Sacred Wars? The Politics of Religious Violence in Cold War Mexico and Colombia

The aim of this talk is to reflect on the impact of political ideologies and political conflict in the organization, escalation, and legitimation of religious violence in Cold War Mexico and Colombia. Characterized by somehow contrasting relationships between the state and the Catholic Church, both countries experienced an intensification of religious conflict during this period in a context characterized by close and collaborative relations between the Catholic Church and conservative and anti-communist political elites. Of particular importance during these years was the surge in Catholic attacks against Protestant minorities. Such attacks were driven by the notion that Protestantism was not only a false religion, but also an ideology responsible for spreading liberal, communist, foreign, and polluting ideas that threatened these nations via their use of propaganda and the promotion of social programs that targeted vulnerable and so-called ignorant individuals, including children, women, and youth, particularly from indigenous or working-class backgrounds.
 
Drawing on the close examination of correspondence, propaganda, and newspaper reports, the essay will offer a comparative interpretation of religious violence in these two countries that highlights the impact of transnational, national, and local dynamics that reflected and were amplified by Cold War ideologies and by the Vatican’s decision to support an anti-protestant campaign in Latin America.  Overall, the talk seeks to shed light on the contentious relationship between violence, politics, and the sacred from a historical and sociological perspective. 

Gema Kloppe-Santamaría is a Nicaraguan-born sociologist and historian whose work deals with questions of violence, gender, religion and the state in modern and contemporary Latin America. She is currently a permanent Lecturer of Sociology at the University College Cork (UCC) and an Associate Research Professor of Latin American History at the George Washington University (GW). Her publications include: In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (University of California Press, 2020); and the edited colletions Violence and Crime in Latin America: Representations and Politics (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017) and Human Security and Chronic Violence in Mexico: New Perspectives and Proposals from Below (Editorial Porrúa, 2019). She has held visiting fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS) at University of Freiburg, and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is currently a British Academy Visiting Fellow at UCL History.  

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