Martín-Baró, Ignacio (1942–1989)

Ignacio Martín-Baró, a Spanish-born Jesuit priest and a University of Chicago–trained social psychologist, teacher, and administrator at El Salvador's Universidad Centroamericana, dedicated his life to the cause of human rights, equality, and social justice. He was murdered in November 1989, along with five other Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter. They were eight of more than 70,000 victims, mostly civilians, who were killed by El Salvador's U.S.-trained armed forces and paramilitary death squads during El Salvador's civil war in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Martín-Baró was a renowned scholar and the author of five books and more than 100 articles. His work addresses themes of increasingly global significance, including the effects of political repression on the human psyche, the effects of war on children, the relationship between religious ideology and political activity, and the nature of industrial psychology from the perspective of the underemployed and unemployed. He was also a gifted speaker and, having experienced firsthand the devastating impact of U.S. policy toward El Salvador, he visited and spoke before many U.S. organizations, stressing U.S. citizens' obligation to speak out against their nation's collusion with the Salvadoran oligarchy and military. He had a profound influence on many academics, psychologists, social workers, activists, and others in the United States and around the world.

Martín-Baró did not make a distinction between his religious, political, and psychological work. He saw them all as part of the same struggle. Liberation theology, an interpretation of Christianity grounded in the experiences of the Latin American poor, considers the critique of economic, social, and political structures (including religion) integral to pastoral work. Similarly, Martín-Baró argued, psychology needs to consider the real-life social, economic, and political conditions of people's lives. Martín-Baró fought against psychology's historical individualism, assumptions of universalism, and reduction of consciousness to observable human behavior. Furthermore, he argued, consciousness is not simply the private, subjective knowledge and feelings of individuals. It also represents the confines within which each person lives, where people take on and work out a knowledge about the self and about reality that permits them to be somebody, to have a personal and social identity. The fundamental premise of liberation theology and psychology alike is that soul and self are constructed, ideologically fought over, and actively drawn into class struggle.

Echoing Paulo Freire, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, Martín-Baró developed a psychology with praxis at its core; a psychology of conscious social transformation and socially transformative consciousness. He demonstrated how psychologists can act as agents of the development of critical consciousness both through the nurturing process of psychological [Page 909]healing for individuals and groups and, as privileged members of society, through intervening in the social, economic, and political system. Martín-Baró believed that the role of the social scientist should not be to explain the world but to change it.