Landscapes of Liberation

Front matter

Cie LEUVEN UNIVERSITY! PRESS

Landscapes of Liberation

Mission and Development in Peru's Southern Highlands, 1958-1988

Conclusion

This book is the culmination of almost four years of research throughout which I received the very generous support of countless people in Peru, Switzerland and elsewhere. I would like to thank all of them wholeheartedly for their help.

My sincere gratitude goes to Professor Christian Btischges, who entrusted me with executing this research and supported me throughout the time I was based at the University of Bern. The Swiss National Science Foundation generously provided the necessary resources for the research project, as well as financial support for this book’s Open Access publication. I would like to extend further thanks to the team of Leuven University Press for their flexibility and guidance throughout the publication process. Moreover, Iam indebted to the two anonymous reviewers whose cogent and constructive comments enriched my analysis.

The history I have written is not mine but - as much as history can ever belong to anyone - rather the history of the many interlocutors who I have met over the past years. These include (former) priests, missionaries, laypeople and academic researchers, who all graciously agreed to share their experiences, ideas and knowledge with me. Many welcomed me into their homes and offered me some of the kindest hospitality I have ever experienced. I would also particularly like to thank the staff of the Centro de Capacitación Campesina de Puno, in Ayaviri, for taking time to introduce the history of peasant mobilizations so vividly, and for introducing me to former organization leaders.

As with most historical research projects, the success of my undertaking depended massively on the availability and accessibility of archives. In this regard, I would like to express my profound gratitude to bishops Kay Martin Schmalhausen and Jorge Carrión Pavlich who, respectively, allowed me to consult the church archives of Ayaviri and Puno. Other archivists and librarians supported me in my research for primary sources and literature on both sides of the Atlantic. I extend my special thanks to Delia Amado for opening the doors of the Sagrados Corazones archives, and for being a great source of knowledge and encouragement during my time studying at Plaza Francia.

Iam also very grateful for the company and support that many people provided during my stay in Peru. While I was in Lima, Juan Miguel Espinoza and Rolando Ibérico offered guidance for my research, petitioned the librarian at the PUCP and critically commented on my early interpretations. Carlos Zegarra Moretti provided invaluable assistance in both Cuzco and Ayaviri, helping me to locate archival files and facilitating contact with local interlocutors and church secretariats. In Puno, the team of Radio Onda Azul, under the leadership of Yovani Manrique, welcomed me as one of their own for the period I spent in the capital of the altiplano department. With thanks to them, I participated in soccer games - still wearing Onda Azul's jersey proudly years later - enjoyed a huatia on the lakeshore and explored the many pizzerias and karaoke bars that brightened up my time in Peru after dark.

During sometimes-difficult moments, I experienced the unconditional support of famiy and friends. Many of them still do not know what my research is exactly about (mea culpa), but they have nevertheless always believed in me and my work. For that, Pll be forever thankful.

Andrea Miiller - a dear friend, colleague and officemate - collaborated with me on the PhD research journey from day one, and I am enjoyed her company and intellectual support immeasurably. Yet I am also grateful that, through her, I learned more about the history of church reform in neighboring Ecuador. Writing retreats alongside other colleagues proved to be particularly helpful for my motivation - and Iam likewise indebted to their company and intellectual support.

Lastly, I want to thank my then partner - and now spouse - Joe for being a steady source of inspiration, joy and support during my doctorate and since. We met just two days into my doctoral research journey, and I credit him for making the years leading up to this publication a truly special time of my life.

In early 1958, a regional newspaper based in Puno ran a series on villages abandoned by the central government. How could it be that Lima is paved with luxury construction, parks and twenty-story buildings while the people of the southeasternmost region of Peru lived “with a paleolithic backwardness of more than a century”? Residents of Nuñoa, located on the wide northern plains of the altiplano, reclaimed the construction of a new bridge to facilitate circulation and hoped that the achievements of modernization, including electricity, running water and health care, would be provided to the inhabitants of the small villages of the sierra. In the same vein, the villagers of Patambuco, situated further to the northeast of the department, also lamented that they had been forgotten by the successive governments in power. Thanks to their own initiative, however, the inhabitants succeeded in constructing a gravel road that connected the community to the road network where “the current of progress” circulated.’ These forgotten villages’ sense of abandonment reveals how the puneno countryside was conceived as a place where the central government was absent. The villagers were not merely part of an unjust social order, but seemed to have been forgotten by the Peruvian state altogether.” Following a local saying, indeed, Puno is so close to heaven, yet so far from Lima.

Contrasts of tradition and modernity dominated contemporary portrayals of Puno in the late 1950s. By time the inhabitants of small villages and hamlets like Nuñoa and Patambuco complained about their abandonment, observers

1 Lucas Guerra, “Nuñoa, un pueblo abandonado a su propia suerte,” Los Andes, 07.01.1958; Julio C. Jiménez Oblitas, “Patambuco, de tierras ferraces pero abandonado a su propia suerte,” Los Andes, 06.02.1958.

2 Benjamin S. Orlove, Lines in the Water: Nature and Culture at Lake Titicaca (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 13.

had already noticed the uptake of modern technology across other parts of Puno. Whereas farms started replacing rudimentary instruments with tractors, reed rafts crossed paths with recently introduced engine-driven ships on Lake Titicaca. Traditions of indigenous religion contrasted even more starkly with the transformations that modernity had brought to the southern highlands. “Indigenous people [...] continue to make offerings to the sun and the spirits of the high places”, a French ethnographer noticed in the early 1950s, “but know the plane, the railway and the telegraph.” This juxtaposition of what he considered old and new, backward and progressive, appeared indicative of the slow but steady modernization of Puno.’

The propagation of ideas of progress and modernity to the inhabitants of Nuñoa and Patambuco was arguably stimulated by a multitude of local and foreign actors who construed Puno as a “space of development” in need of intervention and salvation. They perceived a remote and harsh landscape, at the margins of a state that appeared to care little about its rural inhabitants. Many of these different agents of development subscribed to the indigenismo prevailing since the early 20th century, broadly defined as a heterogeneous political ideology preoccupied with the fate of the (for Peru) unparalleled “density of the indigenous mass” in Puno.‘ As a space-to-be-developed, the region hosted abundant projects, initiatives and organizations which aimed to further the modernization of Puno and the national integration of its population.

The exasperation of the inhabitants of Patambuco and Nuñoa also resonated with a new generation of Catholic priests, missionaries and laypeople arriving in Puno from the late 1950s onwards. The mainly foreign pastoral agents occupied parishes which had thus far been abandoned or rarely visited by a priest. They opened kindergartens, renovated schools and built health centers across the territory. According to the first prelate of Ayaviri, the church needed to launch a “peaceful revolution” in order to counter the threat of a violent and, even more dauntingly, atheist one. Since the fate of Catholicism in Latin America was at stake, the church had to reconsider its pastoral work and contribute to the social transformation of territories where the Peruvian government had barely been present. For its ambitious plan to be successful, the church needed clerics, teachers and medical personnel, as well as cars, didactic material and financial support from abroad.*

3 Jehan Vellard, Dieux et parias des Andes: les Ourous, ceux qui ne veulent pas être des hommes (Paris: Emile-Paul, 1954), 36-37.

4 Francois Bourricaud, Cambios en Puno: Estudios de sociología andina (Lima: Institut Francais d’Etudes Andines, 2012), 23.

5 Luciano Metzinger, “Ayaviri a l'heure du Concile,” Horizons Blancs, no. 13, octobre 1962, 326-29.

In the village of Ollachea, for instance, Swiss nurse Denise Robichon established a health dispensary in 1965. In her words, it was a “small and poor” place where the majority of the population was malnourished - relying on a diet of “potatoes, corn and onion” - and where electricity and running water remained an unimaginable luxury. Besides offering free health care to the inhabitants of the region, the church also financed infrastructure projects and contributed to the education system in support of its parishioners.* Thanks to their social commitment, laypeople and missionaries quickly gained the trust and admiration of the population in Ollachea and its surroundings. In a 2011 interview, the director of the local kindergarten, which still carries the name of Robichon, expressed his gratitude for the “good things [she did] for everyone.” Further emphasizing the legacy of this ‘peaceful revolution’, another senior resident went as far as to claim that Robichon and her colleagues “brought modernity” to the region.”

This snippet of the church-led development in Ollachea is but one telling illustration of how religious and lay actors became actors of modernization in their own right. In the context of emerging discourses on the ‘third world’, they increasingly questioned to what extent their preaching of salvation and religious orthodoxy had to more actively address challenges of human development. The so-called ‘spirit’ of the Second Vatican Council translated into an embrace of the modern (and secular) world and of the hopes and dangers it represented for the Catholic faith. While pastoral agents actively promoted charitable projects in their parishes, the Vatican manifested its conscience of the problems of inequality, injustice and indifference through papal encyclicals. Populorum Progressio (1967) notably affirmed that “the progressive development of peoples is an object of deep interest and concern to the church.”* The Catholic Church, so it seemed, had proven that there exists a moral responsibility for all Christians to manifest their solidarity and provide relief. Commentators even assumed that that the influence of Vatican II upon Catholicism was to permanently alter the relations between the developed and the developing world.’

In Latin America, the aggiornamento of the church coincided with the so-called second evangelization of the subcontinent. In response to the calls for support for many abandoned and understaffed parishes, Latin America experienced a missionary revival during the second half of the 20th century. For many foreign actors - like Robichon and her colleagues - the encounter with prevalent pover-

6 Denise Robichon, “Un dispensaire: Ollachea,” Horizons Blancs, no. 26, janvier 1966, 287-88.

“Las huellas de nuestro pasado,” Apahata. Boletin Informativo de Minera Kuri Kullu, abril 2011.

8 “Populorum Progressio,” Encyclical of Pope Paul VI on the Development of Peoples, 26.03.1967.

9 Georges Hourdin, “Deux événements favorable au Tiers-Monde,” Croissance des Jeunes Nations, no. 51, janvier 1966, 3; Georges Hourdin, “Edito: Chrétiens contre la faim,” Croissance des Jeunes Nations, Numéro Special, no. 42, mars 1965, 3-4.

N ty and inequality served as a “spiritual trigger” for their commitment to Catholic social teaching.” In the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, the Catholic Church upheld an even more fervent critique of communism, but also sought to create better prospects for the impoverished masses at risk of launching a revolution. In line with the 1959 Declaration of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CEL- AM) on the socio-economic problems in Latin America, the church reaffirmed its commitment to Catholic social teaching to create a more equal and just social order.” The counter-revolutionary discourse of the Alliance for Progress further legitimized the social agenda of the continental church and the many missionaries engaged therein.

This church-led commitment to development translated into multifaceted engagement on the part of religious and lay actors. Throughout the 1960s, notably, processes of church reform and secularization led pastoral agents to reformulate their mission in response to the supposed abandonment of Puno. In this regard it is important to underline that Puno did not form a world apart, but was an integral part of a system of global circulations and domestic control.” The fact that villagers from Nuñoa and Patambuco felt otherwise is thus not only a reason to critically examine the politics of modernization and its local manifestations, but also a motivation to inquire what it meant - and entailed - for its inhabitants to belong to Peru or even the Catholic Church.

Questioning Development and Liberation

Towards the end of the 1960s, the emphasis on material progress was subject to mounting criticism across Latin America. According to many activists, the peripheral economy of the subcontinent hardly benefitted from the growth that liberal theories of modernization had been promising for numerous years. The prevalent discourses of development appeared inadequate in the face of the structural problems of inequality. At the same time, the emphasis on foreign aid risked making both state and church increasingly dependent upon financial resources from abroad. These debates also resonated with religious intellectuals, who articulated a new leitmotif for church reform; the ideal of liberation.

Liberation denotes a process of radical transformation. In the book of Exodus, liberation entails crossing a desert - along and difficult journey from domination to emancipation, an escape from bondage to the Promised Land. It is a time of

10 Catalina Romero, “Cambios en la relación Iglesia-sociedad en el Perú: 1958-1978,” Debates en Sociologia, no. 7 (1982): 120, 125.

11 AOP, CELAM, Declaración “La Iglesia ante los problemas economico-sociales de América Latina,” 14.11.1959,

12 Bourricaud, Cambios en Puno: Estudios de sociología andina, 16.

doubt and trial. During their time of hardship in the desert, the pilgrims face the temptation to return to slavery. However, their time in the desert also increases their faith in the possibility of breaking free from oppression, to a life free from servitude and injustice. Indeed, it is hope for a better future, lying at the end of the journey, that underscores the transformative process. Thanks to spiritual guidance, the pilgrims ultimately become agents of their own liberation - finally belonging to the new, just society they had longed for.”

In the early 1970s, Latin American theologians appropriated Exodus as a fundamental schema for liberation theology. For them, it not only revealed the political message of the Bible, but essentially proved that God intervened in history to help the downtrodden and oppressed from enslavement.** Exodus notably inspired their focus on the concept of praxis as a central theological locus. Drawing inspiration from continental Catholic reform, the founding fathers of liberation theology reaffirmed the need for the church to actively address structural oppression. Furthering the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, the Latin American Episcopal Conference in Medellin (1968) questioned the modus operandi of the clergy while advancing the archetype of a pastor committed to support and defend his flock. These messages of ecclesiastical and pastoral renewal were particularly well received among those theologians and clerics confronted with social sins (i.e. poverty, exploitation, injustice) that contradicted their gospel. Brazilian theologian Clodovis Boff later defined (liberating) praxis as a “complexus of practices orientated towards the transformation of society.”**

This (spiritual) commitment to liberation responded to a given geographical context, a space where these promises for transformation could inspire local praxis. This (Latin American) space was often portrayed as one of inequality and oppression: political landscapes where ruling governments craved personal enrichment more than they cared about the common good; social landscapes where the poverty of the many sustained the wealth of the few; and, ultimately, ecclesiastical landscapes where charity was often preached but rarely practiced. It was within these spaces that the old order had to be challenged and a new world had to be fought for. Indeed, for the theologians who subscribed to these ideas, it was through the transformation of these landscapes of oppression that landscapes of liberation, the just society at the end of the Exodus, would eventually emerge.

13 Gustavo Gutiérrez, Teología de la liberación: perspectivas, 7th ed. (Salamanca: Ediciones Sigueme, 1975), 203-07; Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman, Towards Psychologies of Liberation (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2008), 36.

14 John Coffey, Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 15-16.

15 Clodovis Boff, Theology and Praxis: Epistemological Foundations (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2009), 6-7.

The department of Puno was one of these landscapes where many church representatives longed for a radical transformation to overcome structural injustice and inequality. In a workshop in early March 1973, seminarists of the Diocese of Puno discussed the latent social conflict they observed on Peru’s altiplano: a system of domination which sets in opposition the rich and the poor, oppressors and oppressed. Whereas the former benefitted from significant economic resources and political influence, the latter had limited access to land, education and political representation. This dialectical understanding of the social order also had spatial manifestations: essentially, the dominant class lived in urban areas, the exploited class in the countryside. How could the church, the seminarists wondered, respond to this situation of injustice? And how could they, as future priests, engage in and facilitate the envisioned transformation of society?**

Motivated to strengthen a progressive priesthood that identified with the poor masses and was no longer complicit in the oppression of the people, the participating seminarists outlined several requirements for liberating pastoral work. Those wanting to become priests should have satisfactory knowledge of the social milieu, a humanistic education and assert a concrete commitment to realize the divine teachings with specific regard for the altiplano context. The envisioned pastoral reforms not only questioned the content of their religious mission and their evangelization practice, but also the very identity of the church as the People of God. Liberation thus indexed not only a promise of social transformation and an end to oppression, but indeed also a time of trial, debate and scrutiny for all those actors seeking to reformulate their pastoral discourses and practices in order to “demythologize their religious life”. Only in so doing, the seminarists claimed, could the “church of Puno [...] respond to the urgent demands of the peasantry in search of their liberation.””’

The (unequal) distribution of land remained at the heart of these discourses of liberation. Since the long-awaited 1969 agrarian reform did not solve the aspirations of the rural population, the contentious debates on how the vast landscapes were to be fragmented and owned continued for another two decades. Government officials, scholars, development agencies, religious actors and non-governmental organizations accompanied these often conflictual processes and defended their respective vision of rural development. A particularity of the debates over the development of Puno is their ambivalent nature. Whereas many actors shared the broad ideal of more or less radical change, they lacked common objectives and often ignored the aspirations of those they sought to ‘integrate’, ‘modernize’

16 AOP, 13 Realidad Nacional y Luchas Populares, Conclusiones generales del encuentro de los seminaristas de la didcesis de Puno, Chucuito, 05-07.03.1973.

17 AOP, 13 Realidad Nacional y Luchas Populares, Conclusiones generales del encuentro de los seminaristas de la diócesis de Puno, Chucuito, 05-07.03.1973.

or liberate”.** Even as peasant organizations assumed the leadership in the land structuration process in the late 1970s, the department remained a battleground for competing ideologies and ideas of development and modernity.

The translation of ideas of (more or less radical) transformation in contemporary pastoral practice is a far from obvious process that unfolded over several years, if not decades. Be it in the name of development or in the name of liberation - respectively along lines of modernization theory or more radical critiques of capitalism - pastoral agents had to rethink and renew their spiritual and social mission. After all, they had to implement some of the most profound global and continental church reforms according to the circumstances and imperatives of their pastoral work in southern Peru. How could they expect their parishioners to regularly attend Mass and find time for prayers if they struggled to secure their daily income? To what extent did they aim to bring modernity” to their parishioners? In what way, if at all, were they to address structural problems which often perpetuated the poverty of those they spiritually cared for? How did they reconcile their pastoral authority with their commitment to promote grassroots activism? In which circumstances did pastoral agents (re)negotiate the boundaries of faith and politics? And to what extent did pastoral agents, in so doing, interrogate the colonial nature of their mission and legacy of the church?

For the purpose of this book, I examine the imbrication of discourses of mission and transnational Catholic activism in Peru’s southern highlands from the late 1950s until the late 1980s. These three decades represented a time of regeneration and change for the Catholic Church across Peru in general, and in Puno in particular. The Peruvian episcopacy published a pastoral letter “On certain aspects of the social question in Peru” in January 1958, criticizing the concentration of wealth and calling for fair wages and better working conditions.” Concurrently, the Diocese of Puno was subdivided into three independent jurisdictions which aimed to better respond to the spiritual and social needs of parishioners. The timeline ends in the late 1980s, when reform currents within the church were subject to criticism by ecclesiastical authorities. Cardinal Juan Landazuri Ricketts, who presided over the episcopal conference from 1955 and fervently welcomed and defended church reform throughout the following decades, resigned in 1990. The Catholic Church in Peru, “the cradle of [Latin American] liberation theology”, was soon dominated by conservative clerics adherent to Opus Dei or the Sodalitium Cristianae Vitae.” In Puno, albeit more gradually than in other parts of the coun-

18 Jean Morisset, “The Department of Puno as a Territory to Be Developed in Southern Peru - Geographic Views on the Problematics of Integration,” Revista Geográfica, no. 79 (1973): 26-27.

19 Secretaria General del Episcopado del Perú, Primera Semana Social del Perú: Exigencias sociales del catolicismo en el Perú (Lima: Talleres Mercagraph, 1959), 7.

20 Todd Hartch, The Rebirth of Latin American Christianity, Oxford Studies in World Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 153.

try, the church would also change its pastoral work and, from the late 1980s onwards, opt for an increasingly less public profile.

The two jurisdictions examined in this book are not homogenous structures, but a patchwork of different Catholic institutions and parishes. Through the arrival of religious congregations, priests and laypeople from abroad, the department also hosted an “international mosaic” of actors working for the local churches.” After its creation in 1958, the Prelature of Ayaviri constituted a mission territory for the majority-French clergy who committed to the evangelization of the northern provinces of the department, comprising both arid plains of the altiplano and the subtropical lowlands leading to the Amazon basin beyond the mountain peaks. Ayaviri, with its 17th-century Baroque cathedral, was the only sizable town of the prelature. The “monumental church” with its “immense paintings with golden frames”, which gave missionaries the impression of “great prosperity”, differed from the simple housing surrounding the old center of the town inhabited mostly by “authentic Quechuas”.” The Diocese of Puno, founded almost a century earlier, too, served mostly Quechua-speaking parishioners in the provinces adjacent to the northwest of Lake Titicaca. It encompassed the two largest towns of the department, the political capital of the same name and the commercial hub of Juliaca, as well as rural villages and hamlets on the vast altiplano plains between and beyond these urban centers.

At its core, this book traces the transnational interplay between the Catholic Church as a global institution and the parish as its local representative. The Prelature of Ayaviri and the Diocese of Puno hosted priests, women religious and laypeople from Western Europe committed to the evangelization of the predominantly indigenous parishioners. Defying dichotomous ideas of foreign domination and indigenous resistance, I examine initial encounters and the evolving power relations pastoral agents and parishioners were subjected to, as well as established themselves. My approach thus allows for a more nuanced study of how foreign and local actors formed an integral part of the ongoing endeavors of mission, development and liberation. Connecting the local and the global, this book ultimately demonstrates the complex ways church reforms translated into concrete if ambivalent transformations in Peru’s southern highlands.

As much as my research explores historical developments within the Catholic Church of Puno, it is not exclusively a history of the church. It is also a history of how (rural) development was envisioned, debated and reclaimed in one of the most populous, yet most impoverished departments of Peru. In 1961, El Comercio even

21 José Luis Rénique, La batalla por Puno: conflicto agrario y nacion en los Andes peruanos, 1866-1995, 2nd ed. (Lima: La Siniestra Ensayos, Universidad Nacional de Juliaca, 2016), 249. 22 R.P. Mouly SS.CC., Pérou: terre de contrastes (Paris: Tolra, 1961), 85-86.

claimed that “Puno has the worst living standard in the world.”% During the following three decades, successive governments committed to the ideas of desarrollismo and economic nationalism contributed to the transformation the socio-political landscapes of Peru’s southern highlands. Agrarian reform, the mobilization of the peasant population and ensuing land restructuration permanently altered the puneño countryside. Modernization, urbanization and migration led to rapid demographical changes in a region that had historically relied almost exclusively on its agrarian sector. Many new actors, be they social movements, intellectuals, public officials and NGOs, entered the political landscape and left their mark at the regional and local level.

Religious and lay actors, the protagonists of this research, sought to facilitate, accelerate and alter these processes through their spiritual and social engagement. The Catholic Church, in many ways, constitutes a prism which reflects political developments in the mid- to late 20th century and sheds new light on them. Unlike the seminarists I referenced earlier, I do not seek to ‘demythologize’ the Catholic faith in my analysis of the liberating praxis of church representatives. Rather, Texamine how pastoral discourses and practices evolved in response to church reforms with regard to the specific circumstances of rural Puno.

Historizing Catholic Activism

This book builds on multiple historiographies, as it engages with scholarship on liberation theology and church reform in post-1968 Latin America and Peru and literature on both political and social reforms in the Peruvian countryside writ large and the social history of Catholicism in Puno in particular.

The contemporary history of the Catholic Church in Peru has, particularly when compared with Brazil and Central America, thus far drawn limited interest from social scientists and historians. Jeffrey Klaiber remains the principal reference for the study of 20th-century Catholicism in Peru thanks to his extensive research on the social history of the church. He counted the ecclesiastical jurisdictions of Cuzco and Puno, besides the pueblos jovenes and the Peruvian Amazon, among the “most progressive pastoral regions in Peru”. In his view, the region distinguished itself through its “explicit identification with the peasantry”.* Besides the monograph of Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens on the history of the

23 “Situacion actual es peor que la de 1956: Puno tiene el nivel de vida mas bajo del mundo,” El Comercio, 10.08.1961.

24 Jeffrey L. Klaiber, The Catholic Church in Peru, 1821-1985: A Social History (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 322-25; Jeffrey L. Klaiber, “¡Somos Iglesia!: La Iglesia del Sur Andino, 1960-2006,” in Políticas divinas: Religión, diversidad y politica en el Perú contemporaneo, ed. Fernando Armas Asín et al. (Lima: Instituto Riva-Agúero, PUCP, 2008), 375-87.

Maryknoll mission in Peru, regional histories of the Catholic Church are scarce and can mostly be attributed to former religious and lay collaborators. Existing literature - often focusing on pastoral letters, biographies of local bishops or their personal testimonies - tends to perpetuate the exceptionality of the so-called Iglesia del Sur Andino. (Former) collaborators of the church or affiliated actors replicate the same narrative of pastoral reform, focusing on the appraisal of church authorities as “men of hope” or clerics “in the heart of their people”.”®

My analysis also draws inspiration from scholarship regarding what is considered one of the central problems faced by successive governments of Peru: its integration of, and relation to, the rural population. The “problema del indio” of the first half of the 20th century was later rearticulated as the peasant or “rural question” that both political actors and intellectuals sought to respond to.” The research of popular subfields within social and cultural anthropology - “Andean studies”, “peasant studies” and “community studies” - have been critically reviewed over the last decades. Many of these studies arguably fail to account for the heterogeneity of the Andes, but perpetuate the narrative of a “monolitihic Andean mentalité”.?” Informed by this criticism, I aim to critically discuss anthropological knowledge production during the 1960s and 1970s, while also taking into account studies on religious anthropology and examining how research activities themselves contributed to pastoral action and reform in rural Puno.

This book also aims to contribute to regional history through its examination of an understudied facet of social and political history. A small number of historians, most notably José Luis Rénique, have written the most comprehensive works onthe contemporary history of Puno. In their works, they have acknowledged that the Catholic Church - described as the “radicalized foreign clergy” or the “militant church” - played a significant role in the transformation of Puno and the southern highlands and contributed to the emergence of peasant movements.* The lack of

25 Francisco d’Alteroche, Testimonio de un caminar: vivir el evangelio de América Latina (Lima: Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones, 2011); Andrés Gallego, La señal de cada momento: documentos de los obispos del Sur Andino 1969-1994 (Lima: Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1994); Gustave Moyon, Le cavalier solitaire des Andes (Paris: Editions S.O.S., 1983); Cecilia Tovar, Dos obispos del Sur Andino: Luis Vallejos, Luis Dalle, en el corazon de su pueblo (Lima: Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1982); Luis Zambrano and Mauricio Rodriguez, Jesús Calderon, hombre de la esperanza (Cuzco: Instituto de Pastoral Andina, 1997).