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The War on Liberation Theology
The same investigation, restaged one beat at a time. Drive it with the arrow keys, space, or autoplay. Nothing is cut from the piece — long runs are split across frames. Read the full investigation or open the CIA Crimes hub.
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 viral version — the CIA manufactured Brazil's evangelical movement to install Bolsonaro — isn't proven. Underneath it is a documented history: a stated U.S. policy to suppress liberation theology and promote evangelical Protestantism as a counterweight, carried out while U.S.-backed forces killed the movement's priests.
We grade the real history as fact, mark the present-day echoes, and keep the grand conspiracy as the open question it is.
The blueprint: 'U.S. policy must begin to counter liberation theology.'
The Committee of Santa Fe (conservative advisers at the Council for Inter-American Security, several of whom joined the Reagan administration) published 'A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties' in 1980, stating 'U.S. foreign policy must begin to counter (not react against) liberation theology' — cast as a Marxist/Gramscian project — and favoring its Protestant rivals. A documented primary text. Precision: written by a Reagan-aligned think tank, not the CIA-as-agency — but the blueprint named the target.
The killings: U.S.-backed forces and the clergy of the poor.
The war was literal. Archbishop Óscar Romero — who'd begged the US to stop arming his government — was assassinated at the altar in March 1980 by a right-wing death squad linked to US-backed figures; in 1989 six Jesuit priests, a housekeeper and her daughter were murdered by the Atlácatl Battalion, trained at the US Army's School of the Americas; across the region US-aligned regimes targeted priests, nuns and catechists. Killings = FACT; perpetrators US-backed/US-trained. Direct CIA authorship of specific murders not asserted; US sponsorship of the apparatus is documented.
The rivals: encouraging Protestant alternatives — a growth with many fathers.
The Santa Fe call to favor 'Protestant rivals' matched a real phenomenon: the explosive growth of evangelical/Pentecostal Christianity across Latin America, with US missionary organizations active in the Cold War. In Brazil, Protestants went from a small minority to ~a third. Documented: the stated intent + missionary activity. Overclaimed: causation — Pentecostalism's rise has deep independent roots (appeal to the urban poor, lay leadership, local entrepreneurship like the Universal Church). SOME SMOKE: intent + involvement + growth, not proof the US manufactured the movement.
The present-day echo: the evangelical-Israel bloc and the ADL's 42,000 churches.
The evangelical movement became a decisive right-wing force — in Brazil the 'bancada evangélica' and churches like Edir Macedo's Universal Church were central to Bolsonaro's base — and the alignment now runs through Israel. Documented present-day example: the ADL announced a partnership with the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference reaching its ~42,000 affiliated churches, with a 12-month antisemitism curriculum incl. Sunday-school resources (ADL's first direct contribution to Christian religious education). FACT — evidence of a contemporary evangelical-Israel alliance, NOT a link in any CIA operation.
How this page is graded.
- FACT: the Santa Fe 1980 policy to counter liberation theology and favor Protestant rivals; the killings of clergy by US-backed/US-trained forces (Romero, the Jesuits); the 1985 bishops' CIA-subversion accusation; evangelicalism as a right-wing bloc (incl. Bolsonaro's); the ADL's 42,000-church curriculum.
- SOME SMOKE: that US policy produced the Pentecostal wave — real intent and missionary activity, but the growth is multi-causal, not proven US engineering.
- PURE SPECULATION: the unified claim that the CIA engineered Brazil's evangelicalism across 40 years to install Bolsonaro vs Lula, with the ADL as a node — real pieces, unproven as one coordinated plot; we decline to assert it.
Why it matters.
The forgotten core needs no conspiracy to be damning: a great power looked at a movement of the poor reading the Gospel, decided it threatened 'productive capitalism,' wrote a policy to counter it, and backed the forces that killed its priests — while favoring a rival faith as a counterweight. That's the CIA Crimes subject exactly: the national-security state intervening in the inner life of other societies, at the level of what people may believe. It sits beside Guatemala and other Cold War operations, and cross-references Israeli Influence because the evangelical bloc that outlasted the Cold War became one of the hemisphere's most reliable engines of pro-Israel politics.
Help us fill these lines.
- OpenA declassified accounting of direct CIA (as opposed to broad US-policy) involvement in promoting evangelical missions as a counter to liberation theology.
- OpenThe full scope of US missionary organizations' Cold War ties to US intelligence in Latin America.
- OpenWhether any coordinated line can be drawn — on the record — from the 1980s policy to specific modern electoral outcomes, or whether it remains an organic convergence.