October 2004 584 The Psychologist Vol 17 No 10 Viva Nacho! Liberating psychology in Latin America A UNIVERSITY campus, 16 November 1989. Eight people lie dead – six academic staff, their housekeeper and her daughter, all victims of an elite battalion of the El Salvador army, trained and funded by the United States government. Among them was the leading social psychologist from Latin America, Ignacio Martín-Baró (see Harris, 1990), who was also a Jesuit priest and vice-rector of the University of Central America. Known familiarly as Father Nacho, Martín-Baró had established a distinctive approach to psychology that is having an increasing influence in both Latin America and beyond. Martín-Baró’s liberation psychology (psicología social de la liberación – PSL: see Martín-Baró, 1985/1996a; Martín-Baró, 1986/1996b) sought to put psychology at the service of the poor and oppressed majorities of the American continent – to turn psychologists away from the internal problems of psychological research, or from practice oriented to a wealthy minority who could afford private services, and towards problems such as urban overcrowding, land reform and violence. But to do this implied a second task, the reconstruction of psychology itself from the standpoint of the excluded majorities of Latin America and other countries of the South. This meant careful searching through the dominant North American psychology for useful concepts and findings, but always with a critical eye for their limitations and their untrustworthy ideological content. Martín-Baró’s two textbooks of social psychology (1983, 1989b) written in the heat of the El Salvadorian civil war, are remarkable works of reconstruction, integrating orthodox psychological theory with a more sociological and political analysis. For example, his chapter on power starts from the classic French and Raven analysis of five forms of power (coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, expert), both offering a critique and adding in concepts from outside psychology. It is now 15 years since Martín-Baró’s murder. Yet his vision of a psychology of liberation lives on in the work of a network of psychologists, chiefly in Latin America, but also in South Africa, Europe, Australasia and North America. This article provides an overview for the English- speaking reader, as most of the relevant work is only available in Spanish. Why consider liberation psychology here? Despite the differences between Latin America and our own context, there are a number of reasons for us to consider and learn from this Latin American body of work. Much of the work of PSL developed in response to the ‘crisis of social psychology’ of the 1970s. That crisis was experienced in Britain, and North America (Armistead, 1974), but also acutely in Latin America. Empiricist social psychology was seen as irrelevant to the concrete social problems both within the societies in which it was being developed and elsewhere. This was the result of its parochial context of discovery (investigations of particular populations in artificial settings). Despite this, it attempted to suggest general social psychological principles that would apply to all human beings in all contexts. There were also critical suggestions that the imitation of scientific neutrality meant a denial of the moral dimension – a supposed value-free inquiry. However, the route taken by liberation psychology differed from that in both the English-speaking countries and continental Europe. There the academic field has settled into a broadly peaceful coexistence between empiricists and social constructionists, with little impact on psychological work in field contexts. Much of the critical effort remains within the academic community at a highly theoretical level. But Martín-Baró outlined an agenda that was to correct irrelevant scholasticism through the ‘search for truth from the popular masses’ – the oppressed majorities. New psychological theory MARK BURTON on the contribution of Ignacio Martín- Baró and his followers. SUSAN MEISELAS/MAGNUM PHOTOS