Word: latinate
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Latin America's comunidades de base keep growing...
Political recruiting sessions? Insurrectionist cells? Hardly. All the participants were in fact earnest Roman Catholics and members of the most influential movement among Latin America's 300 million faithful, the small constantly spreading groups called comunidades de base (base communities). There may be as many as 150,000 comunidades, 80,000 in Brazil alone, chiefly in the destitute states of that country's north and northeast...
...comunidades, many started by foreign missionary priests working among the poor, have sprung up during the past decade in virtually every country of Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina...
They are variously involved with the needs and wishes of Latin America's largest class, the desperately poor, the uneducated, the politically unorganized. In fetid Netzahualcdyotl, a slum of 2.6 million people that grows like a tumor on the outskirts of Mexico City, several comunidades have cooperated to help protest rising bus fares and appalling health conditions. Human feces lie in the streets. Contaminated water adds to the filth and contributes to a death rate of more than 50% among children less than four years of age. Before Pope John Paul II's visit to Mexico in January...
...southern sugar-cane town of Puerto Tejada when he started to help the citizenry demand potable water. In Argentina, government repression has all but destroyed the comunidades. But elsewhere, throughout the hemisphere, the little groups have become a force to be reckoned with. Last February at the Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM) in Puebla, Mexico, the comunidades were given a special boost. The 220-page final document of the conference lauded them as "one of the motives for joy and hope for the church" and "the focal point of evangelization, the motor of liberation...