Canadian and Us Catholic Promotion of Co-Operatives in Central America and the Caribbean and Their Political Implications

chapter 7 Canadian and us Catholic Promotion of Co-operatives in Central America and the Caribbean and Their Political Implications

Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens and Catherine C LeGrand

This chapter examines the early development of Catholic co-operatives in Canada and the United States and traces their movement through the media- tion of Catholic missionaries to Latin America. By doing so, it offers insight into a transnational and religious dimension of co-operative development. In the case of Catholic-initiated projects in Latin America, credit, agricultural, and artisan co-operatives played a central role, while consumer co-operatives often appeared secondary. This distinction may reflect the particularities of the Catholic mission regions in the Caribbean and Central America, where co-operatives developed to meet specific community needs and often originated in rural rather than urban areas. It may also be the result of the way co-operatives were embedded in mission projects that emphasized the development of Christian communities and viewed economic cooperation as an essential com- ponent of this development. This essay provides brief case studies of Catholic co-operative development in Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Guate- mala to illustrate the way that co-operatives evolved in the political context of each country. Finally, it suggests that in the 1960s Canadian and us Catholic- initiated co-operatives became integrated with the Canadian government’s International Development Agency (CIDA, created in 1968) and USAID development projects, suggesting a convergence of Church-State projects, with religious agents’ initiative preceding secular support for co-operatives.

The Spread of Catholic Co-operativism: The Antigonish Model in Canada and the United States

One important thread in the history of co-operativism in the twentieth century comes out of Catholic social thought and practice, which, building on the Rochdale principles, sought to articulate a “third way” between communism and capitalism. Catholic approaches to co-operatives have been mani- fested historically in the Desjardins credit unions of Quebec, the Antigonish

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movement of eastern Canada, and the renowned Basque co-operatives of Mondragón.1 Addressing the topic of Catholic co-operativism, this chapter fo- cuses specifically on how the Antigonish movement of Nova Scotia spread to the United States and then to the Caribbean and Central America. Our aim is to make sense of the mechanisms of diffusion and the differing political implications of a Canadian Catholic co-operative movement in three countries: Jamaica, a British colony moving toward independence; the Dominican Re- public, ruled by dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo; and Guatemala, where co- operatives that had been supported by democratic and military governments garnered the widespread participation of native Maya people. This international study also sheds light on how, during the Cold War, governments and ngos drew on the Catholic experience with co-operatives as they attempted to formulate approaches to community development that would modernize the countryside, improve the living conditions of the rural poor, and win the hearts and minds of rural people away from communism. Twentieth-century social Catholicism, as expressed in the papal encyclicals of Rerum Novarum (1891), Quadragesimo Anno (1931), and Mater et Magistra (1961), comes out of the Church’s endeavor to grapple with the socio-economic and spiritual effects of the development of capitalism on laboring people and to think through what a just economy might be. The crisis of capitalism manifest in the Great Depression of the 1930s generated multiple responses. Catholic clergy in some places, inspired by the social encyclicals, sought novel solutions to poverty, exploitation and inequality. In Canada, the Antigonish movement, one of the most innovative of Catholic utopian visions and economic movements, was initiated by Fathers J J Tompkins, Moses M Coady and other priests connected to the small Catholic university St. Francis Xavier in the town of Antigonish in eastern Nova Scotia.2 This was a region of poor highland Scottish agricultural, fishing and mining communities, exploited by a few large British and central Canadian companies and hard-hit by economic

1 See Molina and Míguez, “The Origins of Mondragon”, pp. 284–98; and Molina Aparicio, José Maria Arizmendiarrieta. On the Desjardins credit union movement, see Rudin, In Whose Interest? and Girard, “Québec et le Mouvement Desjardins”, pp. 59–71. 2 On the Antigonish movement, see Coady, Masters of Their Own Destiny; Laidlaw, Man from Margaree; Dodaro and Pluta, The Big Picture; Baum, Catholics and Canadian Socialism, pp. 189–211; Cameron, For the People; Laidlaw, The Campus and the Community; MacPher- son, “Patterns in the Maritime Co-operative Movement”, pp. 31–52; and Remes, “In Search of ‘Saner Minds’”, pp. 58–82. Many of the Antigonish movement’s records have been digitalized: see http://coadyextension.stfx.ca. Accessed 2 May 2017.