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Since the 1970s, both foreign and U.S. opponents of U.S.-Central America policy have cited the 1969 Rockefeller Report on the Americas: The Official Report of a United States Presidential Mission for the Western Hemisphere as the beginning of U.S. government efforts to eradicate liberation theology. During the 1980s, progressive Catholic press accounts in the United States and abroad emphasized the similarities between the Report and President Ronald Reagans approach to Central America. But critics' charges are misplaced. The Report supported the Church's leftward turn, and Nelson Rockefeller was the reason. Early report drafts and Rockfeller's comments reveal that he enthusiastically welcomed the Medellín documents. It was family planning that preoccupied Rockefeller, not communist subversion.
Keywords', family planning; liberation theology; Medellin; Rockefeller, Nelson; Rockefeller Report
In a January 1989 pastoral letter, Archbishop Próspero Penados del Barrio of Guatemala railed against Protestants' growing influence in this Central American nation. From 1969 to 1989, Guatemala's Protestants increased from 2 percent to approximately 33 percent of the population, the most dramatic increase in Latin America. The archbishop blamed the United States for this growth.* 1 As he alleged, "The diffusion of Protestantism in Guatemala is more part of an economic and political strategy" of U.S. business and political interests, "than of an authentic religious interest." To Penados, the U.S. desire to promote Protestant conversion was nothing new. In 1969, Penados noted, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller recommended that President Richard Nixon support Protestant churches' attempts to counter the Catholic Church's social justice efforts in Latin America.2 Nixon asked Rockefeller to consult with Latin Americans to assess U.S.Latin America policy and to inform its future development. As part of this project, Rockefeller evaluated the Alliance for Progress, the U.S. aid program to Latin America initiated by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. Based on visits to twenty countries, Rockefeller's findings were publicly released in 1969 as the Rockefeller Report on the Americas: The Official Report of a United States Presidential Mission for the Western Hemisphere (Report).3
Penados was not alone in making these accusations. In the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. and Latin American Catholics who opposed U.S. policy toward Central America cited the Report as the beginning of U.S. government efforts to eradicate progressive trends in the Catholic Church....