The Legacy of Liberation Theology in Colombia

The Economic Model for Third World Countries in Theological Debates

In the post–World War II era, economic development was presented by politicians and academics as the only viable means of resolving the problems of marginality of the masses in the Global South. The disquieting context of the cold war placed the challenges of development at the center of social debates. For the West, the threat represented by the socialist countries grew, while socialist Russia’s industrialization was presented as a model for colonized countries fighting for their independence. In 1949 the West, with U.S. President Harry Truman at the helm (1945–1953), advocated for development as the key to the struggle against communism. Presenting itself as the referent in matters of development, the United States announced its decision to “help” poor countries overcome the situation.

The Catholic Church took part in this reflection, making use of its significant power to influence the debate. However, its power was not characterized by unity of thought. The important issues that concerned it created divisions, particularly on matters of development, which were the object of radical confrontations. In Catholicism the theology of development supported the developmentalist policies while the theology of liberation criticized them, maintaining that they reinforced the economic and political dependence of peoples of the South. The papal encyclical Populorum Progressio (Paul II, 1967) and the document In Search of a Theology of Development (Committee on Society, Development, and Peace, 1969) were the point of departure for both the theology of development and the theology of liberation.

The Theology of Development

Numerous theologians of developed countries subscribe to developmentalist policies that advocate a goal of progress analogous to the civilizing mission imposed on Latin America since European colonization. In these theories underdevelopment is seen as a step toward development. ¹ The resolution of underdevelopment is merely a question of time and the implementation of the model of the developed countries to spur the passage from a backward agrarian economy to a developed industrialized economy. Thia Cooper (2007) emphasizes that the terms of the reflection conducted by theologians in the North remained in the embryonic stage of questions on the role of Christians in development, property ownership in connection with the right of the poor to food, and the relationship between “salvation” and development. The developmentalists spoke to the most powerful classes from a faith perspective, asking them to implement Christian-inspired policies to alleviate poverty and to resolve international injustice (see Gustavo Gutiérrez’s [1972] analysis of the evolution of this idea on ecclesiastical texts, particularly on Popularum Progressio). Likewise, in 1968, the Conference on World Cooperation for Development demonstrated concern for the disparities in technological advances and the growing differences between rich and poor: “The majority of Christians live in the developed North, and while this area is wealthy far beyond the general level of world society, they profit from this unbalanced prosperity and must in conscience account for their stewardship.” In light of these inequalities, the Beirut Conference (1968) called on the industrialized countries to help poor countries increase public assistance for development to 1 percent of the gross domestic product in 1970 and on the developing countries to allow the poor to benefit from technological advances. At the same time, the developmentalist theologians were concerned to preserve the status quo. What worried the Church in the face of social inequalities in Colombia, for example, was that they represented a source of conflict (Pastoral Collective, 1951, quoted in Echeverry, 2007: 60):

When the gospel principles of love of God and neighbor are forgotten by a nation, the result is an avalanche of hatred, divisions, and desires for revenge. We must be especially mindful that class struggle is the result of forgetting the duty of charity and justice toward the poor by the rich and employers toward their workers and the obligations of the poor to their benefactors and proletarian classes to their company bosses. To each we recommend the social doctrine of the Church on the relationship between capital and labor, so that rich and poor, bosses and workers may always be united by the sacred ties of Christian charity and justice.

The Theology of Liberation

Liberation theology emerged in Latin America in the early 1960s in a context of social effervescence that took the form of national liberation struggles. ² Inspired by the story of Jesus’ life, clerics increasingly chose to fight for social justice alongside the marginalized. Liberation theology interpreted Christian practice as needing to be inspired by God’s love—a preferential option for the poor. Thus, faith was linked first to Jesus’ example and then to the men and women who, in his image and likeness, were martyred on the cross. ³ In contrast to the developmentalist theologians, liberationists did not seek peace by maintaining the structures of domination; on the contrary, they called for social struggle. Monsignor Gerardo Valencia Cano, the bishop of Buenaventura, Colombia (quoted in Giraldo, 2012: 47), described the model that liberationists were committed to in these terms:

A Latin American socialism that joins blacks, Indians, and whites in a single race of Latin American color . . . a Latin American socialism that drives us to tap our own resources with our own free hands and our minds free of prejudices, threats, and alienating commitments . . . that is our platform. But who could carry it out? We already know—the oppressed. That’s why we speak of liberation and not development. Development is the new song that capitalism sings to put its victims to sleep. We talk about liberation because oppression surrounds us.

For those who embark on the path of social struggle, change is important: it entails living with the poor and as they do. A common point of theological reflection of religious and laity, Catholic and Protestant, who are committed to liberation theology is that faith leads them to stop thinking of evangelization as a purely spiritual action. Instead it becomes part of a process of conscientization and politicization ⁴ on the path to social transformation. This is the essence of effective love. Interpretation of the biblical texts seeks to reveal the socioeconomic situations in which the communities live, and this leads to a platform of social struggle. Liberation cannot come from the dominant classes but must come from the oppressed. In a Latin America marked by great concentration of wealth and land ownership, the progressive sectors of the Church support landless peasants’ demands for agrarian reform.

At the same time, the liberationists’ critique of developmentalist theories was not for their lack of generosity toward poor countries. The problem lay in the economicist-modernizing focus of the development policies themselves and the fact that their implementation benefited the dominant classes. Both dependency theorists ⁵ and liberation theologians maintained that the problem of development lay in the international economic relations that caused dependency in economies of the periphery and allowed for development in the countries of the center. Criticism of development policies in this context was a rejection not of the goal but rather of the naïve belief that change in the economic situation was possible without change in the situation of domination. The countries of the periphery are not on the road to development. Their role as providers of raw materials and cheap labor in the international system contributes to keeping them underdeveloped. Foreign debt plays an important role in this: it impoverishes the Latin American countries and allows the developed countries to maintain international political and economic control.

Thus, developmentalist theories were attacked as a new version of colonialism reinforcing the dependency of countries receiving international “aid” and “internal colonialism.” ⁶ Voices at variance with the developmentalist discourses argued that opposition in the international system was not limited to ideologies or to East-communist/West-capitalist political regimes. Unequal distribution of wealth created another conflict: the opposition of rich and poor, of North and South. ⁷

Liberation Theology in Colombia

Liberation theology was not as prevalent in Colombia as in other regions of Latin America such as Brazil or Central America. However, in Colombia it took a very special path (see Echeverry, 2007). Two facts characterize the imaginaries of Colombia society. First of all, there was the life and commitment of the Colombian priest Camilo Torres, cofounder of the sociology department at the Universidad Nacional and of the Frente Unido. He joined the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army—ELN) ⁸ guerrillas in 1966 and died in combat on February 14, 1967. His theological reflections and his decision to join the guerrillas greatly impacted the deeply religious Colombian society, and his life has been a reference point in the dynamics of social and armed conflict in Colombia and for those who opt for the poor, whether armed or not. Secondly, there was the Golconda, a group of revolutionary Catholic priests who radically questioned capitalism for being anti-Christian (Torres and Arias, 2013). Its first meeting took place in December 1968, and its founding declaration (quoted in Torres and Arias, 2013: 14, 23) states that

the tragic state of underdevelopment endured by our country—contrary to the premises of certain distorted interpretations of reality—is the historical result of economic, political, cultural, and social dependency exerted by foreign power centers through our ruling classes. Typical of Colombian as well as all Latin American underdevelopment, this is precisely the domination exerted on our society by a minority class whose privileges date back to colonial times. . . We reject the fact that foreign agencies become distributors of our agricultural surplus and that, under the pretext of aid, conceal the exploitation resulting from the continual deterioration of the terms of exchange.

In their first public communiqué, these priests announced their solidarity with “the oppressed, the exploited, and all those who take up their defense” (quoted in Torres and Arias, 2013: 90). By reactivating Camilo Torres’s Frente Unido newspaper and through their educational and social ministry they pursued social justice from a faith perspective. These are the same ideas that were developed in the 1970s as liberation theology throughout Latin America. ⁹

Golconda was short-lived. As Jesuit priest Javier Giraldo recalls, its members were repressed by every means possible: foreign priests were deported, assassinated, ¹⁰ tortured, imprisoned, and stripped of their authority. This intense persecution explains, at least partly, the limited scope of liberation theology in Colombia and certainly also the fact that several members of Golconda later joined the Marxist guerrillas (Torres and Arias, 2013: 10). In addition, the open and bloody repression of social movements in Colombia helps to explain why the debate on development was gradually displaced by the defense of human rights. Repression and human rights violations in Colombia did not diminish as they did elsewhere in the region with the end of the dictatorships.

Valpy Fitzgerald (2007: 262) points out that

in the late 1990s, although economic conditions in Latin America are not much better than before, there has been a major change since the 1970s and 1980s in the sense that democracy and human rights are now better established throughout the continent. This opening up of the political sphere has probably diverted popular protest against economic conditions away from the temple towards the forum, so to speak. Combined with steady pressure from Rome to exclude liberation theologians from bishoprics and seminaries, the public voice of liberation theology on economic questions may become less audible in years to come.

With no intention of arguing with this thesis, I would point out that the controversy over the economic model has extreme repression as a backdrop. This repression, carried out by both democratic and dictatorial regimes, ¹¹ is not marginal in the modern West but, on the contrary, a constituent element of development (Escobar, 2004).

From Liberation Theology to the Theology of Life

The turning point in liberation theology in Colombia, when reflections on development began to be displaced by or at least combined with the idea of defending human rights, seems to have been linked with the repression of the 1960s and 1970s. Aimed at eliminating communism, this repression was at least as bloody as that carried out by other dictatorships in Latin America. The late 1970s saw massive disappearances and torture, and in the 1980s the repression increased and became systematic, with many massacres and forced displacements. ¹² Starting in 1985, a concrete strategy to create right-wing paramilitary groups was established, with the goal of taking military, social, and political control throughout the country (CINEP, 2004). Over the past 30 years, paramilitary groups have committed selective assassinations of social leaders, publicly tortured members of communities, carried out massacres, and threatened people living in areas coveted by capitalist economic development. These crimes constituted the motives for the forced displacement of more than 4.6 million people between 1985 and 2009. In turn, the displacements were a mechanism for wrenching almost 4 million hectares of land from campesinos (Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento, 2009).

We see also that in Colombia since the mid-1980s, human rights work has grown at the same rhythm as repression. The shift from liberation theology to the theology of life is part of a broader process in which different popular sectors have been prioritizing the design of their social project and its demands more in terms of rights and less in socioeconomic terms. As Giraldo (2004) recalls, clerics of the most progressive sectors continued this trend with hope:

By comparing national and international law, we find a possible means for defending fundamental human values, which we previously tried to defend relying more on social and political movements that were vehemently demonized by the Establishment. I had to immerse myself in legal disciplines that were foreign to me up till then, and my hope took the shape, in no small way, of legal struggle.

To comprehend this phenomenon it is helpful to analyze separately the what and the why. Without attempting to enter into a detailed analysis of these issues, I will present here a brief summary of the theoretical analysis of these two research questions.

First, what happened can be explained with the help of social movement theory’s concept of political opportunity (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, 1996; Tilly and Tarrow, 2007), especially taking into account its aspects of institutional liberalization and the repressive propensity of the political regime. ¹³ A political opportunity is a change in the dynamics of a political regime that facilitates or fosters social mobilization. Colombian social movements, among them liberation theology, saw in the defense of human rights an opportunity to advance their demands of the state. In fact, in the mid-1980s the Colombian state began to implement a process that we can call “low-intensity democracy” (see Avilés, 2006)—administrative decentralization and acknowledgment of social problems fostering citizen participation and legitimizing demands in a legal sense. This allowed the defense of human rights to become leverage for these movements, creating new scenarios—such as court proceedings— and new support, particularly at the international level. The political opportunity created by the liberalization of institutions was reinforced by changes in the level of repression. The threat represented by the repression forced a mobilization in defense of fundamental rights, mostly the right to life and physical integrity.

Secondly, the social movement’s prioritization of the defense of human rights has to do with the parallel influence upon it of the dynamics of social and international relations. Social relations in Colombia are characterized by the use of a large dose of violence in the exercise of power and production. The country’s 60-year-long social and armed conflict is this kind of relationship, marked by direct coercion and the response that this violence provokes. From the 1980s on, the violence exerted by the dominant groups (landowners, national and foreign businessmen, armed forces and their paramilitary groups) intensified and became systematic. Crimes such as massacres, forced disappearances, and torture produced massive displacements of people, and this created a true humanitarian crisis. Along with this, in the context of the international system we have witnessed the implementation of a gradually imposed hegemonic procedural democracy. Fostered also by a growing process of internationalization of the dominant class, the democratization of Colombian institutions is taking place through a very progressive legislative process parallel to the increase in violence. ¹⁴

All in all, we can assert that the defense of human rights has benefited from two dynamics that paradoxically feed each other. On one hand, the increase in repression has forced social organizations to treat the defense of human rights as a survival mechanism. On the other, the profusion of political and civil rights has increased hope for the democratic discourse of which human rights are a part. The effects of the new dynamic on the social movements whose principal demand is the defense of human rights is a vast subject that will not be dealt with here (but see Celis, 2013).

On the subject of human rights and faith, we can identify two opposing camps: the defenders of the powerful and the defenders of the majorities who have been denied even their human essence (Pérez, 1992). In Latin America and in Colombia, as the liberationists have insistently pointed out, the actions of the dictatorships and the armed forces were backed by members of the Church. Similar stances in the history of Christianity explain the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the colonization of the Americas. The history of this divergence in Christianity has been acknowledged by the Church hierarchy (Catholic Church and Commissio Theologica Internationalis, 2000), while the consequences of defending human rights are not the same for everyone. The Jesuit priest Javier Giraldo (2008: 54), analyzing the document on memory and reconciliation just mentioned, sees progress in the Church’s assumption of responsibility but criticizes the document’s ambiguity and excessive prudence. The document reflects an intention to acknowledge the facts while trying to avoid their consequences:

Having entered the third Christian millennium we must deplore the weak “mea culpa” announced so far by the Church through its hierarchies. To the record of a historical memory that gravely offends the Christian conscience we must add the record of the grave penitential timidity that halts the renovation of the Church in the spirit of the Gospel. The painful memory will continue to weigh heavily on our consciences unless it is marked by bold gestures, with radical strategies of change in mentalities, in-depth examination of the factors that facilitated the horrors of the past, and pastoral practices that embody options profoundly opposed to the historical sins.

The question for the Christians who accompanied communities that were victims of human rights violations was how to respond from a faith perspective to this ever more violent reality. From their analyses arose a theology of human rights or of life. The theology of human rights would prevent cruelty by acknowledging the humanity of all. Christian response to the repression was the defense of human rights. Accompanying campesino communities in defense of life and the land seemed to be a given for progressive Christian movements (CINEP, 1998; Giraldo, 2010). The option for the poor therefore takes the form of defense of human rights (Abilio Peña, interview, 2012). This was a natural evolution for the religious and laity in the rural regions most affected by the repression. The crimes that had occurred could not be forgotten. In the hope of reducing the repression against social organizations and their communities, Christians committed to victimized communities felt the need to be in solidarity with the suffering of the victims through efforts in defense of human rights.

The 1980s constituted the decade of greatest expansion of the work of liberation theology in Colombia, and it was also the decade in which the defense of human rights became the number-one demand of all social movements (Archila, 2002; Archila and CINEP, 2003). The various organizational mechanisms promoted by liberation theologians for Christian base communities, biblical interpretation circles, and social and pastoral education activities were focused on the defense of life (Echeverry, 2007: 82). In fact, the culmination of liberation theology in Colombia was the Ecumenical Encounter of Christians for Life in 1988 (Abilio Peña, interview, 2012).

The theology of life established a parallel between the crucified Jesus and the martyrdom of communities and their leaders. The establishment of Christian base communities was a response to the desire to establish faith-based spaces for organization and action. As a form of social organization, these communities played a substantive role in important processes of politicization and mobilization. However, given the massive and systematic violation of human rights, the communities themselves became the locus of conscientization and mobilization. As Peña put it,

In the work with [displaced] communities, we can see that they are today’s Christian base communities. A change that I noticed is that we were working to build base communities and we found communities that were total victims—that was their fundamental trait—which was an outrage, as Pérez Aguirre says, and that the people were also deeply religious. We saw that from the perspective of faith and church, those are the communities. . . . The people are victims of all imaginable types of attack. Through the displacement they are murdered, tortured, disappeared, exiled, raped, excluded in the new host location for being black, women, indigenous, campesinos; they’re stigmatized, they say “He’s a guerrilla,” “She’s a guerrilla.” The face of God that Puebla speaks of is sketched there. They are people who have lost absolutely everything, everything!

Jesus’ martyrdom inspired action, martyrdom as witness, for progressive believers. Thus, for example, reference to the Beatitudes provides meaning to suffering and encourages resistance to repression in the service of justice (Abilio Peña, interview, 2012). As Javier Giraldo (2012: 12) points out, in accordance with the testaments and St. Thomas Aquinas, the cause of justice goes beyond faith and justifies martyrdom. ¹⁵ Likewise, hope and faith serve to transform the fear and suffering of communities into acts of resistance, no longer theologically metaphorical but real and part of daily life. ¹⁶ According to Eustaquio Polo, a campesino from the El Tesoro–Camelias humanitarian zone in Curvaradó (quoted in CIJP, 2011: 11),

Our faith has allowed us to come together, to pray in silence, to tell stories of witness in our lives, to make pilgrimages, and in this way we were blessed to celebrate this encounter of faith and politics based on faith understood as the strength, the life of God that gives us courage to confront the palm oil merchants while we live in our occupied lands, sown with oil palm. We have made the decision to cut down the oil palm to dignify our land. This action, motivated by the power of God, gave us confidence in our ability to organize humanitarian zones and biodiversity zones. Today we can see that defending the land keeps us united.

We note that not all Christians committed to the defense of human rights share the same ideological principles. Humanism leads some to disqualify abuses and others, the liberationists, to seek radical change. The Christian commitment reflected in the defense of human rights today has its origin not only in liberation theology but also, in a more general way, in the Christian ethic promoted by the Second Vatican Council (Romero, 1992). Thus humanism and faith have allowed Christian advocates of human rights from different perspectives to carry out part of this task jointly or in a coordinated fashion.

One example of this evolution is the relationship between the Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular (Center for Investigation and Popular Education—CINEP) and the Interdenominational Justice and Peace Commission. At their inception, the work of these two organizations was sparked by the strength exerted by liberation theology. During the 1960s, in coordination with the Episcopal Conference, Jesuit priests created the Centro de Investigación y Acción Social (Center for Research and Social Action—CIAS), which in 1972 became the CINEP. Since its founding, the CINEP has conducted research and organizational development with campesino and workers’ movements. Given the magnitude of the human rights violations, it created a human rights office in 1979, and in 1983 it participated in the creation of the Asociación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared—ASFADDES). Nevertheless, ideological differences among Christian advocates of human rights exist, are deep, and involve the very understanding of those rights and the role they should play as Christians. Whose human rights are to be defended, everyone’s or those of the dehumanized and martyred? Whose responsibility is the violation of human rights, everyone’s or that of the very powerful elites who have historically impoverished and hurt the majority? As Diego Pérez of the CINEP human rights team points out, in 1987 these discrepancies were already evident at the core of the institution (CINEP, 1998: 224):

The previous assertions of the [CINEP] leadership should translate into changes in the handling of information and accusations; in establishing relations and dialogue with government entities in charge of the issue of human rights; in a pedagogy of peace and total rejection of war. In the debates about this new orientation it was even said that the director was giving in to pressure from government officials and the expectations of public opinion. Ultimately, this situation produced changes in the membership of the team.

These ideological differences among Christians defending human rights led to the establishment of the Interdenominational Justice and Peace Commission of the Religious Conference in Colombia in 1988. ¹⁷ The Commission was present in the most conflictive regions of the country providing assistance to the displaced. Among its most significant achievements was the creation of shelters that served as temporary lodging for campesinos displaced by the violence. Despite their differences, the CINEP and the Commission were united in the defense of human rights. Together they documented human rights violations throughout the country, and this effort produced a database (CINEP, 2014) that gave rise to the Nunca Más Project (MOVICE, 2014) as part of the search for the truth regarding crimes of the state—a project in which a great number of regional and national social and human rights organizations participated.

Capitalist Development as a Cause of Human Rights Violations

While pastoral social action is designed in terms of human rights (see, e.g., Giraldo, 2008), the heirs of liberation theology underscore the economic causes of those violations. Interest in the economic aspects of the conflict is explained by the fact that the state violence denounced by theologians who defend human rights is largely a response to a need to implement a particular economic model. This model, based on the extraction of raw materials in agriculture, energy, and mining, positions Colombia in the international economy (Tribunal International d’Opinion, 2008). For Colombia’s indigenous peoples, campesinos, and Afro-descendants, development entails violent and radical breaks with their environment and way of life. As one leader from the Council of Afro-descendant Communities in Curvaradó, Chocó (interview, 2012), pointed out,

Our struggle is not merely to avail ourselves of the mineral or natural resources but also to defend this territory. . . . With the Violence they try to make a community disappear, and when a community loses its customs, its traditions, it disappears. Thus a child will no longer want to eat cooked plantain or salted fish but will want to eat chicken and yoghurt. . . . Instead of growing rice and peach palms, now we want to buy rice in a bag. These are changes, and the Violence has changed everything for us, everything.

On this point, these alienations are a consequence not only of cultural differences from the high-productivity model but also of the direct and physical violence used against these communities to drive them off their lands in order to increase productivity within a capitalist economy. Of Colombia’s 4.6 million internal refugees, more than 80 percent are campesinos, indigenous, and/or Afro-descendants (Garay Salamanca and Comisión de Seguimiento, 2010).

The communities of Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó in the Bajo Atrato region of Chocó have been victims of state violence at several levels. In a deeply racist society, this department, inhabited by mostly Afro-descendants, is the poorest in the country. State violence is manifested not only by the abandonment of the region and its precarious living conditions but, since 1997, by an unprecedented wave of repression. Military operations carried out by the armed forces and paramilitary groups cost the lives of hundreds of Afro-descendants and in many cases forced their displacement (CINEP and CIJP, 2005). As in all displacements, the communities were forced to flee leaving behind all their belongings.

Before the 1997 displacement, the inhabitants of Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó practiced agriculture largely for subsistence, participating in the regional market with a small surplus. Three years after the displacement, the region’s inhabitants were able to return to their lands with the support of Catholic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), ¹⁸ but now these lands were planted with oil palm and the streams had been diverted in order to irrigate them. This megaproject had begun immediately after the displacement. In the government’s 2002 and 2010 economic development plans palm oil was designated a strategic product for Colombia’s development and an alternative to coca. Therefore oil palm growers benefited from government aid and resources from Plan Colombia. Considering this situation, the communities of Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó, accompanied by the Inter-Church Justice and Peace Commission, rejected the official government narrative, which presented forced displacement as a result of the armed conflict, arguing that the conflict had been created to cause their displacement and steal their lands for a project that benefited powerful economic interests.

The Inter-Church Justice and Peace Commission has been accompanying communities that have been victims of state repression for 25 years and the communities of Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó in particular since 1998. It is an NGO specializing in the defense of human rights that is “composed of persons of faith from various Christian denominations who express and live the faith based on the defense of life within the framework of human rights” (CIJP, 2008). Its work in defense of campesino, indigenous, and Afro-descendant communities is carried out in terms of “international human rights law and is inspired by the evangelical precept of human dignity.” With the support of the Inter-Church Justice and Peace Commission, the Afro-descendant communities of Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó have developed a legal defense of their rights. One example of this legal and organizational struggle was the demand for recognition of property titles for their collective lands, which was granted by the government in 2000.

Their determination to remain in their territories and oppose the mega-plantations has exacted a high cost from the communities. Since their return, they have been attacked numerous times by paramilitary groups, causing 14 displacements farther inside the region. Applying the principle of distinction to the civilian population, in 2004 they established humanitarian zones, inhabited exclusively by civilians, as part of a strategy of protection and empowerment through recognition of their status as organized civilian populations. The economic development projects that aim to industrialize their lands and support the participation of the Colombian economy in the international market are not acceptable to them or to the Commission, given that they would transform community members from land owners to company employees. In the conflict between the life project proposed by communities and the state’s development project, faith-based practices such as those of the Commission reinforce the struggles of those communities and make their suffering visible.

Conclusion

Liberation theology has undergone significant transformations from the 1970s to the present. Until the 1980s its pioneers opposed capitalist development and worked toward the construction of socialism. Although today its theological reflections no longer focus on the economic and social model, it has more points of continuity with than of divergence from the theology of life. Currently, the heirs of the liberationists accompany the victims of repression and nurture resistance from the perspectives of faith and the defense of human rights. The human rights violations they resist are carried out in order to impose a development model based on extraction of raw materials and minerals—a model that serves the interests of powerful national and foreign economic groups. They oppose that model and adopt the preferential option for the poor that characterized the liberationists of the 1970s. The defense of human rights appeared as a political opportunity for Colombia’s social movements, including the liberationists, at a time when institutional liberalization had brought at least formal recognition for sectors that had traditionally been marginalized, such as indigenous peoples and Afro-descendents. At the same time, the repression had made the defense of human rights become a priority for these movements. At a time when capitalist development seems to be imposing itself as the universal means of organization of the economy and society, the clerics and laity that make up the Inter-Church Justice and Peace Commission are struggling alongside the campesino, indigenous, and Afro-descendant communities to defend a way of life that does not aspire to capitalist development and refuses to cede its lands to agro-industrial and mining mega-projects. The experience of Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó confirms that, far from having disappeared, the legacy of liberation theology is present in the various processes of social resistance in Colombia today.