Biography
Juan Martínez Benavides is a PhD student in Religion and Society at Drew University Theological School. Born and raised in the ancestral lands of the Nahua people of Kuskatan, known today as San Salvador, his work examines how religion, memory, and war shape identities and political struggles in postwar El Salvador. His research engages social ethics, liberation theologies, decolonial thought, and cultural trauma theory.
Paper Abstract
Since the signing of the 1992 Peace Accords, El Salvador has witnessed more than sixty environmental conflicts that reveal the unfinished work of environmental peacemaking in the postwar period. These struggles, which Rafael Cartagena names socio-ambientalismo, emerge from the convergence of distributive critiques rooted in livelihood with ecological critiques grounded in the defense of the environment. While the Catholic Church has historically played a prominent role in these formations, recent events suggest the emergence of unexpected alliances.
In 2025, José Ángel Pérez, a pastor of Misión Cristiana Elim—a Pentecostal megachurch historically distant from land struggles—was unjustly imprisoned while accompanying the El Bosque cooperative during a demonstration to protect campesino families from dispossession. His presence in this conflict, and his subsequent inclusion in the protest art and communications of the ecofeminist movement Reverde (Rebelión Verde El Salvador), signal an unusual but significant convergence between Pentecostal social engagement and ecofeminist resistance.
Drawing on Rosemary Radford Ruether’s conception of religious ecofeminism, I explore how such convergence becomes possible and generative. Ruether argues that Christian traditions contain “powerful patterns” capable of healing ecological crises and that “pioneering ecological communities” can model new planetary consciousness. Pérez, however, has framed his activism not in ecological terms and Elim’s environmental ethic remains within patriarchal and anthropocentric assumptions and in contrast with Reverde’s ecofeminist principles. This tension challenges Ruether’s vision of ecological community and reveals openings for new alliances beyond ideological divides.
Using Cartagena’s and Paul Almeida’s analysis of postwar social movements, I interpret this convergence as an unlikely alliance grounded in a different radicality (from the Latin radix). Here, the “returning to the roots” is not a return to past dogma but to the soil itself as the site of political struggle, where unexpected solidarities take root and reshape our understanding of religious participation in ecological struggle.