Italian Catholic Intellectuals and Indigenous Latin Americans: Transnational Networks and Violence at the End of the Cold War

Abstract

The Latin American indigenous question has represented over the centuries, between modern and contemporary age, a laboratory that is apparently marginal but in its own way singularly powerful for the Italian Catholic cultural world. The question has in fact contributed to the elaboration of political symbols and instruments, cultural, religious, moral and solidarity projects. The construction of an original perspective, mirror of a distant world, has in fact allowed Italian Catholicism to carry out a sort of self-analysis, in the face of modernization processes, the relationship between power and law, between local and global perspectives, between past and present. With this in mind, 1992 represented a real crossroads. While the global Cold War was closing, the disputed celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the “discovery” and European conquest of the Americas, together with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Maya Quiche Rigoberta Menchu Tum and the Genoese celebrations for the “Colombiadi”, opened an intense debate in Italy. In particular, a group of Catholic intellectuals, laity and religious, tried to reflect on the legacies and contradictions of that Euro-American encounter-clash produced and on the transformation of the global history that ensued. A reflection that connected to the ongoing debate on the violations of human rights in Latin American dictatorships was calling into question the responsibilities of Europe as a community in the making.