13 - Latin America

Summary

Latin America is undergoing dramatic religious transformation but maintains healthy indices of religious freedom. [paragraph break] Activist Christians were persecuted by military regimes from the 1960s to 1980s. A new style of regime collided with the new Catholic emphasis on human rights. In response, strategies included episcopal denunciations, documentation of outrages, international solidarity, a human-rights discourse, and (very occasionally) armed resistance. [paragraph break] The main contemporary case-studies are Cuba, Colombia and Mexico. Cuba represents a residual case of Marxist-inspired opposition to religion, in process of morphing into one-party regime concern with pre-empting challenges to its rule. Colombia’s insurgency- and drug-fuelled violence clashes with a strong grassroots clerical presence to make it very dangerous for Catholic pastoral workers (at least until the 2016 peace agreement). In Mexico, an intransigent Catholic culture co-exists with a laïciste state tradition. Violence against Protestant converts occurs in indigenous areas; and violence against Catholic pastoral workers prevails wherever organized crime runs rampant. [paragraph break] Brazil illustrates attempts to mobilize regional countries in global defence of religious freedom. Such attempts have suffered from a narrow ideological and confessional base. Globally, responses to persecution should take more account of geopolitics, especially by straddling ideological divides and internationalizing the defence of IRF.