Gaspar García Laviana (November 8, 1941 — December 11, 1978) was a Spanish

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priest who took up arms to fight as a soldier in

Nicaragua Nicaragua (; ), officially the Republic of Nicaragua (), is the largest country in Central America, bordered by Honduras to the north, the Caribbean to the east, Costa Rica to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Managua is the countr ...

with the

Sandinista National Liberation Front The Sandinista National Liberation Front ( es, Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN) is a socialist political party in Nicaragua. Its members are called Sandinistas () in both English and Spanish. The party is named after Augusto Cé ...

(FSLN) in 1977.

Early life

García Laviana was born in 1941 in Les Roces, San Martin del Rey Aurelio,

Principality of Asturias Asturias (, ; ast, Asturies ), officially the Principality of Asturias ( es, Principado de Asturias; ast, Principáu d'Asturies; Galician-Asturian: ''Principao d'Asturias''), is an autonomous community in northwest Spain. It is coextensiv ...

(

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) moving during his childhood to

Tuilla Tuilla ( ast, Tiuya) is a small parish and former mining village in the municipality of Langreo, Asturias, North Spain. It is located to the southeast of the center of the city of Oviedo, near La Felguera-Langreo, and had a population of 1,491 ...

Langreo Langreo (; ast, Llangréu) is a municipality and town in northern Spain, in Asturias. It is the 4th largest town of Asturias with 43,000 inhabitants. Langreo is located in the centre of Asturias, approximately south-east of Oviedo. It was an im ...

. He was ordained a

priest A priest is a religious leader authorized to perform the sacred rituals of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and one or more deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in partic ...

of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (MSC) in 1966. After taking charge of a church in

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for three years, working at the same time as a carpenter.

Missionary in Nicaragua

In 1969 arrived to Nicaragua as a missionary priest. Through his missionary work with Pedro Regalado in the parishes of

San Juan del Sur San Juan del Sur is a municipality and coastal town on the Pacific Ocean, in the Rivas department in southwest Nicaragua. It is located south of Managua. San Juan del Sur is popular among surfers and is a vacation spot for many Nicaraguan ...

and

Tola Tola may refer to: Places * Bella Tola, a mountain in the Pennine Alps in the Swiss canton of Valais * La Tola, a town and municipality in the Nariño Department, Colombia *Tola (Shakargarh), a village in Pakistan * Tola, Rivas, a municipality ...

in the department of Rivas, García Laviana worked closely with the Nicaraguan peasants and was intimately aware of the many hardships they faced. He joined other progressive Christians in ''concientización'' (or awareness raising) in poor rural communities around the country.

An Activist against Social Injustice

Gaspar happened to arrive in a country where a revolution was in the making. His work as a missionary inevitably led him to take sides with the poor and join the revolutionary process. His noisy complaints about the neglect of the poor, including sit-ins in government offices, caught the attention of Anastasio Somoza's administration. García Laviana was also an outspoken critic of the brothels located in his parish, many operating with underage girls.

Exile in Costa Rica and Involvement in the Revolution

When he exposed this scandal on the radio, Somoza's National Guard tried on two occasions to assassinate him. He fled to Costa Rica where he met exiled members of the

(FSLN). He agreed with them that the overthrow of Somoza was a moral—even religious—necessity. After agonizing soul-searching, and deep reading in church doctrine, he decided that taking up arms to fight evil did not violate his Christian principles. His decision was broadcast in two secretly distributed public letters that made clear that, with a heavy heart, he felt armed struggle was his Christian duty as a priest in solidarity with the oppressed. Trained in explosives in Cuba, he returned to Central America and joined the "'Benjamin Zeledon' Southern Front" in the Sandinista guerrilla war against Somoza. His unit was betrayed by a traitor and was ambushed on a farm along the Costa Rican border called "El Infierno." Gaspar rose up to fire when he should have stayed down; he was killed instantly. He never lived to see the triumph of the insurrection the following July.

Legacy

A closet poet, García Laviana expressed his outrage at the poverty and neglect of Nicaraguan peasants, society, as well as his own mixture of emotions as he took up arms, in many secretly circulated poems that, after the triumph of the insurrection were published as a collection in 1979 called '' Songs of Love and War''; this was the first book published by the

Sandinista The Sandinista National Liberation Front ( es, Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN) is a socialist political party in Nicaragua. Its members are called Sandinistas () in both English and Spanish. The party is named after Augusto C� ...

government's Ministry of Culture, headed by another poet and priest,

Ernesto Cardenal Ernesto Cardenal Martínez (20 January 1925 – 1 March 2020) was a Nicaraguan Catholic priest, poet, and politician. He was a liberation theologian and the founder of the primitivist art community in the Solentiname Islands, where he lived fo ...

. Biographies include GASPAR VIVE by Fr. Manuel Rodriguez Garcia (privately printed, 1981) and !GASPAR! A SPANISH POET/PRIEST IN THE NICARAGUAN REVOLUTION by David Gullette (Bilingual Press, 1994) which contains a bilingual collection of his most important poetry. Laviana was a priest who was greatly influenced by the spirit of

Liberation Theology Liberation theology is a Christian theological approach emphasizing the liberation of the oppressed. In certain contexts, it engages socio-economic analyses, with "social concern for the poor and political liberation for oppressed peoples". I ...

which focused on a "preferential option for the poor" declared at the Latin American Bishop's conferences at Medellín and

Cuernavaca Cuernavaca (; nci-IPA, Cuauhnāhuac, kʷawˈnaːwak "near the woods", ) is the capital and largest city of the state of Morelos in Mexico. The city is located around a 90-minute drive south of Mexico City using the Federal Highway 95D. The na ...

. Daniel Ortega, president of Nicaragua, acknowledged the importance of García Laviana's participation in the revolutionary struggle. García Laviana's involvement in the Nicaraguan Revolution encouraged Catholics to support the FSLN by providing the revolutionary movement with a sense of moral legitimacy. Many of García Laviana's concerns became priorities for the Sandinistas when they assumed power. The revolutionary government took up health care as a major priority, implemented

agrarian reform Agrarian reform can refer either, narrowly, to government-initiated or government-backed redistribution of agricultural land (see land reform) or, broadly, to an overall redirection of the agrarian system of the country, which often includes land ...

initiatives that redistributed land back to many peasants individually and in cooperatives, made education through the fourth grade free and universal, and denounced prostitution.

References