“Cold War Parable: Radio Sutatenza, Accion Cultural Popular, and the Politics of Religion and Rural Development in Colombia (1950s-1970s)”

• In Event: Revolutions of the Saints: The Politics of Religion in Latin America’s Long Cold War: Panel II

Abstract

In 1947, a Colombian priest, Jose Joaquin Salcedo, laid the cornerstone of what would become, until its demise in the late 1980s, Latin America’s largest Catholic, mass-media based education and community development network, Radio Sutatenza and the ‘Radiophonic Schools’ of Accion Cultural Popular or ACPO. For nearly three decades beginning in the early 1950s, ACPO formed a centerpiece of official efforts undertaken by a variety of Colombian governments of different political stripes to galvanize rural community development and education while keeping at bay revolution. This paper focuses on the little-known role ACPO played on an international stage at the height of the Cold War (1950s-1970s). With the support of the Vatican, Pro Deo University in Rome, various Colombian official, private and religious entities, and U.S. secular, religious and intelligence groups, ACPO emerged as a critical player in a transnational, Cold War effort that linked religion, business, and government to stem the tide of communism and promote an American model of free enterprise and democracy that could be replicated and exported from Colombia to other parts of Latin America and the developing world.

Author

• Mary Roldán, Hunter College/CUNY Graduate Center