One of the touchstone documents of the Reagan administration’s backing of anti-Communist death squads and dictatorships in Central America is Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare. A product of the Central Intelligence Agency, the manual gives advice to the “guerrilla student” on how best to generate support for “the Christian and democratic crusade being conducted in Nicaragua by the Freedom Commandos,” better known as the Contras. It is also the unlikely place where the CIA would name as a particular enemy the country’s most famous priest and poet, Ernesto Cardenal.
The tone of the document alternates between Orwellian doublespeak and the self-indulgent theatrics of a Bond villain. In the latter spirit, its preface declares that “the human being must be considered as the primary objective in a political war,” and that “the most critical point of the human being is the mind. Once the mind has been reached, the ‘political animal’ has been vanquished, without necessarily having received any shots.”
Seldom has the word necessarily done more heavy lifting. As early as February 1986, with years to go before formal ceasefire negotiations, 119 separate incidents of human rights violations by the US-backed Contras had been documented, including “assassination, kidnapping, rape, mutilation and torture.” The figures dwarf the 21 violations attributed to the Sandinista government in the same report. The CIA manual is a self-described guide to the construction of “armed propaganda teams” (equipos de propaganda armada), consisting of “persuasive and highly motivated guerrillas […] motivating the people to support the guerrillas and resist the enemy.” Given that an estimated 0.6% of the entire Nicaraguan population died between 1980 and 1987, one can imagine the means of persuasion employed.
Among those whom Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare deemed in particular need of persuasion was Ernesto Cardenal. In various guises—as a poet, an advocate of liberation theology, a scholar of Amerindian cosmologies, a post-revolutionary Minister of Culture, and eventually as an internal critic of state repression under Daniel Ortega—Cardenal is perhaps the single most globally known cultural figure from modern Nicaragua, owing in part to his longevity. (Cardenal died of kidney failure in 2020, at the age of 95.) Along with his fellow priest Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, Cardenal is one of only two enemies singled out by name in the entire 67-page manual. In a list of topics for operatives to bring up when agitating among the population, the last item offered is “[i]ndignation […] over the participation of priests such as d’Escoto and Cardenal in the Sandinista government, against the explicit orders of His Holiness the Pope.”
It is fitting that the manual should single out a poet for outrage-baiting: its appendix includes a lengthy section on “Some Literary Resources” for the persuasive CIA operative, defining and giving examples of such classic rhetorical tropes as anaphora, antithesis, and apostrophe. It also lists “interrogation,” which in this case is not a euphemism for torture but means “questioning oneself for emphasis.”
For Cardenal, as for the CIA, politics and literary technique were closely intertwined. In Cardenal’s case, a third element completes a trifecta of life-defining orientations: his deep and longstanding Catholic faith. To understand why he so threatened the architects of counterrevolution, one must follow him far from Nicaragua and Latin America entirely to a monastery three thousand miles away in the woods of Kentucky, an hour south of Louisville.
There, he talked God, politics, and poetry with Thomas Merton, the celebrity author-monk he’d first read as an undergraduate at Columbia University, which Merton also attended. Cardenal’s literary encounter with Merton was so formative that when a spiritual crisis led Cardenal to take up the monastic life, he made special arrangements to complete his novitiate—a period of pre-vow monastic training and contemplation—at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, where Merton was “Master of Novices.” The fruits of the Cardenal-Merton encounter and their ensuing lifelong friendship via correspondence offer an object lesson in the transnational history of liberation theology and the religious left. Together, they offer a model of the internationalist outlook so badly needed in the Americas today.
By the time Cardenal arrived in 1957 to the novitiate at Gethsemani, Merton had become a rare kind of religious celebrity. The foremost Catholic literary intellectual in American life, especially one identified with progressive social movements, he was a public moral voice whose influence lasted until his early death in Thailand in 1968. (Cardenal wrote an elegy on the death of Merton, which he worked on for a year and called “the most important thing I’ve ever written.”) Even thereafter, his approximate successors—such as the priest and dissident Daniel Berrigan, with whom Merton helped organize an antiwar organization at the height of the Vietnam War—lacked Merton’s name recognition and breadth of audience.
In his bestselling spiritual autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), Merton addressed the postwar alienation and spiritual hunger for experiments in living that soon found outlets in the Beat movement. The autobiography turned Merton into a spiritual role model for a generation of seekers, and this reputation only grew as a result of the great torrent of writings on Christian mysticism and world religion that burst from Merton’s Trappist cell.
Merton’s writings ranged widely: translations of Latin American poetry; antiwar, anti-nuclear, and civil rights activism; and interreligious dialogue, including a collaboration with Daisetz Suzuki, known as the celebrated pen of Zen. Merton’s output was a furiously, sometimes frantically, energetic contribution to several of the major sectors of US intellectual and political life in the late 1950s.
At the monastery, Cardenal and Merton quickly hit it off. “From the beginning, there was a great understanding between us, as we were both poets,” Cardenal wrote. Reflecting later on their friendship, he described the “very special” monastic formation Merton gave him:
I would say: a monastic formation for a poet (something I believe no other monk in the world was capable of doing). The formation consisted of ensuring that everything I had loved as a poet in the world and everything that had been my personality didn’t die in the monastery to give rise to a ‘contemplative,’ but rather that the same person I was should be the contemplative without sacrificing anything authentic within me.
Instead of talking to Cardenal solely about “the spiritual life,” Merton “talked about anything” and insisted on broad conversation: “writers, Latin America, Gandhi, dictators, imperialism, Russia, etc.” Politics, especially the politics of dictatorship, became a recurring theme in their conversations. The Somoza family, the entrenched dictators of Cardenal’s Nicaragua, came up with particular frequency.
When the Somoza regime first came up, Merton surely could not have imagined that within two years, he would be writing to them directly. Through the introductions of Cardenal, Merton began lively correspondences with several other prominent Nicaraguan poets and revolutionaries. One of them was Pablo Antonio Cuadra, who co-edited the Managua-based dissident newspaper La Prensa with Pedro Joaquin Chamorro. In 1959, Chamorro was arrested along with others in an uprising that presaged the formal establishment of the Sandinista movement in 1961.
With encouragement from his Nicaraguan friends, Merton wrote to Nicaragua’s sitting president, Luis Somoza Debayle. Luis had inherited the presidency from his father two years before, and, like his brother Anastasio, was a graduate of a United States military academy. Merton urged the humane treatment and non-torture of all imprisoned rebels—in particular, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro. In service of his plea, he quoted Scripture:
I trust you will remember the words of Christ Our Lord and our Judge Who said: ‘Whatsoever you have to the least of these my brethren, you did it to ME.’ In the same manner I beg that the other leaders of the revolt may be spared from treatment which can only blacken your good name and bring further sorrow and violence upon Nicaragua.
Although Merton was willing to appeal to Somoza in terms a dictator might find palatable—distinguishing, for instance, between the “idealists” among the rebels and the “hidden Communist elements” that he feared Somoza would use as a justification for repression—his private reflections reveal a more nuanced political outlook. Merton was hardly a Marxist, but he acknowledged what he took to be Marx’s genuine humanism and remained comfortable befriending and collaborating with Marxists. In his political essay “A Letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra Concerning Giants,” he wrote that Marx “understood the roots of alienation, and his understanding even had something spiritual about it.”
Beyond the way his audience shaped his anticommunist rhetoric, there are other reasons for seeing Merton’s views on Nicaragua as something more than reactive humanitarian concern. Merton’s qualified appreciation for Marx reflected his growing conviction that resisting abusive power was a moral necessity. In a personal letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra around the same time, Merton expresses sweeping support for revolution in Nicaragua, by violence if necessary:
It is becoming more and more clear that our fundamental moral obligation is to resist complicity and submission to every form of abusive power, whether physical or moral or spiritual. And this is both complicated and perilous. Mistakes will be made, and violence is hard to check. It is sometimes necessary to meet force with force, and then one can only hope that the violence that follows will not go too far beyond reasonable limits. In the great international problems of the world, this hope no longer clearly exists. In local situations, such things are still possible. May freedom and justice come to Nicaragua, and to all the Latin American states.
These are not the sentiments of a stereotypically (and in this case literally) cloistered liberal. They reflect the integrated vision Merton shared with Cardenal, in which spiritual life flowed directly into concerns about politics, literature, and justice. In his written reflections after Merton’s death, Cardenal wrote that Merton “taught me to be like him, in whom the spiritual life was not separate from any other human concern (racism, politics, literature, nuclear issues, etc.).”
This ethos carried into their later correspondence after Cardenal left Kentucky for Mexico, then Colombia, and eventually back to Nicaragua. Cardenal wrote to Merton that the literary collectives and “new magazines in Latin America… are creating an interesting continental movement[,] and there we have a job to perform, and a mission bestowed by God. I consider this to be the field of action for my apostolate, which no other cleric in Latin America is going [to do], and probably would not be able to do.” For Cardenal, the religious, literary, and political were inseparable, and Merton encouraged that fusion at every turn.
Merton’s correspondence with Cardenal opened him to a wider Latin American political world that would draw him steadily beyond the cloister. A monk at Gethsemani once captured this evolution unintentionally, describing Merton with a typological misfire as a “Colombia [sic] man, and something of a poet and writer” when introducing him to Cardenal as a Columbia alumnus.
The misplaced vowel, while on one level the chance slip of a US monk with Latin America atypically on the brain, is fitting nevertheless. When Cardenal eventually left Gethsemani in 1959 to pursue the priesthood instead of the monastic life, part of his training was indeed in Colombia. Even later, as one of the major voices of liberation theology in Latin America, Cardenal inherited the mantle of the 1968 Episcopal Conference of Catholic Bishops in Medellín, Colombia, often cited as the movement’s formal beginning. In this sense, Cardenal was a “Colombia man,” too.
Meanwhile, Merton would go on to contribute an essay to be read aloud at the Camilo Torres Latin American Conference (Encuentro Latinoamericano Camilo Torres), a gathering of Marxists and Catholic radicals held in Montevideo in 1968. The gathering was held to honor the second anniversary of the death of Camilo Torres, a Colombian priest, socialist, and guerrilla fighter killed by the national army. Merton’s correspondent for the event, Juan García Elorrio, was the founder of the journal Christianity and Revolution (Cristianismo y Revolución), which in one issue printed a translated Merton essay alongside a statement from Torres himself, dispatched “from the mountains.” The juxtaposition was not lost on outside observers. A declassified 1967 CIA report on the Colombian Communist Party repeatedly described Torres as a dangerously influential “renegade priest” and traced the impact of his “short-lived United Front” on the Colombian left of the preceding decade.
By the time Merton was corresponding with Elorrio about the commemoration of Torres, the CIA had already completed its report noting Torres’s influence. Merton did not know this, but it adds an edge to his ringing endorsement of the conference in his reply to Elorrio: “I want very much to keep in touch with your important work. I want to express my complete solidarity with you in your work, and at a later date I hope I will have a chance to write more fully.”
Merton died later that year, and no further correspondence with Elorrio survives. All the same, statements and contacts such as these do something to puncture the image of Merton as a middlebrow spiritual writer of basically liberal orientation, much of which is a holdover from the early influence of The Seven Storey Mountain. His willingness to align publicly with a movement centered on a martyred guerrilla priest was not an isolated gesture. It was the outgrowth of years of friendships and exchanges with Latin American poets, revolutions, and clergy—above all being Ernesto Cardenal. Merton’s willingness to pluck Elorrio’s packet from his seven-story mountain of correspondence surely also reflects the long shadow of his encounter in Kentucky a decade earlier with Cardenal, and the intellectual and spiritual kinship that continued, in letter after warm letter.
What survives of Cardenal and Merton’s bond is more than a chapter of Cold War religious history. It is a living provocation that offers important lessons for the US left.
One of these lessons, to be sure, is a cautionary one about humility. Merton had a wide range of Latin American correspondents: in addition to Cardenal and his Nicaraguan associates, Merton was a frequent pen pal of Miguel Grinberg and Nicanor Parra, and he also worked as a translator of Latin American poetry. Despite the breadth and depth of these engagements, Cardenal remarked that Merton “idealized” Latin America. Merton’s letters time and again expressed feeling more at home among the poets of Nicaragua than in the United States. At one point, Merton sought permission from the Vatican to join Cardenal at Solentiname, the spiritual and artistic colony Cardenal founded off the coast of Nicaragua.
The isolation of Merton’s monastic life intensified the risks of romanticization. His “Letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra” waxes nostalgic: “Characteristic of [the mestizo populations and indigenous peoples] is a totally different outlook on life, a spiritual outlook that is not abstract but concrete, not pragmatic but hieratic, intuitive and affective rather than rationalistic and aggressive.” Latin America as embodied, traditional, emotional: there is more than a splash of the noble savage in this, especially given that indigenous identity plays a part in Merton’s picture.
But to my mind, the more interesting fact is the warmth and authenticity of Merton’s correspondence with Latin American writers, in spite of his romantic views. Progressive white Americans want to avoid engaging in exoticism or unwitting insensitivity, so much so that the avoidance of such mistakes becomes their singular focus. This neoliberal version of identity politics, as examined by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, has a negative normativity: it evaluates you for what you succeed in not doing (that is, saying something stupid). While the desire for sensitivity is a good thing in and of itself, in practice it often discourages good-faith, critical engagement with thought and art from the global South.
With Merton living in a monastery in a pre-internet era, naïveté seems inevitable in his case; still, he sought out friendships, correspondences, and collaborations that reshaped his political imagination. His example suggests that imperfect engagement is better than disengagement, and that internationalist self-formation is both possible and necessary, even when one’s starting point is partial or flawed.
The rise and persecution of Latin American liberation theology also remind us of the historic vitality of the Christian left and the religious left at large, a tradition now largely in eclipse in the United States. This reminder is timely, for today, US institutions of Christianity have become yoked to a fascist movement and its attendant cult of personality, one that treats the habitus and language of religion as instruments for political veneration.
Examples abound, and readers can doubtless contribute their own. Scholars now standardly discuss QAnon as a religious movement with clear structural affinities to US evangelicalism. The influential Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule’s brand of Catholic “integralism” has motivated his calls for a “common-good constitutionalism [that] does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy, because it sees that law is parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits.” America’s most prominent neo-Nazi, Nick Fuentes, advocates for a “Catholic Taliban.” The Catholic magazine Crisis sees his rise as posing a “dilemma” for Catholics. On the one hand, he is the kind of person who shouts “I love Hitler” into a microphone. On the other hand, as Crisis puts it, “he is an articulate advocate for truths Catholics hold dear.” Today’s Father Coughlin has swapped radio for Twitch.
If US Christianity will have anything to say to this battery of fascist and otherwise authoritarian options, it will need to have a robust critique of the US security state as a hemispheric ideological police force. Its diagnosis will need to extend beyond Trumpism to Trumpism’s roots in the extralegal violence of the Cold War, which standardized secretive police violence by highly ideologized, semiprofessional, paramilitary battalions: first in Central America, and now, in modified form, domestically.
US Christianity will also need to be educated about the alternative, Pan-American tradition that Cardenal and Merton emblemize. Their friendship puts cosmopolitan values into practice, a practical expression of “cosmopolitan socialist” values as recently described by Michael Brooks and Matt McManus. For both priest and monk, physical distance and the lack of a mutual nation-state did not limit moral concern for the suffering of others or license the neglect of their flourishing. If the enemies of liberation theology organized along international lines—as the CIA’s Psychological Operations manual makes plain—then so must the movement’s defenders: monks and nuns, priests and poets, journalists and Witnesses for Peace. Merton and Cardenal’s intellectual curiosity and cosmopolitan solidarity are a useful model for today’s Christian left.
Nick Dolan is a PhD student in English and American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Some of his other writings can be found here.
Image Credit: Rob Croes / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
