Latin American Anticlerical Campaigns Against the Catholic Church

Latin American governments have repeatedly confronted the Roman Catholic Church's institutional power through anticlerical campaigns spanning more than a century, restricting or persecuting the clergy in the name of secular reform or revolutionary authority. Guatemala's 1871 Liberal Revolution under Miguel Garcia Granados and Justo Rufino Barrios expelled the Society of Jesus and stripped the church of its landholdings within its first years in power. Ecuador's Eloy Alfaro pursued a comparable program between 1895 and 1911, seizing church property and barring new religious orders. Mexico's Plutarco Elias Calles enforced the anticlerical articles of the 1917 constitution in the 1920s, closing churches and provoking the armed Cristero Rebellion. A century later, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega government expelled priests and bishops and moved against the Catholic hierarchy directly. Historians of anticlericalism treat these episodes, though separated by generations and differing ideologies, as part of one recurring Latin American pattern of state action against the church.