The Popular Church and Revolutionary Insurgency in El Salvador
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Ching, Erik. 2018. The Popular Church and Revolutionary Insurgency in El Salvador. Latin American Research Review 53(4), pp. 876–885. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25222/larr.782 BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS The Popular Church and Revolutionary Insurgency in El Salvador Erik Ching Furman University, US [email protected] This essay reviews the following works: Vida, pasión y muerte del jesuita Rutilio Grande. By Rodolfo Cardenal. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 2016. Pp. 564. $12.00 paperback. ISBN: 9789996110283. Poets and Prophets of the Resistance: Intellectuals and the Origins of El Salvador’s Civil War. By Joaquín M. Chávez. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xii + 336. $74.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780199315512. The Salvador Option: The United States in El Salvador, 1977–1992. By Russell Crandall. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xv + 690. $39.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781316500644. Assassination of a Saint: The Plot to Murder Óscar Romero and the Quest to Bring His Killers to Justice. By Matt Eisenbrandt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. Pp. ix + 219. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780520286801. El Salvador: Historia contemporánea, 1808–2010. Edited by Carlos Gregorio López Bernal. San Salvador: Editorial Universitaria, 2015. Pp. 424. ISBN: 9789992327869. A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura. By Eileen Markey. New York: Nation Books, 2016. Pp. 1 + 307. $26.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781568585734. Priest under Fire: Padre David Rodríguez, the Catholic Church, and El Salvador’s Revolutionary Movement. By Peter M. Sánchez. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015. Pp. xvi + 308. $44.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780813061191. Liberation through Reconciliation: Jon Sobrino’s Christological Spirituality. By O. Ernesto Valiente. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Pp. 289. $35.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780823268870. Those of us who study El Salvador assumed that an outpouring of research on the civil war would occur eventually after the signing of the Peace Accords in 1992. The existence of a sufficient number of books dedicated solely to El Salvador to justify a substantive review essay here in the LARR would seem to indicate that the awaited day has arrived. Furthermore, the books under review here are not an exhaustive representation of scholarship to date. However, there is plenty of cause for pessimism. While all of the books here introduce new documentary evidence, the fact remains that most of them rely heavily on interviews for their source base, which highlights the deficiency in documentary materials available in El Salvador. We know of some documentary collections that exist but remain off limits, such as a military archive in downtown San Salvador that I personally saw in the mid-2000s, and another intelligence archive that a trustworthy source described to me. Beyond that, we have no governmental archives available, and it remains anybody’s guess as to whether other collections that are supposed to exist but have never been revealed, such as buried caches of guerrilla documents, actually do exist or will emerge. Ching: The Popular Church and Revolutionary Insurgency in El Salvador 877 The common theme uniting these eight, somewhat diverse works is the origin and trajectory of El Salvador’s civil war (1980–1992), and in particular the role of the popular/liberationist church in the insurgency. The works by Joaquín M. Chávez, Peter M. Sánchez, Russell Crandall, and Rodolfo Cardenal address these topics directly. The other four works, by Matt Eisenbrandt, Carlos Gregorio López Bernal, Eileen Markey, and O. Ernesto Valiente do so more tangentially. For example, Eisenbrandt narrates the quest to bring the murderers of Archbishop Romero to justice in US courts. Markey looks at the life of one of the four US churchwomen notoriously murdered by a death squad in December 1980, and so El Salvador enters the story at the end of the book. The volume by López Bernal brings together five prominent Salvadoran scholars to provide an updated survey-like narrative of El Salvador’s modern history, and thus the civil war fills a modest portion of the book. Finally, the work by Valiente focuses on the theology of Jon Sobrino, which was deeply informed by the lived reality of El Salvador, but the book focuses on theological concepts and intellectual trends such that the civil war is an indirect topic. Of the eight books, Chávez’s makes the most the substantive contribution to scholarship, so I will begin with it. At the forefront of Chávez’s study is the question of why El Salvador had a civil war and how the insurgency became, in Chávez’s words, “a massive social phenomenon” (6). Chavez roots the insurrection in the peasantry—a shorthand way of referring to the rural poor as a whole. Chavez’s main argument is twofold: first, peasants, and specifically “peasant intellectuals,” played an autonomous role in giving rise to the insurgency; and second, the traditional urban guerrilla leaders emerged out of the budding New Left of the 1960s. A related but secondary argument regards the Catholic student organization, Salvadoran University Catholic Action (Acción Católica Universitaria Salvadoreña, ACUS). Chávez shows how it transitioned from a conservative stance in the 1950s to a progressive one dominated by adherents of liberation theology in the 1960s. Each of Chávez’s arguments is based heavily on oral interviews, but he also includes new documentary materials, such as the periodicals and records of ACUS in the Archive of the Archdiocese of San Salvador. Chavez advances his first argument, about peasant intellectuals and autonomous peasant mobilization, in opposition to what he identifies as the prevailing “dominant narrative … established during the past two decades” (257, note 36), which he says privileges the guerrilla organizations and their leadership as the determinant variable in giving rise to the insurgency. He contends, in contrast, that “this [the insurgency] was not the typical case of ‘unblocking’ the peasants’ consciousness by urban intellectuals.” Instead, by the time guerrilla leaders and even liberationist-oriented diocesan priests got to them, the peasants were already politicized,” and their “decision to fight the repressive forces emerged from the peasant communities and their leaders” (6, 97). My reaction to Chávez’s research and his claims on this particular topic is resoundingly positive. I agree that scholarly analyses of the war have been too focused on the political-military organizations, that is, the guerrillas and various popular front organizations. Indeed, notwithstanding some exceptions, we have lacked either the evidence or the conceptual frames to realize the potentially autonomous role of the peasantry in the making of its own history. Chávez’s research and arguments are original and they make important contributions that will set an argumentative standard for years to come. One caveat is that I find the wording of Chávez’s argument about peasant intellectuals to sometimes outrun his evidence. Chapter 3 is a main locale for his argument on peasant intellectuals, and therein a reader will find a modest number of specific examples of these individuals. But alongside those examples are myriad references to the important role of outsiders, particularly the priests and lay workers in the Catholic Church’s liberationist wing. They created a vast network of peasant training centers, or “peasant universities,” across the nation in the mid to late 1960s. As Chávez points out, these centers trained “thousands of peasant leaders,” many of whom remember their training as having “changed their ‘mentality,’ that is, it helped them to develop analytical skills to fully engage in social and political activism” (78). In the face of repeated statements like that, I find Chávez to be revealing a highly sophisticated, dialectical relationship between peasants and so-called urban intellectuals, who in many instances were humble priests and lay workers, as well as so-called urban intellectuals, some of whom were guerrilla activists. I see Chávez showing a dynamic interplay between the various groups, such that his claim about the primacy of peasant intellectuals is unnecessary. I would like Chávez to have been slightly more nuanced with his claims at the beginning and end of the book to better reflect the evidence he provides in between. If scholars of El Salvador keep that dialectical interplay in mind as we move forward, we will be well served. In regard to Chávez’s claims about ACUS and the New Left origins of the guerrilla leaders, I have no concerns. His research on ACUS is original, sound, and compelling. He essentially reveals that an organization that was founded on one set of principles can be transformed toward another set rather quickly when its 878 Ching: The Popular Church and Revolutionary Insurgency in El Salvador members dictate as much. In the specific case of ACUS, what Chávez shows is that once a critical mass of members chose to identify with an alternative perspective, in this case liberation theology’s preferential option for the poor, then the organization and its mission changed. Chávez’s claims about El Salvador’s New Left are less pathbreaking and instead offer more a recasting of familiar people and organizations in the light of the concept of the New Left. Chávez takes time to show his readers the countercultural milieu of books, ideas, and music that existed in 1960s El Salvador and how they contributed to a small but influential number of affluent, educated, mostly university-age people who gave up everything and formed clandestine militant organizations bent on overthrowing the Salvadoran state. I have refined my understanding of the guerrilla leaders as a consequence of reading Chávez’s book. Another modest concern I have about Chávez’s book is that he portrays the oppositional protagonists in an almost uniformly positive light, be they peasants or urban guerrilla leaders. Chávez is hardly alone in doing so. The corpus of scholars working on El Salvador is sympathetic toward the opposition, if not because of its members’ personal virtues, then because of the other side’s widely heinous and disproportionate acts of barbarity.