12 - Neoliberalism, Human Rights, and the Theology of Liberation in Latin America

Summary

This chapter examines the historical and normative contribution of Latin American theologians and religious actors attentive to the neoliberal underside of the human rights breakthrough associated with the Carter administration and the Trilateral Commission. By tilting the axis to the global South, this chapter charts the emergence of an alternative liberationist discourse and praxis of human rights for the Catholic Church in Latin America centered on the concrete struggles of oppressed peoples and the preferential option for the poor. In contrast to the global human rights politics of the 1970s, the liberationist praxis of human rights critically analyzed socioeconomic inequalities as part of the Church’s effort to resist the overreaching powers of the national security state and the global market. The chapter turns to the case of El Salvador from the 1970s to the 1990s and the examples of Archbishop Óscar Romero and theologian Ignacio Ellacuría to illustrate this alternative liberationist praxis of human rights. Their life-giving opposition to structural violence embedded in old and new forms of colonialism injuring poor campesinos brought them into direct conflict with the moral doctrine of human rights from the global North linked to US interventionism supportive of national securitization and later neoliberal policies.