Afterword Contemporary witnesses to life and liberation: The persistent and evolving reality of Latin American martyrdom

Latin American martyrdom: as it was in the beginning?

When I first began to study liberation theologies in the late 1990s, and then lived and worked with the ecclesial base communities (Comunidades Eclesiales de Base, CEBs) of El Salvador in the early 2000s, Latin American memory of martyrs who had been murdered during the revolutionary years of the late twentieth century was fresh, the wounds of war and political repression still gaping. As a privileged, white student of liberation theology in the North Atlantic world, though, the rhetoric of liberation theology’s decline gave the impression that the days of self-styled ‘dirty wars’, armed conflict and martyrdom in Latin America were over. I naively relegated the era of martyrdom to the 1970s and 1980s, although I knew that Monseñor Juan José Gerardi had been murdered for his prophetic commitment to speaking the truth about the Guatemalan genocide just three short years before I studied Spanish in his homeland. Even when Sr. Dorothy Stang was murdered in 2005 for her defence of subsistence farmers’ land rights and the preservation of the Amazon, I jumped to the conclusion that this was an aberration. And so, when I published my first academic article on women and martyrdom in El Salvador in 2007 (Gandolfo 2007, 26–53), I wrote and reflected as if martyrdom was a thing of the past, from which liberation theology had been born, but which was now present in contemporary praxis of historical memory and collective resurrection, not in continued persecution and death. The above litany of human rights and environmental defenders murdered in the past twenty years indicates that I could not have been more wrong. This blind spot in my own work is not surprising, given my social location in the United States and my theological formation at a time Latin America was no longer ‘trending’ in the theological academy or in the praxis of solidarity more broadly.

If we care enough to pay attention, though, it becomes obvious that martyrdom in Latin America was not and is not a thing of the past, but rather a very real and present experience, taking on new and complex forms, yet just as persistent a reality as it was in the beginning of both liberation theology and the history of Latin America more broadly. In fact, it is from the blood-soaked grounds of martyrdom that new and diverse expressions of liberation theology have emerged and proliferated across the continent. Zechmeister invites readers to lean into the ‘productive asynchronicity’ that exists between theological reflection, memory of historical martyrdom and memory of Jesus’ own concrete practices of healing, liberation and communion.⁴ However, the productive asynchronicity of liberation movements with the historical memory of martyrdom is too often met with the destructive asynchronicity of powerful forces that repeatedly respond with violence, time and time again, when oppressed and marginalised communities rise up to demand justice and freedom. These perpetual cycles of violence thus require a creative synchronicity between contemporary liberation theologies and the challenges that contemporary martyrdom poses to the praxis of and affective commitment to liberation.

The persistence of Latin American martyrdom: from origins to contemporary reality

In the beginning was the sword. When Iberian conquistadors invaded and colonised the lands that would later be designated as the Américas, the extractivist imagination that they brought with them required that they violently seek possession and total control of land, labour, religion and culture, in order to amass untold wealth and global dominance. In the face of this new reality, the original peoples of these lands resisted the extractivist evils of enslavement, land theft, cultural annihilation and genocide. When European agents of human trafficking captured Africans and transported them across the Atlantic Ocean to serve as forced labourers in the Americas, enslaved peoples resisted, fleeing to the forests to form autonomous Maroon communities and quilombos. In both cases, colonisers responded to the defiance of those they sought to colonise with further violence, meeting uprisings and opposition with acts of war, ethnic cleansing and political executions. For example, in the Caribbean, the Indigenous Taíno Cacique Hatuey is remembered as one who valiantly resisted the Spanish invasion and was burned at the stake for his rebellion, refusing baptism with the famous statement that he wanted nothing to do with a heaven where the Spanish would be present.⁵ In Brazil, the quilombola king Zumbi dos Palmares, who is remembered for his resistance to the enslavement of his people and his refusal to submit to Portuguese rule, was executed and decapitated to disprove his perceived immortality.⁶ But, like so many martyrs of liberation, these men represented untold masses who were also killed. And, moreover, popular memory of Hatuey, Zumbi and other martyrs has not silenced their witness but rather has multiplied their impact across time and space. Just as the Inca-descendant revolutionary Tupac Amaru II prophesied for himself before his own execution, these martyrs have returned and have become millions.⁷

Refusal to submit to colonisation, oppression and exploitation in Latin America did not begin or end with the revolutionary popular movements from which liberation theology was born in the mid- to late twentieth century. As the previous examples indicate, the liberationist experience of Latin American martyrdom did not originate at this time either, for the peoples of Latin America have repeatedly sought freedom, faced violent defeat and risen again from the ashes over the course of more than 500 years. A key difference in the experience of martyrdom during the early years of twentieth-century liberation theology was that a significant number of public religious leaders, including archbishops, stood in solidarity with the poor and oppressed in their struggles for liberation and therefore suffered ‘the same fate as the poor’.⁸ What was new was not the resistance of colonised and impoverished peoples, but the response of certain sectors of the Church to their resistance, and the violence that was meted out on those ecclesial sectors in return. This perpetual cycle of extractivism, oppression and violence is abhorrent, but it should not be surprising that liberation struggles continue to face violent repression in the Americas today. Indeed, there are places in contemporary Latin America where solidarity with collective struggles for human rights and social and ecological liberation is a perilous endeavor that too often leads to violent persecution by powerful proxies of global capital and local agents and beneficiaries of organised crime and political corruption.

In fact, since the turn of the century, thousands of human rights defenders have been slain across Latin America for their commitments to justice, peace, equality, truth, human rights, Indigenous autonomy and sustainable access to the social and ecological goods on which human life depends. Certain countries are particularly dangerous (such as Mexico, Honduras, Colombia and Brazil), and land and environmental defenders are especially at risk, with Indigenous peoples being the most disproportionately vulnerable population in the region. Advocates for gender justice and LGBTQ+ rights are also targeted with violence, and anti-racist organising is always risky, particularly for persons of African descent. Online databases of persecuted and murdered human rights and environmental defenders are replete with examples of violent repression, and these databases only document confirmed cases, which represent a much larger phenomenon in the region and around the world.⁹

The reality of contemporary martyrdom in Latin America is rooted in more complex social, economic and political networks of power and violence than it was during the 1970s and 1980s, and martyrdom is no longer as visibly tied to the Church, Christian commitment and public religious leadership as it was in the early years of liberation theology. Martyrdom for justice and liberation has always transcended the narrow confines of religious affiliation in Latin America, as the examples of Hatuey and Zumbi above make clear, but the late twentieth-century martyrs whose lives and legacies are most well known in the ecclesial communities and theological academy of the North Atlantic world are still male clerics and women religious, such as Monseñor Óscar Arnulfo Romero, the four North American churchwomen, the UCA (Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas) Jesuits and Sr. Dorothy Stang. Nevertheless, in more recent years, Latin American liberation theologians and ecclesial communities committed to a liberating faith have begun to engage more deeply with the witness of twenty-first-century martyrs – Christian or not – who have paid the ultimate price for embodied participation in their peoples’ struggles for social and ecological liberation. As Zechmeister suggests, we must ‘see – take the weight’, and we must ‘hear – and give space in our hearts to what we hear’ in the witness of contemporary martyrs so that ‘[t]he theological word that our time demands’ might not be taken as ‘already given’ but rather reborn from our encounters with their struggles. And so, it is right and just to conclude this volume by signalling how the lives and commitments of contemporary martyrs challenge us to deepen our analysis of what we ‘see and hear’ so that we can better ‘take on the weight and give space in our hearts’ to the witness of popular movements for liberation in our world today.

The theological challenge of contemporary martyrdom

In his extensive theological reflections on martyrdom, Jon Sobrino (1999) posits that martyrdom brings to theology a ‘dialectical disposition’ that challenges theology not only to announce the good news of grace, justice, truth and the living presence of God but also to denounce the historical realities of sin, injustice, falsehood and death. Contemporary persecution of human rights and environmental defenders is a clear revelation of how capitalism, racism, patriarchy and ecological destruction are violently entangled manifestations of sin in our world today. This dialectical disposition opens Christian theology in general and liberation theologies in particular to self-examination and self-critique in light of the witness of martyrs who have incorporated not only liberationist, but also intersectional, feminist, anti-racist, queer, environmental and decolonial modes of analysis into their struggles for justice, liberation and ecological well-being.

Take, for example, the case of Marielle Franco, a queer Black woman who was born in a Rio de Janeiro favela in 1979 and became a fierce opponent of racism, police brutality and economic exploitation, fighting for the rights and dignity of Afro-Brazilian and LGBTQ+ people, first as a community activist and then as a councilwoman.¹⁰ She was especially astute in her analysis and vocal in her denunciation of the police and military violence in Black neighborhoods of Rio and Brazil more broadly, where police kill upwards of 6,000 people per year, with Black Brazilians accounting for 83 percent of the victims but 56 percent of the population (Carvalho and Costa 2023). Marielle’s prophetic denunciation of this reality, coupled with her unapologetic existence as a queer Black woman, was such a threat to the ruling elite that she was assassinated by hitmen in Rio de Janeiro on March 14, 2018, along with her driver, Anderson Gomes. Liberation theologies are at their best when they elevate the witness of contemporary human rights defenders who, like Marielle, show us what it means to struggle against contemporary forms of oppression and injustice in Latin America, and throughout the Americas as a whole. Benedictine monk Marcelo Barros makes this connection clear by recognising Marielle as one of many martyrs who, Christian or not, challenge the Church to stand in solidarity with the poor, marginalised and oppressed, not as an ‘appendage of faith’, but as ‘the fundamental core of what it means to follow Jesus’ (Barros 2022). Furthermore, in his response to the murders of Marielle and Anderson, Leonardo Boff (2019) calls on white Brazilians to deepen their critical reflection on the ever-present and rising discrimination not only against the poor, but against LGBTQ+ folks, quilombolas, Indigenous communities and especially the Black community, which makes up over half of the Brazilian population. The CEBs of Brazil include Marielle in their litany of martyrs, and her witness is a touchstone for a new generation of Black theological reflection emerging in Brazil, including that of Ronilso Pacheco (n.d.), who coordinated the publication of a book on Jesus and human rights in the same year that Marielle was murdered. Marielle’s commitments to economic, racial, gender and LGBTQ+ justice point us toward intersectional analyses of oppression and an appreciation for how the fullness of liberation is multidimensional and universal – it cannot privilege one identity, form of oppression or expression of liberation over others. In the words of Fannie Lou Hamer (2010, 134–9), ‘nobody’s free until everybody’s free’.

Similarly, the witness of Berta Cáceres, who was murdered on March 2, 2016, illuminates the intersectionality of oppressions and the multidimensionality of what decolonial scholars today call the ‘colonial matrix of power’.¹¹ Berta was an Indigenous Lenca woman organizing among her people in the mountainous region of southwestern Honduras. At the time of her death, she and the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), which she co-founded and directed, were fighting to protect the sacred waters of the Gualcarque River and surrounding communities from social and ecological devastation by the internationally financed Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam project. Berta herself was inspired by the legacy of historical and contemporary martyrs, and dedicated the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize that she was awarded in 2015 to all the rebels out there, including the martyrs who have been slain for defending the goods of the natural world. In the analysis of Berta and COPINH, defence of the natural world and the liberation of human communities are intertwined, with both processes requiring multi-pronged resistance to not only projects of capitalist extractivism that devastate local ecosystems and marginalised human communities, but also the patriarchal and racist structures that fuel these extractivist projects with the bodies of women, campesinos, Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendant communities. Berta’s Goldman Prize acceptance speech states the matter succinctly:

Wake up! Wake up, humanity! We are out of time. We must shake ourselves free of the rapacious capitalism, racism and patriarchy that will only assure our self-destruction. The Gualcarque River has called upon us, as have all the rivers that are seriously threatened in our world. We must answer the call. Our Mother Earth – militarised, fenced in, poisoned, where basic rights are systematically violated – demands that we take action. (Cáceres 2015)

With these words and the witness of her life, Berta teaches us that the struggle for liberation, and ultimately for the future of human life and the planet itself, must be anti-capitalist, anti-racist and anti-patriarchal. As ecofeminist and ecowomanist activists and scholars have been arguing for decades, there is no reducing the struggle to one of these logics of domination, for they are all inextricably interconnected.

As with Marielle, ecclesial communities and liberation theologies have embraced Berta’s witness with love, rage and courage for carrying on her legacy. María José Caram (2017, 123–4) names Berta as one of the ‘crucified people’ whose ‘death provides a glimpse of the intricate challenges facing those who have committed their lives to the cause of justice today’. On the fourth anniversary of Berta’s assassination, Radio Progreso, the community radio station run by the Jesuits in Honduras, offered an extensive theological reflection on the meaning of martyrdom, the brutality of the violence that precipitates it, the depth of the loss that it occasions, and the ways in which the martyrdom of persons like Berta ‘dignifies’ all those who struggle for life and the life of creation as a whole. This broadcast named Berta’s martyrial significance as equal to that of San Romero:

Berta is also our Monseñor Romero in our Honduras, although it may sound blasphemous to certain clergy who are well-situated. And if it doesn’t seem that way to them, then we are saying it wrong because Jesus was assassinated with the approval of those who were religiously well-situated in his time. (Radio Progreso 2020)¹²

Berta has since become a subversive symbol for ecologically conscientious communities and environmental justice movements throughout the Americas, including in Honduras’ neighbouring country El Salvador, where ecclesial base communities emblazon her image on banners and reverently place it on altars alongside the images of Romero and other Salvadoran martyrs of liberation. The symbolism of her martyrdom is hecho realidad and the seed that was planted when she died has multiplied in the concrete praxis of all those who carry on her struggle.¹³

A comprehensive commitment to socio-environmental justice has led many human rights defenders to deepen and broaden their understanding of how the coloniaje of the current world system is designed to privilege an elite minority at the expense of the colonised peoples and the earth itself. As we have seen, the analysis and praxis of Berta Cáceres reminds us that the anti-reino against which martyrs of liberation stand as dialectical witnesses is not only structured by capitalism but by the extractivist and colonial ravages of racism and patriarchy. Liberation theologies have begun to take these intersectional and decolonial critiques into account in their attempts to formulate a dialectical understanding of how the sinful dynamics of anti-social and anti-ecological imaginaries operate in complex interconnected webs of violence and oppression. Just as the elements and energies that give life to the cosmos are interconnected, so, too, are the human systems that produce the cries of the earth and the cries of the poor.¹⁴ These cries intersect with the cries of Indigenous peoples and people of African descent, women (especially women of color), immigrants and refugees, LGBTQ+ folks, persons with disabilities, the elderly and all those whom society dismisses as disposable. First-generation liberation theologians were not fully equipped to engage the fullness of these intersections of oppression and liberation all that well, even as they attempted to expand the category of the poor to include race and gender. Pope Francis’ integral ecology gestures toward the intersections of multiple systems of oppression, but his contributions require significant correction in terms of his omission of an explicit analysis of racism and his reaffirmation of binary and essentialist thinking around gender and sexuality. Nevertheless, the proliferation of feminist, ecofeminist, Black, Indigenous and queer theologies across the Americas has moved the analyses of liberation theologies toward synchronicity with the struggles of contemporary martyrs for the fullness of liberation in all of its multidimensional forms.

It bears mentioning here that another dimension of the dialectical disposition that engagement with contemporary martyrdom can cultivate in liberation theologies has to do with the dangers of Christian supremacy and the need to cultivate a culture of interreligious encounter characterised by humility and solidarity. The murder of human rights and environmental defenders is a worldwide phenomenon that claims the lives of many more non-Christians than Christians, especially Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, many of whom adhere to their own ancestral cosmovisions, lifeways and spiritualities. Remembering that Latin American martyrdom embraces and transcends many religious and spiritual traditions can challenge liberation theologies to an internal critique of the barriers to encountering non-Christian communities in a dialogical spirit of genuine respect and collaboration. Given the history and current legacy of Christian complicity with colonialism’s extractivist legacy of neoliberal capitalism, racism and patriarchy, Christian churches have much to learn from this dialogue.

Creative synchronicity with the ‘living martyrs’ of today

In his tribute to Marielle Franco on the first anniversary of her death, Marcelo Barros recalls sentiments expressed by the CEBs of Brazil at their sixth national meeting in 1986: ‘Nós queremos nossos mártires vivos e não mortos.’ We want our martyrs alive, not dead! Witnessing to the sacred interconnectedness of human life and the life of our earth community, our common home, should not lead to unjust and early death. It should not provoke persecution, criminalisation, defamation, torture or imprisonment. It should not lead to death threats, nor should it end in the violent theft of human lives. To be a witness to the integrity of creation and to human dignity, justice and peace is an option for life, albeit in the face of death. Indeed, as Barros (2022) puts it,

the journey of the popular church and its immersion in struggles for liberation teach us that martyrdom is not only a way of dying; it is above all a way of living. We [in the popular church] are witnesses that there is redemption in this world and that, despite all the forces of evil, we will continue on this journey.

Similarly, all freedom fighters and land and environmental defenders in the Americas and around the world continue on this journey of life, witnessing to their own particular wellsprings of love for humanity and the earth as one interconnected community. In their continued social and ecological struggles, in their persistent praxis of love and liberation, they make present and honour the resurrection and legacy of those witnesses who have fallen, not only in historical liberation struggles but in their own contemporary popular movements. Those whom Barros names as ‘living martyrs’ continue to bear witness to the realities for which historical and contemporary martyrs have died, refusing to be silent in the face of violence and continuing to build an alternative world in which many worlds are free to co-exist,¹⁵ a world that resembles, at least in part, the reality named by Christians as the reign or kin-dom of God.¹⁶ Scholars and practitioners of liberation theology are therefore faced with the task of seeking creative synchronicity with contemporary martyrs – both the living witnesses who face persecution and those who have died and risen in the struggles of their people – such that we all might participate in the incarnation of the divine dream of life in the face of death and destruction.

Notes

1. 1. This litany of contemporary Latin American martyrs has been drawn from the following online databases and reports on the persecution and assassination of human rights and environmental defenders: Organization of American States, www.oas.org; Human Rights Defenders Memorial, www.hrdmemorial.org; Front Line Defenders, www.frontlinedefenders.org; Amnesty International, www.amnesty.org; Global Witness, www.globalwitness.org.

2. 2. For an incisive critique of liberation theology’s marketability and decline in European theological circles, see Althaus-Reid (2000, 23–33).

3. 3. This is how Michael E. Lee (2018) describes martyrs who have been murdered as a result of their solidarity with the poor and oppressed.

4. 4. Martha Zechmeister’s keynote address at the November 2020 conference, ‘As It Was in the Beginning? Liberation Theology and Praxis in Contemporary Latin America’, on which her foreword to this volume is based, was originally titled ‘The Productive Asynchronicity of Liberation Theology: Theology in the Footsteps of the Martyrs’.

5. 5. See Lucas (2004, 36). All translations from original Spanish and Portuguese sources are mine unless otherwise noted.

6. 6. See Lucas (2004, 77–82).

7. 7. See Lucas (2004, 95–8).

8. 8. In one of his final homilies in 1980, Archbishop Romero made this observation: ‘Christ tells us not to fear persecution. Because – believe me, sisters and brothers – those who commit themselves to the poor must experience the same fate as the poor. And in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor is: being disappeared, being tortured, being arrested, being found dead’ (Romero 1980). Martyred Maryknoll Sister Ita Ford is said to have quoted these words soon before she and three other North American churchwomen were murdered later that year. See Noone (1984).

9. 9. For an extensive analysis of ecological martyrdom in Latin America, see Gandolfo (2023).

10. 10. See Erdos (2018).

11. 11. For an introduction to decolonial scholarship, see the series of essays under the topic ‘Globalization and the De-Colonial Option’ in Cultural Studies (Mignolo and Escobar 2007).

12. 12. Full English translation available in Gandolfo (2023, 232–6).

13. 13. Among those who carry on Berta’s legacy, it is often said that ‘Berta did not die, she multiplied.’ See, for example, the poem by Berta’s daughter Laura Zúniga featured on COPINH’s Facebook page at https://m.facebook.com/copinh.intibuca/posts/2856494517957642?locale2=ar_AR.

14. 14. See Boff (1997).

15. 15. This is the language used by the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, to describe the world that they envisioned in their 1994 uprising and continue to embody in their construction of an autonomous Indigenous homeland and a world in which all people are free to fully exist. ‘The world that we desire is one in which many worlds fit. The Homeland that we are building is one in which all peoples and their languages fit, that is traversed by all paths, that all may enjoy, that is made to dawn by all’ (Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena-Comandancia General del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional 1996).

16. 16. See Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s (1990, 34) use of ‘kin-dom’ language for the reign of God. See also Isasi-Díaz (1996; 2004).

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