In Plain View of the Catholic Faithful: Church-Peasant Conflict in the Peruvian Andes, 1963–1980

This essay chronicles the mounting conflict between indigenous peasants and Catholic Church authorities in mid-twentieth-century Chuschi, an Andean community in Ayacucho, Peru. What began as a local conflict between villagers and individual priests developed into an open rebellion against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Ayacucho. Taking advantage of Peru's changing social and political landscape, as well as a vocational crisis within the church, Chuschinos ultimately succeeded in ousting the church from the community, thus contributing to the Catholic Church's final collapse in the Ayacuchan countryside.