Category: Decolonial practices

Coast | The Hour of the Peoples | Jobel, 2025

Back to our roots in times of devastation About witnesses from other worlds

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

A few months ago, we mourned the passing of Diego Irrazábal, a Chilean theologian who dedicated a significant part of his adult life to accompanying Andean indigenous peoples and grassroots communities in "Our America," as the youth of Bendita Mezcla (Blessed Mix) often refer to our continent. Our dear friend Fran Bosch wrote a memorable farewell to Diego in Ameridia from Mar del Plata, recalling his legacy of smiles and warmth as spiritual and theological spaces where we can celebrate the God of Life. Such was the precious gift of this missionary theologian to so many people and communities throughout his life.

I met Diego on the editorial board of the journal Concilium a decade ago, where we briefly coincided in a passing of the torch between Latin American colleagues of both older and newer generations. In that space, we shared the desire to update the vision and mission of an international journal that had been able to read “the signs of the times” in the spirit of the Good Pope, John XXIII, opening new perspectives for Christian theology during the difficult times of the Cold War and the utopian ideals of social change of the 1960s and 70s that were spreading throughout Latin America and other continents.

But the theoretical framework for Catholic theology of those years could not remain the same sixty years later in order to account for the decolonial turn that all theology—not only Christian but also Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and all religious and spiritual traditions—is called to undertake in order to discern the complicity of coloniality that appropriated our religious practices and theological discourses, where the paths of resistance and liberation take on bold and new forms. We were able to make some progress in this new understanding of theology in times of global devastation and the re-existence of people and communities with combative hope, but the processes and work of critical reflection that can emerge in these new theological spaces in times of systemic violence that is rapidly taking over the world remain pending.

Remembering Diego these days at the World Forum for Theology and Liberation (WFTL) held in Cotonou, Benin, Luiz Carlos Suzin - a Brazilian colleague from the generation that founded this theological process to accompany the social movements of the Global South - recalled with gratitude the vision of the Chilean colleague, from long ago, to admire the soul of the peoples in their ancestral religions and their diverse ways of coexisting with the colonial Christianity that marked the first evangelization of America, exploring new ways of dialogue of spiritual knowledge.

I met Diego again at some colloquiums in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Santiago, Chile. He was always a curious man, passionate about knowing how to forge connections with new generations, without losing the impetus of a prophetic and liberating Christianity that could not renounce its spiritual and theological DNA in order to always stand with the poor and the dispossessed of the earth.

Participating these days in the World Forum on Theology and Liberation, I see its influence also in this process of accompanying social movements that cultivate, in each territory, the world change we yearn for, and that build diverse collectives from the margins of the hegemonic world. Ultimately, we seek to build the “other possible world” of the World Social Forum, one “where many worlds fit,” as the Zapatista communities propose today.

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In its current edition, uncertainty gripped the participants in the World Social Forum upon receiving the unexpected news that it would be postponed, partly due to the difficult relationship with the Beninese government, as well as the political instability of the West African region in an international context aseptic to social internationalism, and some confusion on the part of the organizing committee in following the process that followed the forum held in 2024 in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Faced with this situation, the international delegation invited to the World Forum on Theology and Liberation was called to a last-minute assembly to decide how to host the two panels that the FMTL had offered to the World Social Forum: one on feminisms as theological voices of change and innovation confronting patriarchy, and the other on the resistance of peoples to the devastation of Mother Earth. An intense day allowed us to hear voices from social movements that are a sign of hope, such as the Ecolojah initiative with its Center for the Valorization of Agroecology, Sciences, and Endogenous Techniques (Cevaste), opened by Père Jah and Mère Jah in the interior of Benin, where it is possible to explore the connections between caring for the land and the spiritualities of the God of life.

In order to keep alive “the spirit of Porto Alegre” that gave birth to the World Social Forum, Silvia Regina de Lima Silva, Nicolas Panotto, and I proposed to the coordination team a day of work as the international delegation of the FMTL to creatively reflect together on the current challenges of liberation theology in a context of escalating global violence. We reformulated the traditional see-think-act steps of liberation theology with a decolonial emphasis, to make visible, problematize, and articulate our political, epistemic, and spiritual options where today we weave theology with social movements. It was a rich and intense day of reflection, accompanied by symbols of resistance and re-existence where we see glimpses of the Kingdom of God emerging in our present time.

We finally decided to spend a day at the World Social Forum to explore its current edition in an African country. The difficult negotiations between the organizing committee and the government, as well as the limited time for many international delegations to reach the event, raised doubts about the future of this space for autonomous social movements that share the vision of another possible world that gave rise to the WSF. The relevance of this model, now twenty-five years old and facing a crisis of internationalism and alter-globalization in times of global technofascism, will have to be evaluated.

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Today, August 8th, is the feast of Dominic of Guzman who—along with Diego de Osma, a bishop troubled by the uncertainty of his time in 13th-century Castile, a group of women from Prouille in southern France seeking to return to the roots of the Gospel in community, poverty, and prayer, and Peter Ceyla, a layman from Languedoc who offered his house to host the initiative of “holy preaching”—shared “the charism of preaching” to return to the roots of the Christian faith through apostolic preaching.

This is an opportunity to celebrate, without triumphalism and with a critical eye, a constantly evolving lifestyle that has borne rich fruit for the Church and for humanity. A charism of seeking truth, wherever it may be found, as lived by Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Meister Eckhart in the Middle Ages. A drive for justice, beginning with the forgotten of society, as exemplified by the School of Salamanca and Bartolomé de Las Casas in Chiapas in the 16th century, and in our times by Albert Nolan in Apartheid-era South Africa and Gustavo Gutiérrez in Shining Path-era Peru. A passion for beauty, which is the splendor of divinity, from Fra Angelico in Florence to Father Couturier in France, and Julián Pablo in Mexico. A yearning for spirituality from the unfathomable mystery of the living God, like Meister Eckhart on the banks of the Rhine, or the laywoman Catherine of Siena in medieval Tuscany, or the layman Piergiorgio Frassati in the 20th century, a mystical tradition never trapped by any feeling, idea or institution, but seduced by the loving divinity that is always unattainable and yet close.

Today I celebrate this feast with the Dominican friars and the Dominican family of Cotonou, enlivened by a youth choir with powerful voices and African rhythms, even amidst a Roman ritual that shows no sign of inculturation of the faith of the Beninese people. I hope that one day preaching, theology, and spirituality will reach that “decolonial stage” that will allow us, as peoples, to quench our thirst for the divine in the polyphony of spiritual traditions that weave us together as a human and divine creation in the heart of our communities.

Happy Feast of Domingo, the seeker and preacher of the saving truth.

Cotonou, August 8, 2026

August 8, 2026
Carlos Mendoza | Door of no return (detail) | Cotonou, August 1, 2026

The door of no return Some echoes of the XII World Forum on Theology and Liberation

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

Ouidah is the symbolic port of captivity, human trafficking, and African slavery at the dawn of modernity. It represents the dark side of the moon of the egoic dream of Western reason, which became a nightmare for those subjected to the dominating libido of European conquering power.

This small city on the Atlantic coast of Benin, in West Africa, has slowly transformed the memory of the atrocious suffering endured by around fourteen million people - who were enslaved by Portuguese traders, from the 16th to the 18th century - into a territory of resistance and hope for its survivors.

«"Africa Decides" is a cultural community center that promotes the healing of the collective memory of the survivors of those individuals and communities deported to Brazil five hundred years ago. It was an unprecedented diaspora that crossed "the door of no return," a succinct expression to describe the horror of those generations who never went home.

In the 19th century, after the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, some decided to return from northeastern Brazil to their homeland in Benin, the former kingdom of Dahomey. They returned with the longing to find the land from which they had been taken, the land that was etched into their bodies, hearts, and souls. That indelible mark was what drew them back.

But upon returning, these new generations from the diaspora discovered a different time and place, where they didn't recognize their families or their crops. Their land had been colonized by France in the 18th century until its independence in 1960. Another period of dispossession that, to this day, has left a mark of impoverishment on the daily lives of its people. The country had a brief socialist period between 1960 and 1975 that left a legacy of social unrest, until it transitioned to a Western-style democracy with a strong influence in the West African region.

Those who had been resurrected had returned to reunite with their ancestors and reclaim their path as a diaspora people with those who remained behind. The revival of Vodou in present-day Benin represents a way of recovering precisely that collective memory that was stolen from them and left tattooed on their bodies and souls. It is a radically different mark from the brand of slavery imposed with a hot iron on their black skin, by which the trafficker assigned them an owner, a plantation, and a task that ranged from forced labor on the farms to systematic sexual abuse. These were practices that lasted for centuries and proved to be the foundation of the enrichment by dispossession that created modern European wealth.

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Silvia Regina de Lima Silva is a decolonial feminist theologian who has participated in the World Forum on Theology and Liberation for many years. She spoke to us from her own history as an Afro-Brazilian woman, rooted in both Christianity and Candomblé. She wove a narrative from her diasporic history of "returning home." Silvia proposed that we consider decoloniality as a process of liberation from diverse colonialities—those of power-knowledge-being analyzed by the Peruvian Aníbal Quijano—in which she delved into the spiritual depths of this devastating process she called "coloniality of the soul," a process of domination that, in her own words, consists of "killing one's own beliefs from within." The deepest aspect of modern coloniality, intrinsically linked to racism, is, for her, this servitude of being in its deepest spiritual impulses.

In dialogue with Silvia Regina, we have begun a joint theological reflection to consider the new forms of Christianity that can emerge from this process of "decolonizing the soul," engaging in creative dialogue with the spiritual traditions that inhabit our bodies and imaginations. Each of us, from our own "place," our "body," our "deepest being of believers," explores dialogues, mixtures, dynamic syntheses, and other practices of diverse spiritualities that we now call "dual belonging," or perhaps "mutual belonging," until we find no other way to speak of new ways of living in the divine Ruah.

Whether in South Africa or Brazil, in Benin or Chiapas, we, the people, are living through the time of that "return," to give a decolonial turn to the history of coloniality of yesterday and today, giving way to spiritualities of the pluriverse.

The "no return" signifies today a generating impulse of new spiritual communities of shared belonging, where traditions leave behind the logic of the coloniality of the soul to give way to a "decoloniality of believing" as a source of full life for all the spiritual traditions of humanity.

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The World Social Forum is about to take place in Benin, updating the "spirit of Porto Alegre" that inspired social movements in the Global South to seek "other possible worlds." As an alternative to the Davos Forum, controlled by governments and transnational corporations from the Global North, this forum has, for more than twenty-five years, sought to build networks of solidarity among social movements for justice, human rights, and the care of the planet from an alter-globalization perspective.

In the context of de-globalization, the financial oligarchy and the "warlords" who control the global economy and world politics today, enormous challenges are emerging for the articulation of resistance to this "war against humanity," as the Zapatistas from southeastern Mexico call it.

In the coming days, we will learn how these networks are being woven amidst an uncertain local context. It is a time for creativity, for mutual listening, support, South-South solidarity, and the cross-cutting nature of resistance. Indigenous peoples, women, children, and youth, along with so many other collectives resisting systemic violence, continue to weave their voices, where the recovery of each people's soul will be the compass for the birth of these other worlds, "where many worlds fit.".

Cotonou, August 2, 2026

August 2, 2026
Gabriela Soriano | Underground Memories | San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas | 2026

Peace as a path to messianic insurrection About the Frayba Agenda 2026 Underground Memories

By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez

Last Wednesday, the presentation of the fifteenth edition of the Frayba Agenda Titled “Underground Memories,” it was prepared by the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center in Chiapas. This annual publication, since 2011, preserves the living memory of the actions carried out in the promotion and defense of the human rights of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, as well as of people in forced migration and refugees, who have been supported by this civil society organization over several decades. Frayba -as this organization is affectionately called- was born inspired by the winds of conciliar renewal of the diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas and the social processes that emerged as an expression of the indigenous movement of the second half of the twentieth century.

Three articles reflecting on the local, regional, and national context—by Jorge Santiago, founder of several ecclesial and civil organizations, Susana Montes de la Commission for Support of Community Reconciliation (Coreco) and an interview with Carlos González, a member of the Coordination of National Indigenous Congress of Government Created by Pedro Faro, these are accompanied by a valuable graphic record of the key moments of three decades of peacebuilding in Chiapas. The editorial design and illustrations by Gabriela Soriano Segoviano reflect, with beautiful strokes of contemporary folk art, the connections of the underground memories of resistance that inspire the indigenous peoples of today, as well as civil society and the churches that walk with them.

Below, I transcribe my participation in the round table discussion, on that rainy afternoon in San Cristóbal de Las Casas.

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“There is no path to peace, peace is the path”

Mahatma Gandhi

This year we are commemorating three decades of peacebuilding in Chiapas: Frayba, Coreco, Sipaz, the National Indigenous Congress, the Zapatista Movement, the San Andrés Accords, and many other initiatives of civil society, churches, and social movements. These networks emerged from the fertile soil of Chiapas, prepared more than six decades ago by the pastoral plan of the Diocese of San Cristóbal with the arrival of Bishop [name missing]. jTatik Samuel Ruiz, who, after an arduous and patient conversation and journey with the native peoples, led to the birth of an indigenous Church.

A decade later, the Indigenous Congress of 1974 fostered the emergence of a collective consciousness among Indigenous peoples as historical subjects. And finally, the rise of the Zapatista movement, with its support bases and militias, proposed a different way of living and creating the political sphere as a shared endeavor. All these processes were accompanied by a vibrant and creative current of critical thought, which arose in the Highlands of Chiapas and the canyons of the Lacandon Jungle throughout the second half of the 20th century.

The San Cristóbal School, so named by Pablo Romo, along with the Cuernavaca School, analyzed by Humberto Bech, have been, in my opinion, the two main Mexican contributions to critical thought in the second half of the 20th century. Both provide us today with a precise direction for confronting with clarity the growing spiral of systemic violence that, with the Puerto Rican decolonial thinker Nelson Maldonado-Torres, we call here the Great Catastropheand.

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Jorge Santiago's reflection on the Frayba Agenda 2026. Underground Memories The work we present today rightly underscores the centrality of the San Andrés Accords as a crucible of decades of struggle for peace with justice and dignity. The thinker from San Cristóbal points out that the historical demands of Indigenous peoples remain relevant, and that the Mexican state still owes a debt for honoring these historic accords.

Two pastoral letters from jTatik Samuel Ruiz and Don Raúl Vera prepared the celebration of the Third Diocesan Synod, which took place from 1995 to 1999. This process allowed the diocese to reap the harvest of half a century of pastoral life and thus give a clear path of synodality to the life and commitments of this diocese. Both letters arose in a context of uncertainty due to the animosity and conflict on the part of Vatican authorities of that time, fueled by the Club of Rome, or a group of Mexican bishops who were declared enemies of liberation theology in Mexico and Latin America.

The first pastoral letter So that justice and peace may meet (1996) is an ecclesial response to the armed uprising of 1994. It reflects the struggle for land by indigenous peoples, as well as the commitment to justice and peace made by this diocese, following the impetus of the Second Vatican Council and the Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellín. The second pastoral letter From pain to hope, The agreement, signed by both bishops in 1998, after the Acteal massacre, is a commitment to hope amid the pain of the survivors and a pledge to continue seeking peace with justice and dignity.

The Vatican's violence against this pastoral project would later be unleashed against Don Raúl Vera, who was transferred to the Diocese of Saltillo on December 30, 1999, in a failed attempt to dismantle the synodal process. What his detractors never imagined was that this perverse decision would become the opportunity to sow the seeds of a liberating Church, now in lands of mining extraction and gender violence, which Don Raúl would embrace with fidelity to his mission as a pastor in those desert lands of northern Mexico.

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Finally, I would like to make two final comments to continue the conversation.

The challenges of moving forward, after three decades of peacebuilding, are now unprecedented, as we find ourselves in the uncertain moment of civilizational collapse. A commitment to justice for Indigenous peoples is no longer enough; it is essential to integrate other forms of justice, such as gender justice (sexual diversity) and ecological justice, to understand the rebellions. transmodern that build individuals and collectives of survivors in contexts of global violence. The historical strength of the poor, which the first generation of liberation theology envisioned, is giving way to the unsubmissive reason of social and ecclesial movements that are already weaving networks of mutual support, dignity, resistance and diverse re-existences.

It is also time to reformulate the theoretical framework for thinking about systemic violence. Liberation theology requires a radicalization that arises from dialogue with decolonial thought and theory. queer/cuir /queer and intersectionality to continue supporting peace processes, transitional justice, and diverse spiritualities of life that face the ongoing Great Catastrophe.

Let us not forget that it is our task to honor the legacy of the ancestors of the liberating Church, but from the new subjectivities, bodies and territories in resistance, with the fruits of thought, art and spirituality that emerge as messianic insurrections anticipating other worlds, of dignity and life for everyone.

The spirituality of messianic time is an interruption of the linear time of that Chronos that devours its children on altars of bloody sacrifices. Such a messianic force arises as an insurrection. peaceful In the face of systemic violence, that is, as a break from the vicious cycle of rivalry and violence, to establish processes of mutual recognition, beyond the violence that produces poverty, exclusion, and subjugation to hegemonic powers. It is a spirituality of life in the midst of death. Another time that (in)emerges as an anticipation of other possible worlds from the survivors of yesterday and today.

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Next Wednesday, March 25, at 6 p.m., we will continue our discussion on critical thinking emerging from Chiapas, with reflections by Pablo Romo on the San Cristóbal School and experiences of a spirituality of mutual support amidst violence, presented by our friend and Peruvian colleague Juan Carlos La Puente. Both reflections will be followed by a dance performance by Martha Elena Welsh.

See you at the restaurant Belil, in the historic center of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, where with Ricardo and Carmen as hosts, along with Angélica and Abraham, we will continue opening dining spaces, where resistances and spiritualities emerge as a commitment to permanent dialogue and mutual support in the care of life.

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, March 7, 2026

March 7, 2026

English