Events

What effect did Cold War politics have in escalating or de-escalating religious conflict, and what does this reveal about the contentious relationship between religion and violence more broadly? In Latin America—a region that contains one of the largest Christian populations in the world and some of the highest homicide rates globally—scholars have typically addressed these questions by examining tensions between right-wing Christian actors and left-wing activists and movements. In this presentation I will shift our attention to an important yet neglected history of intra-Christian violence that unfolded during the early Cold War (1945–1960). I will argue that this violence was not incidental but politically produced: it emerged from Vatican policies and their implementation at national and local levels through anti-Protestant campaigns. By centering Cold War geopolitics and the Vatican as key actors, this study demonstrates that religious conflict in Latin America was deeply embedded in transnational political struggles. It therefore calls for a comparative and transnational approach to understanding the political roots of religious violence.

Gema Kloppe-Santamaría  is a Nicaraguan-born sociologist and historian. Her work examines the intersections of violence, religion, gender, and the state in modern Latin America. She is the author of the award-winning book In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (University of California Press, 2020) and lead editor of 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 (Porrua Ediciones 2019). Her current work explores the intersections of religion, secularism, and contentious politics in Latin America’s long Cold War.