The Silencing of Priests and the Perceived Threat of Jocismo

Born in the small town of Maravatío, Michoacán in 1920, Rodolfo Escamilla García was brought up in a modest lower-middle-class family.Footnote ¹² His parents were devout Catholics who worked in the textile industry and introduced the young Rodolfo and his ten siblings to the charity projects of the church. In the 1930s, the parents expressed dissatisfaction with the socialist education platform of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40), but they welcomed his labor politics. In 1935, their son Rodolfo decided to follow the example of his three uncles and became a priest. He boarded a train to the United States to enroll at the Montezuma Seminary, an institute established in New Mexico by American Jesuits during the Cristero Rebellion (1926-29) for the education of Mexican priests. He studied theology there and organized a study group to discuss the contemporary politics of Mexico and the United States. In September 1944, Escamilla was ordained as a Jesuit priest. Soon after, he completed his education in Social Sciences and became interested in “cooperativism,” a developmentalist movement with roots in Canada during the 1920s, which promoted social justice, transparency, cooperation, and economic independence through association.Footnote ¹³

Alliance with the Secretariado Social Mexicano and Commitment to the See, Judge, Act Method

In 1946, Escamilla gave his first homilies in the small towns of Tlalpujahua and Zacapu, in his native state of Michoacán. During the six years that he lived there, he assisted mine workers in petitioning for higher wages and better working conditions. He also advised factory workers and campesinos and assisted them in their efforts to organize independent unions. He led study groups that used the Bible to promote adult literacy, and with the support of the priest and influential member of the SSM, Pedro Velázquez, Escamilla traveled to Canada to attend workshops on cooperativism at the universities of Laval in Quebec and St. Francis Xavier in Nova Scotia. Some of Escamilla's acquaintances called him “the teacher”; others referred to him as the “sociologist.” But for the ruling elite of Zacapu, the priest's involvement with peasant and worker organizations made him a political nuisance and a threat to their economic power. In collaboration with local figures in Michoacán, they organized several campaigns against him. In 1952, they lobbied the ecclesiastical authorities to relocate him to a different parish. By order of the bishop of Morelia, Salvador Martínez Silva, Escamilla was sent to a parish in León (Guanajuato) and asked to refrain from political activity.

Escamilla did not last long in the conservative city of León. For a few months there, he remained in contact with local activists and progressive leaders from the parish of Zacapu. Then, at the insistence of Pedro Velázquez, he moved to Mexico City, where he became a devoted member of the SSM. Founded by the Episcopate in 1922, the original purpose of the Secretariado was to coordinate all institutions and projects promoting the social work of the Church. By the late 1930s, however, it had lost its social mission and become an evangelical tool for the Acción Católica Mexicana (Mexican Catholic Action, ACM), mostly involved in the spiritual work of the Church.Footnote ¹⁴ This changed in 1941 when Pedro Velázquez became a member of the SSM and pressured the episcopate to provide the organization with greater autonomy from the ACM. In the next few years, Velázquez played a profound role in energizing the bases of the Secretariado, in strengthening its presence across the nation, and in providing Escamilla with a bigger platform in leading the creation of the JOC in the mid to late 1950s.Footnote ¹⁵

The interest of Velázquez in the JOC dated back to his education in Europe. In 1925, at the age of 13, he enrolled at the Conciliar Seminar of the Diocese of Mexico where he excelled as a student. Seven years later, he received a scholarship to attend the Gregorian University in Rome, where he translated his first texts to Spanish. In 1939, he earned a doctoral degree and met Joseph Cardijn, the Belgian worker priest who founded the Young Christian Workers movement. Six years his senior, Cardijn introduced Velázquez to the JOC's revisión de vida method, which eventually influenced the most iconic documents written during the Second Vatican Council and the 1968 Medellín Conference.Footnote ¹⁶ First popularized in France by Cardijn in the 1920s, this method consisted of a three-stage process of organizing (See, Judge, Act) that effectively evangelized non-practicing Catholics and provided workers with an opportunity to improve their lives, raise their consciousness in relation to their labor, and make the Catholic faith relevant to their everyday world.

Those who embraced the revisión de vida method were first asked to “see” the conditions and injustices around them. Then, they were required to “judge” those conditions by asking themselves how God might call on them to respond, based on their readings of the Scriptures and the social teachings of the Church. Finally, once they had developed a better understanding of their surroundings and the specific circumstances of their lives, they were asked to “act” and thus become faithful and effective agents of substantial change.Footnote ¹⁷ Hoping to learn more about this method, Velázquez traveled to the north of France, where he intended to enroll at the Workers’ Missionary School in Lille. However, the outbreak of World War II forced him to return to Mexico, where he began his work with the ACM, as the central advisor to the Juventud Católica Femenina Mexicana (Mexican Catholic Feminine Youth, JCFM), in 1941. That same year, he joined the Secretariado, hoping to popularize the JOC method in his native country. But the director of the SSM, Rafael Dávila Vilchis, and the ACM leadership saw jocismo with suspicion and as likely to harm Church-state relations, which had improved significantly during the 1940s when President Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940-46) embraced reconciliation with ecclesiastical authorities, allowed the Church to hold massive religious celebrations, and abolished the controversial socialist provisions from the 1917 constitution.Footnote ¹⁸

For three years, Velázquez served as a loyal supporter of the ACM mission and encouraged its authorities to give autonomy to the SSM. His commitment paid off. In 1944, the Mexican episcopate approved the Secretariado's separation from the ACM, and four years later, Velázquez was named its new director. He immediately put together a team that agreed with his goals of fostering cooperatives and mutual aid societies, training promoters of social work to travel to these local communities, and creating JOC chapters in large industrialized cities to address the needs and improve the living conditions of the working class. Besides Escamilla, this group of JOC supporters included Fr. Manuel Velázquez (Pedro's older brother) and Carlos Talavera, who had just been ordained as a priest and, like Escamilla, was already a practitioner of cooperativism. On behalf of the SSM and with the hosting of the St. Francis Xavier University, Rodolfo, Manuel, and Carlos traveled to Nova Scotia at the turn of the decade to study the Antigonish Movement in Quebec and specifically to learn from the success of its adult education program as a means toward social improvement. Upon their return, they established the first “cajas populares” (parish-based credit and consumer unions) in León, and soon others followed in various working-class neighborhoods in Mexico City. These unions played a significant role in improving the economic conditions of thousands of people who organized themselves into cooperatives. A year later, the SSM published dozens of pamphlets explaining the benefits of the cajas populares, and these grew exponentially across the nation throughout the decade.Footnote ¹⁹

Following his participation in Rome at the First World Congress of the Secular Apostolate in 1957, Escamilla shifted his attention to the expansion of the JOC. In addition to cooperativism, he promoted the See, Judge, Act method. After becoming reacquainted with Joseph Cardijn at a 1946 international conference of the JOC in San José, Costa Rica, Pedro Velázquez supported Escamilla's efforts. But despite his support, Velázquez understood that the ecclesiastical authorities in Mexico would continue to oppose the perceived radicalism of jocismo.Footnote ²⁰

Escamilla formed the first chapters of the JOC in 1957 in collaboration with the younger Jesús García, also a native of Michoacán, born in 1933 and ordained as a Jesuit priest during the 1950s. Together, they created chapters in a house located in the working-class Buenos Aires neighborhood in Mexico City. Others soon followed in La Malinche, Arenal, Progreso Nacional, and Tepito, also in the nation's capital. Their method of organizing consisted of training a selected group of militants in charge of leading teams of five or six young people who would be responsible for educating future members of the JOC and encouraging them to adopt the See, Judge, Act method. García, who had studied sociology in Europe, served as a key advisor to the young leaders. He led workshops that applied the tools of sociology to the revisión de vida method. With Escamilla, he had organized the first preliminary meeting of the JOC in Zacapu, Michoacán, where García also founded the Juventud Agraria Católica (Catholic Peasant Youth, JAC) in the early 1950s.Footnote ²¹

New JOC and JAC chapters had emerged by the end of the decade, and in 1961, after the national JOC conference in Toluca, Escamilla and García called for the “massification” of their movement and approved the election of national representatives. However, conservative sectors of the church were suspicious of the radical lay activists who were attracted to the See, Judge, Act method and did not entirely welcome the success of the JOC or the ambitions of the radical michoacanos. This opposition was accentuated with the publication of two books written by Pedro Velázquez that tested the diplomatic relationship between the Church and the state, Miseria de México: ¡Tierra desconocida! (1946) and Iniciación a la vida política (1956). While the former provided a detailed sociological analysis of poverty across Mexico at a time when the government was promoting its revolutionary achievements, the latter reminded Catholics of their moral obligations to vote and elect representatives who truly embodied the social teachings of the Church.Footnote ²² Leading ecclesiastical authorities, who preferred to avoid confrontation with the government, interpreted this work as a campaign of opposition to the ruling PRI. Among them were the archbishops of Guadalajara and Puebla, José Garibi Rivera and Octaviano Márquez Toriz.Footnote ²³

In the same year that Velázquez published Iniciación a la vida política, Miguel Darío Miranda was appointed archbishop of Mexico, and two years later he was elected as the first general secretary of CELAM. He held this position until 1963, when Manuel Larraín from Chile, Hélder Câmara from Brazil, and Carlos McGrath from Panama took over the leadership of CELAM and pushed Latin American Catholicism toward the progressive path of liberation theology.Footnote ²⁴ During his tenure (1956-63), Miranda spoke against the radicalism that emerged in the region in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, which coincided with the rise in popularity of the See, Judge, Act method, as widely adopted by myriad social movements across the continent during the 1960s.Footnote ²⁵ Furthermore, he insisted that religious authorities should stay away from politics and instead engage exclusively with the catechism of the Church and its commitment to its faith.Footnote ²⁶ These positions contrasted with those adopted by his successors, who instead championed the radical language of social justice, dignity, solidarity, and Third Worldism that emerged in the context of aggiornamento following the issuing of encyclicals like Mater et Magistra (1961) and the later and more progressive Populorum Progressio (1967).Footnote ²⁷ As archbishop of Mexico, Miranda removed the politicized Velázquez from the directorship of the SSM in 1956, briefly sent him to Europe, and momentarily replaced him with José Garibi Rivera. The latter emerged as one of the most influential anticommunist voices of the Church and later a harsh critic of the 1968 student movement.

While in Europe, Velázquez reconnected with his friend and colleague from the Latin American College in Rome, Sergio Méndez Arceo. Both returned home convinced that the Mexican Church needed a liberationist approach. In collaboration with other leaders of the Church and rising intellectuals, they transformed the diocese of Cuernavaca into a hub of solidarity for various progressive movements that sparked across the country during the 1960s.Footnote ²⁸ By contrast, Garibi Rivera and Márquez Toriz asked Cardinal Miranda to delay Velázquez's return to Mexico, but the archbishop refused to take such drastic measures. Instead, he demanded silence from Velázquez, who embraced a discreet profile and was reappointed as the director of the Secretariado in 1959.Footnote ²⁹

With the outbreak of the Cuban Revolution, Velázquez adopted an explicit anticommunist position. In response to the student protests demanding democratic control of the Autonomous University of Puebla (UAP) in 1960 and 1961, he saw the rise of Marxism inside the schools as a natural response to their dissatisfaction with the system, but, in contrast to a position later adopted by his friend Méndez Arceo, he argued that communism represented the worst option for the nation, as it threatened all forms of liberty and could potentially place the resources of Mexico entirely in the hands of the state.Footnote ³⁰ For their part, Escamilla and García remained committed to the See, Judge, Act method. They continued to work with the JOC and pushed the SSM to adopt a progressive view toward the social and political unrest that emerged during the decade. Like Méndez Arceo, they saw no need to participate in the widely influential “Christianity, Yes; Communism, No!” campaigns that quickly expanded across the nation with support from multiple leaders of the Church, including Pedro Velázquez. Instead, in 1959 Escamilla traveled to Havana so that he could brief the SSM about the situation in Cuba and to provide advice to the Unión de Trabajadores Cristianos (Christian Workers’ Union, UTC), which saw the leadership of Fidel Castro with suspicion but also disapproved of US aggression toward Cuba.Footnote ³¹

In 1960, Escamilla aligned himself with a few members of the Partido de Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN), including the journalists Horacio Guajardo and Gerardo Medina, who welcomed the presence of militant Catholics in the labor unions. With their support and the work of the JOC chapters in the neighborhoods of Tepito and Buenos Aires, Escamilla was a key player in the creation of the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (Authentic Workers’ Front, FAT), a confederation of labor unions composed mostly of former jocistas and young panistas. In addition, between 1961 and 1966 Escamilla continued to rely on the support of García, who became further involved with the popular projects of the Secretariado and began teaching theology at the seminary in Toluca. Together, Escamilla and García expanded the presence of the JOC to more than 15 dioceses across Mexico. These were the most successful years of the JOC, as it established its presence in all of the major industrial cities, but, as historian Gomes Moreira has argued, it was also a period when the ecclesiastical authorities aggressively undermined the work of Escamilla and his radical See, Judge, Act method. His superiors disapproved of his efforts to pin the success of the JOC exclusively on the effective leadership of lay workers, and not priests. They were equally critical of Escamilla's disdain of middle-class lay Catholics who, according to the Jesuit, had little understanding of poverty or what it meant to be politically disenfranchised. For the rebellious priest, in short, the future of the JOC, and the decisions it made, should be solely in the hands of the workers.Footnote ³²

In 1964, Archbishop Miranda acted to suppress the perceived radicalism of Escamilla by removing him from the leadership of the JOC and ordering the Asociación Católica de la Juventud Mexicana (Catholic Association of Mexican Youth, ACJM) to take over his movement. An organization of young men, the ACJM had its most active years in the 1920s and 1930s but had gradually lost the bulk of its membership in the 1950s.Footnote ³³ Miranda also relocated the JOC from Mexico City to the conservative city of León, where powerful businessmen expressed concerns about the presence of Catholics in the labor unions.Footnote ³⁴ In the mid to late 1960s the ACJM leadership tried to revive their organization, which had remained a loyal supporter of the most conservative wing of the church and disdained the radicalism of aggiornamento as a threat to the Catholic sensibilities of the nation.Footnote ³⁵ While the JOC was momentarily removed from its desired working-class base, the continuous support from the key leaders of the SSM, García and Manuel Velázquez, allowed it to remain committed to its effective See, Judge, Act method of activism. It soon created new chapters across Mexico and established a stronger regional presence in Central America and the Caribbean.Footnote ³⁶

In 1965, Escamilla distanced himself from the JOC but remained loyal to his commitment to promote the See, Judge, Act method. He moved on to create the Movimiento de Trabajadores Católicos (Catholic Workers Movement, MTC) and continued to collaborate with the FAT, which successfully competed with the government-sponsored unions.Footnote ³⁷ With support from Escamilla, young members of the PAN, and founders of the Christian Base Communities, the FAT declared its complete autonomy from the ecclesiastical authorities in 1966 and quickly expanded its bases across the nation during the 1970s.Footnote ³⁸ Also in 1966, the International JOC celebrated its congress in Mexico City, but a disappointed Joseph Cardijn saw little future for the movement in Mexico, where the number of jocistas remained stagnant in comparison to other countries in Latin America.Footnote ³⁹ In July 1967, Cardijn died, at the age of 85. The JOC remained active elsewhere across Latin America after his death, namely in Brazil, Chile, and Peru.Footnote ⁴⁰

Solidarity with the 1968 Student Movement and the Autonomy of CENCOS

In Mexico, the JOC experienced its most damaging clash with ecclesiastical and government authorities in the context of the student movement of 1968. Jocistas expressed strong support for the students and boldly condemned state repression. In doing so, they confronted an ecclesiastical leadership headed by the conservative bishop of León, Anselmo Zarza Bernal, who made every effort to silence them, including the withdrawal of episcopal and economic support of the JOC. The bishop got rid of the national representatives of the JOC and pushed many of its members to abandon their movement. Searching for greater autonomy, these jocistas joined other independent organizations, including the FAT, which remained an autonomous labor federation, as envisioned by its founder Escamilla.Footnote ⁴¹

The JOC made its first substantial statement regarding the 1968 student movement on September 1, the same day Gustavo Díaz Ordaz gave his fourth annual address to the nation. In that speech, the president accused students of taking advantage of the international visibility of the Olympics to defame the nation, insisted that their movement had been hijacked by foreign entities, and ordered them to halt their strike and resume their classes.Footnote ⁴² In contrast, jocistas described the movement as “transcendental” in raising the political consciousness of the country, and in successfully highlighting the need to create a democratic society.Footnote ⁴³ Moreover, following the See, Judge, Act method, the leadership of the JOC saw the movement as part of a broader international effort that called for closing the economic and political gap between an authoritarian minority and a disenfranchised and disadvantaged majority. Failing to support the students was simply sinful, they argued, while remaining on the sidelines was equivalent to siding with the repressors.Footnote ⁴⁴

In solidarity with the student movement, the national president of the JOC, Ramón García, met several times with leading members of the Consejo Nacional de Huelga (National Strike Council, CNH) during the first week of September. After multiple discussions with them, he published a manifesto titled “Truth, Justice and Liberty,” in which the JOC declared its full support of the students. The statement lamented that the press and the ecclesiastical authorities sided with the government, producing “a narrative that vilified the students.” They concluded that “Justice and Liberty,” would only take place with the revoking of the law of social dissolution (employed since the 1950s to imprison labor and student activists). They argued that justice could exist only when the worker is conscious of the capitalist system that exploits him or her and the consumer realizes the crucial role US companies play in promoting a materialistic culture. They demanded that the universities break their relationship with powerful caciques and create spaces for productive dialogue, including the participation of communists who often shared the same concerns. “Without genuine dialogue,” they declared, the students cannot engage in meaningful action and thus “the prospect of liberty and justice” will continue to be at risk. “We must all fight for the right to protest, regardless of our political points of view, without having to censor ourselves in fear of state repression.”Footnote ⁴⁵

The statements made by Ramón García did not go unnoticed by the bishop of León, where the JOC had been headquartered since 1964. On September 23, Bishop Zarza called Ramón García to his office to express his dissatisfaction with the JOC, reminding the young leader that the Church could not be associated with political movements that had “objectionable goals,” and “engaged in violent acts” that were ostensibly “led by foreign agents.” For these reasons, Zarza prohibited Ramón García from any further contact with the students, to which the national representative of the JOC replied that “the movement was also composed of young Christians who were committed to the language and principles of Vatican II.” Hoping to retain the leadership of the organization and support the movement, Ramón García sent a letter to the international headquarters in Brussels explaining the JOC's position. The International JOC reacted positively and sent a letter of support to all of its national offices in Latin America, in which they explained the democratic nature of the movement and its relevance to the founding principles of justice and solidarity, as originally voiced by Joseph Cardijn.Footnote ⁴⁶ Furious that Ramón García had acted over his authority, Zarza declared that his diocese would no longer support the JOC and that any further dialogue would have to take place with the archbishop of Oaxaca, Ernesto Corripio Ahumada, who, in turn, declined to support the organization in light of his opposition to the students.Footnote ⁴⁷ A weakened and divided JOC remained active in the aftermath of the Tlatelolco massacre, but many of its members left the organization. Some did it out of fear of persecution from government authorities, while others left to join more radical movements.Footnote ⁴⁸

The final blow to the JOC took place on February 19, 1969, when the bishop of León requested the support of Archbishop Miranda to put an end to the organization. He explained that the only reason that the agonizing JOC remained politically active was the insistence of a small group of radical priests who supported it, namely the director of the SSM, Manuel Velázquez, and three local priests from León who allegedly conspired against Zarza. “I beg you,” he concluded in his letter to Miranda, “to look into the motivations of these people.”Footnote ⁴⁹ By the end of that month, priests across the nation were prohibited from establishing further contacts with a JOC that was no longer recognized by the Mexican Church.Footnote ⁵⁰

Pedro Velázquez, who had timidly welcomed the language of aggiornamento but who nonetheless served as one of the guiding counsels of CELAM in drafting the Medellin conference documents, conveyed to his friends his anger at the brutality of the Mexican state during the 1968 movement.Footnote ⁵¹ And although he failed to express public support for the students, he nonetheless pressured the Church to publish a response to the Tlatelolco massacre. Widely reprinted in most of the nation's newspapers on October 9, 1968, and signed by the Episcopate Committee, the letter strategically condemned all forms of violence, including the alleged acts of vandalism by the students, and, without making reference to the actions of security forces or to the jailing of political prisoners, noted that “we were all responsible” for the Tlatelolco massacre.Footnote ⁵² With a long history of health complications, Velázquez died in December of 1968. His brother Manuel took over the leadership of the SSM and expressed a more condemnatory attitude toward state violence during the 1970s. The same was true of José Álvarez Icaza, founder of CENCOS in 1964.Footnote ⁵³

In its initial years, during the 1960s, CENCOS welcomed the progressive language of aggiornamento, but for the most part it aligned with the social and economic policies championed by the PRI regime.Footnote ⁵⁴ This changed drastically in 1968 when students pressured CENCOS to lend them its offices to publish manifestos for the movement. More importantly, the student movements pressured CENCOS to adopt a radical position that welcomed a dialogue with Marxism, consistent with Vatican II.Footnote ⁵⁵ When the Tlatelolco massacre took place, Álvarez Icaza was in Rome attending the Fourth World Congress for the Lay Apostolate. Appalled by the images he saw published in the Italian newspapers, and then disillusioned with the lack of condemnation from ecclesiastical authorities on his return to Mexico, he concluded that CENCOS had failed to take an assertive position in support of the movement and realized that he “could no longer serve as a speaking representative of the Episcopate.” Tensions between the latter and CENCOS peaked in April 1969, when Álvarez Icaza officially announced that his organization would no longer depend on the economic support of the Church or the blessing of its authorities. As a civic and autonomous organization, CENCOS continued to promote the social teaching of the Church, playing a profound role in championing human rights and in articulating the radical tenets of liberation theology in response to continuous state repression and the rise of neoliberalism in Mexico during the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁵⁶

During the 1970s, Manuel Velázquez, Jesús García, and Álvarez Icaza emerged as isolated but powerful Catholic voices who protested the tortures, disappearances, and killings of political activists that swelled during these years. In 1977, they joined the radical Jesuit priest and founder of Proceso Enrique Maza in speaking loudly against the assassination of Escamilla and his friend Rodolfo Aguilar Álvarez.

The Repression of Rebellious Priests

On November 5, 1972, the president of CENCOS, José Álvarez Icaza, published the disparaging testimony of Carlos De Anda, the head of the Marist priests, in which he condemned the brutality of the state. Published in the daily Excélsior, De Anda's testimony blamed the administration of President Luis Echeverría for the kidnapping and torturing of priests Oscar Núñez and Rafael Reygadas. According to the original account, given by the Marist priests who were present, a group of secret agents disguised as employees of the local power company rang the bell of their home on October 3. Once inside, the heavily armed men ransacked their office, taking everything they deemed suspicious, including a pamphlet on liberation theology. Reygadas was not present at the house, but the assailants shoved Núñez into the back seat of a car without license plates. Once blindfolded, he was taken to a prison equipped with torturing devices, that included “all the elements [needed] for terrorizing people.” Located “somewhere in the southeastern part of the city,” the prison was packed with dozens of young people who were tortured. Reygadas was kidnapped separately and taken to the prison the next day. “It was an atmosphere ‘psychologically’ created to make people talk,” said Núñez in his testimony.Footnote ⁵⁷ Years later, Reygadas explained that the prison was located at Campo Militar #1, the same military facility where activists of the 1968 student movement were tortured and disappeared.Footnote ⁵⁸ The place “smelled like death”; he added, “You could feel the fearful madness in the air, while the screaming of people tortured in other rooms pierced you like a knife into your soul.”Footnote ⁵⁹

The terror started as soon as the Marist priests arrived at the prison. According to Núñez, one of their torturers applied electric shocks to his genitals and angrily said to him, “We are not going to tolerate any hero priests in Mexico! There will be no martyrs in the style of [Colombian priest] Camilo Torres here. Be careful, because you are going to have some fatal accidents here!” The nickname of their torturer was “El Manzanas,” who “caressed his submachine-guns” and further told the priests, “as he spat on the floor”: “This is war. You cannot expect legal and considerate treatment because we are not in normal, peaceful times.” A different man asked, “Do you think that you can hide behind your cassock [and] receive immunity because you are priests[?]” Another torturer shouted, “We are going to smash you without mercy.” According to De Anda, the torturers took turns plunging the priests into a tank of water and then beating them. More than 35 hours had passed since Núñez was kidnapped, while the unfed priests waited in a room without cots or blankets. On the night of October 5, they were blindfolded and placed in another unmarked car, where one of the torturers told them, “I am very sorry for what we have done. Forgive us.” They were then dropped off near La Merced market. According to De Anda, “the cries [of the people tortured at the prison] were heartrending,” while the accusations made against the priests were “baseless and ridiculous.” As he explained to Álvarez Icaza, “The interrogators took turns reading the lists of charges made against them,” ranging from manufacturing bombs, blackmailing the authorities, planning the “kidnapping of a very rich Jewish person,” and serving as the “liaison between the guerrilla group of Lucio Cabañas” and the urban radical groups in charge of “collecting money [and] weapons to [send to] the mountains of Guerrero.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Appalled by the baseless and bizarre allegations and the horrendous accounts of state brutality, the leader of CENCOS explained to his readers that such methods of torture and intimidation were typical of CIA-sponsored operations in other countries of Latin America. Álvarez Icaza then pleaded, “We must not allow torture as a system of repression to enthrone itself in Mexico, as is happening today in Brazil.”Footnote ⁶¹ Similarly, an anonymous column published in La Nación, the weekly magazine of the PAN, indignantly asked, “Has Mexico institutionalized torture?” In claiming that the torture of the priests was not an isolated phenomenon, the author reported that a group of teachers and students from the National Agricultural School of Chapingo, who allegedly worked under the guidance of a priest, had suffered a similar fate—they too were kidnapped and beaten. “Tragically,” the anonymous writer reckoned, “no authority has made a statement, leaving us to conclude that any of us [who question state abuse] can become victims of similar crimes, anytime and anywhere in the country. Is this the beginning of a new and shameless chapter in our history?” In agreement, Álvarez Icaza and Manuel Velázquez concluded that what Mexico needed was a truly democratic system with a reliable judicial system capable of protecting its citizens from human rights abuses and acts of impunity.Footnote ⁶²

The Radicalization of Priests and the Unresolved Murders of Escamilla and Aguilar

What made Núñez and Reygadas so dangerous in the eyes of the authorities was their affiliation with the Centro Politécnico de Proyección (Projection Center of the Polytechnic, CPP) and their open embracement of socialism. The CPP was founded by the Society of Mary in 1966, with Núñez and Pedro Herrasti at the helm; both were public supporters of the 1968 student movement. Their goal was to create a university parish inside the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) capable of “evangelizing its students.”Footnote ⁶³ Reygadas joined them in 1972, a few weeks before he was kidnapped and tortured alongside Núñez. The CPP organized round-table discussions, leadership workshops, and athletic competitions. Their most successful events were those that involved hiking and spiritual retreats. The Marists priests often took students to the Ajusco mountains in the outskirts of Mexico City for the weekend, where they spoke of their participation as founding leaders of the socialist Sacerdotes para el Pueblo (Priests for the People, SPP). There, they also encouraged their Catholic students to adopt liberation theology and become invested in improving the lives of the poor, as championed by similar Latin American movements such as Priests for the Third World in Argentina, the National Office of Social Information (ONIS) in Peru, and Golconda in Colombia.Footnote ⁶⁴

The SPP was founded in 1972 by a group of theologians, headed by the Dominican Alex Morelli, who embraced the preferential option for the poor and called for socialism. Among them were the Marist priests Núñez and Reygadas, and a group of Jesuits who fortified networks with student activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s, namely Luis del Valle and Martín de la Rosa, among others.Footnote ⁶⁵ Their four central goals included strengthening ties with the popular sectors of society; helping them achieve economic and political independence from caciques and political parties; teaching them the principles of liberation theology as practical tools to improve their everyday lives; and calling for a socialist alternative to capitalism.Footnote ⁶⁶ Reygadas remained active with the SPP until the movement dissolved in 1975, primarily as a result of pressures from ecclesiastical authorities.Footnote ⁶⁷ For Núñez, his involvement with the liberationist movement ended immediately after he was tortured. Within days, he left for Paris, where he got a job teaching philosophy. “I visited him twice in France during the 1970s,” recalled García. “He was distraught and promised that he would never return to Mexico.” He never did.Footnote ⁶⁸

Years later, Reygadas revealed in an interview that one of the individuals who oversaw the priests’ torture was Miguel Nazar Haro, a violent agent who had worked for the infamous DFS since the 1960s and who became head of the same institution of surveillance and state repression from 1978 to 1982. His victims remember him as someone who took pleasure in seeing people suffer.Footnote ⁶⁹ “Oscar took the brunt” of the beatings, Reygadas noted. But they both remained terrorized. General Raúl Mendiolea Cerecero, head of the Special Services Section of the Mexico City Police and a key player during the Tlatelolco massacre, also directed their torture. Specifically, he wanted to extract information about the alleged involvement of Jesuits from Monterrey in supporting the guerrilla movements. “It was Mendiolea and Nazar Haro who told us that a young man in Monterrey (under torture) had accused us of having connections to guerrilla priests and this is why we were illegally arrested, without a formal investigation. That is how they operated, with impunity and lack of accountability. They were simply interested in hearing what they wanted to hear.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Reygadas considered going into exile, as had Núñez, but after consulting with one of his superiors, he decided to take refuge at a Dominican convent in Tolantongo, Hidalgo. There the Marist priest stayed for 30 days, with the help of the friar and key advocate of the human rights, Miguel Concha Malo. In addition to Concha Malo,” Reygadas added, “it was Álvarez Icaza who ultimately came in our defense. Unfortunately, that was not the case of the ecclesiastical authorities who failed to follow his example.”Footnote ⁷¹

Reygadas had met the leader of CENCOS in the mid 1960s. In 1972, they participated in the Christians for Socialism Conference in Chile, where dozens of leaders of the Latin American Church met to discuss the social and economic injustices in the region with attention to liberation theology and its dialogue with Marxism.Footnote ⁷² Soon after, Reygadas left the priesthood. Álvarez Icaza published new testimonies denouncing the violation of human rights.Footnote ⁷³ For Reygadas, the decision to leave the Church rested largely on his conclusion that ecclesiastical authorities had failed to condemn state repression. A majority of them, he explained, felt threatened by the ideas of Sacerdotes para el Pueblo.Footnote ⁷⁴

García reached a similar conclusion and saw the crimes against radical priests as part of a broader Latin American story that began with the 1964 coup in Brazil and continued with the long tenure of conservative Colombian priest Alfonso López Trujillo as leader of CELAM, from 1972 to 1984. During this time, García explained, “the conservative majority of Latin American bishops combatted the radicalism of Liberation Theology going as far as to minimize, overlook, and even privately justify the repression of radical priests.” Unfortunately, he noted, “in Mexico the Núñez and Reygadas cases were not isolated exceptions.” His friend Rodolfo Escamilla was murdered in 1977; others suffered the same fate. “Like Héctor Gallego in Panamá and Carlos Mugica in Argentina,” García argued, Mexican priests “were also callously assassinated.”Footnote ⁷⁵

The murder of Escamilla took place on April 27, 1977, but as García suggests, “his killing needs to be understood in the broader context of the 1970s.”Footnote ⁷⁶ These years marked the time “when Christian Base communities and guerrilla movements simultaneously expanded across the country,” he explained. At the time, “a number of radical priests grew increasingly defiant against the brutality of the state” and some of them openly called for a socialist alternative to capitalism, as was the case with Sacerdotes para el Pueblo. A year after Núñez and Reygadas were tortured, “many of us followed the leading position taken by the Bishop of Cuernavaca [Méndez Arceo].” Collectively, “we had protested against the second student massacre, on June 10, 1971,” when dozens of young activists were killed at the hands of a paramilitary group with ties to President Echeverría.Footnote ⁷⁷ Four years later, in November 1975, 19-year-old Fernando Calvillo and 21-year-old Juan Bosco Rosillo were killed. Both were politically engaged members of the ACJM, and while the episcopate demanded an investigation and several newspapers reported on the crimes, their killers were never identified.Footnote ⁷⁸ A year later, the hitherto untouched bishops of Cuernavaca and San Cristóbal de las Casas, Méndez Arceo and Samuel Ruiz, were expelled from Ecuador, where they were attending a conference, along with other “radical Mexican priests who were [allegedly] agitating” in South America, including, among others, Jesús García.Footnote ⁷⁹

The repression against radical priests reached its most violent moment at the end of the Echeverría administration, between 1976 and 1977. A month prior to the killing of Escamilla, 26-year-old Rodolfo Aguilar Álvarez was gunned down in his native state of Chihuahua. Known to his friends as “El Chapo” (“shorty”), Aguilar had served as a priest for only two years. During this time, he preached the principles of liberation theology in his homilies at the Nombre de Dios parish in Chihuahua and hosted weekly meetings at the church to organize a group of displaced campesinos. With them, he organized the Comité de Derechos del Barrio Nombre de Dios, a cooperative that demanded the return of their lands and public services for their communities. In a meeting with the governor of Chihuahua, Manuel Bernardo Aguirre on June 25, 1975, the young priest was ordered to put an end to “his agitating and subversive actions.” Four days later, his house was burned down; the local press blamed a group of guerrilleros for the crime. Despite the threats, the priests remained active with the committee. Just days before his death, Aguilar publicly stated, “If something happens to me, the only people that will be responsible are those working with the government.”Footnote ⁸⁰ On March 21, 1977, he was kidnapped and gunned down. His murder was never investigated, and with the exception of some lay journalists and priests from La Nación, CENCOS and Proceso, no Catholic authorities protested against the atrocious crime.Footnote ⁸¹

The lack of involvement from the highest authorities of the Church in relation to the murder of Aguilar stood in vast contrast to the way a handful of influential bishops responded to the harassment, intimidation, and arrest of José Batarse Charur, a priest from Torreón, Coahuila, who was jailed on two different occasions, labeled a “communist” by the local press, and ultimately expelled from his parish, first in October 1976 and again in May 1977. Like Aguilar, Batarse was also an outspoken critic of caciquismo and a vocal sympathizer of liberation theology.Footnote ⁸² Following a second arrest in May 15, 1977, Batarse moved to Chiapas, where he first assisted Bishop Samuel Ruiz in the expansion of Christian Base Communities, but ultimately abandoned the priesthood and married.Footnote ⁸³

By the time Escamilla was killed in April 1977, it was clear that a pattern of state repression had been established, including an effort to create confusion in the press and minimize the role of government authorities in the crimes. By then, the radical priest from Michoacán had opened an office in Mexico City's Colonia Roma on behalf of the Centro Social de Promoción Popular (Social Center for the Advancement of the People), a collective project of displaced citizens that supported land reform and a halt to gentrification. There, he also organized people who had been evicted from their homes and led workshops to brief them on their legal rights and to encourage them to create autonomous and self-reliant organizations.Footnote ⁸⁴

Escamilla's killing received wide but inconsistent and sometimes disbelieving coverage in the press. As with the killings and disappearances of countless activists of the time, the press presented his murder as a tragic outcome of the radicalism of the era. According to accounts by two key witnesses of the murder, and as reported in several newspapers, the alleged killer was a 25-year-old man who shot the priest in the back five or six times. Under his right arm, the assassin allegedly carried dozens of Leninist pamphlets with messages on the emancipation of women. The officer who captured the killer stated that the young man was a member of the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre, the largest guerrilla organization in Mexico, founded in 1972, which bore the brunt of state terror during the 1970s.Footnote ⁸⁵ The daily El Informador questioned the validity of this narrative, telling its readers that “Escamilla had a long history of practicing a Marxist doctrine,” while qualifying a statement made by Manuel Velázquez that the priest was “above all, a long-time defender of human rights.” Citing the director of the SSM, the newspaper “demanded an exhaustive investigation” and called for “greater solidarity with a [progressive] sector of the church that, with its own blood, has awakened a greater sense of justice.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Yet, unlike their reaction in the case of Batarse, the highest ecclesiastical authorities made no public condemnation.Footnote ⁸⁷

For its part, the conservative daily Avance identified José Barrigueta Sada as the alleged lone-wolf assassin. According to the publication, the killer was a leading member of the “Communist group ‘Antonio Gramsci’ who had received support from Escamilla” but who “murdered the priest in an effort to take over the printing press of the Centro Social” and publish the radical pamphlets of his organization.Footnote ⁸⁸ For Jesús García, “these and similar outlandish accounts published in various newspapers served two purposes: to stain the memory of Escamilla and question the legitimacy of the work he was doing with the Centro Social in effectively halting the developmentalist projects of urbanization.”

By the late 1960s, Escamilla's efforts on behalf of workers, “had already produced the results that he wanted.” The FAT had emerged “as the only labor union in the country that could truly claim to be independent from the government, from the political parties, and from the wealthy industrialists,” García explained. Moreover, Escamilla had “moved to organize people who had been displaced from their homes.” He added, “His most successful project resulted in the creation of the Palo Alto Cooperative.” Located in the southern part of the city, near the highway to Toluca, the cooperative included the work of hundreds of families who collectively occupied and eventually claimed ownership of their lands and effectively advocated for public services and the building of public schools and health clinics.Footnote ⁸⁹ In García's interpretation, the cooperative contrasted with the developmentalist projects of the government. “There was no mystery. It was clear why they killed him.”Footnote ⁹⁰

CENCOS, SSM, and Proceso backed the version given by García. They published multiple denunciations following the killing of Escamilla, demanding not only an investigation of his case and an immediate end to state repression, but also the creation of a national human rights organization.Footnote ⁹¹ In July 1977, the Mexico City offices of the SSM, CENCOS, and the Jesuit Order were ransacked by DFS agents, while a press campaign continued to link them to violent leftist groups.Footnote ⁹² “You have to give it to the agents of the government and the ecclesiastical authorities that blessed them,” García sarcastically concluded in the interview. “The blatant manipulation of the facts worked for them in 1968 and remained an effective tool of repression throughout the 1970s.”Footnote ⁹³ The radical priest and once director of the Jesuit journal Christus (1968-72) Enrique Maza agreed. In 1968 and 1971 he had provided harsh criticisms of government authorities in the Jesuit journal, making them solely responsible for the Tlatelolco and Corpus Christi massacres. In 1972, Church authorities removed him from the directorship of Christus. Four years later, the ecclesiastical authorities similarly forced Alex Morelli to step down as director of the radical catholic magazine Contacto. That same year, Maza founded Proceso, where he opened a space for radical Catholics —including, among others, Miguel Ángel Granados Chapa, Alejandro Aviles, and Gaspar Elizondo—to denounce the assassination of Aguilar and Escamilla as a gross violation of human rights. These influential journalists joined Maza in depicting the assassinations as an “unambiguous effort” on the part of government and ecclesiastical authorities to “silence” those who practiced the preferential option for the poor.Footnote ⁹⁴