Documents the history of Catholic activism to mitigate human rights abuses in Guatemala and the failed US policies in the country and region during the 1970s and 1980s
 
Blessed Are the Activists examines US Catholic activists’ influence on US-Guatemalan relations during the Guatemalan civil war’s most violent years in the 1970s and 1980s. Cangemi argues that Catholic activists’ definition of human rights, advocacy methods, and structure caused them to act as a transnational human rights NGO that engaged Guatemalan and US government officials on human rights issues, reported on Guatemala’s human rights violations, and criticized US foreign policy decisions as a contributing factor in Guatemala’s inequality, poverty, and violence. His work foregrounds how Catholic activists emphasized dignity for Guatemala’s poorest citizens and the connections they made between justice, solidarity, and peace and brought Guatemala’s violence, poverty, and inequality to greater global attention, often at great personal risk.

Cangemi pays considerable attention to multiple facets of the strained US-Guatemala diplomatic relationship, including how and why Guatemala’s military dictatorship exposed the internal flaws within the Carter administration’s decision to link military aid to human rights and how internal foreign policy debates in the Carter and Reagan administrations helped to intensify Guatemala’s bloody civil war. He also includes interviews conducted with Guatemalan genocide survivors and refugees to provide firsthand accounts of the consequences of those policymaking decisions. Finally, he offers readers an in-depth examination of the US Catholic press’s sharp rebukes of US policies on Guatemala and all of Central America when the broader Roman Catholic Church began to move farther toward the ideological right under John Paul II.

Blessed Are the Activists offers rich, original research and a gripping narrative. With Guatemala and other countries in Latin America still experiencing human rights abuses, this book will continue to provide context. It will appeal to a broad swath of readers, from scholars to the general public and students.
 

Michael J. Cangemi is assistant professor of history at the US Military Academy.
 

“Michael Cangemi provides an outstanding contribution to historical research on Guatemala, Catholic activism, and US policy in Central America. By using a breadth of United States English language secular and religious archives, a range of Catholic newspaper accounts, and by delving into Guatemalan Human Rights reports, Cangemi creates a dialogue among these distinct experiences of and perspectives on Guatemala’s violent history.”
—Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, author of The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943–1989: Transnational Faith and Transformation

"The book is a work of remarkably deep multilingual and multiarchival research that uses documents from religious as well as government archives in the United States and Guatemala, Catholic newspapers, and official human rights reports to give a voice to the victims of the Guatemalan genocide. Cangemi treats the topic with extraordinary sensitivity, delving deeply into diplomatic relations, state and church relations, and the experiences of Guatemalans and Catholic activists, including priests, nuns, and lay people. It is a wrenching, devastating account, but never a sensationalized one, and Cangemi weaves together the complex stories of transnational human rights activism, Cold War exigencies, and genocide with sophistication. The writing is crisp and the arguments compelling. It adds considerable to our understanding of Cold War U.S.-Latin American relations as well as to our understanding of the religious dynamics of genocide and the significant influence of religious activism on U.S. politics and foreign policy making. In short, it is a groundbreaking addition to the work on religious groups and the Guatemalan civil war that scholars such as Theresa Keeley and Virginia Garrard have done."
—Lauren Turek, author of To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations.
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