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How Latin American Liberation Theology Sees the United States and the USSR
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14641 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1988 |
6,589 Words |
| Author
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John K. Roth
John K. Roth is Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at
Claremont McKenna College, where he has taught since 1966. A
specialist in both American and Holocaust Studies, he has been
a visiting professor at the Universities of Innsbruck
(Austria), Doshisha (Japan), and Haifa (Israel). The most
recent of his fifteen books are Approaches to Auschwitz: The
Holocaust and Its legacy (with Richard L. Rubenstein), The
Questions of Philosophy (with Frederick Sontag), and American
Ground: vistas, Visions and Revisions (with Robert H.
Fossum). |
Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism and a call for the peoples' unity against the great enemy of mankind: the United States of America.
--Ernesto "Che" Guevara
Provoked by hunger, poverty, exploitation, and premature death, Latin American liberation theology, in the words of Brazilian priests Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, is a "chant of the Third World transformed into a reflection of messianic hope for a society of freedom, a society that will become a communion of brothers and sisters." This religious-political movement--rooted in the Bible, the social theory of Karl Marx, and above all in the plight of the impoverished people--intends to change the world radically. Its aims put Latin American liberation theology on a collision course with the United States. American policy-making must reckon with that fact.
To get the analysis under way, consider that Latin American liberation theology did not exist when Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) studied early nineteenth-century democracy in the United States. Even then, however, that French observer's keen insights targeted factors throughout the Americas that would eventually conspire to produce this theological-political development, which may yet rival Islamic fundamentalism as the most politically volatile religious upsurge of the twentieth century's second half.
Egalitarianism, individualism, an influential role for religion, a propensity to let majority rule form public opinion--these were among the qualities Tocqueville found most pronounced among U.S. citizens. He regarded something else, however, as "the characteristic trait which now distinguishes the Americans most particularly from all others nations." According to Tocqueville, the origins of life in the United States, coupled with the nation's politics, social environment, and geography, resulted in the Americas' becoming "an almost exclusively industrial and trading community." Although Tocqueville took "their principal interest" to be "exploitation" of the "huge new country," he also saw American appetites reaching well beyond those borders. In the United States, international trade "would become a national interest of the first importance."
This commercial republic, believed Tocqueville, was destined to be the dominant economic power in the New World. The implications for Latin America seemed clear to him. Long under Spanish and Portuguese hegemony, those regions were industrially backward. That fact,
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