Category Archives: Liberation Theology

The movement that defeated Trump’s agenda in Brazil has deep roots

by Jim Hodgson

Lula’s victory Sunday has global significance. Lula – Luiz Inácio da Silva – faced threats from U.S. President Donald Trump. His campaign withstood interference by the U.S. government and by giant tech companies, notably Meta.

In his victory speech, Lula proclaimed: “This country does not accept being anyone’s back yard.” The United States has always treated Latin America and the Caribbean as a back yard. Even when then-President Joe Biden said in 2022 that it wasn’t the back yard, but the front yard, he still implied U.S. possession.

Trump’s revival of the early-nineteenth century Monroe Doctrine, continuing airstrikes against fishing boats while arguing without evidence they were used for drug-trafficking, the fuel blockade against Cuba, the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, and overt interference in elections in Honduras, Colombia and Argentina (among others) all show renewed U.S. determination to force the region’s submission – together, evidently, with that of Canada.

This election was the fourth that he has won (2002, 2006, 2022 and 2026), but there were three others before 2002 which he lost.

Images from the 1989 campaign: “Without fear of being happy”

The deep roots of Lula’s movement

In December 1989, a night or two before the run-off vote in that year’s election (Lula’s first campaign), I was one of about 300,000 people who gathered in the wide avenue leading to the old cathedral in Rio de Janeiro for Lula’s final rally of that campaign. The famous “Olé” soccer chant, altered here to end “LU-LA, LU-LA,” reverberated in the steel and concrete canyon.

After long decades of military dictatorship, Brazilians were making history: this was their first direct presidential election since 1960. In 1980 with the military still in power, Lula and others formed the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) – the workers’ party – from his base in the industrial suburbs of São Paulo. It built links with social movements across Brazil: farmers, landless farm-workers, women, Indigenous people, ecological defenders and others.

What I learned in my 1989 visit was that many of those movements had roots in the development of Christian base communities in the Catholic Church and in the processes of popular education and cultural action developed decades earlier in Brazil by people like Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. Those methods had spread rapidly across Latin America, and shaped the work I did in the Dominican Republic from late 1986 through 1988. I was a “communications technician,” working in an organization dedicated to popular education and cultural action. My role was to train people in basic skills: how to write a news release, how to publish a newsletter. (This was long before the internet!) My colleagues did the prior work: adult literacy, building awareness. The people worked on issues of land, water, and threats of expulsion from their homes. I helped them make more noise about their concerns.

I learned far more from my Dominican colleagues about long-term struggles than they did from me about communication!

I returned to Toronto from the Dominican Republic at the end of 1988 and began working with the Canadian Council of Churches (CCC) in early 1989. That work brought me to Rio de Janeiro for a global ecumenical “Cultural Action Workshop.”

The World Council of Churches and the Brazilian Ecumenical Youth Union (UBRAJE) organized the event for young adult leaders from around the world to share experiences of action for social change, and to learn from each other. The theme was “The Senses of Creation,” and participants (about 20 of us from various parts of the world) were encouraged to use our senses to increase our awareness of our surroundings as a sort of first step in a longer process of personal and social change.

We spent a day, for example, visiting parts of Rio de Janeiro: a traditional neighbourhood market, a middle-class beach area (Ipanema), and a Pentecostal church. We broke into small groups, each group corresponding to one of the senses. Later, we returned to our conference centre and talked about our experiences. This wide-ranging discussion succeeded in heightening our awareness of various components of Brazilian society.

Drama exercises took us into our own minds and bodies, and then back out into the world, moving us to think about our place in the world. It seemed quite simple to open a huge trunk, remove costumes from the trunk and don the garb of some other personality. Here we entered the world of Boal’s “popular theatre,” used in Brazil to help people understand issues which surround them and begin to see what can be done to make change happen.

The Brazilians with whom we worked showed us how these activities helped participants to discover their roots, notice the ground on which they stood, and match their ideals to proposals for political and social action, lessons that we would later apply in our own contexts.

One of the organizers was Mauricio Lissovsky, who worked then with Brazil’s Institute for the Study of Religion (ISER) and later as a communications professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Despite the disappointment of Lula’s loss, Brazilians, he said, would continue to strive for transformation of Brazil “with full awareness of the ground beneath our feet.” Action for change could not be rooted in ideologies that were abstracted from people’s daily realities, but rooted instead in the ways that people live, work and express themselves.

In the years that followed, I thought often of Mauricio’s words as Brazil’s Landless Peoples Movement (MST) emerged alongside other social movements across the country. These movements played lead roles in the new international social movement spaces like the World Social Forum and the Hemispheric Social Alliance. Meanwhile, Lula’s political movement gathered strength and the PT won power in various cities and states.

Finally, in 2002, Lula won the presidency. He and his successor, Dilma Rousseff, led the country until 2016, when Rousseff was removed from office through a series of legal and parliamentary manoeuvres that eventually led to the presidency of the right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro. Lula won the 2022 vote and returned to power – and won again in 2026 as the whole region seemed to be shifting to the right.

Some people from the social movements took positions within various PT-led local, state and national governments, and played positive roles within the structures of power. But the movements themselves retained their autonomy from the party and governments. When necessary, they criticized various government policies, such as the glacial pace of land reform, the charity model implicit in the government’s anti-hunger program, persisting corruption, the government’s embrace of food fuels like ethanol despite their impact on food prices and supply, and more recently the government’s move to allow oil and gas exploitation in the Atlantic Ocean near the mouth of the Amazon River.

Leaving aside for the moment debates over successive PT administrations, what had been underway among social movements in Brazil and many other countries in Latin America since long before the PT’s electoral success was a process of stepping back from reliance on political parties as vehicles (much less vanguards) for social change.

Instead, the social movements themselves become protagonists themselves in the political arena – as had Lula in his labour-organizing days. Widespread use of the techniques of popular education accomplished what they were intended to do: create new social subjects – people who were passive no longer and who understood themselves as agents of change.

Javier Giraldo and “community ways of thinking”

“The killers did not seek to kill individuals, but rather to destroy community ways of thinking.”

Javier Giraldo, a Jesuit priest, was speaking of the paramilitary death squads and their allies in the official armed forces who did most of the killing during Colombia’s decades-long civil war. “This was their project since the sixties.” The paramilitaries were created by forces of greed – the large land-holders and industrialists – who demanded the land and fealty of impoverished people who had learned over centuries to support each other in community.

We had gathered on a Sunday evening in November 2019 to witness the presentation of a report to the chair of Colombia’s Truth Commission, Francisco de Roux, also a Jesuit. We met in an auditorium of the seventeenth-century Colegio San Bartolomé. It sits on a corner of Bogotá’s Plaza Bolívar, roughly between the national congress building and the cathedral. This was three years after ratification of the peace agreement between the government and the largest guerrilla army. 

The event mourned the victims of war but also celebrated decades of work for peace with justice and the investigations then underway into past crimes. The report, “Blood of Martyrs, Seeds of Liberation,” was prepared by the Mesa Ecuménica por la Paz (MEP), an ecumenical peace movement supported by The United Church of Canada and the KAIROS Canada ecumenical coalition.

Padre Javier died Tuesday (Aug. 25): 82 years of age, 61 of them among the Jesuits, 50 years a priest. After surviving countless death threats, he died quietly in hospital.

“Arm yourselves, leave, or be killed”

Javier Giraldo was partly responsible for my first visit to Colombia in 1993. He led a group of Roman Catholic religious communities called the Inter-Congregational Commission for Justice and Peace (known as Justicia y Paz). Later, after tension with conservative bishops, the group became the Inter-Church Commission for Justice and Peace. 

Months before our 1993 visit, Justicia y Paz had presented a report on the growth of paramilitary activity in the mountains of Santander department. It compiled testimonies that showed how paramilitary groups – backed by the Colombian armed forces – were imposing control in the region. In the early 1990s, I was working with the Canadian Council of Churches as its ecumenical education and communication secretary. My colleagues at the Inter-Church Committee for Human Rights in Latin America (ICCHRLA) invited me to join a small delegation that would show solidarity with affected communities and amplify the findings of the Justicia y Paz report.

From people who had been displaced from their land, and from people who lived in fear of displacement, we learned of the paramilitary strategy. People were given three options: join the paramilitaries, leave or be killed. In 1993, the number of displaced in Colombia was around 200,000. 

Over time, the paramilitary strategy we witnessed in Santander was imposed on most of the country. My work with the United Church brought me back in 2001 and the number of displaced was two million. (During that visit, I met Fr. Javier again; because of threats, he was sheltered within a maze of connected churches and schools in central Bogotá.) By the time of my last visit in 2019, more than eight million people had been displaced.

In 1986, large land-owners had thirty-six per cent of the land; by 2011, they controlled 53.6 per cent of the land.

The violence

Media depictions of Colombians, with the drug lord Pablo Escobar as an archetype, have not served its people well. Yes, the violence is real. I think each of the Colombians I know has been touched within their immediate families by war and crime. A child watches a man be murdered in their father’s apartment. A teenager is witness to the killing of another teen and the whole family flees to Venezuela. A middle-class family surrenders its modest savings to extortion after a parent is kidnapped by one of the guerrilla armies. A local bank manager becomes aware that the security firm that delivers cash to the ATMs is pilfering money, and that senior management allows them to do so; he and his family leave for Canada. While I talk with a human rights defender in Bogotá, I am distracted by the bullet hole in her office window. 

But Colombia also produces countless stories of people who work for justice, peace and reconciliation within and among communities. Against all odds, they restore “community ways of thinking.” At all stages of my decades of travel in Colombia, there was time for friendship: a coffee, una cerveza, a conversation, dancing, or a hike in the hills above Bogotá. And now, after more than sixty years of war and despite a new crop of hard-right politicians, they’re still working toward “total peace.” 

Fr. Javier is mourned by many and will be missed, but there are thousands more inspired by his vision who will carry on the labour for peace with justice.

In reading many tributes yesterday and this morning, I am struck by his impact far beyond the Catholic religious communities. Here is what Bishop Luis Andres Caicedo of the Colombian Methodist Church wrote in a Facebook post:

“To follow the path of Father Javier Giraldo is to understand that peace is not built from silence in the face of injustice, but from truth, dignity and commitment with those who have suffered most. 

“May his path continue to engage us and our commitment to peace be also a commitment to justice and life.”

The Vatican’s mass for the “beloved people of Cuba”

The following homily was delivered by Cardinal Michael Czerny, the Canadian Jesuit who is prefect for the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, at a Mass for Peace and Social Development in Cuba. The mass was celebrated at the Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola in Rome on May 15. 

We have heard the Word of God that the liturgy offers us on this Friday of the sixth week of Easter. A Word imbued with perseverance and hope. In the passage from the Acts of the Apostles, we see Paul weary, tried and faced with misunderstanding and rejection. Yet the Lord says to him: “Do not be afraid; keep on speaking and do not be silent.” It is a word that sustains the believer’s heart in the difficult times of history. A word that preserves trust when everything seems fragile and precarious.

In the Gospel according to John, we have heard another powerful image: that of the woman suffering the pangs of childbirth who then, at the birth of the child, experiences a new joy, capable of transfiguring the pain she has endured. Jesus speaks thus to his disciples to prepare them for the time of trial, teaching them that the suffering of history is not alien to God’s work and that every authentic human journey toward peace and justice requires patience, discernment and spiritual courage.

Dear brothers and sisters, dear institutional representatives, ambassadors and authorities present here, this evening we bring before the Lord’s altar the sufferings, hopes and expectations of the Cuban people. We do so with respect, with sincerity, with deep affection for a land that cherishes a history rich in dignity, culture, sacrifice, faith and resilience.

The church’s social teaching clearly reminds us that true peace is founded on moral and spiritual pillars even before political or economic ones. In “Pacem in Terris,” St. John XXIII identified truth, justice, freedom and love as the indispensable conditions for a form of human coexistence worthy of the human person. These words retain an extraordinary power even in our own time.

Justice demands concrete attention to those who suffer most. 

Freedom calls for real opportunities for participation, listening and shared responsibility.

Truth becomes a form of sincere dialogue, capable of overcoming propaganda, hardening attitudes and mutual mistrust. 

Love opens the way to solidarity, to the sharing of material, cultural and spiritual goods amongst peoples.

From this perspective, any logic of constant confrontation risks exacerbating the burden already weighing on ordinary people, especially the poorest, the elderly, the sick and children. Pope Leo XIV, in his recent appeals to the international community, has reminded us that no stable order can arise from the force of arms or from pressure that humiliates peoples; human development, on the other hand, grows through dialogue, international law, cooperation between nations and the safeguarding of the dignity of every human being. In the same spirit, humanitarian aid should arrive in sufficient quantities and without hindrance and must never be exploited for political or geopolitical ends. 

During his 2015 apostolic journey to Cuba, Pope Francis also emphasized, in his historic homily at the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, the urgent need to place the concrete person at the center of social and political life, especially the vulnerable, the wounded and the poor. He said that service “is never ideological,” because it arises from genuine attention to the face of the other; “we do not need ideas, but people.” Those words remain highly relevant today.

The appeal of St. John Paul II still resonates with prophetic intensity: “May the world open up to Cuba, and may Cuba open up to the world.” It was not a political slogan. It was a spiritual and human invitation to break down walls of misunderstanding, to create spaces for mutual trust, and to allow peoples to meet without fear.

We are here this evening above all to pray. In a short while, the Eucharist will make present the Paschal sacrifice of Christ, the crucified and risen Lord who bears within himself the suffering of peoples and the wounds of history. Before him we entrust Cuban families, young people in search of hope, those in positions of authority, those who suffer, and those who await more peaceful days.

The Gospel offers us a promise: “Your sorrow will turn into joy.” This is no naive promise. It is the Christian certainty that God continues to work within human history even when darkness and confusion prevail. The Holy Spirit continues to raise up men and women capable of building fraternity, reconciliation and paths of peace.

Let us pray, then, that the beloved land of Cuba may know days of greater serenity, of authentic human and social development, of harmony and hope. Let us pray that every political, economic and international decision may be guided by wisdom, prudence and a sincere search for the good of all people. Let us pray that the Lord may turn the hearts of men and women towards universal brotherhood.

And we ask the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, so dearly loved by the Cuban people, to accompany this nation’s journey with her maternal protection and to watch over all her children in peace.

At the conclusion of the mass, the Cuban ambassador to the Holy See, Leyde Ernesto Rodríguez, expressed gratitude on behalf of the Cuban people and government for the mass, emphasizing that his country is a nation of solidarity, peace, sovereignty, and independence, and “does not pose a threat to the national security of any other nation.”

“We have the right to live in peace, without threats of military aggression, with respect for human dignity, and without obstacles of any kind to our comprehensive economic development,” the diplomat stressed.