they retain a predominantly female following while for the most part excluding women from positions of leadership? These questions become even more urgent when we come to neo-Pentecostal churches, with their highly centralized global organizations, their proclamation of material well-being as an end in itself and their disruptive intervention in electoral politics.
Pentecostalism is not a comfortable sort of dissidence, but it is a dissidence in several senses: it is a religious dissidence which stands apart from a still hegemonic Catholicism; it is a cultural dissidence that stands against the permissive society and against intellectual elites, and against those elements of popular culture that draw on tradition, on indigeneity, on African heritage and on rituals of ‘the world turned upside down’ like carnival. It cannot be dismissed merely as false consciousness, as an artefact of neo-liberalism or as a money-making machine.
Interpreting Pentecostalism requires a compromise between the evidence of many shared characteristics within and between countries and cultures across the globe, especially the style of meetings and the ethical content of preaching, and innumerable local variations in scale and in class and ethnic composition. Explanations in terms of the power of neo-liberalism and its mediatic allies to intoxicate the minds of the illiterate masses may be criticized as expressions of patronizing intellectual arrogance, but there is plenty of evidence that certain sorts of churches – mainly neo-Pentecostals – are collecting incalculable amounts of money from followers in response to promises of health and wealth and a life free from demonic powers. Is this evidence of a partnership between the churches and neo-liberalism? And how do we interpret some pastors’ collusion with the drug traffic as well as supposed addiction recovery? Evangelical politics have veered sharply to the right in Colombia and Brazil, while church leaders have successfully pursued political careers on the back of appeals to family values and a fierce denunciation of permissiveness and non-traditional sexualities, paving the way for the (very narrow) defeat of the consultative peace referendum in Colombia in 2017 and the large second-round majority of a fiercely illiberal president in Brazil in 2018. And yet Pentecostalism also retains many features of religion as we conventionally conceive of it: many local church leaders (the ones who do not pursue wealth and power) regard such extravagances with contempt, and there are also innumerable churches where prayer is an act performed for its own sake, rather than as a plea for a windfall or for help in finding a suitable life partner.
Pentecostalism has for long raised many questions for ready-made models in the interpretation of Latin American culture, and the recent aggressive political turn associated with neo-Pentecostalism has been an additional shock, both practical and intellectual, to those models, whether modernist, postmodernist or decolonial.
Indigenous movements and democracy
The focus of academic and political debate about indigenous movements on what they have done for their followers and their ethnic constituencies, and on what external forces have done or should do for them, has distracted from what they do for society as a whole. By fighting discrimination, they also fight for civil and human rights. By demanding recognition, they raise awareness of a nation’s history and of the neglect of their social exclusion and maltreatment in dominant as well as dissenting (Marxist and marxisant) narratives of a nation’s history. This is most glaringly visible in the standard phrase voiced when Argentina’s indigenous people are mentioned: ‘there are no longer any Indians in this country: they were all massacred in the nineteenth century.’ The phrase manages to recognize yet also to relativize the appalling violence unleashed against the Araucanian Indians by the Campaña del Desierto in the 1870s. It is also untrue: Argentina has in recent years ‘discovered’ or rediscovered a significant and vocal indigenous population. The recognition of these populations and of their right to full citizenship is a contribution to the democratization of a society – in Bolivia, it has gone together with an incorporation of a mass of the population whose previous political participation had been extra-institutional. In Chile, growing awareness of the Mapuche demands has contributed to the atmosphere of dissent and disillusion underlying the 2020 referendum and opening the way to a new Constitution. In Brazil, what began in the 1990s as a demand for quotas in universities for black students has extended into many walks of life, for example into the fashion world, into the allocation of funds for political campaigns, and into the appointment of public servants. Meanwhile, more and more Brazilians were declaring themselves black or brown so that by now there is a consensus that more than half the population count themselves as negro or moreno (brown) and thus as part of the quota-eligible class formally described in censuses as pretos, pardos and indígenas (black, brown and indigenous). The effect can be called democratizing in two senses: increasing awareness of racial discrimination and inequality in society; and an ever-broadening access to affirmative action. Unfortunately, as of 2021, the country’s president has no interest in democracy, yet despite expressing hostility to quota systems, he has not attempted to reverse them.
If these movements have indeed contributed to a democratization of some kind in society, we must at the same time recognize that Latin American political institutions, that is, Latin American democracy, broadly speaking, has entered a retrogressive phase since 2010: authoritarianism and abuse of power are on the increase under governments of the right as well as others thought to be of the left.
Indigenous and anti-racist movements are openings. Assembled under a broad banner of identity, they are able to absorb, or shelter, a range of ideas and ideals and varied racial and ethno-linguistic groups. Indigenous movements represent indigenous people and are carried forward by their leaders, but the restoration or protection of indigenous culture is but one part of their demands and activities. Their most notable other achievements are in the spheres of institution building and the position of women. Because of the weakness or absence of the state, or to avoid co-optation, they build institutions of land tenure and collective self-management, and sometimes they construct development agencies with the help of international NGOs. Women are becoming more and more prominent in their ranks and among their leaders, often challenging deeply embedded practices. The democratic impetus embodied in movements of ethnic and excluded racial populations can eventually nurture embryonic forces that join with others to democratize society as a whole.
That impetus has also provoked a reaction. The abrasive conservatism that led to the election of Bolsonaro was justified by hostility to race quotas, to the reservation of land for Indians in the Amazon, and to liberal openings in the field of sexuality and gender. Repressive and patriarchal notions of family and male dominion have bolstered resistance to women’s reproductive rights in many countries. The backlash is sometimes frightening.
But is there a choice? We have seen in Europe the consequences of different countries’ ways of dealing with their Nazi past – compare Germany with Austria, Poland or Hungary. We see the never-ending rifts in the United States.
Some Latin American countries, through truth commissions and judicial processes, recognized human rights violations by recent authoritarian regimes, punished a few of those politically responsible and a few leading perpetrators and instituted reparation schemes. But the ghosts have not always been laid to rest – defenders of those regimes are sometimes elected even as presidents (in Brazil and Guatemala), and impunity and denial continue under elected governments. In Guatemala, Bishop Juan Gerardi, author of the Recovery of Historical Memory Report (REMHI, Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica) documenting responsibilities for human rights violations on an unimaginable scale, was murdered the day after its publication in April 1998.
Behind these recent traumas lie deeper and more ancient historical wounds: in England, the legacies of slavery, of imperialism and of Ireland underlie the separation from Europe and the possible dismemberment of the United Kingdom. In Latin America, the legacies of colonialism, of slavery and of Republican assaults on indigenous land and institutions weigh on contemporary resistance to recognizing injustice and discrimination: the weariness and the resentment will not go away … nor will the suppressed guilt that haunts the generations of beneficiaries.
To remember, to restore, to repair … and then to forestall and control the backlash. That, translated as a compromise between identity politics and social justice, could stand as the