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3. Origins of the Anti–Contra War Campaign
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[ 53 ] CHAPTER 3 Origins of the Anti–Contra War Campaign The anti–Contra War campaign emerged out of progressive U.S. sectorswithconnectionstoLatinAmericaalongwiththepost– Vietnam War peace movement. The Nicaragua solidarity campaign coalesced in early 1979, the Central America movement in 1980, and the anti–Contra War campaign in early 1982, drawing together an eclectic mix of groups. Progressive Religious Networks Liberation theology had the effect of drawing Christian liberals closer to the political left and pushing them further from the religious right—in both the United States and Latin America. One result in the United States was a more sympathetic view of Latin American revolutionaries. According to the historian Edward T. Brett, “until 1985 most of the U.S. Catholic popular press sympathized with the Sandinistas, and several periodicals continued for the most part to do so throughout the decade.”1 The foremost proponent of liberation theology in the United States was the (Catholic) Maryknoll publishing house, Orbis Books, founded in 1970 with the assistance of Fr. Miguel d’Escoto, later to become the minister of foreign affairs in the Sandinista government. Liberation theology and its corresponding manifestations in the popular church and Christian base communities had a great effect on U.S. missionaries [ 54 ] CHAPTER 3 servinginLatinAmericainthe1960sand1970s.AccordingtoMargaretSwedish, director of the Religious Task Force on Central America, these religious workers not only began “to discover the real structural causes of the misery in which most of the people they served were living—the result of nearly five hundred years of colonial oppression—but they encountered sectors within the Latin church that were taking on a new model of pastoral work from within that reality , a model perhaps best expressed in the Basic Christian Communities movement.”2 Protestants in Latin America also took up liberation theology. In the early 1960s the Latin American Protestant Commission for Christian Education (Comisión Evangélica Latinoamericana de Educación Cristiana) was formed to carry out an “evangelical option on behalf of the poor” and assist “their liberation in every Latin American situation.”3 The World Council of Churches provided institutional support for this mission. In the United States, Rev. Philip Wheaton, an Episcopal minister who served in the Dominican Republic from 1952to1964,createdtheEcumenicalProgramforInteramericanCommunication and Action (EPICA) in 1968. Its dual purpose was to promote solidarity between U.S. and Latin American progressive sectors and to raise awareness in the United States regarding the historic roots of poverty, repression, and war in Latin America. The main U.S. Protestant connection in Nicaragua was the Evangelical Committee for Aid and Development (CEPAD), which formed in the wake of the devastating earthquake of 1972. Although Protestants constituted a smaller proportion of the Nicaraguan population than Catholics, membership was on the rise, growing from 3 percent in 1979 to 15 percent in 1985.4 Among the various Catholic orders, the Jesuits played a key role in developing transnational connections between progressive sectors in the United States and Nicaragua during the 1980s. The Jesuits administered a major university , two high schools, several urban and rural parishes, and the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica. In June 1981 Jesuit priests at the latter initiated a high-quality news journal called Envío, published in Spanish, English, German, and French for international audiences. “We felt that Nicaragua was not understood because of the ideological campaign of the United States against Nicaragua,” said Fr. Álvaro Argüello, a founder of the journal. “We wanted to clarify, explain, from the people who lived the experience , what was happening in the country and to ask for solidarity. That was the motivation.”5 The Jesuits generally supported the FSLN reform program but maintained a [44.222.116.199] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:24 GMT) Origins of the Anti–Contra War Campaign [ 55 ] “criticaldistance”fromtheparty,accordingtoFr.JosephMulligan,soastomake independent assessments of policies. Mulligan, a North American Jesuit who moved to Nicaragua in 1986, lived in a house with Frs. Ernesto and Fernando Cardenal, respectively the ministers of culture and education in the FSLN government , and worked as a translator and writer for the English language edition of Envío. He also assisted in the caring of those wounded or maimed in contra attacks, an undertaking, he said, that “helped me to better understand the reality .” He saw his role as both ministering to the needs of Nicaraguans and raising consciousness in the United States—a “reverse mission.”6 What impressed U.S. people of faith most about Sandinista Nicaragua was that so...