The War on Liberation Theology
In 1980, Reagan’s advisers put it in writing: U.S. policy should “counter” the Catholic movement of the poor in Latin America, and encourage its Protestant rivals. What followed was a Cold War fought over a continent’s faith.
There is a viral version of this story — that the CIA manufactured Brazil’s evangelical movement to install Jair Bolsonaro against the left. We don’t assert that, because it isn’t proven. But underneath it is a documented history far less known than it should be: a stated U.S. policy to suppress liberation theology and promote evangelical Protestantism as a political counterweight, carried out while U.S.-backed forces killed the movement’s priests. This page grades the real history, marks the present-day echoes, and keeps the grand conspiracy as the open question it is.
What this page is about
Liberation theology was the movement, born in Latin America in the 1960s, that read the Gospel as a call to side with the poor against structures of oppression — the “preferential option for the poor.” To the U.S. national-security establishment of the Cold War, it looked like Marxism in a cassock. In 1980 the Committee of Santa Fe, a group of conservative advisers feeding the incoming Reagan administration, wrote it plainly: U.S. policy “must begin to counter (not react against) liberation theology,” which it cast as a Gramscian bid for Marxist cultural hegemony, and it favored encouraging Protestant alternatives.
That blueprint was not idle. Across Central America, U.S.-backed regimes and death squads killed the movement’s clergy — Archbishop Óscar Romero, gunned down at the altar in 1980; six Jesuit priests murdered in 1989 by a battalion trained at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas — and in 1985 Latin American Catholic bishops publicly accused the CIA of a campaign of subversion against the Church. In the same decades, evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity grew explosively, until it became a decisive political bloc — the base that, in Brazil, would help carry Bolsonaro to power.
We grade each link. The policy intent and the killings are fact. The claim that the CIA single-handedly manufactured the evangelical wave to produce Bolsonaro is not — Pentecostalism’s rise has many causes, and documented intent is not the same as proven engineering. We include the striking present-day echo — the ADL’s new alliance with tens of thousands of Latino evangelical churches — as what it is: a fact of the current evangelical-Israel politics, not a link in a Cold War plot.
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The War on Liberation Theology.
In 1980, Reagan's advisers put it in writing: U.S. policy should 'counter' the Catholic movement of the poor in Latin America and encourage its Protestant rivals. A Cold War was fought over a continent's faith.
The blueprint, the killings, the rivals, and the open question
What liberation theology was, the written policy to counter it, the violence against its clergy, the promotion of Protestant rivals, the present-day echo, and the thesis itself.
The movement: a church that sided with the poor.
FACTLiberation theology emerged in Latin America in the 1960s — crystallized at the 1968 Medellín conference of bishops and in Gustavo Gutiérrez's 1971 'A Theology of Liberation' — reading Christianity as a mandate to confront poverty and injustice, the 'preferential option for the poor.' It gave the Catholic Church a role on the side of peasants, workers, and the landless across a continent of U.S.-aligned dictatorships. That this movement existed and became powerful within the Church is FACT; it is the thing the policy described below set out to defeat.
The blueprint: 'U.S. policy must begin to counter liberation theology.'
FACTIn 1980, the Committee of Santa Fe — conservative foreign-policy figures at the Council for Inter-American Security, several of whom joined the Reagan administration — published 'A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties.' It stated, in words that are not ambiguous, that 'U.S. foreign policy must begin to counter (not react against) liberation theology,' which it characterized as a Marxist, Gramscian project, and it favored supporting its Protestant rivals. This is a documented primary text, graded FACT. One precision we hold: it was written by a Reagan-aligned think tank, not by the CIA as an agency — it is the policy blueprint, and the blueprint named the target.
The killings: U.S.-backed forces and the clergy of the poor.
FACTThe war on liberation theology was literal. In El Salvador, Archbishop Óscar Romero — who had begged the United States to stop arming his government — was assassinated at the altar in March 1980 by a right-wing death squad linked to U.S.-backed figures. In 1989, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter were murdered by soldiers of the Atlácatl Battalion, a unit trained at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas. Across the region, U.S.-aligned regimes targeted priests, nuns, and lay catechists associated with the movement. We grade FACT: the killings happened and the perpetrating forces were U.S.-backed and in cases U.S.-trained. Direct CIA authorship of specific murders is not what we assert; U.S. sponsorship of the apparatus that committed them is documented.
The rivals: encouraging Protestant alternatives — and a growth with many fathers.
SOME SMOKEThe Santa Fe document's call to favor 'Protestant rivals' matched a real phenomenon: the explosive growth of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity across Latin America, including U.S. missionary organizations active in the region during the Cold War. In Brazil, Protestants went from a small minority to roughly a third of the population. The documented part is the stated U.S. intent and the missionary activity; the overclaim is causal. Pentecostalism's rise has deep, independent roots — its appeal to the urban poor, its lay leadership, its emotional worship, local entrepreneurship like the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. We grade SOME SMOKE: a documented intent to encourage Protestant rivals, real missionary involvement, and a genuine growth — but not proof that U.S. policy manufactured the movement that resulted.
The present-day echo: the evangelical-Israel bloc, and the ADL's 42,000 churches.
FACTWhatever its origins, the evangelical movement became a decisive right-wing political force — in Brazil, the 'bancada evangélica' and churches like Edir Macedo's Universal Church were central to Jair Bolsonaro's base. And the alignment now runs through Israel. In a documented, present-day example, the Anti-Defamation League announced a partnership with the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference reaching its roughly 42,000 affiliated churches, rolling out a 12-month antisemitism-awareness curriculum — including Sunday-school resources, which the ADL called its first direct contribution to Christian religious education. We grade this FACT and present it precisely for what it is: evidence of a deep contemporary evangelical-Israel political alliance, not a link in any CIA operation.
The thesis: 'the CIA engineered evangelicalism to install Bolsonaro' — posed, not proven.
PURE SPECULATIONHere is the honest line. It is FACT that a U.S. Cold War policy set out to counter liberation theology and favor Protestant rivals; FACT that U.S.-backed forces killed the movement's clergy; FACT that evangelicalism grew and became a right-wing bloc that helped elect Bolsonaro; FACT that an evangelical-Israel alliance is real today. What is NOT established — and what the viral framing asserts — is that these are one coordinated operation: that the CIA deliberately manufactured Brazil's evangelical wave across forty years in order to install Bolsonaro against Lula, with the ADL as a present-day node. That welds a documented 1980s policy intent, a complex organic religious transformation, and a 2018 election into a single conscious plot. We grade that unified claim PURE SPECULATION: a provocative hypothesis resting on real pieces, but unproven as a coordinated whole — and we decline to assert it.
A continent’s faith as a theater of war
The forgotten core of this story needs no conspiracy to be damning: a great power looked at a movement of the poor reading the Gospel, decided it was a threat to “productive capitalism,” wrote down a policy to counter it, and backed the forces that killed its priests — while favoring a rival faith as a political counterweight. That is the CIA Crimes hub’s subject exactly: the U.S. national-security state intervening in the inner life of other societies, here at the level of what people are permitted to believe and whom their churches are permitted to serve. It belongs beside the record of U.S. Cold War operations from Guatemala onward, and it cross-references Israeli Influence because the evangelical bloc that outlasted the Cold War has become one of the most reliable engines of pro-Israel politics in the hemisphere. The discipline is the usual one: grade the documented history as fact, resist the temptation to make it one seamless plot, and let the proven part — which is a lot — stand on its own.
Questions worth taking seriously
Did the CIA create evangelical Christianity in Latin America?
No — and we don’t claim it. What’s documented is a U.S. policy (the Santa Fe document) to counter liberation theology and favor Protestant rivals, real U.S. missionary activity, and the suppression of left-wing clergy. But Pentecostalism’s explosive growth had many independent causes. “Encouraged as a counterweight” is supportable; “manufactured by the CIA” is not, and we grade the strong version as speculation.
Then what part is actually proven?
A lot. That Reagan-aligned strategists wrote a policy to counter liberation theology and back its Protestant rivals (the Santa Fe document); that U.S.-backed and U.S.-trained forces murdered the movement’s clergy, including Archbishop Romero and the Jesuits; that Latin American bishops accused the CIA of subversion in 1985; and that the evangelical bloc became a pillar of the right, including Bolsonaro’s. The documented history is the point — it just isn’t the single seamless plot.
Why bring the ADL into a Cold War story?
Because it’s a documented present-day echo of where the evangelical bloc ended up, not a hidden link. The ADL’s own announcement describes a partnership with 42,000 Latino evangelical churches and a Sunday-school antisemitism curriculum. We include it as a real fact about the modern evangelical-Israel alliance, and we explicitly do not fold it into a CIA plot — that would be exactly the overreach we’re warning against.
If you are named on this page
If you are named on this page, or are a party materially affected by the claims made here, and you wish to respond, correct the record, or add context, use the Contact page. Responses are published verbatim alongside the original claim, with the sender identified and the date of receipt. The channel stays open for the life of the page.
This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The record
- SourceWatch — the Committee of Santa Fe and ‘A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties’ (1980)
- UPI Archives (1985) — Catholic bishops’ report accuses the CIA of subversion
- Latinoamérica21 — from liberation theology to Pentecostalism and the Brazilian right
- ADL — partnership with the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (42,000 churches; curriculum)
- Wikipedia — Óscar Romero (the 1980 assassination of the archbishop of the poor)