The Religious War between CIA and KGB in Latin America
How the U.S. Supported the Protestant Advance against the Liberation Theology Promoted by Catholic Bishops and KGB
By Julio Severo
The information and disinformation war by the Soviet
Union and the United States in the Cold War days was not limited only to the
political sphere in Latin America. According to two Catholic bloggers, while
the Soviet Union supported the advance of Liberation Theology, the U.S.
supported the advance of evangelicals and Pentecostals.
In his article entitled
“La Expansión del Protestantismo Fue Parte del Plan de Guerra de la CIA para
América del Sur” (The Expansion of Protestantism Was Part of CIA War Plan for
South America), Catholic blogger Jorge Rondón Santos mentions a 1969 memorandum
addressed to President Richard Nixon. Drafted by Republican Nelson Rockefeller,
Baptist and U.S. vice-president, it said about Latin America: “the Catholic
church has ceased to be an ally in whom the U.S. can have confidence.” It is
confirmed by Wade Clark Roof, in the page 84 of his book “World Order and
Religion” (1991 SUNY Press). Roof was Professor of Religion and Society in the
Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Santos said that Rockefeller and the U.S. government
supported the Protestant advance in Latin America. Their strategy was to counter
Liberation Theology by promoting Protestant churches that were rivals to the
Catholic Church.
Santos uses as special example Guatemala, which
according to him will be the first mostly Protestant nation in Latin America.
He declares that to counter a devotional revolutionary Catholicism, the U.S.
government’s plan was to stimulate Protestant missions, “which with a ‘bread
and dollar’ speech drew to themselves thousands of poor people in the
countryside and cities who sought spiritual power.”
Former general and former Guatemala President José
Efraín Ríos Montt used, during his administration, the national broadcasting
network on Sundays to preach and say that the Guatemalan people were the
“elected people” and accusing the Catholic Church of being a “collaborator of
Marxism,” Santos complained. Montt was a member of a Pentecostal church.
The connection between Protestant missions and CIA was more
exposed in the 1980s, when several Latin American military governments expelled
the Summer Institute of Linguistics (connected to Wycliffe Bible Translators),
accusing its missionaries of being CIA operatives. Nevertheless its
anti-Marxism and its pro-U.S. position, the Brazilian military government did
not want such intrusion of missionary spies, especially in the Amazonian
region, suspecting that these missionaries, funded by the Rockefeller family
(unprincipled capitalist executives), were spying on the natural resources of
Amazon.
In that time, I thought it was greatly unfair for the Brazilian
military government to expel the U.S. missionaries and I wrote a supporting
letter to the Summer Institute of Linguistics. I still support their work, but
only years later I learnt, through U.S. and Brazilian sources, that actually
there were and there are in Brazil American missionaries connected to CIA.
Even though it was very helpful the financial,
strategic and logistic support of Nelson Rockefeller for the Protestant and
Pentecostal advance in Latin America to counter the religious leftist advance
from the Catholic Church, it should not go unnoticed that he was also behind
the infamous
NSSM 200, or the Kissinger Report, a confidential document written by the
U.S. government in 1974 addressing the keeping of resources of other nations
for the U.S. interests having as a focus the population reduction of those
nations. The purpose of this reduction was to weaken opposition to the U.S.
interests.
The harmful effect of Rockefeller’s strategy in NSSM
200 is that the goal of population reduction did not hit only leftist
Catholics, but also Protestants and Pentecostals he said that he was supporting
and who became equally victims of population reduction propaganda and politics
disguised as “family planning.”
Rockefeller’s only success was to identify Liberation
Theology as a threat. According
to the American leftist Catholic blogger Mike Rivage-Seul, in his article “The
First Religious War of the 21st Century”: “The Rockefeller Report of 1969
already identified liberation theology as a threat to the national security of
the United States… The [Reagan] administration heeded the advice, and responded
both militarily and ideologically.”
According to Rivage-Seul, there was an agreement in
which Ronald Reagan would help Pope John Paul II in the campaign against
communism in Poland and, in return, the pope would remain silent about U.S.
campaigns against Latin American leftist Catholics. The papal collaboration
happened also through the gradual replacement of pro-Liberation Theology
bishops for conservative bishops. But over three decades later, huge is the
number of pro-Liberation Theology Catholic bishops. The substitutions were not
enough.
The anticommunist fight itself of John Paul II was
imperfect, because he was a great supporter of Yasser Arafat, the founder of
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a terrorist Islamic group fighting the
State of Israel. In this fight, the Vatican was more comfortable with PLO,
which promoted a Palestine version of Liberation Theology.
Today, the Vatican under Pope Francis is much more
aligned with the leftist ideology, having approved
the sainthood process for Helder Camara, the founder of the National
Conference of Bishops of Brazil and patron of the Brazilian Catholic Left.
As if the Brazilian Catholicism were not plagued enough
by the leftist ideology, U.S. Catholic missionaries coming to Brazil brought
the same ideology. In 2005, U.S. nun Dorothy Stang, who was a Liberation
Theology adherent, was murdered in Brazil. She was allegedly killed for
political and environmental activities in Brazil since the 1970s.
With the picture of religious war during the Cold War in
which the Soviet Union used Catholics and the U.S. used Protestants and
Pentecostals, I am surprised then that a Brazilian Catholic blogger said that “Marxism is a Protestant product,”
when the reality is that the most Catholic region in the world, Latin America,
has been mostly a garner and ally of Marxism, while Protestantism, especially its
Pentecostal variants, has mostly resisted Marxism.
Another Brazilian Catholic says
that the first totalitarian society (of a Marxist kind) in the Modern Age was
Protestantism in Geneva under Calvin.
Yet, by considering the Latin American population
growth, especially in Brazil, as a threat to the U.S. national security, Nelson
Rockefeller and the U.S. government, as made evident by NSSM 200, harmed both
pro-Marxism Catholics and anti-Marxism evangelicals.
NSSM 200 was produced by a U.S. Republican
administration, the Richard Nixon administration, in which abortion was
nationally legalized from conception until childbirth in 1973. In fact,
Rockefeller was also a member of the Republican Party, which supposedly is
conservative and does not want to meddle in the internal affairs of other
nations.
Even though it has brought huge benefits to Protestants
and Pentecostals in Latin America (not in the population control issue), the
fight of those worldly-minded Republicans helped in no way to change the fate
of the U.S., which has as its current president Barack Obama, raised up as a
Muslim and posteriorly mentored in a Liberation Theology Black Protestant
church.
Besides, the U.S. government gave support not only to
anti-Marxist Protestants (and also Catholics). In the administration of Jimmy
Carter, who as a progressive (leftist) Baptist, great was the U.S. support for
the World Council of Churches (constituted by leftist Protestants) and Brazilian
Catholic bishops. Papers
gathered by the Carter administration against the Brazilian military government
were used two years ago by the Obama administration to help Brazilian
President Dilma Rousseff to strengthen her socialist administration against
military attempts to destabilize it. But the destabilization, and especially her
impeachment, is coming exactly from Pentecostals, traditional enemies of Marxism and friends
and allies of U.S. administrations that are honestly conservative.
In fact, Pentecostals can be friends and allies of any
government, regardless it is American or not, that are honestly conservative.
If a today’s ruler is brave to resist the politically correct trends of valuing
abortions and homosexual “marriages,” he will receive support from conservative
Christians, especially Pentecostals.
Today’s religious war is not any longer between CIA and
KGB. It is not any longer between the Soviet Union and the U.S. Now, it is
between pro-life values and pro-abortion impositions; pro-family values and
homosexual “marriage” impositions. Pentecostals are more than willing to
support the right side in this war.
Yet, Catholics in Brazil, the largest Catholic nation
in the world, remain confused by being led for decades by mostly Liberation
Theology bishops.
Times have changed. There is no longer a Soviet Union.
But the U.S. government, under Obama, could be more than wiling to take
advantage of their confusion, a confusion that is engulfing also Pentecostals
increasingly mesmerized by the Protestant versions of Liberation Theology.
Portuguese
version of this article: A guerra religiosa entre CIA e KGB
na América Latina
Source: Last Days Watchman
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