beyond national borders to see the situation of the oppressed across the globe; we are tasked with creating an international and subaltern education that will reveal the dialectical relationship between wealth nations and poor nations, wealthy classes and poor classes. Ellacuría was realizing this in

El Salvador when he was murdered, and it is now an ethical and moral obligation for those of us from the center to join in that project understood theologically as historicizing the kingdom of God and secularly as one to “overturn history, to subvert it, and send it in another direction” (Ellacuría “The Challenges 173).

246

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Endnotes

Introduction i All texts for which I did not have access to an English translation can be found in the bibliography with their original Spanish titles. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from those texts are my own translations. ii Clearly, not all Hispanics in Columbus belong to the category of oppressed, but the organizations my students were volunteering with served exclusively that portion of the Hispanic population. iii To be sure, it is not common to see Ellacuría’s name on a list of decolonial thinkers. To date, I have not seen his work analyzed in relation to decolonial theory. In part, with my dissertation, I hope to show that his work should be considered decolonial and merits being entered into that field of debate. iv I have purposefully changed some of the information to protect my student’s anonymity. v To borrow from the title of Dussel’s book The Underside of Modernity. vi This is not a search for some abstract notion of truth or justice. I do not dispute or uphold the notion that Truth and Justice exist. Rather, like Ellacuría, I posit that our access to these are through history and so my search is for a truth and a justice that apply to the historical reality of my times. vii The names of the other victims of this political act of murder are: Ignacio Martín-Baró, Juan Ramón Moreno, Amando López, Segundo Montes, Joaquín López y López, Julia Elba, and Celina Ramos. viii For example, see Artucio, Alejandro. A Breach of Impunity: The Trial for the Murder of Jesuits in El Salvador : Report of the Trial Observer of the International Commission of Jurists. New York: Fordham UP, 1992. Print; Doggett, Martha. Death Foretold: the Jesuit Murders in El Salvador. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown UP, 1993. Print; Whitfield, Teresa. Paying the Price: Ignacio Ellacuría and the Murdered Jesuits of El Salvador. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1994. Print. ix See, for example, Ribera, Ricardo. “La categoría ‘realidad histórica’ en la filosofía de Ignacio Ellacuría.” Historia, ética y ciencia: El impulse critic de la filosofía de Zubiri. Eds. Juan Antonio Nicolás and Héctor Samour. Granada: Editorial Comares, 2007. 157-173. Print; Velásquez, Carlos Molina. “Pensamiento crítico y cristianismo de liberación.” La filosofía en su tiempo histórico. Eds. Felix Valdés García and Yohanka León del Río. La Habana: Ruth Casa Editorial, 2012. 181-205. Print; Senent de Frutos, Juan Antonio. Ellacuría y los Derechos Humanos. Bilbao: Desclée De Brouwer, 1998. Print; and Alvarenga, Luis. “Fundamentos filosóficos de la crítica ellacuriana al movimiento revolucionario.” In Revista Realidad 83 (1998): 117-123. Print. x The breadth of his work expands even more if we are to consider the numerous texts that have been published posthumously. As stated in the presentation to the three volume series that gathers his political writings together, published by the Central American University, “Ignacio Ellacuría did not want to publish his books while he was rector of the Central American University ‘José Simeón Cañas’, because he said that he did not want to be accused of taking advantage of his position of power to publish his writing” (Cardenal Escritos políticos 7). For the compilations of texts on Ellacuría, see Burke, Kevin F., and Robert Anthony. Lassalle-Klein, eds. Love That Produces Hope: The Thought of Ignacio Ellacuría. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2006. Print; Ashley, J. Matthew, Kevin F. Burke, and Rodolfo Cardenal, eds. A Grammar of Justice: The Legacy of Ignacio Ellacuría. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2014. Print; Sobrino, Jon and Rolando Alvarado, eds. Ignacio Ellacuría: «Aquella libertad esclarecida». Santander: Sal Terrae, 1999; and Cardenal, Rodolfo and Héctor Samour, Enrique Dussel, Jon Sobrino, Gerardo Martínez Cristerna,

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Alejandro Rosillo Martínez, and Juan José Tamayo-Acosta. Ignacio Ellacuría: intelectual, filósofo y teólogo. Valencia, España: ADG-N Libros, 2012. Print. xi Calveiro, Pilar. “Testimonio y memoria en el relato histórico.” In: Memoria y ciudadanía. Ileana Rodríguez y Mónica Szurmuk (eds). Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2008. 207 – 224. Print. xii Rivera-Garza, Cristina. “(Con)jurar el cuerpo: historiar y ficcionar.” In Memoria y ciudadanía. Ileana Rodríguez y Mónica Szurmuk (eds). Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2008. 171 – 194. Print. xiii Cardenal, Rodolfo. “De Portugalete a San Salvador: de la mano de cinco maestros.” Ignacio Ellacuría: «Aquella libertad esclarecida». Santander: Sal Terrae, 1999. 43-59. Print. xiv I want to underline that my argument is to include both the cultural text and Ellacuría’s writing-as- cultural-text as archives of the historical past and cultural memory. In his text, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits”, Achille Mbembe speaks what this selection implies: “The archive, therefore, is fundamentally a matter of discrimination and of selection, which, in the end, results in the granting of a privileged status to certain written documents, and the refusal of that same status to others, thereby judged ‘unarchivable’. The archive is, therefor, not a piece of data, but a status” (20). In my argument, I am not proposing that only these texts be considered archives, but rather am contesting the dominant selection and discrimination process by advocating for an opening of the historical archive that might include the voices of those who tend to be excluded. xv This is a subaltern methodology that Rodríguez employs in nearly all her written work and the courses that she imparats to her students. More explicit explanations of why she does this can be found in the following examples: Women, Guerrillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996. Print; Operación pájaro: expediente 27, 1998. Obispo Gerardi: enemigo del estado; marcado para ser eliminado”. Revista de Historia 27 Memoria, cultura y ciudadanía (2012): 17-33. Print; “Organizaciones populares y literatura testimonial: los años treinta en Nicaragua y El Salvador.” Literatures in Transition: The Many Voices of the Caribbean Area : A Symposium. By Rose S. Minc. Gaithersburg, MD: Hispamérica, 1982. 85-96. Print; and Debates culturales y agendas de campo. Estudios Culturales, Postcoloniales, Subalternos, Transatlánticos, Transoceánicos. Providencia, Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2011. Print. xvi Alvarenga, Luis. “Prólogo” In No pronuncies mi nombre: Poesía completa. Roque Dalton. San Salvador: Dirección de Publicaciones e Impresos, 2008. 13-31. Print. xvii See Walsh, Catherine. “Estudios (inter)culturales En Clave De-colonial.” Tabula Rasa 12. January-June (2010): 209-27. Print; and Restrepo, Eduardo. Antropología y los Estudios Culturales: Disputas y Confluencias desde la Periferia. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2012. Print. xviii Achille Mbembe says of commemoration that it is “part of the ritual of forgetting: one bids farewell to the desire or the willingness to repeat something”. See his “The Power of the Archive and its Limits.” In Refiguring the Archive. Ed. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh. Cape Town, South Africa: Springer, 2002. 25. Print. xix See Lemus, Virginia. “La Banalización del Martirio.” Weblog post. Los Blogs De El Faro. El Faro, 24 Mar. 2014. Web. 13 Mar. 2015. xx I use the prefix trans here in the sense that it transcends the national, overcoming the ideologization of nation and nationalisms and not in the corporative sense of the transnational (company). Perhaps it might be more accurate to speak of the trans-human. xxi Roque Dalton born to a poor, working-class Salvadoran mother and a wealthy U.S. father, who was primarily absent. Beverley and Zimmerman affirm that he had “what seems a normal urban upper-middle class upbringing” (126). How, then, do we explain his empathetic position with respect to the peasant struggle. I was unable to find facts to corroborate this, but wonder if it was not his Jesuit education and contact with that spirituality that laid the foundations for his opening up to the reality of the Salvadoran poor.

Chapter 1

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xxii One of the most popular newspapers of the time, the Diario de hoy, published an article in 1986 with the headline: “Dr. Ignacio Ellacuría, SJ—Go, Please Go” (qtd in Whitfield 310). In 1988, the same newspaper denounced the supposed link between Ellacuría and communism, portraying him as a villain to the people of El Salvador: “after World War II, a sinister person arrived in the country, and it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if he turned out to be a KGB agent” (qtd in Dogget 17-18). See Whitfield, Teresa. Paying the Price: Ignacio Ellacuría and the Murdered Jesuits of El Salvador. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1994. Print; and Doggett, Martha. Death Foretold: the Jesuit Murders in El Salvador. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown UP, 1993. Print. xxiii Because of this, Molina Velásquez claims that “you should talk (and write) about them” (182). xxiv The leaders of the ERP failed in their attempts to make his assasination look like the work of the CIA. xxv The translation of this work into English by the Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade titles the work Clandestine Poems in English and Poemas clandestinos in Spanish. Luis Alvarenga argues that the proper title for the book of poems should be Historias y poemas de una lucha de clase, since that is the name Dalton gave the collection. It was the Propaganda Committee for National Resistance that decided to title the book Poemas clandestinos, and it was published that way in 1977 by Ediciones por la causa proletaria. I will be using the title of the English translation, Clandestine Poems. xxvi I am referring to his article “Fragmentación de la república de las letras”, found in the bibliography of this dissertation. xxvii See: Lassalle-Klein, Robert. Blood and Ink: Ignacio Ellacuría, Jon Sobrino, and the Jesuit Martyrs of the University of Central America. xxviii Lassalle-Klein points out that this theory of Zubiri’s actually anticipates and agrees with 21st century neuroscience and the “unity-in-distinction between the mind and the brain” (216). In that sense, Zubiri was far ahead of his time. xxix On the conjunction of the ego conquiro (embodied by Christopher Columbus) and the ego cogito (as developed by Descartes), see Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of liberation. xxx In other words, recognizing the unity-in-distinction of sensing and intellection opens up space for what Walter Mignolo and other decolonialists have called “otros saberes”, other knowledges. It is also worth highlighting that Ellacuría was calling attention to this issue in the 70s —and Zubiri much earlier—, nearly a decade before the modernity/coloniality group began working with the concept of the coloniality of knowledge. For a collection of essays from the modernity/coloniality group, including an introduction that provides a sort of genealogy of their work, see Grosfoguel, Ramón, and Santiago Castro-Gómez, eds. El giro decolonial: Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global. Bogotá: Siglo Del Hombre, 2007. Print. xxxi See: Quijano, Aníbal. “Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social.” Journal of World Systems Research 11.2 (verano/otoño 2000): 342-386; and “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1.3 (2000): 533-580. xxxii For more on the topic of “Wold History”, see Guha, Ranajit. History at the Limit of World-history. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Print. xxxiii For the remainder of the essay, then, we will refer to reality as in the sort of reality that interests Ellacuría. That is, not in the abstract sense (Reality). xxxiv This form of reality that is historical reality is where reality is ‘more’ and where it is more ‘of itself’, where it is also ‘more open’. (Filosofía 43). xxxv Hector Samour, for example, tells us the following: “Si lo metafisico para Zubiri es el todo dinámico de la realidad, Ellacuría asumirá básicamente este planteaminto, pero lo radicalizará en la línea de la afirmación de la historia como envolvente principal de ese todo dinámico en que la realidad consiste” (Crítica y liberación 110). xxxvi This concept influences Ellacuría’s theological thinking as well, as we shall see in chapter two. There, rather than referring to the height of the times, he writes about the sign of the times, which can be understood as the manifestation of the “Servant of Yahweh” in relation to the height of the times. That is to say, Ellacuría’s theology depends on a historicizing of Jesus in order to see his face in the oppressed people of each given era.

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xxxvii This plurality of times rejects the sort of hierarchization that we see in the current conceptualization of progress. Cultures can no longer be more advanced or backwards compared to others. Rather, they are coetaneous. In recent Latin American theory, Josefina Ludmer has been articulating similar ideas. See: Josefina Ludmer. Aquí, América latina. Una especulación. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2010. Print. xxxviii In a similar light, Ellacuría rejects Marx’s evolutionary perspective on history. He finds that the error in both Hegel and Marx is that while they both have some sense of the biological aspect of history, they do not make the biological a fundamental part of their conceptualizations of history. Rather than seeing history itself as having a biological aspect, primarily due to the influence of natural forces but also due to the way in which humans appropriate possibilities, Hegel attributes the biological to the Spirit and so history becomes a biography of the development of the Spirit and Marx attributes the biological to the modes and relationships of production, making history a biography of the economic. What Ellacuría is proposing is that history itself is biological, which also implies that the evolution that we see in history is proper to history and not just to an outside entity of history. This makes our way of understanding historical age radically different from Hegel and Marx’s. The biological aspect of history is maturation, as both Hegel and Marx would have it, but it is maturation of historical reality itself, not of the Spirit or of the rational process of modes of production. xxxix In his own words: “This radical unity requires that mankind acquire a body of unique alterity and be immersed in an increasingly unitary process, in which the system of possibilities is truly the same, even though within the system each and every one of the possibilities are not attainable to all individuals nor all groups in the same way” (Filosofía 448). xl The notion of historical sin forms the bases for another of Ellacuría’s concepts that I will analyze in chapter four: the common evil. He defines historical sin the following way: This is not just to recognize the existence of a structural sin, as they say today, because structural sin is in itself a social sin, something that affects society, as it is structurally understood. Historical sin, besides being structural, alludes to the formally historical character of that sin: it is a system of possibilities through which the real power of history is conveyed. (Filosofía 590) xli Robert Lassalle-Klein argues that Ellacuría’s philosophy was transformed by his encounter with Latin American historical reality and with the crucified people of El Salvador. When he locates himself in solidarity with these people, that is, outside of power, he is able to question the ‘development’ and ‘progress’ of history, criticizing from his situatedness in Central American historical reality the idea of Europe as the vanguardia of history and the culmination of human actualization. Ellacuría’s notion of historical reality allows us to see this eurocentric perspective as nothing more than the structuring of distinct capacities and historical ages into what has increasingly become a global social body. And in doing so, he signals to us both its constructive and destructive potential. xlii The notion of historical sin might remind us of Walter Benjamin’s thesis VII on the philosophy of history. In that thesis, Benjamin criticizes the way in which history empathizes with the victors, benefiting the rulers. He points out that the cultural treasures that the ruler parades over the defeated after his victory were only achievable through violence and horror. For this reason he affirms that no document of civilization is free from barbarism, echoing the dialectics we have already seen present in Ellacuría’s philosophy. Benjamin then goes on to assert that it is the task of the historical materialist to brush against the grain of history. We could liken this brushing against the grain to the recognition of the historical evil that alienates and oppresses. But Ellacuría goes even a step beyond Benjamin, asking the historical subject not only to brush against the grain, but also to actually act against it, to move toward the transformation of history in terms of historical liberation. xliii Ellacuría makes reference to this in his book La filosofía de la realidad histórica when he says: “En la praxis histórica es el hombre entero quien toma sobre sus hombros el hacerse cargo de la realidad, una realidad dependiente, que hasta la aparición del primer animal inteligente se movía exclusivamente a golpe de fuerzas físicas y de estímulos biológicos” (596). However, the three part definition of historical praxis comes from his 1975 article “Hacía una fundamentación filosófica del método teológico latinoamericano”. The English translations that I am using coincide with those used by Kevin Burke in his chapter in the book Love That Produces Hope: The Thought of Ignacio Ellacuría.

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xliv We will return to the concept of deideologization in chapters three and four, where we will follow Ellacuría’s methodology of applying it specifically to concepts such as private property, human rights, the common good, and liberalism. xlv Ideologization is not the same as ideology. Ideology is a necessary component of thought in that it represents a particular approximation to a series of systematic ideas about reality. Ideology is neither positive nor negative, but rather it is realized in its pejorative sense when a given ideology is used to mask reality for specific individual or group benefits. This is ideologization.

Chapter 2 xlvi This has been studied by many historians of Central America’s recent history. See, for example Phillip Berryman’s The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in Central American Revolutions and Stubborn Hope: Religion, Politics, and Revolution in Central America; Enrique Dussel’s The Church in Latin America: 1492-1992; Tommie Sue Montgomery’s Revolution in El Salvador: From Civil Strife to Civil Peace, especially its introduction by Rodolfo Cardenal and Ignacio Martín-Baró, both colleagues to Ellacuría and the latter one of the UCA martyrs; finally, Ellacuría also wrote on the topic in articles such as “Luces y sombras de la Iglesia en Centroamérica” and “La teología de la liberación frente al cambio sociohistórico de América Latina”. xlvii This is in line with one of the primary objectives of the Exercises, which has to do with the discernment of spirits. In this way, the retreatant is meant to be given the tools to recognize how the dark spirit and the spirit of God both are active in their life, and to actively choose to follow the Holy Spirit. xlviii The centrality of the Spiritual Exercises and Ignatian spirituality in Ellacuría’s thought is taken up in many of the articles found wihin Jon Sobrino and Rolando Alvarado’s book Ignacio Ellacuría: «Aquella libertad esclarecida». Santander: Sal Terrae, 1999. Print. xlix See Cardenal, Rodolfo. “De Portugalete a San Salvador: de la mano de cinco maestros.” Ignacio Ellacuría: «Aquella libertad esclarecida». Santander: Sal Terrae, 1999. Print. l See: Gutiérrez, Gustavo. “The Task and Content of Liberation Theology”. Trans. Judith Condor. The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology. Christopher Rowland (Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 19-38. li This signals that there is a political dynamic to poverty: the rich are rich because they dispossess the poor. lii This form of viewing poverty implies a denunciation of poverty. Ellacuría puts it this way: “This dialectical character of the poor dialectically blames their counterpart, which are the rich. If the poor are impoverished, the rich are impoverishing; if the poor are dispossessed, the rich are possessors; if the poor are oppressed and repressed, the rich are oppressors and repressors” (“Los pobres” 142). liii Originally from A. Jerez Magaña, La Infiltración Marxista en la Iglesia, Editorial Dignidad, Instituto de Relaciones Internacionales, San Salvador: 1989. liv Loyola separates the Exercises into four “weeks”. There is a structural and thematic unity to the weeks, but they are flexible in their duration and do not correspond to calendar weeks. lv Similar sentiments have been made recently by Pope Francis when he says that “Theologians should smell like the sheep, too”. See the article by the same title in the National Catholic Reporter, March 9, 2015. http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/francis-theologians-should-smell-sheep- too#.VP2y3LADe1p.facebook lvi See, for example, the recent book by Bonaventura de Sousa Santos: Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Paradigm Publishers, 2014. Print. lvii Another aspect that Lupe’s narrative highlights here that relates to the topic of the next chapters is the way in which this religion that she overcomes actually supports an ideologized notion of private property. It conditions and disciplines the peasants to be submissive to the landowners. lviii For more on the five great mentors of Ellacuría, see Cardenal, Rodolfo. “De Portugalete a San Salvador: de la mano de cinco maestros.” Ignacio Ellacuría: «Aquella libertad esclarecida». Santander: Sal Terrae, 1999. Print. lix When the Mountains Tremble. Dir. Pamela Yates. Skylight Pictures. 1982.

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lx We should also highlight that this is a subjectivity from the feminine, but that is a topic for another paper. lxi For an excellent study on the history of the link between the Salvadoran armed forces and the landed elite and the resulting culture of violence, see Alvarenga, Patricia. Cultura y ética de la violencia. El Salvador 1880-1932. San Salvador: Dirección de publicaciones e impresos, 2006. Print. lxii The four characteristics of the limit-situation that Ellacuría enumberates are: we find the following characteristics: 1) it is obligatory to act; 2) all solutions are evil; 3) once embarked, we enter into the grip of laws that leave no room for personal moral decision; 4) we easily lose our mental clarity and proper disposition due to the momentum of the situation, which on the whole is an embodiment of evil. (98) See Ellacuría, Ignacio. “Fundamental Human Rights and the Legal and Political Restrictions Placed on them.” in Hasset and Lacey (Eds.) Towards a Society that Serves its People. Translated from “Los derechos humanos fundamentales y su limitación legal y política”. ECA 24, no. 254-55 (1969): 435-49. lxiii This quote is cite comes form Rodolfo Cardenal’s private collection. See footnote 234 on page 102 of Lassalle-Klein, Robert. Blood and Ink: Ignacio Ellacuría, Jon Sobrino, and the Jesuit Martyrs of the University of Central America. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2014. Print. lxiv Robert Lassalle-Klein quotes President Molina, who states “We don’t use the term agrarian reform because that is communist ideology” (102). lxv Montgomery, Tommie Sue. Revolution in El Salvador: From Civil Strife to Civil Peace. 2nd ed. Boulder: Westview, 1995. lxvi The original Spanish title is perhaps slightly more revealing of the content: “La historización del concepto de propiedad como principio de desideologización”. lxvii His understanding of ANEP’s objections to the new law can be summarized in six points: 1) the State will gain a quasi-totalitarian power if the law is passed; 2) the proposed measures will destroy the entrepreneurial spirit; 3) the law should be based on the criteria of productivity, and so the first lands to be expropriated should be that of the State; 4) the reform will negatively effect productivity in the country and consequently will increase unemployment and decrease international investment; 5) the measures will increase bureaucracy and as a result will hurt productivity; and 6) the transformation is against the values of the free market and so are anti-democratic. The government, on the other hand, describes the historical situation of the poor majorities and insists that the finality of the law is to change the anachronistic structures that maintain the majority of Salvadorans in a situation of underdevelopment and social injustice. lxviii I am using the term past-present in the way that memory studies scholars have used it in order to refer to the way in which a thorough and complex understanding of the past can aid us in finding new sensibilities and potentialities to our understanding of the struggles of the present. For examples of articulations of this idea, see Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory. Trad. Judy Rein y Marcial Godoy-Anativia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2003; or Vezzetti, Hugo. Pasado y presente: guerra, dictadura y sociedad en la argentina. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Ed., 2009. lxix There are indeed a number of affinities between their two lines of thought even though Ellacuría’s text predates Quijano’s work on coloniality by roughly 15 years. Quijano proposes his theory of coloniality in order to refer to the hegemonic and global structure of power that exists today. This structure, he holds, is born from a Eurocentric positionality and has its origins in the ‘discovery’ of the New World and the colonial period. The concept of coloniality has three central axes: 1) eurocentrism, 2) social classification vis-a-vis race, which leads to the race/labor apparatus, and 3) world capitalism. In the way in which Quijano has developed his theory, Eurocentrism responds to an imaginary that, though what Edward Said calls a positional superiority, posits European culture as the peak of civilization. From this position, differences are hierarchized and racialized to the point that race becomes a social classification system. In his work, Quijano points out that in the Americas salaried work was reserved exclusively for white subjects. In other words, modernity and progress have been built upon the backs of racialized other — primarily indigenous and African slave labor. We have already seen evidence of this in our cultural text with the case of Deininger, whose wealth was multiplied from the fruits of the labor of Lucía and her family while their own work did not even allow them necessities like adequate nutrition. See Quijano, Aníbal. “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad.” In: Perú indígena. 13.29 (1992); and “Coloniality of

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Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” In: Nepantla: Views from South. Durham: Duke Univ, 2000. 532-80. lxx See Dussel, Enrique. The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation. Ed. Eduardo Mendieta. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1996. Print. And Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print. lxxi This was the general argument of Dra. Ana Del Sarto in her seminar on Latin American cultural studies given at The Ohio State University during the Spring semester of 2013. It is also similar to the position of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in her book Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2010. There she claims that the coloniality/modernity group too neatly and uniformly constructs their pyramids of power to explain the modern world. Likewise, she also accuses them of building power pyramids in academia to benefit themselves that could compete with corporate marketing models. She charges that this creates clientelistic relationships with the Latin American and especially indigenous intellectuals. “Los Mignolo y compañía han construido un pequeño imperio dentro del imperio, recuperando estratégicamente los partes de la escuela de los estudios de la subalternidad de la India y de múltiples vertientes latinoamericanas de reflexión crítica sobre la colonización y la descolonización” (58). lxxii Shortly, we will enter in detail into the arguments made by some of these intellectuals, but a list of those who emphasize the need to consider colonial legacies is long. Important examples would include the work of Rodolfo Cardenal, Ileana Rodríguez, Segundo Montes, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Severo Martínez Peláez, Martha Elena Casaús, Juan Carlos Mazariegos, Sergio Visquerra Tischler, Gustavo Palma Murga, Patricia Alvarenga, Sergio Ramírez, Ricardo Falla, Mario Lungo, Ana Silvia Monzón, and Luisa Cabrera. lxxiii There is no English equivalent to these terms. The encomendado is the colonized subject that lives in the zone of the encomienda and is ruled by the encomendero, the settler to whom the Spanish Crown grants the right to tributes and forced labor from the indigenous population of a given area. lxxiv See Gómez, Juan Pablo and Gustavo Palma Murga. “Romper las cadenas” Orden finca y rebeldía campesina: el proyecto colectivo Fina la Florida (Cuadernos de Investigación No. 26). Ciudad de Guatemala, Guatemala: AVANCSO, 2012. lxxv See Falla, Ricardo. Masacres de la selva. Ixcan, Guatemala (1975-1982). Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 1992; and Negreaba de zopilotes. Masacre y sobrevivencia: finca San Francisco Nentón, Guatemala (1871 a 2010). Guatemala: AVANCSO, 2011. lxxvi Martínez Peláez, Severo. La patria del criollo. Ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial guatemalteca. México: Fondo de cultura económica, 1998. lxxvii Martha Elena Casaús Arzú. Genocidio: ¿La máxima expresión del racismo en Guatemala? Guatemala: F & G Editores, 2010. lxxviii This violence permeated the entire society, but two examples will serve to illustrate my point. The social inequalities that continued to grow after the ISTA’s failure fomented a strengthening of the opposition to Molina’s political party and the National Opposition Union (UNO) ran a successful presidential campaign in 1977. Despite massive voter turnout in support of UNO, the oligarchy still controlled the military and the electoral authorities and so fraud gave the victory to General Carlos Humberto Romero. In an attempt to pacifically and legally protest and demand justice, 50,000 people gathered in the Plaza Libertad along with UNO’s candidate. Violence broke out when the National Police opened fire on the protesters, setting the stage for the years leading up the civil war. What is worse is the repression that the newly ‘elected’ president set into place. Although official US accounts claim that Romero acted on human rights within the country, his enacting of the “Law for the Defense and Guarantee of the Public Order” “gave the military virtual carte blanche to pick up anyone it remotely suspected of being subversive in word or deed […] the number of disappeared doubled, and political assassinations increased times ten” (Montgomery 73). The next chapter will deal with how certain revolutionary subjects responded to this violence and lack of space for negotiation. lxxix “A sus órdenes, mi capital” is the title of one of his texts criticizing the government’s failure to pass the agrarian reforms. He accuses the government of bending to the orders of capital and big business.

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lxxx I put special emphasis on the word “individual” because the contrast between individualism and collectivism and the common good will be a central topic in my next chatper.

Chapter 4 lxxxi Quoted in Ellacuría, Ignacio. “The Historicization of the Concept of Property.” Trans. Phillip Berryman. Towards a Society That Serves Its People: The Intellectual Contribution of El Salvador's Murdered Jesuits. Eds. John J. Hassett and Hugh Lacey. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown UP, 1991. 105- 137. Originally published as “La historización del concepto de propiedad como principio de desideologización.” ECA 335-36 (1976): 425-50. Print. Also found in Veinte años de historia en El Salvador (1969-1989): Escritos Políticos. Vol. I. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1993. 587-627. Print. lxxxii Originally published in Spanish as No me agarran viva: la mujer salvadoreña en la lucha. México D.F.: Ediciones Era, 1983. lxxxiii The prologue is not found in Amanda Hopkinson’s translation of the book; consequently, this translation is mine. All other translations from Hopkinson’s translation. Despite not having the prologue, her version does have a section titled “About this book” that reflects a similar sentiment: “the story is not just Eugenia’s. It is that of her suffering and rebellious fellow-nationals, still engaged in waging the ‘popular war’, against a system that many of them describe here in cruel and personal detail […] it is a book dedicated to Salvadorean women engaged in political struggle, to Ana Patricia (Eugenia’s daughter), to the next generation and a new civilisation” (32). lxxxiv I am referring to his “Utopia and Prophecy in Latin America.” lxxxv Regan, Ronald. “Radio Address to the Nation on Central America.” Washington D.C. 24 March 1984. Speech to the nation. lxxxvi Ellacuría would refer to the sort of violence being articulated here from the State as the imposition of one class’ interests over that of the majority of the nation’s citizens. Like Alegría’s affirmation of the role played by the United States, Ellacuría also characterizes this imposition as being of an international flavor, implicating the United States in the maintenance and creation of the spiral of violence that we will explain in the next paragraph: “By imposition, however, we mean the intent to maintain the order established by force, which seeks to improve in order to strengthen itself; the principal subject of this imposition by force is Reagan’s government, whose primary interest in the conflict is not El Salvador’s interests, but rather North American security in the area, which is considered to be threatened by subversion” (“Replanteamiento” 1106, my emphasis). lxxxvii He explicitly states the effects of structural injustice for the oppressed majorities: “[it] violently maintains – through economic, social, political, and cultural structures—the majority of the population in a situation of a permanent violation of their human rights” (“Factores endógenos” 169). In another text, Ellacuría offers a sort of definition of structural injustice: “What defines structural injustice is that poverty is unjust in how it arises; it arises structurally from the interaction of some classes or groups over others and, at the same time, it affects the whole of the social structures and the agents responsible for them; finally, this structural injustice that is in itself a state of violence, the so-called institutional violence, is maintained by repressive violence, fueled retroactively, as we have said, by subversive violence” (“Replanteamiento 1107). lxxxviii Ellacuría asserts, for example, that “The superposition of the competing interests of the superpowers on the real problems of Central America makes the Central American problem, also for this additional reason, a universal problem. North American citizens have been propagandistically convinced that in Nicaragua and El Salvador not only is their security at play but also their historical destiny; they have been convinced that the United State’s great adversary, both real and ideological, is taking positions in the vicinity of its borders” (“Centroamérica como problema” 129). The next line in his essay reveals the drastic consequences of the success of this propaganda for Central America: “With this, the Reagan administration is considered sufficiently supported to oblige the small countries of Central America to live in a permanent war or, at least, in constant pre-war tension” (“Centroamérica como problema” 129). See: Ellacuría, Ignacio. “Centroamérica como problema”. Veinte años de historia en El Salvador (1969-1989): Escritos

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Políticos. Vol. I. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1993. 123-133. Print. Originally published in ECA. 456 (1986): 821-33. Print. lxxxix This is not to say, however, that he justifies violence. His relationship with violence is in line with this paradoxical understanding of the concept, given the historical reality of El Salvador and especially that reality as understood and lived by the poor majorities. In his text “Violencia y cruz”, for example, he concludes the article stating: “The rejection of violence must be absolute. And the paradox is that the absolute character of that rejection demands attitudes and actions that cannot but be extreme” (482). See Ellacuría, Ignacio. “Violencia y cruz.” Escritos teológicos Vol. III. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 2002. 427-482. Print. xc In a 1981 article on the situation in El Salvador he talks about how the oligarchy has effectively used the military in order to maintain the majority of Salvadorans in “infrahuman conditions since the 1932 massacre. See Ellacuría, Ignacio. “El estado de la cuestión salvadoreña.” La Lucha por la Justicia: Selección de Textos de Ignacio Ellacuría (1969-1989). Ed. Senent, Juan Antonio. Serie de los Derechos Humanos Vol. 18. Bilbao: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Deusto, 2012. 171-74. Digital. Originally published in El país (España) January 23, 1981. xci See Rodríguez, Ileana. “Ciudadanías abyectas: intervención de la memoria cultural y testimonial en la res publica.” Memoria y ciudadanía. Eds. Ileana Rodríguez and Mónica Szurmuk. Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2008. 15 – 37. Print xcii Take, for example, the first three articles of the 1962 Constitution: “Article 1: El Salvador is a sovereign State. Its sovereignty resides in the people and is limited to what is honest, just, and convenient to society. Article 2: It is the obligation of the State to assure for the inhabitants of the Republic the enjoyment of freedom, health, culture, economic wellbeing, and social justice. Article 3: The government is republican, democratic, and representative” (Artículo 1, 2, 3, “1962 Constitución Política de El Salvador”, my translation). We will see shortly that this political imagination coincides with the liberal notions of government put forth by John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. xciii I am referring here to Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan - Parts One and Two. New York: Macmillan, 1958; and Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Ed. C. B. Macpherson. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub., 1980. xciv She does this in her introduction to Ileana Rodríguez’s text “Ciudadanías abyectas: intervención de la memoria cultural y testimonial en la res publica.” Memoria y ciudadanía. Eds. Ileana Rodríguez and Mónica Szurmuk. Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2008. 15 – 37. Print xcv For example, in an article titled “Unverdevelopment and human rights”, Ellacuría denounces the current system of nationalisms: “We cannot permit the idolatry of the nation and of nationalism to put in danger the much higher values of humanity, above all in a world situation as dramatic as the one we just described” (320). See “Subdesarrollo y derechos humanos.” Revista Latinoamericana de Teología 25 (1992): n. pag. Also in Ed. Senent, Juan Antonio. La Lucha por la Justicia: Selección de Textos de Ignacio Ellacuría (1969-1989). Serie de los Derechos Humanos Vol. 18. Bilbao: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Deusto, 2012. 317-337. Digital. xcvi I have modified Hopkinson’s translation here. She says that the landowners begin to “inflict” repression, but the Spanish original uses the verb “exigir”, which more properly should mean demand or require. xcvii In his 1978 text “Historización del bien común y de los derechos humanos en una sociedad dividida”, Ellacuría gives a very succinct definition of his methodology of historicization: “Historicization consists of seeing how that which is abstractly affirmed as a ‘should be’ is actually being realized in a given circumstance” (284). See Ed. Senent, Juan Antonio. La Lucha por la Justicia: Selección de Textos de Ignacio Ellacuría (1969-1989). Serie de los Derechos Humanos Vol. 18. Bilbao: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Deusto, 2012. Digital. xcviii “It has not been a fight in favor of individual freedom as such,; as has been seen through the battle between the government and the ANEP, it has been a fight in favor of the freedom of business. What businessmen were defending were their own rights to improve their own advantages and what they attacked was that the State was looking out for those who do not have power because they don’t have property. Liberty is an essential good, but by the same it should be accessible to all citizens. But not all citizens can

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access it by way of private ownership of the means of production; hence the need for the State to intervene in order to ensure even the beginning of freedom for all” (“La transformación” 648). xcix Ellacuría argues that the notion of the common good is nonexistent both in local-national terms and in a larger, global sense. This affirmation coincides with the notion of the concept modernity/coloniality developed by the coloniality group already mentioned in this dissertation and those who work on internal colonialism, such as Pablo González Casanova. c Alegría’s text puts the number of Salvadoran immigrants who crossed the Honduran border in order to find subsistence work at upwards of 300,000. The socio-economic situation that lies at the root of this crisis and Honduras’ eventual response should be studied by U.S. scholars and policy makers attempting to understand the problem of Central American immigration to the U.S. Ellacuría wrote an excellent article criticizing the government of both sides of the conflict and their ideologicalized use of nationalism and their failure to protect basic human rights. That essay, read in the context of the problem of immigration within any of the Western countries today, would constitute a powerful criticism of the current policies. See “Los derechos humanos fundamentales y su limitación legal y política.” In my bibliography. ci Given her field, it is quite possible, given the timing, that Eugenia would have been a student of Ignacio Martín-Baró’s, one of Ellacuría’s fellow martyrs and a close intellectual companion. Ellacuría’s leadership within the university also allows us to imagine that his thinking may have had directly or indirectly shaped Eugenia’s thinking. We can be certain that the UCA helped her in her academic and critical thinking formation, as we shall see in the next section. cii Schmitt explains that this requires the creation of a new vocabulary that describes our current situation eerily well: War is condemned but executions sanctions, punitive expeditions, pacifications, protection of treaties, international police, and measures to assure peace remain. The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy but a disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity. A war waged to protect or expand economic power must, with the aid of propaganda, turn into a crusade and into the last war of humanity. This is implicit in the polarity of ethics and economics, a polarity astonishingly systematic and consistent. But this allegedly non-political and apparently even antipolitical system serves existing or newly friend-and-enemy groupings and cannot escape the logic of the political. (79) ciii Ellacuría’s development of the concept of the common evil is related to the concept of historical evil or historical sin that we saw in chapters one and two. Ellacuría highlights three ways of defining the concept. The first has to do with a recognized evil that has an impact on the majority of people. He refers to malnutrition being one of these evils and signals that children in El Salvador, and even more so in Africa, underscore that this is a problem that affects a large number of people. The second sense of common evil still depends on the majority being effected but goes beyond this to center on the communicability of the evil: “In this second sense, evil is common because that which is understood as evil has the capacity to affect others more or less profoundly, in such a way that its capacity to proliferate and to spread is highlighted” (“El mal común” 378). The final sense of the term puts special emphasis on the structural and dynamic nature of evil and its impact on the entire social unit: “the common evil is that structural and dynamic evil that, because of its own structural dynamism, has the capacity of also rendering evil most of those who form part of a social unity” (“El mal común” 378, definition from Samour’s text). civ This quote is a footnote written by the editors of A Grammar of Justice. The Legacy of Ignacio Ellacuría within the article written by Hector Samour. cv Take, for example, Ellacuría’s own use of testimonios in his philosophical writings. See ““Subdesarrollo y derechos humanos.” Revista Latinoamericana de Teología 25 (1992): n. pag. Also in La Lucha por la Justicia: Selección de Textos de Ignacio Ellacuría (1969-1989). Ed. Senent, Juan Antonio. Serie de los Derechos Humanos Vol. 18. Bilbao: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Deusto, 2012. 317-337. Digital. There, Ellacuría cites testimonios from a displaced migrant, a survivor of the massacre at El Mozote, and a peasant who sought refuge in Honduras. cvi Samour confirms that common evil actually “institutionally and functionally configures historical reality”, and it does so “in such in a away that it carries a dehumanizing dynamism which condemns the majority of those that live in the so-called situation (of the real) to being or living badly” (209). 269

cvii Even despite the weight of common evil, I find it necessary to reiterate Samour’s gesture in his text on the topic and affirm that it is not “the only form of evil about which we can and must speak today” (206). cviii This translation comes from Samour’s text. cix I am referring to the episode in the narrative in which Eugenia has to prove her worth to the revolution by proving her “toughness”, by carring weight and being able to march like the rest of the men. cx When developing his concept of coloniality, Quijano did not take into account the role that gender played in the system of hierarchies. Fortunately for us, feminist theorists have taken him to task and amplified his notion of coloniality to include concepts like the modern-colonial system of gender (Lugones) and the colonial/modern patriarchy. See, for example Lugones, María. “Colonialidad y género.” Género y descolonialidad. Comp. Walter Mignolo. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo, 2008. 13-54. Print.; and Segato, Rita. “Género y colonialidad: en busca de claves de lectura y de un vocabulario estratégico descolonial.” Feminismos y poscolonialidad. Descolonizando el feminismo desde y en América Latina. Eds. Karina Bidaseca y Vanesa Vazquez Laba. Buenos Aires: Editorial Godot, 2011. 17-48. Print. cxi I have slightly adapted the translation in Hopkinson’s version. It reads “Eugenia had her own highly individual opinion of what motherhood…”. The original in Spanish reads “Eugenia tenía una visión muy particular de lo que significaba…”. Hopkinson’s translation could be confused to suggest that Eugenia’s idea of motherhood was individualistic. It was not. cxii I have adapted Hopkinson’s translation to employ the American English words “mommy” and “diapers” instead of the British English “mummy” and “nappies”. cxiii I must insist here that this be read not as an abandoning of her duties as a mother. It is not as though Eugenia is placing her own desires and needs over those of her child; rather, she is allowing the historical reality within which she is located to inform her of the way in which she must imagine her own maternity. This was a painful and difficult process for Eugenia, as we can see with two examples. The first comes from a reflection on Eugenia’s revolutionary motherhood by her comrade, Ana María: I know from my own experience how hard a revolutionary’s life is. The revolutionary has to abandon her family. Of course, she’s fighting for the supreme values, but in practice these have to be suppressed for short periods. […Eugenia] was integrating [her daughter] emotionally, detaching herself from her. It’s possible for a mother’s natural and rightful egotism to be irreproachable but she, in her knowledge of the revolutionary’s life, emotionally integrated her daughter into the collective. (113, my emphasis) The second example is a letter that Eugenia wrote for Javier. The pain that this need to detach herself from her own daughter for the sake of the common good is especially salient in this passage: Your and Ana Patricia’s] absence hurts horribly. Coming here today and not finding [my] little girl, not hearing her laughter, her funny way of talking, hurts so much, Darling, but I gain strength from our people and from faith in what we’re fighting for. I hope it’ll be over soon, but that’s something we can’t foresee. Darling, I love you both. I believe the pain of our separation is small compared with that of our people. It’s worth putting up with in order to forge ahead. (139, my emphasis) cxiv See Curiel, Ochy. “Los aportes de las afrodescendientes a la teoría y la práctica feminista. Desuniversalizando el sujeto ‘Mujeres’”. En: Perfiles del feminismo Iberocamericano. Vol III. Buenos Aires: Catálogos, 2007. cxv Despite beginning in the more traditional nuclear sense, with Eugenia and Javier, Eugenia’s collective testimonio proposes family as a more fluid term. When the situation demanded of it, Eugenia would hand her daughter over to a comrade and would even refer to that person as her daughter’s mother. The second in command of the revolutionary forces recalls. In this way, her notion of family and maternity also breaks down the gender binary enclosed in the term allowing us to imagine family as being much more than just father-mother-child(ren). cxvi It is worth highlighting that this decision to serve the people even over self coincides with the Ignatian indifference that is highlighted in the meditation on the three types of people mentioned in chapter two. This is one articulation of the sort of poverty of spirit that the Spiritual Exercises hope to inculcate. Moreover, what is articulated as a sacrifice here is also aligned with the Jesuit notion of following the historical Jesus. In a conversation with a Jesuit priest, he told me that even if the Vatican allowed priests to 270

marry, the Society of Jesus would most likely not accept married priests because they must sacrifice the ability to have an individual family in order to serve what they consider to be the human family. This is how they understand Jesus’ decision not to marry and have children, as a decision that reflects his dedication to historicizing the Reign of God. cxvii My use of intercultural is also highly influenced by Rosanna Reguillo’s development of intercultural communication, which she imagines as being the foundation for the construction of a more just and inclusive political system. She claims that interculturalism is a form of communication and dialogue that recognizes the other as different but equal: “intercultural communication is, I think, above all, to advance a politics of representation of otherness in which difference ceases to be threatening” (20-21, my translation). The objective of this sort of communication is to “foster the spaces of encounter and dialogue amongst difference, without alluding to the sympotoms and the legibility of a project that expels, excludes, and silences those that do not fit within the formulation of the parameters of belonging, those who do not meet the requisites to be considered first class citizens” (4). For more, see Reguillo, Rossana. “Pensar el mundo en y desde América Latina. Desafío intercultural y políticas de representación.” Diálogos de la Comunicación. Número 65. 2002. Pp. 61-71. cxviii One of her comrades, Commander Ricardo, says this of her process and gradual transformation: Eugenia underwent a process of proletarianization, though hardly a romantic one. Her level of work in the countryside was formidable. […] She showed all the signs of knowing how to integrate herself into her field of work, sharing the same lifestyle as her peasant comrades, without giving rise to conflict […] this signaled something very important, not only in her life, but in terms of our revolutionary work and a growth of political consciousness among our working-class comrades. (60) cxix Given the colonial nature of our current structure, the coloniality of our modernity, as it were, this means that Ellacuría is presenting us with a decolonial methodology. cxx Ellacuría’s idea of the third force coincides with another thinker from Central America who describes the active, decisive subject of Central American revolutions as the “popular actor”. Edelberto Torres-Rivas uses this term to explain the complex situation of the emergence of Central American revolutionary processes to refute theoretical approaches that attempt to read the situation as solely an ideological or class conflict: “The contradiction, then, is between the people [el pueblo] before the oligarchy, the poor before the rich, a contradiction that is not produced in the terrain of the economy, but rather in that of politics (or of war) […] It is debatable if this is a class struggle in the Marxist sense, that would be so in the theoretical sense only in a political confrontation and in terms of production relations […] Because the most striking contradiction in this particular historical moment in Central America is that which occurred in terms of relationships of domination, between a majority that is exploited but also subjugated, that once it ‘stands up’ with rifle in hand, is met with the State” (185). See Torres-Rivas, Edelberto. “Capítulo III: El actor popular, los otros, sus ideologías, la violencia.” Revoluciones sin cambios revolucionarios: Ensayos sobre la crisis en Centroamérica. Guatemala: F&G Editores, 2011. 165-252.

Conclusion cxxi Quoted in the introduction to Burke’s The Ground Beneath the Cross and Lassalle-Klein’s introduction to Ignacio Ellacuría: Essays on History, Liberation, and Salvation. cxxii My intention here is not to articulate some sort of “white guilt” in which I imagine the mere recognition of my privilege and my work here as being a (self-)pardon, a penitition of sorts. Rather, my aim is to imitate Ellacuría in placing myself in solidarity with the historically poor in order to, from my position of privilege, think with the oppressed in order to undo that privilege. cxxiii Robert Lassalle-Klein deals with this issue specifically with respect to Ellacuría and from a Christian perspective: “We ask now, therefore, in the pages that follow: What was the transformative character of their relationship with Jesus of Nazareth whose memory fanned the flame of love that led the UCA martyrs to a life for others? And, for the U.S. reader, what does it mean to be his disciples twenty-one centuries

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after his death, citizens of a country more powerful than the Rome that killed him and the nation that paid the bill for the UCA assassins?” (341, my emphasis). cxxiv I do take issue, however, with Porpora’s claim that the U.S. attitude toward the violence in Central America was not shaped by racism. He argues that it is indifference and not racism that allows the U.S. population to become complicit in the murderous policies of the government toward the Central American people. Is racism not a factor in that indifference? I would argue that even Porpora’s need to refer to the Central America as “holocaust like” reveals a level of racism, given that we must compare the deaths of Central Americans (the racialized other) to that of the victims of the holocaust (white, Europeans) in order to constitute a “living principle of action”, as though the deaths of the Central Americans on their own do not do so. cxxv An excellent example of this is his article following the transformation of the ISTA law, “A sus órdenes, mi capital”. Another example of this fearlessness can be found in the commentaries that Ellacuría read publicly on the radio in 1979. There he grounds his justifications for a “necessary revolution” and states: “What needs to change in this country, soon and drastically, is the regime of private property, which has assured the liberty of a few but the oppression of the majority; the abundant well being of a few, but the scarcity of the many”. He then links that situation with two powerful names, a past and a current president: “Maybe soon we will know, for example, how much money was spent by the oligarchy so that Molina could rise to power and so that Romero could do the same, or so that the agrarian transformation might be stopped” (829). See Ellacuría, Ignacio. “La revolución necesaria.” Veinte años de historia en El Salvador (1969-1989): Escritos Políticos. Vol. II. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1993. 819-830. Print. cxxvi I am understanding decolonial theory here as defined by Catherine Walsh in her book Interculturalidad, estado, sociedad: Luchas (de)coloniales de nuestra época. The she says that the intention of decolonial theory is to “signal and provoke a positioning—a posture and a continuous attitude—of transgressing, intervening, rising up, and influencing. The decolonial denotes, then, a path of continuous struggle in which we identify, make visible, and animate ‘places’ of exteriority and alternative constructions” (15). There is a double gesture in decolonial theory that corresponds directly to Ellacuría’s notions of prophecy and utopia. cxxvii Hector Samour, for example, writes this regarding the convergence of intercultural philosophy and Ellacuría’s thought: “The proposal for the intercultural transformation of philosophy, however, is not incompatible with Ellacuría’s liberation philosophy project. According to this project, the political character that philosophy acquires by consciously linking itself to historical praxis will force it to theoretically reconsider its own foundations, methods, and characters […] This effort does not exclude, therefore, the need to take interculturality seriously in philosophical reflection itself” (16). See Samour, Hector. “Postmodernidad y filosofía de la liberación.” A Parte Rei 54 (2007): 1-17. Digital. http://serbal.pntic.mec.es/AParteRei/; See also Fornet-Betancourt, Raúl. Interculturalidad y Filosofía en América Latina. Aachen: Wissenchaftsverlag, 2003. Print. cxxviii Ellacuría claimed that human rights must be thought of from the perspective of the oppressed: The fundamental assumption is that human rights can and should reach a universal perspective and validity, but this will not be achieved if it does not take into account the ‘from’ where they are considered and the ‘for’ who and ‘for’ what they are proclaimed. Consequently, we should be clear and explicit that this ‘from’ and this ‘for’, that in this case, for reasons that will be given, is from the oppressed people and from the popular majorities for or in search of their liberation” (“Historización de los derechos” 365). cxxix Specifically on the freedom of press, Ellacuría writes: “press freedom is said to be a fundamental right and an indispensable condition for democracy, but if such press freedom can only be exercised by soemone who owns means of production that are out of the reach of the oppressed majority, freedom of the press is a fundamental sin and a decpetion that renders democracy impossible. If a newspaper or a radio or televisión station can only be maintained by a great deal of money and can only keep going with support from advertisers, who represent the forces of capital, press freedom historicized in this fashion is the denial of that formal freedom of the press with which we all agree in theory and in a universal sense” (“The historicization” 109).

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