Solidarity Then and Now: 35th Anniversary of the UCA Massacre
This November, we remember Ignacio Martín-Baró, a Jesuit priest and social psychologist who was revolutionary for his work to liberate psychology and support the psychosocial and collective wellbeing of frontline communities struggling for transformative changes.
Ignacio Martín-Baró was one among eight assassinated by the US-trained and funded Atlacatl Battalion on the campus of the Jesuit University of Central America-José Simeón Cañas (UCA) in San Salvador, El Salvador on November 16, 1989. The United Nations has estimated that more than 75,000 people were killed and approximately 8,000 disappeared in El Salvador between 1979 and 1992. Approximately one-fifth of the Salvadoran population was displaced during the twelve years of its civil war.
Ignacio, or Nacho, as he was known among his friends, was an activist scholar who drew on liberation theology as well as social, political, and community psychology in his work with rural Salvadoran parishes. He is credited for having articulated processes through which psychologists would liberate psychology, while listening and responding to the leadership of the marginalized.
We offer these reflections as an invitation to others who seek to support the psychosocial and collective wellbeing of frontline communities struggling for liberatory and transformative changes in these times of uncertainty and horrific violence in many corners of our world.
Brinton and Gordon, authors of this brief reflection, are community psychologists and members of what is now the Martín-Baró Initiative for Wellbeing and Human Rights (MBI) at Grassroots International. We offer these reflections as an invitation to others who seek to support the psychosocial and collective wellbeing of frontline communities struggling for liberatory and transformative changes in these times of uncertainty and horrific violence in many corners of our world. I, Brinton, entered this journey alongside Ramsay Liem with whom I had organized a sub-committee of the Committee for Health Rights in Central America, forging relationships with Latin American psychologists addressing the impact of state-sponsored violations. We met Nacho together with colleagues from Chile and Argentina at the InterAmerican Society of Psychologists (SIP) in 1987. These developing transnational networks informed our local efforts to protest the US government’s repressive political, economic, and military intrusions in Central America. Nacho and others in the Southern Cone shared with us some of the ways in which psychologists in their countries were accompanying survivors of torture, massacres, and human rights violations.
I, Gordon, am deeply inspired by Martín-Baró’s work and legacy, including his incisive challenges to ahistorical and individualistic global North psychologies, his advancement of psychologies that center the knowledge and protagonism of frontline communities surviving and resisting oppression, and his embodiment of scholar activist praxis. I joined MBI about a year ago and am honored to be part of this initiative aligned with Martín-Baró’s calls for supporting grassroots knowledges and traditions that foster collective wellbeing, peacebuilding, and transformative change.
Liberation Psychology and the Origins of MBI
The brutal assassinations of November 16, 1989, reverberated throughout the world and challenged many in our nascent networks to respond through activism and within the profession. In the wake of the UCA massacre that claimed Nacho’s life, colleagues in Boston, MA, and Berkeley, CA, formed the Martìn-Baró Fund for Mental Health and Human Rights, “in hopes of furthering some of the goals to which he [Nacho] had dedicated his life and to honor his memory.”
Human rights activists on the frontlines engage in healing practices to respond to the multiple effects of these violations. They persist in resisting repressive forces that violently destroy the living systems of which they, as humans, are but one.
The founding of the Fund, now known as the Ignacio Martín-Baró Initiative for Wellbeing and Human Rights at Grassroots International, was one of many responses to the horrific violence in and beyond El Salvador. This initiative is but one of multitudes of efforts among psychologists and mental health workers across and beyond the Americas to continue a praxis of liberating psychology. Such a praxis includes liberating ourselves from psychological frameworks developed within universities of the global North, with their focus on a decontextualized individual, in the absence of an analysis of broader socio-historical processes and systems of oppression (see Dykstra, 2014 and Lykes & McGillen, 2021 for summaries). Recent activists and activist scholars have highlighted not only Nacho’s liberation psychology but pressed for decolonizing psychology, challenging us to critically examine the persistent legacies of colonialism and genocidal appropriation of Indigenous peoples’ lands. Ancestral practices and rituals of Original peoples as well as healing justice emergent from Black, queer and trans BIPOC-led movements are contributing to extending and expanding contemporary praxis within grassroots movements while also informing ongoing efforts to liberate psychology.
The Fund and now Initiative has distributed nearly $2 million to grassroots projects and social movements since 1990. Partnering with Grassroots International has increased our capacity to garner and distribute resources to community-based organizations and social movements engaged in healing justice and a liberation psychology that promotes psychosocial wellbeing. In addition, a major impetus for this transition has been the desire to deepen our capacity to develop partnerships with grassroots movements of the global South. We seek to learn alongside those on the front lines of building the world in which we hope to live, and to strengthen capacities through which activists can protect those among their movements engaged in human rights activism, climate justice initiatives, food sovereignty and Land Back initiatives.
Seeking Truth & Justice: Impunity Then and Now
As we have written in previous newsletters and multiple publications, the search for truth and justice in the wake of the assassinations of 1989, like that in many other contexts, has been long and only partially successful. The Center for Justice and Accountability has been actively engaged in seeking truth and justice for these brutal murders. The 1993 General Amnesty Law for Consolidation of Peace in El Salvador protected most involved from prosecution, but in 2008 the CJA joined the Spanish Association of Human Rights and filed criminal charges in Spain against the former President of El Salvador and 19 former members of the military for the massacre. On Sept. 11, 2022, the National Criminal Court of Spain convicted former Salvadoran Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano and sentenced him to 133 years and three months for his role in the 1989 murder of five Jesuit priests during the 12-year Salvadoran civil war. Despite changes in El Salvador declaring the 1993 general amnesty law unconstitutional in 2016, no other defendants in the Jesuits Massacre case have been arrested and prosecuted.
When he lectured at Harvard University in 1989, Nacho quipped that, in the USA, university-based psychologists had to publish or they would perish; whereas, in El Salvador, “we publish and we perish”.
Genocidal Violence Today
While recognizing with gratitude the ongoing persistence and struggles of grassroots movements and community-based wellbeing and healing justice work — and those who accompany them — imperial and colonial violence continues to devastate communities in the Global South. Human rights activists on the frontlines engage in healing practices to respond to the multiple effects of these violations. They persist in resisting repressive forces that violently destroy the living systems of which they, as humans, are but one.
When he lectured at Harvard University in 1989, Nacho quipped that, in the USA, university-based psychologists had to publish or they would perish; whereas, in El Salvador, “we publish and we perish”. Although shockingly prescient vis-à-vis his own life, neither he nor we could have envisioned the interlocking, repressive forces – including those in our universities, government, military, and among capitalist oligarchs – driving US militarism today. We are challenged to respond to a horrific convergence of forces that support and sustain the genocide and ecocide unfolding for more than a year in Gaza today. Despite the growing global movement protesting Israel’s genocide and the US’s funding of its military — as well as the case brought by South Africa against Israel before the International Court of Justice — entire lineages in Gaza are being annihilated through military assaults, hunger, disease, and ecocide. The demands for a ceasefire, arms embargo, and for humanitarian aid echo as the US continues to send bombs to Israel, bombs currently used not only to annihilate Gaza and all Palestinians but to provoke regional war by assaulting Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. And in the midst of such horrors, the American Psychological Association and many others engaged in this profession refuse to speak in one voice in opposition to this genocide.
Thus, as we commemorate the assassination of Nacho and others on November 16, 1989, we urge you to join us in support of the Ignacio Martín-Baró Initiative for Wellbeing and Human Rights at Grassroots International. We need your assistance to strengthen our support for the leadership and collective resistance of frontline activists in Palestine, Central America, West Africa, Haiti, Brazil, Puerto Rico and among migrants in the United States. As we learn from their leadership and listen to their wisdom and that of Mother Earth, we strive to deepen our solidarity and engage in mutual accompaniment towards a world of equity and justice in which we seek to celebrate our multiple and diverse living systems.
Please consider contributing to the vital work of MBI by making a donation today.