Chapter 5 When liberation theology met human rights

Introduction

Liberationist theologies, philosophies, ethics and practices present a captivating and critical perspective on the Western concept of human rights. This chapter focuses on the encounter between liberation theology and liberal human rights that took place in transnational spheres of opposition to Brazil’s military dictatorship of 1964–85. As domestic opposition to authoritarianism brought liberationists into contact with a global network of human rights and solidarity activists, diverse forms of engagement emerged. In dialogue with the work of Mark Engler, I show how political strategies, communication techniques, social networks and group interests came together to shape the ways in which liberation theology interacted with concepts of human rights circulating in Western Europe at the time.

For much of the Western world, the post-war period would have appeared as a time of great hope. The creation of the United Nations (UN) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights represented the establishment of a common moral commitment to individual freedoms, both political and in terms of enterprise, and grounded the political regime of liberal democracy that united the West against the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill’s 1946 ‘Iron Curtain’ speech was followed by the 1947 Truman Doctrine, cementing an alliance between the two world powers. Meanwhile the creation of the CIA, the National Security Council and NATO added US military might to the project.

In theory, the benefits of this new order would also be extended to Latin America. Governments across the region quickly joined the UN, which set up the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) in 1948 to better understand the specific economic dynamics of the region, while local businessmen and political leaders welcomed the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. With promises of import-substituted industrialisation, the diversification of domestic markets, positive relations with the USA and a more prominent position within global trade more broadly, many Latin American nations saw this as a time of continued opportunities to develop and expand state capitalism domestically.

Nevertheless, the freedoms promised by the Western interpretation of democracy and human rights were somewhat conditional. The USA quickly established that Latin America should not continue industrialising but should instead return to the unfavourable position of exporting traditional primary goods. In 1947, the Rio Pact had reasserted the right to interfere militarily in the region, while in 1948 the creation of the Organization of American States (OAS) revealed interest in keeping US–Latin American disputes outside the reach of the UN. Yet through the establishment of new dependences, namely imported technologies and other foreign investments, Latin American countries diversified their economies and exports. By the 1960s, Latin America was seeing significant growth in manufactured exports, as well as good growth in GDP and average income per capita, even if the terms of trade were in decline (Ffrench-Davis, Muñoz and Gabriel Palma 1995, 159–60, 180; see also Furtado 1970).

All the while, Latin American populations were growing at the fastest rate in the world (Merrick 1995, 3). Over the following decades, migration into the region, as well as from rural to urban areas, saw the vast expansion of capital cities and, with it, growing levels of inequality. While between the 1960s and mid-1970s real incomes rose across the board, income concentration grew for top earners, worsening inequality (de Oliveira and Roberts 1995, 294). Cities also saw the growth of shantytowns and proprietary trade and production as a major part of the economy, leaving huge sectors of society to fall to the wayside of any benefits created by economic growth (1995, 277). But the 1960s also brought with it centralised efforts to increase levels of education, public employment and healthcare accessibility, among other things, to meet the demands of the growing concentration of people in cities (1995, 284–5; Merrick 1995, 12, 43). With greater access to schools, hospitals and work, absolute poverty declined, life expectancy rose and birth rates increased. Simultaneously, however, tensions arose between growing numbers of waged labourers and their bosses, with mass strikes becoming more intense and sometimes violent.

In light of the growing conflicts between impoverished masses, waged labourers and the interests of global capitalist trade, the USA feared that wider Latin America might become a breeding ground for ‘communism’, or another Cuba. Latin America had already been designated a region of priority in the Cold War context in 1954, when a CIA-backed military coup deposed Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz. Over the following decades, to varying degrees, this model would be replicated across several other Latin American states. Parallel to these covert interventions, the USA also proposed a number of development aid projects to pacify demands for greater social and economic equality. The famous 1961 Alliance for Progress sought to facilitate greater economic cooperation in the region by setting up infrastructures of technological dependence under the guise of liberal development and democratic values (Taffet 2007). Authoritarianism, local elite interests and liberal development therefore came to depend on one another to sustain capitalist expansion in Latin America.

Proponents of a critical interpretation of the Western model included prominent scholars, intellectuals, politicians and artists, as well as unions, student bodies and various Christian organisations, including more radical activists who took up arms (Marchesi 2018). The potential alliance between liberationist Christians and militants posed a particular threat to Catholic conservatives. From the 1960s, a time when Latin America comprised 35 per cent of the world’s Catholic population (Dussel 1995, 549), conservative Catholics feared ‘a trend away from church orthodoxy toward a materiality that many felt was inappropriate’, and denounced the practice of social critique or Marxist economic analysis by members of the Church hierarchy (Nagle 1999, 466–7; see also Dussel 1995, 552). Such ideas and practices spread to rural, Indigenous and other marginal communities with the growing number of ecclesial base communities (or CEBs, Comunidade Eclesial de Base in Portuguese), which by the 1980s had reached around 100,000 in Brazil. CEBs were part of a grassroots movement made up of various ‘pastoral agents’, who regularly visited mostly vulnerable communities to facilitate collective reflections and discussions and share ways of thinking (Mainwaring 1987). To carry out these social and pedagogical tasks, CEBs drew from liberation theology and critical pedagogies, particularly Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1967).

In 1968, the Second Latin American Episcopal Conference (Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano y Caribeño, CELAM) in Medellín controversially institutionalised a commitment to the poor and oppressed, a milestone in the broader rupture in the Catholic Church in Latin America. Clergy and Catholic laity across the region, concerned with social justice and equality, interpreted scripture to shed light on the human suffering they witnessed around them, integrating Marxist concepts to critique the ‘structures of power and wealth that exploited the oppressed’ (Dussel 1995, 551). Liberationists also found an opportunity in recent developments in Rome, where reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) provided justification for engaging marginalised communities and addressing social injustice.

Brazil’s liberation theology and transnational human rights

The fundamental tension between liberation theology and Western human rights emerges from their opposing interpretations of the ongoing marginalisation, poverty and hunger in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. A key incompatibility lies in the universalist assumptions encoded in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For liberationists, this particularly hegemonic language of human rights ‘is so universal that it masks and justifies the implicit domination and injustice behind it’ (Adiprasetya 2013, 167). The prioritisation of individual political and economic freedoms over collective bargaining and public goods was seen as another contradiction. The complicity and impunity of multinational corporations and human rights violations during the Brazilian dictatorship only evidences this further (Filho 2022). When Latin American workers fought back against the bosses of the foreign companies and multinationals for which they worked, or on the rarer occasion that a government might propose reforms in their favour, foreign, often US, officials would decry the violation of individual and property rights to encourage state repression. The dictatorial regimes dealt with this predominantly through infiltrating and replacing union leadership with agents of the regime, arresting, torturing or disappearing union activists and generally repressing strike action with violence (Moreira Alves 1985, 46–7, 127–8). This was incompatible with what liberationists understood to be the problem of Latin America: inequality. If individual rights are universal, in other words, if they are to be distributed evenly, the structures that underpin inequality will remain undisturbed. The liberationist ‘preference for the poor’ instead begins on the premise that inequality can only be addressed through solidarity, which requires some to renounce or forfeit their own rights and privileges for the benefit of those who need them more.

Drawing from key publications of the period, Mark Engler’s ‘Toward the “Rights of the Poor”’ (2000) provides an excellent analysis of liberationists’ evolving relationship with Western human rights. Engler conceptualises the fundamental contention between Latin American liberationists and Western human rights through ‘four dangers’. First, ‘human rights language does not provide the conceptual tools with which one could even understand oppression in institutional, rather than individual terms’ (2000, 346). Second, therefore, human rights language condones oppression by acclaiming the capitalist world as a model for global order. Third, human rights can provide the bases (in some cases, legally) for condemning genuine attempts to fight back against oppression – here we can refer back to the de-legitimisation of collective bargaining and public protest, which under the authoritarian regimes of the era were met with heavy repression, often under the pretext of defending property and other rights. The fourth and final danger is the fact that, being rooted in the historical trajectories and moral and philosophical reference points of the Global North, human rights as devised by the UN cannot include the voices of the globally marginalised, rather, it denies agency and frames the oppressed as beneficiaries.

Liberationists saw oppression as the fundamental violation of human dignity. Influenced by Marxism, liberationists interpreted the ‘structural sin’ of injustice through broader economic structures of exploitation that marginalised large sectors and generated poverty and hardship. Political repression, in this context, served only as a supplementary mechanism that enabled structural violence, exploitation and oppression to be maintained. Examples of political violence such as illegal imprisonment, torture and disappearances were therefore interpreted as further symptoms of the prevailing inhuman structural conditions in Latin America. Western human rights, on the other hand, placed individual political and civil rights at the core of their analysis. One of the most impressive organisations of the period was the human rights advocacy group Amnesty International, which brought about such levels of international public awareness and engagement that they succeeded on multiple occasions to secure the release of specific political prisoners. At the same time, and like many others, Amnesty International took the position not to approach the topic of broader oppressive social and economic structures that might also explain the violation of political rights (Grimaldi 2023), demonstrating the dominance of liberal frameworks.

The problem with Western human rights is also illustrated by contrasting the liberationist remedies to conditions of oppression, which were very different to those promoted by mainstream humanitarian and human rights organisations at the time. Whereas liberationists sought to address poverty and inequality by fostering social awakening and structural change from within, the Western world offered charity, development aid and financial investments or loans. In other words, solutions to oppression were imagined in a way that did not disturb the social structures whose reproduction necessitated that oppression in the first place. This is precisely the rhetoric espoused by the Brazilian military regime of 1964–85. Defenders of the economic model of the regime claimed that mixed economies like their own needed to grant equal opportunities to the state and private enterprise, and this meant accepting foreign investment. As a result, economic and productive growth would trickle down in the form of expanded domestic markets, employment and opportunities for the poor (Costa 1971).

There are a number of reasons this discussion is important. The hegemonic narrative of human rights history has long been told from the Euro- or Western-centric perspective, built on the assumption that human rights are both individual and universal. The global human rights movement of the 1970s generated greater awareness of and attention to human rights abuses in Latin America through diverse activism, advocacy, diplomacy and solidarity (Moyn 2010; Sikkink 2022; Stites Mor 2013), as well as the beginning of an acknowledgement by regional organisations such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Torelly 2019). Nonetheless, liberal-democratic narratives persist. Pressure to establish group- or identity-based rights has demonstrated the ability of universal human rights to address pressing issues in the Global North, such as gender, ethnicity or health, without disturbing the neoliberal order or de-prioritising individual rights. At the same time, by representing Global South claims about rights through Western concepts uncritically, it claims agency over the development of collective or group-based rights while also excluding critical voices of the Global South that have long offered – both in theory and in practice – alternatives to universalist interpretations of human rights. Liberation theology has critical insights here. In a world of increasing inequality, seeing human rights as rights of the most impoverished and marginalised offers huge potential for rethinking global ethics (see Aldunate 1994). As such, an analysis emerges of liberation theology not simply as a critic of human rights but as itself pioneering the development of a critical, liberationist human rights perspective.

The objective of taking a closer look at the dialogue between Latin American liberation theology and Western human rights is twofold. On the one hand, this chapter seeks to highlight the agency of one of the many underrepresented protagonists of human rights theory and practice through the contribution of Latin America as a region of the Global South. On the other hand, the chapter provides a more nuanced historical account of how the relationship between liberation theology and the political category of human rights developed. Looking past the more well-known canons of liberation theology literature to understand the liberationist position on Western human rights, I examine transnational spaces of solidarity as a basis for understanding how, through everyday activities and conversations, liberationists were brought into direct contact with definitions and practices of human rights in Western Europe.

Developing the rights of the poor

In his influential essay, Engler proposed an important periodisation of the responses liberation theologians had to human rights in the latter half of the twentieth century. Drawing from the first major works of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Engler notes a distinct lack of engagement with the concept of human rights. In this context of deep intellectual reformation within the radical Latin American Left, key figures such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Hugo Assmann, José Míguez Bonino and Juan Luis Segundo presented liberationism as a means for creating a ‘new society’; one that would break from the capitalist model that had birthed the individualism that marked the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other Western initiatives. These early years were thus a time for liberation theologians to establish their own position within Latin America’s political and ontological landscape, not to generate dialogue with Western human rights.

The second period was one of critique. Within some of the more well-established narratives of human rights history, the later 1970s are sometimes heralded as a turning point for global human rights (Eckel and Moyn 2015). Famously, 1977 was the year that Amnesty International was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and US President Jimmy Carter announced human rights as a component of US foreign policy. For liberation theologians, human rights thus became a means through which to critique US imperialism, liberal individualism and the aforementioned ‘four dangers’, regarding the practical implementation of human rights. A significant marker of this turn was the publication of Carter y la lógica del imperialismo, edited by Brazilian theologian Hugo Assmann (1978).

The third phase of Engler’s periodisation is marked by a ‘shift to appropriation’ (2000, 350). This pragmatic turn was concerned not with the inherent elitist biases existing within mainstream conceptualisations of rights but with the potential for human rights as a conceptual framework to render liberationist value systems more readable. It was here that mainstream Latin American liberationists began speaking of marginalised groups’ oppression in terms of rights: rights of the poor, rights to equality and other minority rights. By way of example, Engler points to the publication by José Aldunate of Derechos humanos, derechos de los pobres (Aldunate 1993). Elsewhere, I have shown that this also manifested in liberationists’ appeals to the human rights language of internationally established documents and institutions, such as the UN (Grimaldi 2023, 35, 152).

These are not discrete chronological stages. They blur and overlap in parts, and the ‘turns’ to rejection, critique and appropriation do not necessarily mean a total overhaul of older ideas and attitudes to human rights. Likewise, it is also important to consider the spaces in which these debates were taking place: established through major published works and national and regional conferences, they represent a particular cohort of voices that emerged as the most prominent. Early debates were inward-looking and reflective; they sought to self-define, self-critique and self-promote. At the same time, many liberationist works were not translated or published in English or French on any significant scale until the early 1970s.

In the undercurrent of these more official and mainstream debates, every day on-the-ground interactions between liberationists, human rights advocates and solidarity activists were also taking place. An important figure often recognised for contributing to the third period (appropriation) was El Salvador’s Óscar Romero, who in 1978 was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and in 2018 granted sainthood. In particular, Romero is known for disseminating a liberationist defence of human rights which addressed the structural socio-economic inequalities generated by the globalised neoliberal order from the murder of his Jesuit colleague Rutilio Grande, in 1977, until his own assassination in 1980 (Cangemi 2019; Lantigua 2020). Some years before Romero’s 1977 turn towards liberation theology, from the early 1960s, exchanges and debates about rights were already taking place between liberationists of the Southern Cone of Latin America, in particular Brazil, and groups in the Global North. Taking a transnational approach, I turn to the specific event of Brazil’s military dictatorship of 1964–85, during which some of the first transnational solidarity networks between Latin American groups and supporters in Western Europe were established to oppose the wave of military and authoritarian regimes sweeping across the region.

Drawing on the concepts of structural violence and oppression, liberationist voices from Brazil focused on the global economic order as the root of human suffering and rights violations, arguing that those who bear the brunt of economic policies are the primary victims. Interferences in union leadership and activity, limiting wages and other benefits, and establishing minimum wages that cannot cover the basic costs of living were all common themes discussed in these communications. The agricultural sector also featured regularly with attention drawn to the lack of access to land, seasonal and informal work that leaves farmers in a perpetual situation of precarity and insecurity, illiteracy and ill-health, homelessness, and the lack of even the most basic benefits of formal waged labour. Solidarity and exile publications amalgamated these data and testimonies to inform local audiences. One pamphlet, from 1974, argued that ‘behind [the] façade of Brazil’s economic growth there lies a situation of under-development and misery amongst a great majority of people’, indicating that ‘the most basic human rights are being violated and crimes against the individual are the norm’ (cited in Grimaldi 2023, 78–9).

These arguments also drew from dependency theory to underline how the global economic order and the relationship between Brazil as a peripheral country and the Global North lay at the core of these individual human rights violations (Cardoso and Faletto 1971). Solidarity materials thus focused on dispelling Brazil’s so-called ‘economic miracle’, highlighting Brazil’s low exports vis-à-vis their increasing imports, the unfavourable terms of trade the country accepts, the increasing proportion of profits that either leave the country or contribute to growing domestic inequality, and, more generally, the dependence on US and other foreign firms. In the liberationists’ eyes, keeping this system in place not only required the repression of workers through economic and social policy but also made it necessary to silence the opposition by limiting political freedoms and speech through censorship and imprisonment. In this analysis of the country’s problems, the dictatorship was not presented as the principal or sole perpetrator of human rights violations through the arrest and torture of political activists, nor were political prisoners seen as the principal victims. Rather, the state was interpreted as a vessel of structural global oppression, through which individual political and civil rights violations were just the tip of the iceberg.

In what follows, I analyse three important ways in which Latin American liberation theology came into contact and dialogue with Western human rights during this time. The first is through what I call the friends and networks of the liberationist mission: Western European Christian clergy and laity sympathetic to and supportive of the cause of Latin American liberation theologians. The second, I refer to as the incidental exile of liberation theology: the fragments and strands of liberation theology that travelled to Western Europe through political exiles. Finally, I emphasise the direct encounter between the well-known Brazilian liberation theologian Dom Hélder Câmara and his public addresses and media appearances in Europe. It was through these channels, I argue, that Latin American liberation theology sat at the table with Western human rights and began a provocative debate about the rights of workers, Indigenous people, the rural and urban poor, and, more broadly, the marginalised and oppressed of the world.

Friends and networks of the liberationist mission

Liberation theology as a school of thought is made up not only of a small central circle of clergymen, intellectuals and academics but also the many individuals and organisations who ensure its theories are turned into practice. In the context of the Brazilian dictatorship, both groups include an international component – friends and networks of the thinkers, writers, leaders and practitioners of liberation theology in Latin America. This section looks at how some of the first networks were formed, as well as some of the ways they began to bring Latin America’s liberation theology into contact with Western conceptualisations of human rights.

European Catholic Action of the early twentieth century is widely acknowledged as an important point of reference for many Latin American liberation theologians. Through the concepts of ‘see, judge, act’, Catholic Action established that its responsibility was to critically and actively engage with the social injustices around them. Catholic Action developed around the issues of child labour, trade unions, and youth and worker movements (Horn 2008). In Brazil, the concept of ‘see, judge, act’ was instead more relevant to local struggles faced not only by waged workers but by peasants, farmers, informal workers and the urban poor. The Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium, stands out as one of the most important spaces through which Latin American and European theologians exchanged and shaped each other’s ideas. Key figures from the liberationist circle, such as Peru’s Gustavo Gutiérrez, Uruguay’s Juan Luis Segundo, Colombia’s Camilo Torres and Brazil’s Clodovis Boff, all studied at Louvain starting in the early 1950s (Berryman 1987; Cleary 1985).

It was in Belgium that these Latin Americans were introduced to the work of organisations such as the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (JOC) – or Young Christian Workers, in English – a group founded in 1912, which in 1957 became an international organisation. The JOC had an intimate relationship with the University of Louvain, for whom the former vice-rector Cardinal León-Joseph Suenens was a respected advocate (Grimaldi 2023, 15). Following the Brazilian military coup of 1964, which ushered in a dictatorship that would last twenty-one years, Cardinal Suenens and the broader JOC would host some of the continent’s first public campaigns against the military regime. While Latin Americans came to Belgium to develop ideas about liberationism, Western European theologians were drawn to Latin America for the same reasons. Well-known activists, such as François Jentel, Jean Cardonnell, Jan Talpe, Charles Antoine and Georges Casalis, made their way to Brazil to carry out missionary work alongside local liberationists, teach in local universities, exchange knowledge with theologians, or even to join local revolutionary resistance movements (Gildea, Mark and Pas 2011; Grimaldi 2023).

All of the above laid the groundwork for some of the first encounters between Latin American liberation theology and Western human rights. European clergymen and representatives of Christian organisations who came up against the Brazilian regime and suffered persecution as a result generated significant attention among European audiences, who saw this repression as an attack on their own national citizens. As a result, the Latin American struggles that European clergymen came to support through missionary work – including those of Indigenous peoples, landless peasants, workers or the urban poor – would gain attention through awareness campaigns as well as national and international press coverage.

While many Brazilians did not explicitly discuss their troubles and struggles in terms of ‘human rights’, the international network of the JOC certainly did. The JOC had maintained regular correspondence with its Brazilian branch since before the 1964 coup, yet it was during the regime that letters from Brazilian members to the international headquarters of the JOC began to act as records of repression, harassment, torture and disappearance. Correspondence included notes and summaries of JOC meetings in Brazil, as well as transcripts of speeches and motions from important members of the Catholic hierarchy, such as the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (Conferência Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil, the CNBB) or Archbishop Dom Hélder Câmara. Letters also provided detailed evidence on the targeting and arrest of JOC members, as well as the continued social and economic inequalities and other hardships faced by workers and marginalised groups across the country. Through global solidarity activists and advocates of liberationism, therefore, Brazil’s human indignities were communicated to international audiences in terms of human rights. By January 1969, the JOC had set in motion a global solidarity campaign for Brazil. As part of the campaign, open letters and press releases were sent to the Brazilian president at the time, General Castelo Branco, as well as the general secretary of the UN, and the general secretary and president of the General Conference of the International Labour Organization (ILO). In these communications, the JOC were careful to ‘translate’ the situation in Brazil into human rights terms by making direct references to specific resolutions of the UN Economic and Social Council and the ILO, as well as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

The International [JOC] declares […] that the awakening of awareness amongst young workers of their inherent dignity as human persons, which enables them to assume responsibility in society towards the ideal of free human beings enjoying various freedoms and freedom from fear and want, is in accordance with the universal declaration of Human Rights.¹

The JOC was predominantly concerned with the plight of traditional waged labourers in urban and suburban areas. Others worked more explicitly to raise the profile of the urban and rural poor of Brazil, including Indigenous peoples and peasants. Father François Jentel was one such individual. A priest from France, Jentel first arrived in Brazil in 1954 to carry out missionary work with the Tipirapé Indigenous people. The Tipirapé first gained widespread attention among European audiences when, in 1977, Professor Charles Wagley published Welcome of Tears, a work based on almost thirty years of anthropological fieldwork with the group.

Jentel first appeared in national news in September 1972, when his missionary work with peasants and Indigenous peoples and their defence against development projects captured the attention of Marcel Niedergang, a journalist for French newspapers Le Monde and France-Soir, who regularly investigated inequality in Latin America. In May 1973, Jentel was arrested in Brazil and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for fighting back against illegal harassment taking place in the context of a development project in Araguaia, in the State of Mato Grosso. The dispute was between locals and the Development Company of Araguaia (Companhia de Desenvolvimento do Araguaia, CODEARA), a private company that had begun repurposing agricultural land through the illegal sale of public rural and urban landholdings.

Jentel’s arrest once again made national headlines, both in Le Monde and La Croix, two major French newspapers.² Sparking the outrage was a public letter addressed to the Brazilian Ambassador in Paris, which was received by Le Monde with 1,895 signatures. Given Jentel’s intentions to settle the dispute legally and pacifically, the letter argued: ‘We therefore do not understand how a case with legal standing can today lead to the condemnation of Father François Jentel, who has only helped the peasants to defend their rights, which until now have been recognised by the Brazilian Constitution’.³

As a result of these international outcries and other underground diplomatic negotiations, Jentel was eventually released and returned to France (Serbin 2001). Not long after, he re-entered Brazil to continue his work, only to be expelled again in 1975. Jentel eventually settled back in France, where he began working with the Comité de Solidarité France-Brésil, another organisation that campaigned against a variety of human rights abuses in Brazil.

Jentel and many like him would appear once again in the context of human rights debates in 1974, when the Bertrand Russell Tribunal for Brazil and Latin America investigated human rights violations carried out by states across the region. One of the testimonies they received was from Suzanne Robin, a French woman who had worked with Jentel in the late 1960s. Discussing missionary work in the state of Mato Grosso in central-west Brazil, Robin focused her accusation of human rights violations not only on the arrest and torture of missionary clergymen like Jentel but also on the local victims of large-scale development and modernisation projects.

The Bertrand Russell Tribunal also welcomed the support and input of other European liberationist missionaries who had spent time in Brazil. On the organising committee, for example, was the French Jean Cardonnell, who had been decommissioned as a priest in 1954 following his public criticisms of the Church and their treatment of workers. Cardonnell taught as a professor of theology in Rio de Janeiro, but was forced to leave in 1968. The tribunal committee also included the French liberation theologian Georges Casalis, who had worked with Brazilian liberationist Paulo Freire and spent his final years serving Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

Both the Bertrand Russell Tribunal and the JOC formed part of a broader network of Western European Christian solidarity groups and campaigns, including Justitia et Paix, the Christian Worker Movement (MOC), the General Council for the Apostolate of the Laity (CGAL) and the Christian Movement for Peace (MCP), among many others. In 1973, these groups formed a coalition to run the Non a Brésil Export campaign. The campaign intended to boycott a Brazilian trade exposition being held in Brussels that November, and it aimed to raise awareness of the situation in Brazil and to draw attention to the compliance of Western European nations in the regime’s repression. A motion organised by CGAL as part of the campaign reads as follows:

The CGAL assembly is concerned with the respect for fundamental human rights in all countries, and the coming organisation, in Brussels, of ‘Brazil Export’, which aims to present the image of a Brazil that promotes the economic and social development of the people. It is also concerned with numerous testimonies, most notably those of various groups of Brazilian priests, which demonstrate:

That the ‘Brazilian Miracle’ does not benefit more than a property-owning minority of the people and exerts an ever-growing gap between rich and poor.

That the Brazilian government represses freedoms of political expression and unions and that political assassination and torture are practised in the country.⁴

Human rights in this instance are defined first and foremost in terms of social and economic inequalities, while the human rights violations linked to political repression and state violence are presented second. This framework clearly reflects that of Latin American liberationist analysis, which placed the global economic order – in this case, global trade – at the centre of debates surrounding human dignity and oppression. What in the Western tendency is seen as the fundamental component of rights – individual, civilian and political rights – are here presented as a consequence of said oppression, rather than the primary human rights violation ongoing in Brazil.

Friends and networks of Latin American liberation theology were some of the first to bring liberationism into dialogue with Western human rights. They were also some of the first to campaign on behalf of Brazilians, educating the broader public as to what was going on under the regime. The foundations for this dialogue were set well before the start of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1964 through intellectual and academic exchanges between Latin American and European theologians. In particular, the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium stood out as an important point of encounter, where Latin American and European liberationists learned of each other’s context-specific theories and practices.

These connections and curiosities brought Europeans directly to Brazil, where they worked as missionaries and teachers, experiencing first-hand Latin America’s own liberation theology. Individuals like Father François Jentel, who worked with poor and Indigenous communities, drew significant attention to oppression in Brazil. What was perceived as the fundamental human rights component of Jentel’s experience for European audiences was his arrest, a clear attack on political rights to freedom of speech, political action and constitutional and legal procedures. However, by drawing attention to Jentel, the international community also raised awareness of the social and economic plight of marginalised Brazilians, whose situation was inseparable from the violation of Jentel’s individual rights.

Meanwhile, liberationist groups in Europe, such as the international JOC, rallied their own networks to support their colleagues and friends in Brazil. Brazilian members of the JOC and the broader Christian community were individually targeted and subject to political repression such as imprisonment and intimidation, which was often justified on the grounds of their so-called ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ project to raise social consciousness and action around inequality. News about these arrests, received through regular correspondence, came accompanied by detailed reports on the social and economic situation of marginalised groups in Brazil. Accordingly, when the JOC staged public protests and information campaigns and wrote open letters to human rights institutions such as the UN or ILO, they presented the violation of social, economic and political rights as inseparable.

This phenomenon was not limited to predominantly liberationist or even Christian groups. As seen through events such as the Non a Brésil Export campaign, or the Bertrand Russell Tribunal for Brazil and Latin America, European groups regularly engaged with liberationist conceptual and analytical frameworks to talk about human rights. At a time when political rights were perceived as the most basic and inalienable, the idea that human rights could also be social and economic and that the root of the problem might sit with transnational structures beyond the state represented a significant shift in discourse.

The incidental exile of liberation theology

While local organisations and public media introduced some of the building blocks of Latin American liberationism to European audiences, ideas drawn from Latin American liberation theology also travelled through Brazilian exiles who fled or were expelled by the regime. A critical examination of exile testimonies, interviews and autobiographies has revealed that, like liberation theologians themselves, many of the most politically active opposition to the Brazilian regime struggled with the Western concept of human rights (Grimaldi 2023). Following an initial period of ‘rejection’, many exiles would begin to appropriate the language of human rights as a way of appealing and relating to European audiences.

Brazilian exiles were well connected and organised; they published, coordinated media campaigns and participated in solidarity events to share testimonies and spread awareness of the situation in Brazil. They used their identities as victims and their experiences of political rights violations, imprisonment and torture to capture the attention of European audiences before relating their experiences to other, less visible victims of oppression and marginalisation. The intersection of exiles’ political activism and liberation theology, ethics and philosophy – as analytical and conceptual frameworks – thus provides another transnational space within which Latin American liberation theology entered into debate with Western human rights.

I call this particular encounter ‘incidental’ because not all Brazilian political exiles and activists were liberationists. The key here lies in the fact that Latin America’s liberation theology developed alongside parallel political movements and economic theories with which it shared multiple defining characteristics. Therefore, Latin American liberation theology cannot be understood without considering the ongoing academic movement towards dependency theory, nor the humanist, Marxist-inspired, radical and militant political theories that were also taking shape from the late 1950s. This is what Mario Osorio has called ‘Latin American Theory’, the combination of dependency theory, theology and philosophy of liberation, and popular pedagogies (Osorio 2009).

What connected Brazilian political activists and liberation theologians was the analytical framework they used to shape political demands and visions for the future, the same framework that understood global inequality as the ultimate violation of human dignity and justice. Beyond these intellectual connections, there were significant overlaps between networks of theologians and political activists, ranging from urban guerrilla groups in Brazil to exile communities in Paris. Brazilian exiles relied on their Catholic networks to settle and assimilate in destination countries, to exchange news with political activists and prisoners back home in Brazil, to connect with local Christian solidarity groups, and to gain access to important platforms such as national newspapers.

One of the most well-known exile publications of the time was the Frente Brasileira de Informações, the Brazilian Information Front. Founded in 1969, the bulletin was set up firstly to connect and update Brazilian political exiles on developments back home, and secondly to bypass press censorship and offer an alternative source of news for international audiences unaware of the extent of repression in Brazil. Broadly speaking, the Frente Brasileira de Informações was quick to begin using the language of human rights to engage with local audiences, and not only through its publications. The widely dispersed network of exiles also functioned to connect several other advocacy and solidarity groups across the world. This network included, among others, an alumnus of the Catholic University of Louvain, Jan Talpe, who had moved to Brazil in 1965 and become involved in the left-wing Christian group Ação Popular.

The Frente Brasileira de Informações covered numerous human rights issues. Beyond providing updates on political prisoners, testimonies of torture, disappearances and other forms of state violence exerted on members of the opposition to the regime, the bulletins also presented a more expansive conceptualisation of rights by addressing what liberationists understood as the structural violence of the global economic order. Further, they regularly reported on the regime’s treatment of liberationist Catholic priests and laypersons involved in social justice activities, raising additional awareness around many of the groups with which they worked. In this context, Frente Brasileira de Informações articles discussed workers, the urban poor, inequality and Indigenous peoples, frequently referencing terms and concepts from international human rights institutions.

Other exiles more explicitly identified as liberationist, such as the Brazilian sculptor Guido Rocha. Rocha, a political exile, disseminated his own liberationist ideas internationally through artistic and cultural production. He had been an active member of the Brazilian Socialist Party, and as a result was first arrested in 1962 – even before the coup – for protesting against the military. He was arrested again in 1969 during one of his exhibitions, where the political nature of his work roused suspicion of subversion. His first attempt to flee Brazil landed him in a Bolivian detention centre for ten days, before he was returned to Brazil. In 1971, he was arrested once again and detained for eight months, during which he was frequently tortured.

‘By some sort of irony’, recounts Guido Rocha in a pamphlet accompanying one of his exhibitions, ‘one of the torturers hid his identity behind the pseudonym “Jesus Christ”’. From then on, Rocha began to create sculptures that depicted the crucifixion of Christ. Interpreting the principles of Brazilian liberation theology, Guido’s sculptures were of a Christ that sided with the oppressed: ‘From that moment on, all the Christs I make have facial characteristics which simultaneously reflect the expressions of comrades that were murdered or tortured by the police, as well as the faces of poor peasants.’

Their bodies were shaped to resemble the marginalised masses of the country’s dry northeastern backlands, while the material they were made from, burned plaster, represented the regime’s use of electric shock torture on political prisoners. On the eve of an exhibition of these sculptures, Guido was warned that he was in danger, and so fled once again with his partner, this time for Chile. It was not long after his arrival that the Chilean coup of September 1973 took place, and Guido was captured standing in line to enter the Argentine Embassy before being detained and tortured for another forty days. Connections in Switzerland eventually helped him to secure a special scholarship at the École des Beaux Artes, funded by the Canton of Geneva, allowing him to enter the country as a refugee.

In exile in 1975, Guido produced one of his signature sculptures and donated it to the All Africa Council of Churches (AACC) in Nairobi.⁵ In July that year, it appeared on a poster produced by the Swiss Committee of Defence for the Political Prisoners of Chile; in September, the image was displayed during a discussion on torture held at the Parish of Saint Germain in Gevera; and in November, a print of the photo was presented to the World Council of Churches as a gesture of gratitude on behalf of refugees helped by the church.

Guido Rocha’s work merged the concepts of political human rights with those of marginalisation and oppression in a powerful way. His exile in Switzerland was not planned; his intention had initially been to remain politically active through his work in Brazil, if not Latin America. Ultimately, it was his connection within Christian circles that gained him his safety in Western Europe and allowed him to continue producing and disseminating his work. Importantly, these artworks engaged critically with liberation theology and its mission to side with the poor and oppressed – placing equal emphasis on peasants and political prisoners, thus creating a conversation between liberationist and Western notions of human rights.

Rocha’s experience relates to a broader phenomenon of political exile from Brazil, which was the alignment between the political project of opposition to the military dictatorship and the social action being carried out by liberationists. This alignment, intellectual, ideological and practical, manifested in exiles’ political activity overseas, such as through the publications of the Frente Brasileira de Informações. In this way, news about members of the Church, mostly liberationists, and the plight of Brazil’s oppressed were presented alongside reports on human rights violations, including illegal imprisonment, political repression, censorship, torture, disappearances, social and economic inequality, workers’ rights and Indigenous rights, among many others.

Dom Hélder Câmara’s European tour

The final way in which Latin American liberation theology was brought into contact with Western human rights was through the independent public campaigns of Brazilian liberationists themselves. Within Brazil, liberationists provided support for victims of the regime in a number of ways, ranging from working with marginalised groups, to supporting militant student and guerrilla movements, to lobbying the Catholic Church hierarchy to speak out against the regime (see Dussel 1995; Serbin 2001). Elsewhere, liberationists used their platforms to directly engage a range of European publics. An important figure in this regard was Dom Hélder Câmara, then Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in Brazil. Câmara was well known internationally, regularly speaking to a range of audiences in the Global North to raise awareness about the plight of the underdeveloped world, and to do so in the terms of Latin American liberation theology. Brazil, just one of many victims of global oppression caused by the neoliberal economic order, was often used as an example. Through a speech delivered in Manchester and London in 1969, titled Violence and Misery, Câmara introduces the concept of a ‘triple violence’, made up of internal colonialism, violence from the developed world, and structural violence (Câmara 1969).

The first, internal colonialism, is defined as the violence exerted upon the marginalised masses in order to sustain the wealth of a small, privileged group. As an example, he points to the fact that, at the time of writing, 94 per cent of the country’s rural properties were owned by 6 per cent of landowners, leaving smallholders, share-croppers and tenants in a state of misery and even a form of slavery. The second violence is conceptualised in terms of the relationship between the developed and underdeveloped world. Here, Câmara points to the global trade system, foreign policies and overseas aid programmes that were created to suit the needs of the developed world and which perpetuate the situation of underdevelopment of the Third World. Such a system, he explains, prevents poorer nations from owning and using ‘what material resources they possess in their own interests and in their own way’ (1969, 493). Finally, is structural and legally established violence, which targets democratic social movements and collective actions that attempt to challenge the social, economic and political structures of violence. Câmara points to the liberationist method of ‘conscientisation’, or conscientizaçao, drawn from the pedagogical work of Freire, which seeks to awaken social consciousness and action. Such methods, he points out, are often deemed socialist or communist in nature, and thus subject to the military containment methods supported by US intelligence services.

Neither Violence and Misery nor many of Câmara’s later public and media addresses focus explicitly on human rights – after all, he is speaking from the position of a Latin American and by drawing from the conceptual framework of humanist liberation theology. In this way, he simultaneously provokes a critique of Western human rights and their contradictions, while also appropriating the terminology as a way of identifying with European audiences. In his words, the victims of this system are considered to be ‘sub-human’; they do not have the most basic human rights and dignities, such as access to clothing, food, education, health and welfare. Likewise, the marginalised lack self-determination and the right to develop according to their own needs. The violation of these rights is upheld by the same global economic order that claims to promote human rights:

Capitalism, despite its championing of the human and individual freedom is egotistic, selfish and cruel. It does not hesitate to crush human beings when profit demands it. Under the banner of saving the free world, it commits terrible atrocities against freedom. It speaks proudly of tradition and family but it does not create the right conditions for workers and small proprietors to rear their families. It makes much of religion when it supports its own interests, but it defies and persecutes it when it fights for the development of the whole man and of all men. In the name of individual initiative, it supports national and international trusts and combines. (Câmara 1969, 493)

Over the following years, Dom Hélder Câmara would continue to use his overseas prestige to disseminate the ideas and practices of Latin American liberation theology, appearing in newspapers, radio programmes, documentaries and conference halls across Western Europe. Within those spheres, he and those who wrote about him would regularly connect the liberationist analysis of global inequality and oppression with mainstream concepts of human rights and development.

The international campaigning of Brazilian liberation theologians was of course not limited to Dom Hélder Câmara. In a later issue of the New Blackfriars, a group of Dominican Friars imprisoned in São Paulo published a collective testimony (‘Accusation from Prison’ 1970). Despite being political prisoners themselves, the focus of their text was on the structural nature of oppression and the problem with dominant methods of addressing it:

Today we know that the roots of poverty are not natural, and almsgiving, which fails to attack the roots, is a mere palliative. Poverty is conditioned by particular socio-economic and political systems and structures, and charity cannot blink this fact. Today Christian charity will be seen in attempts to change these systems and structures. Love today is political or it is nothing; charity must have a social and political dimension. (Câmara 1969, 495)

In other spheres, Brazilian liberationists made more explicit efforts to dialogue with the language of human rights. The year 1973 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the tenth anniversary of the Papal encyclical Pacem in Terris. To mark the occasion, a group of religious elders from the northeast of Brazil produced a twenty-five-page manifesto titled ‘I have heard the cry of my people’. The manifesto was released on 6 May that year and provided a detailed overview of underdevelopment in the northeast of the country. In the tradition of Latin American liberation theology, the text focuses on the most marginalised of society, the poor, the working class, peasants, children and, more specifically, on how these groups suffer the additional oppression of living in the most neglected parts of the country.

To replicate the authority and professionalism of the large international institutions they were attempting to appeal to, the priests and religious elders drew from official statistics and data to support their claims about the human rights situation in Brazil. Discussing the 23 per cent figure of unemployment in the northeast of the country, they cite the fundamental right to work and participate in the economic life of their country. Referring to the 60 per cent level of illiteracy for all persons over the age of five in the region, the document claims a violation of the right to education and professional training. The list of examples goes on, but ultimately the message is that social, economic and political marginalisation and oppression are all violations of fundamental rights.⁶

With this final example, I come full circle to where the chapter began. At the start of the Brazilian regime in 1964, a French priest named Father Charles Antoine moved to Brazil to undertake missionary work as part of a development project with the Second Vatican Council (1962–5). There, he became an active member of the France-Latin America Episcopal Committee (CEFAL) and was involved in the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB). When he returned to France in 1971, he created the Diffusion of Information on Latin America (DIAL), the very same news bulletin that printed ‘I have heard the cry of my people’.⁷ Charles Antoine was a friend of Latin American liberation theology, and the creation of DIAL provided a point of reference for several journalists, human rights organisations and solidarity campaigns for Brazil and wider Latin America. DIAL also provided a platform for the northeastern clergymen and their manifesto as it was sent into exile to add to political resistance taking place in Western Europe, in this case, to the build-up to the Non a Brésil Export campaign.

Conclusion

In the major publications and conferences attended by well-known liberation theologians in Latin America, a clear trajectory has emerged. Early works of the late 1960s and early 1970s did not bother to engage with the Western notion of human rights, and when they did, by the later 1970s, it was to critique and set themselves apart from the liberal, individualist tendencies that upheld an oppressive global economic order. It was only later on that liberation theology in Latin America would demonstrate a mainstream attempt to take advantage of the language of human rights to further their own philosophical and ethical missions. By engaging the concept of the ‘rights of the poor’, liberation theologians could ‘bring the principle of “partiality” to bear on the claims to “universality” that they previously found so problematic in human rights’ (Engler 2000, 353). Writing twenty years later, McGeorch revisits liberationism’s relationship to human rights through the so-called ‘Pink Tide’ governments of the 1990s and 2000s. He argues that ‘Liberation Christianity has chosen to “defend democracy” and “uphold human rights” within the broader narratives of democracy and human rights, without specifying what kind of democracy and human rights it is seeking to defend and uphold, particularly in light of its “option for the poor”’ (McGeorch 2020, 11).

The journey across these varying interpretations of rights can be drawn back to the mid-1960s, when, spurred by the Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964, transnational spaces of solidarity, activism and knowledge exchange pushed Latin American liberation theology and Western human rights into direct conversation with one another. Political repression and violence exerted by the Brazilian regime upon its citizens sparked outrage across the Global North, where individual political and civil freedoms were upheld as the most fundamental and sacred of human rights. Opening a window into Brazil, activists shed light on several other human injustices and structural forms of violence, in particular social and economic inequality and oppression. Liberationist champions of social justice, both Brazilian and European, directly and indirectly, appropriated the language of human rights to further awareness and support for opposition not only to the regime, but to the global economic structure that perpetuated oppression.

Therefore, what we see is that between Engler’s ‘neglectful’ phase of the late 1960s (in which prominent theologians ignored the notion of human rights), and the ‘critical’ turn of the late 1970s (when they began to scrutinise them), Latin America’s Theology of Liberation had already established a dialogue with the concept of human rights through alternative channels of advocacy and solidarity. This dialogue is not so easily interpreted in terms of distinct periods; rather, the presence and absence of explicit concepts of Western human rights shows that while there were some moments of neglect, simultaneously and equally present were moments of critique and appropriation.

By dominant European standards of the time, the violation of individual political and civil rights was the ultimate moral wrong a government could commit. By this logic, the arrest and repression of European missionaries and Brazilian liberationists more clearly fit into the mainstream understanding of rights in Western Europe than did the social justice projects they were pursuing. In places, this tendency was indeed reflected within European media and solidarity activism that emphasised the individual rights violations taking place against members of the Church. Gradually, with the input of activists, liberationist concepts of oppression, preferential rights and self-determination came to embed themselves in the global human rights discourse surrounding Brazil. What challenged the sole focus on political rights and the Brazilian regime’s violation thereof was the distinct analytical approach and conceptual framework established and disseminated by Latin American liberationism. Through structural analysis, Latin American liberationists drew out the relationship between marginalisation, oppression, social and economic inequality and political repression on the one hand, and the global economic order on the other. Liberationists and their networks of solidarity and political exiles also forged an important dialogue with Western human rights by framing experiences and manifestations of oppression in terms of specific rights violations.

The 1970s are often cited as a breakthrough moment for human rights, the moment that the global community began using human rights as a way of pressuring foreign states to end state violence (Eckel and Moyn 2015). In the decades that followed, human rights came to incorporate values relating to solidarity, equality and new notions concerning minority rights (such as the Indigenous), environmental rights and rights of development. From above, powerful liberal-democratic states and organisations addressed these issues through global mechanisms of human rights governance, while, from below, transnational activists and organisations contributed new interpretations and practices. From a global historical perspective, the story of liberation theology – incorporating as it does a theology, an analytical framework, an ethical position and praxis – and its encounters with human rights were shaped by transnational social networks and organisational strategies in Western Europe. In my telling of this story, I expand on existing historiographical accounts of the period by moving beyond the text. As alternative windows into the past, I consider diverse sociological contexts, forms of knowledge exchange, acts of solidarity and media representations to illustrate the diversity and complexity of interactions between Latin American liberation theology and human rights.

Notes

1. 1. Letter to all international members of JOC from Jack Salinas, January 1969 source: JOCI 03.3.1–8

2. 2. To cite a few examples: ‘Brésil’, Le Monde, 20 February 1974; ‘Le P. Jentel Toujours en Prison’, La Croix, 2 March 1974; ‘Le Prêtre Français François Jentel’, Le Monde, 17 April 1974; ‘L’affaire Jentel Toujours en Suspense’, La Croix, 25 May 1974.

3. 3. ‘Un appel en faveur du Père Jentel’, Le Monde, 18 July 1973.

4. 4. CGAL Motion on the Brésil-Export protest. Letter attachment from CGAL sent on 20 September 1973 source: CIEX BR DFAN BSB Z4 REX IBR 25 16.

5. 5. Sculpture by Guido Rocha, World Council of Churches Archive, Geneva, WCC 429.07.03 40. See an image of the sculpture here: https://developingeconomics.org/2021/12/13/constructing-a-global-history-of-human-rights-and-development/. Accessed 3 August 2024.

6. 6. J’ai Entendu Les Cris de Mon Peuple. Document d’Evêques et de Supérieurs Religieux du Nord-Est, 6 May 1973. DIAL 99. https://www.alterinfos.org/archives/DIAL-99.pdf. Accessed 21 February 2022.

7. 7. https://www.alterinfos.org/spip.php?article1377. Accessed 21 February 2022.

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