The Church and Politics in the Chilean Countryside

Most observers of the Catholic church in Latin America point to the early emergence of a progressive heirarchy in Chile. As early as the 1930s, for example, church leaders in urban areas championed workers' organizations and pioneered many of the ideas that became precursors of liberation theology. Yet, in the countryside, where the pattern of land distribution was one of the most regressive in Latin America, the Church was clearly allied with the interest of the landowning elite. It wasn't until the 1960s that the Church began to channel resources into agrarian reform efforts and peasant mobilization. In this book, Dr Stewart-Gambino examines the shifting alliances of the Church, arguing that the ability of the church to formulate its own rural policy was constrained by the highly competitive political structure that necessitated reliance on first the Conservative Party's electoral strength as well as in the rapid rise of the Christian Democratic Party in the 1960s. Her analysis of the Church's competitive relations with political parties in the countryside provides a deeper understanding of the importance of rural issues to Chilean political development

Geography · Political science · Politics · Rural area · Sociology · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · Law · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious and Theological Studies

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