Medellín Is “Fantastic”: Drafts of the 1969 Rockefeller Report on the Catholic Church

Since the 1970s, both foreign and U.S. opponents of U.S.-Central America policy have cited the 1969 Rockefeller Report on the Americas: The Official Report of a United States Presidential Mission for the Western Hemisphere as the beginning of U.S. government efforts to eradicate liberation theology. During the 1980s, progressive Catholic press accounts in the United States and abroad emphasized the similarities between the Report and President Ronald Reagan’s approach to Central America. But critics’ charges are misplaced. The Report supported the Church’s leftward turn, and Nelson Rockefeller was the reason. Early report drafts and Rockefeller’s comments reveal that he enthusiastically welcomed the Medellín documents. It was family planning that preoccupied Rockefeller, not communist subversion.