From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals: Peasant Catechists in the Salvadoran Revolution

By Leigh Binford

From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals explains how a group of Catholic lay catechists educated in liberation theology came to take up arms and participate on the side of the rebel FMLN during El Salvador’s revolutionary war (1980-92). In the process they became transformed from popular intellectuals to insurgent intellectuals who put their organizational and cognitive skills at the service of a collective effort to create a more egalitarian and democratic society. The book highlights the key roles that peasant catechists in northern Morazán played in disseminating liberation theology before the war and supporting the FMLN during it—as quartermasters, political activists, and musicians, among other roles. Throughout, From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals highlights the dialectical nature of relations between Catholic priests and urban revolutionaries, among others, in which the latter learned from the former and vice-versa. Peasant catechists proved capable at making independent decisions based on assessment of their needs and did not simply follow the dictates of those with superior authority, and played an important role for the duration of the twelve-year military conflict. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Dec 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978833708

Leigh Binford

Leigh Binford is Professor Emeritus of the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. He writes on rural social economies, international migration and struggle in Mexico and El Salvador. His recent publications include (with Scott Cook) Obliging Need: Rural Petty Industry in Mexican Capitalism (2013, University of Texas Press).

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Cover: From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals, Peasant Catechists in the Salvadoran Revolution by Leigh Binford

From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals

From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals

Peasant Catechists in the Salvadoran Revolution

LEIGH BINFORD

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Binford, Leigh, 1948– author.

Title: From popular to insurgent intellectuals : peasant catechists in the Salvadoran revolution / Leigh Binford.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022009354 | ISBN 9781978833685 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978833692 (hardback) | ISBN 9781978833708 (epub) | ISBN 9781978833715 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Catholic Church—El Salvador—History—20th century. | Catholics—Political activity—El Salvador—History—20th century. | Liberation theology—El Salvador.

Classification: LCC BX1446.3 .B56 2022 | DDC 277.284—dc23/eng/20220801

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009354

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2023 by Leigh Binford

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Fabio Argueta Amaya (1943–2010) and Jacinto Márquez

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Preface

Introduction

1 From El Mozote to El Castaño, 1942–1974

2 Economy, Society, and Culture in Northern Morazán

3 Political Incorporation, 1974–1977

4 The Ligas Populares 28 de Febrero, 1977–1980

5 A Political Activist in the War, 1980–1988

6 Departure and Return, 1988–2010

Conclusion

Appendix 1: On Fabio Argueta’s Political Formation

Appendix 2: Interviews Cited

Notes

References

Index

Abbreviations

Preface

This project stretched over a quarter century and three university posts in two countries. Most of the fieldwork took place in the early to mid-1990s, when I worked in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. I began to write it up in 1997 in Puebla, Mexico, while teaching in the Social Science and Humanities Research Institute of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. The book came together in Brooklyn, New York, while I was employed at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Final editing took place following my retirement from CUNY and my move to Willimantic, Connecticut, a mere six miles from UConn. This is the second of three books on northern Morazán. The first book (The El Mozote Massacre) focused on a place and event; From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals addresses a group of people and their roles before and during the revolutionary war; the final volume, yet to be written, will offer an integral ethnography of northern Morazán over the fifty-year period between 1960 and 2010 and will draw on the entire corpus of material I obtained during ten field trips there. Different phases of my fieldwork received financial support from the Fulbright-Hays Foundation (1994–1995) through grant no. P019A40011 and from the National Science Foundation (2010–2012) through grant no. BCS 0962643.

I take full responsibility for the shortcomings of the result, but any merits must be widely shared. In northern Morazán, I chalked up debts with far too many people to thank individually, but I do want to recognize the contributions of Abraham Argueta, Fabio Argueta Amaya (Beniton, 1943–2010), Andres Barrera (Felipe), Roberto Carrillo, Benito (Sebastian) and Cristobal (Manelio) Chicas, Ismael Romero (Bracamonte), Santos Lino Ramírez (Chele Cesar), Francisco López, Jacinto Márquez (Oscar), Fr. Rogelio Ponseele, and Fr. Miguel Ventura. Carlos Henríquez Consalvi (Santiago), the Voz de la Radio Venceremos during the war and founder of the Museum of the Word and Image after it, has been a constant source of encouragement. Santiago also responded promptly for my requests to publish various photographs in possession of the museum, two of which he took.

Many people assisted during one or another of my trips to Morazán. They include Ellen Moodie (summers of 2010–2011), Rafael Alarcón Medina (summers of 2010–2012), Shelli McMillan (summer of 1993), and Phyllis Robinson and Roxanna Duntley Matos (1992–1993). Northern Morazanians who worked on the project in some capacity included Samuel Vidal Guzmán (1992–1993), Jacinto Márquez (1992–1993, 1994–1995, and summers of 2010–2012), and Yaneth Hernández (summers of 2010–2012). I owe a special debt to Rafa Alarcón, who displayed an acute and critical intelligence regarding fieldwork. Rafa developed his own dissertation project, and I will surely draw heavily on it in the sequel to this book, which will devote considerable attention to the first two decades of the postwar period.

At various points in time, the following persons transcribed taped interviews: Elise Springer and Claudia Santalices in the United States; Marina Muñiz in Puebla, Mexico; and a team of young transcribers led by Sofía Máximo in Mexico City. Julie Ann Cottle provided an initial English translation of the interviews with Fabio Argueta. Lesley Gill helped prepare many of the photographs for publication and cartographer Mike Siegal of the Rutgers University Department of Geography put his considerable talents to work in producing the maps. Kimberly Guinta has been a kind and attentive editor at Rutgers University Press, and John Donohue at Westchester Publishing Services expertly shepherded the manuscript through production. The corrections and suggestions of copy editor Diane Ersepke and of John Donohue made this book much more reader friendly.

A number of people read portions or the entirety of some version of this manuscript and provided both critical feedback and encouragement. These include Jennifer Casolo, Erik Ching, Nancy Churchill, Kate Crehan, Lesley Gill, Ricardo Macip Ríos, Peter Mayo, Gavin Smith, Lena Voigtländer, and two anonymous reviewers. The manuscript sent to Rutgers was influenced by my reading of Augustine Sedgewick’s wonderful Coffeeland. Finally, I cannot thank enough Mary Gallucci, Jerry Phillips, and Nancy Churchill, my partner of more than forty years, for their love and friendship, which was as important to me in bringing to fruition this project as it was more than a quarter century earlier during the research and writing of The El Mozote Massacre.

I dedicate this book to the memory of Fabio Argueta Amaya (1943–2010) and to Jacinto Márquez, whose interest in and contributions to historical memory in northern Morazán have and continue to be a source of inspiration.

From Popular to Insurgent Intellectuals

Introduction

This book examines the role of Catholic Church lay catechists before and during the Salvadoran revolutionary war, which lasted from 1980 to 1992.¹ In El Salvador, catechists often worked alongside Delegates of the Word, the former leading community religious services in the absence of the priest and the latter devoting themselves to organizing Bible study. In northern Morazán—a rugged area of Morazán department north of the Torola River—where this project unfolded, catechists carried out both tasks, as noted by Gould (2020, 34–35n26). Here I argue that many northern Morazanian catechists fulfilled the role of, first, popular and, later, insurgent intellectuals—terms discussed below in more detail. In the early to mid-1970s, most catechists participated in the formation of an extensive network of Comunidades Eclesiales de Base (Christian Base Communities, CEBs) through which they disseminated the messages of hope, dignity, and social and economic betterment inscribed in liberation theology. Beginning in 1974 and thus well before the Fuerzas Armadas de El Salvador (Salvadoran Armed Forces, FAES) invaded northern Morazán for the first time in October 1980, many catechists joined the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People’s Revolutionary Army, ERP), one of five political-military organizations that composed the leftist Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, FMLN), which fought Salvadoran government forces—often armed, advised, and trained by the U.S. government—to a standstill over the course of what became a twelve-year (1980–1992) military conflict.

Between 1974 and 1980, the catechists (and others) took charge of recruitment, intelligence, and self-defense operations. When open warfare began, the ERP leadership relocated from the capital city of San Salvador to northern Morazán, took control of the nascent rebel camps, and assigned ERP-affiliated catechists to different roles. I explain the contribution of the catechists’ communicational, organizational, and local knowledges to the ERP’s success in forming its guerrilla army, maintaining discipline, and sustaining morale. As well, many catechists in their roles as political activists functioned as important interfaces between ERP comandantes (commanders) and the portion of the civilian population that resisted government pressure to abandon homes and fields, which would have deprived insurgent fighters of the material, logistical, and intelligence support they needed to maintain northern Morazán as a strategic rearguard.

Culture, Consciousness, Liberation Theology, and Armed Struggle

This book homes in on several aspects of peasant consciousness. First, I discuss what I think of as the preconditions that enabled—but did not determine in any absolute sense—peasants to rethink their identities and positions in the world. A key feature of this rethinking took place in Catholic-sponsored schools for the training of adult catechists or centros de formación campesina (centers of peasant formation), colloquially known as universidades campesinas (peasant universities).² However, I will also argue that experiences of oppression and exploitation—and the folkloric critique of the same—preconditioned many adult males to identify with the social critiques and activist proposals embedded in liberation theology. I make clear in this introduction and again in chapter 2 that the exercise of hegemony, a key conceptual term explained in the next section, on the part of dominant over subordinate groups is never totalizing, it never succeeds in saturating consciousness completely. Rather, the transformation of systems of belief always builds on pre-existing experiences and ideas. I explain that hegemony works because in situ ideas are confused, unsystematic, and a mix of accurate and inaccurate conceptions that on the whole support dominant groups in the sense that they limit resistance or pose domination as inevitable.

However, I also note that catechists informed by liberation theology did not advocate armed struggle for several years. They followed priest-teachers in the peasant universities who promoted self-help programs that mitigated rural poverty, compensated for the absence of state health services, and in extreme cases fostered cooperative projects intended to provide alternatives to renting land and selling cheap and purchasing dear from landlords and regional merchant capitalists. I will show that the willingness of northern Morazanian catechists to take up arms by joining the ERP was an active response on their part to growing repression in El Salvador and paramilitary and security force surveillance of meetings with Fr. Miguel Ventura, a young, progressive priest assigned to administer a newly created parish in 1973. The material supporting this position will be encountered mainly in chapter 3.

Also coursing through the text is the relationship among at least five groups of people: northern Morazanian peasants (and workers); peasant catechists, conceived of as popular and later insurgent intellectuals; priest-teachers in peasant universities, as well as parish priests and the bishop in charge of the Diocese of San Miguel; military commanders and combatants of the ERP; and the approximately twenty thousand civilians that remained in northern Morazán once it became a war zone and the ERP’s strategic rearguard. The book focuses on the second of these categories (catechists) but interrogates the catechists’ relationships with the other groups. The relationships were very much dialectical ones through which consciousness changed all around (or not in the cases of older, conservative priests and bishops). As I note later in this introduction, catechists have been washed out of accounts of the war and the years leading to it, most of which have been produced by former ERP (and other) commanders mainly concerned with ensuring their place in history. Joaquín Chavez (2017) sought to recuperate peasant intellectuals in his seminal Poets and Prophets of the Resistance, but he focused inordinately on those persons who achieved high rank in the Fuerzas Populares de Liberación (Popular Forces of Liberation, FPL), which operated in Chalatenango, San Vicente, and elsewhere. He paid little attention to those catechists (the vast majority) that failed to achieve public renown but whose labor underpinned many rebel successes.

The aforementioned themes draw heavily on the work of Antonio Gramsci, especially his conceptions of intellectual, hegemony, war of position, and prefigurative struggle, explicated in the following section.

Gramsci, Catechists, and Their Labor

Antonio Gramsci’s writings seem particularly useful for an analysis of priests, catechists, and the Catholic Church, for which reason I have drawn extensively upon his work and that of selected interpreters of it. Gramsci wrote his famous Prison Notebooks (Gramsci 1971) between the years 1929 and 1935 while jailed by Italian fascist Benito Mussolini. In the Notebooks, he reflected on the conditions that enable revolutionary transformations, whether from feudalism to capitalism or from capitalism to socialism. Gramsci argued that in the West, the day-to-day political rule of dominant classes depends less on coercion (threat and/or use of force and violence) than the cultivation of consent, which we might think of as the acknowledgment on the part of dominated groups of the right of others to rule over them (Kurz 1996). Coercion is centered in political society, which consists of government, the military, police, and the judiciary—institutions that secure obedience by recourse to force (though political society also promotes consent). By contrast, discourses, narratives, and practices that specialize in consent or hegemony are broadly diffused in myriad voluntary organizations that compose what we commonly think of as civil society: trade unions, churches, cultural clubs, newspapers, political parties, and the like. Adamson noted that rather than a neat division, Gramsci made the distinction between political and civil society on a functional basis relevant to a particular society at a particular time so that some institutions like the army or bureaucracy might be considered as part of political society in all [nation-]states, but the church or newspapers could be incorporated into or manipulated by political society depending on the circumstances (1980, 219). What counted as an element of civil society at one time and in one place might be an element of political society, justifying the use of force, at another time and/or place.³

Gramsci viewed all manner of educational institutions, formal and informal, as part of the powerful system of fortresses and earthworks of civil society that help reproduce hegemony and shore up dominant rule (Gramsci 1971, 238). However, civil society could also serve as the site of what he called prefigurative struggles by means of which dominated groups challenge and even displace dominant discourses and practices, establish new forms of consent, and assert the right to rule on their own behalf—prior to actually taking power. These prefigurative struggles take place before a direct assault or war of movement on political society. They develop through a war of position in which subaltern groups—all those who are dominated, including peasants and rural workers—work to transform existing institutions from within and create and disseminate a new oppositional culture.⁴ In prewar northern Morazán, the war of position was characterized by a series of shifting encounters in which peasants and rural workers used the legal resources at their disposal to undermine the dominant hegemony and develop formulations that better captured their experience and reflected their interests. They did this in particular through liberation theology, materialized in their participation in CEBs and in their contacts with a young, progressive priest. For Gramsci, the ultimate goal of collective movements had to be to construct a sociocultural force of their own that is capable of uniting the masses in a common political struggle (Green 2002, 21). To what degree, we might ask, were catechists working with CEBs in northern Morazán involved, consciously or unconsciously, in a prefigurative struggle to weaken hegemony?

As noted earlier, another matter addressed in this book concerns the preconditions that enabled northern Morazanian subaltern figures to begin to oppose local, regional, and national elements of the ruling class. Far too much attention has been paid to middle-class urban intellectuals who supposedly seduce simple peasants and workers into adopting radical ideas and not enough attention to the limited reach of hegemony itself, which never permeates completely the consciousnesses of dominated populations. The idea that hegemonic ideas do so has found its way into the social scientific analyses of both progressives (e.g., Wood 2003) and conservatives (e.g., Grenier 1999). Chapter 2 provides an extended example of subaltern beliefs in the form of the exploits of Pedro Grimales, a folkloric (and thus apocryphal) character who projected an entrenched criticism of the rich without thereby advocating for collective action on the part of the poor to alter the class structure. I cannot emphasize enough the example of discourses that manifest an awareness of the nefarious exercise of power on the part of dominant groups but fail to offer recommendations for its redistribution in favor of subaltern groups.

The importance of intellectuals in these processes (maintenance of and/or challenge to power relations) is a derivative feature of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, and intellectuals of the peasant variety are the main topic of this book. Peter Mayo argued that Gramsci viewed intellectuals as cultural or educational workers who are experts in legitimization (2008, 425–426) and that Gramsci’s entire political project is … an educational project (421). By intellectual, Gramsci referred to people who occupy particular social roles in which they perform intellectual functions rather than a particular kind of cognitive activity per se. All people think, according to Gramsci, for which reason "homo faber cannot be excluded from homo sapiens" (Gramsci 1971, 9), but not everyone specializes in activities of the mind (i.e., exercises the social function of an intellectual). Furthermore, every social group occupying what Gramsci referred to as a fundamental role in the process of production produces (organic) intellectuals that reflect the group’s interests within the totality of the relationships that configure society. In the Italy of Gramsci’s time, these intellectuals were, at the highest levels, the creators of the various sciences, philosophy, art, etc. [and] at the lowest, … humble ‘administrators’ and divulgators of pre-existing, traditional, accumulated intellectual wealth (13).

Apart from the aforementioned vertical dimension (higher/lower), Gramsci discussed what I think of as a horizontal dimension in which some intellectuals fulfilled traditional roles and others organic ones. The traditional/organic distinction is often misunderstood, erroneously thought to designate characteristics of the intellectuals themselves when Gramsci was more attuned to the overall social matrix that gives rise to intellectuals and in which they function. A brief discussion of the distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals, on the one hand, and of common sense as opposed to good sense, on the other, sets up the analysis of catechists in this book.

Intellectuals: Organic and Traditional

In the dissertation that preceded his seminal Poets and Prophets of the Resistance, Joaquín Chávez discussed popular intellectuals in the Salvadoran revolution, defining them as university students, teachers, and peasant leaders who played crucial leadership, educational, and organizational roles in the emerging social movements [in El Salvador]. Chávez considered popular intellectuals the chief articulators of counter-hegemonic discourses and anti-oligarchic mobilizations in El Salvador during the 1960s and 1970s (2010, 7).⁵ Most catechists in northern Morazán fulfilled the roles of popular intellectuals, according to the conception extended by Chávez.⁶ Whether Morazanian catechists and other peasant intellectuals might also be characterized as organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense is questionable.⁷

Nor were the peasant catechists who advocated for and practiced liberation theology traditional intellectuals in Gramsci’s conceptualization. For Gramsci, traditional intellectuals were precipitates of earlier historical processes of class formation that established institutions and secured their reproduction. Crehan gives the example of the modern secular university: Over time, she writes, established institutions of learning develop their own bases of power and their own deeply entrenched cultures (2016, 34). They may seem to occupy autonomous roles, no longer beholden to any contemporary class and cut off from day-to-day political intrigues, and this may form part of their self-image, but such pretensions are illusory; intellectuals who claim to be disinterested seekers of truth, above the hurly-burly of class struggle, are deluding themselves (34–35).

Like other rural areas of El Salvador, northern Morazán produced traditional intellectuals in the form of priests, a few technicians and service providers, as well as bureaucrats and other agents of the state. Some remained in the region to take up positions in local government, but most relocated to the capital or another large city where there existed more demand for the intellectual skills they had cultivated, often through higher education. Renán Alcides Orellana (2002) and Enrique Castro (2001), from Villa El Rosario and Jocoaitique, respectively, gravitated to the capital city of San Salvador, where they became journalists working for major newspapers. And Walter L. Grijalva (2009), born in Torola, worked as an architect, also in San Salvador.

Intellectuals: Common Sense and Good Sense

Gramsci thought that subaltern groups, among which he counted peasants, lacked a consistent, thought-out, and rational understanding of the world. Much subaltern knowledge takes the form of senso comun, loosely (but inaccurately) translated in English as common sense. Crehan explained that the English common sense can refer to the possession of a faculty, a sixth sense that enables a person to unerringly sort out cause and effect, or it can refer to the knowledge so obtained. But in Crehan’s reading, Gramsci’s senso comun lacks these strong positive connotations, referring rather to beliefs and opinions held in common, or thought to be held in common, by the mass of the population; all through heterogeneous narratives and accepted ‘fact’ that structure so much of what we take to be no more than simple reality (Crehan 2016, 44). Heterogeneous narratives and accepted ‘fact[s]’ go a considerable way to shore up hegemony. For instance, common sense usually explains poverty, illness, and other forms of suffering as resulting from fate, God’s will, individual failures, bad luck, and so on, some of which gained broad acceptance as explanations for suffering in northern Morazán. When common sense (occasionally) directs the subject’s attention to the social arrangements of domination, it treats those arrangements as immutable. As I discuss in chapter 2, elements of good sense containing relatively accurate assessments of social relations may be embedded in otherwise inchoate common sense infused with hegemonic ideology. I propose that Catholic lay catechists (popular intellectuals) worked through common sense to extract and order the good sense contained in it, so as to construct a systematic view of the world that embodied and reflected subaltern experience and that might become the foundation for a new hegemony.⁸

Gramsci denied that the systemic analysis of the relations between rich and poor were not simply imposed by middle-class, urban, leftist intellectuals, as Grenier (1999) maintained, but considered them a dialectical product of the relationships between local organic (or popular in this case) intellectuals, urban intellectuals (here priests advocating liberation theology), and the local populace. Indeed, though this book focuses on peasant catechists, it also treats their relations with progressive and conservative priests, the Morazanian peasantry, and even the bishop of the San Miguel diocese.

Fabio Argueta’s narrative and my commentary on his and other narratives offer examples both of commonsense beliefs prevailing in prewar northern Morazán and of the good sense sometimes embedded in them. I deem it important to point out, however, that the systematic worldview that Gramsci held up as an indispensable challenge to dominant class hegemony was not wholly locally produced (i.e., built up by catechists and others exclusively from fragments of a confused northern Morazanian common sense). Rather, liberation theology was developed by priests and other church officials influenced by the Second Vatican Council, then materialized in official position papers ratified by Latin American bishops in the Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano (Latin American Episcopal Council, CELAM) meetings in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968 and in Puebla, Mexico, in 1979, as well as a plethora of books, articles, and other publications authored by progressive theologians. Adding progressive bishops and priests to the mix complicates any effort to understand popular, peasant intellectuals—catechists in this case—who communicated to others many ideas that they did not themselves originate. However, I understand this communication as involving creative acts through which progressive catechists strived to adapt the liberation theology message to the needs of specific groups of northern Morazanian peasants and rural workers. An analogous process of adaptation must have occurred when Fabio Argueta, Tercisio Velásquez, Samuel Vidal Guzmán, and others (see chapters 3–5) joined the ERP and became political organizers (which also involved their transition from popular to insurgent intellectuals). Yet the changeover did not require a radical transformation in their thinking, for training as a catechist disposed them toward collective organization and a search for collective solutions to problems.

The Salvadoran Revolutionary War

Sedimented causes of the Salvadoran revolution go back to the Spanish colonial period, but the immediate antecedents lie in the rise of the coffee economy in the latter half of the nineteenth century and a series of laws passed between 1879 and 1881 that privatized many corporate (community and church) landholdings and led to the concentration of much fertile land in the hands of a small oligarchy (Lauria-Santiago 1999).⁹ The 1881 rebellion, led by Anastasio Aquino, and the more robust rebellion of 1932 associated with Agustín Farabundo Martí involved mostly indigenous peasants and were violently repressed. The government hung Aquino, severed his head from his body, and placed it on an iron pike with the label example for rebels. The police captured and imprisoned Martí before the peasants rebelled, then quickly tried and executed him and two coconspirators by firing squad. The army put down the mostly indigenous rebels initially, after which civil guards hired by wealthy landowners carried