All speeches are now available through videos in both English and Spanish.
by Massimo Introvigne
On average, I attend a couple of scholarly and religious liberty advocacy conferences every months, perhaps more. Many are good but one of the best was held at the Palacio de la Legislatura Porteña in Buenos Aires on July 19, 2024, on “Discrimination and Criminalization for Religious and Spiritual Reasons in Argentina: Legal Challenges in a Diverse Democratic Context.”
One reason I liked the conference was the Palacio itself. It hosts the Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires and is both a masterpiece of Argentina’s neoclassical architecture and a testament to the glory of the late 1920s and early 1930s, when it was built. It was a time when Argentina was among the wealthiest countries in the world, although the first signs of decadence due to the Great Depression and political instability had started manifesting themselves when the majestic building was inaugurated in 1931. Yet, much remain in the palace—which most foreigners would only recognize because several scenes of the 1996 movie “Evita” were filmed there—to remind visitors that Buenos Aires was once one of the cultural and artistic capitals of the world.
The conference was a first in its genre in Argentina and, although organized in a few weeks by a group of friends, was exceptionally well-attended with standing room only. It was also significant that representatives of most religions active in Buenos Aires attended the event, including of minorities that rarely socialize with others. On the contrary, by the end of the conference persons who did not know each other before had found a common cause and remained in the Palacio chatting as if they were old friends. Perhaps, real friendships started, and a cooperation between very diverse groups developed for the common cause of religious liberty.
Happily, it did not end there, as the organizers created a website where all the conference and all the speeches subtitled in Spanish and English can be accessed. Again, it is a feature of the best conferences that they do not end when the audience leaves the room. They create a social movement of sort, and continue.
It would of course be inappropriate to summarize the speeches and it would also spoil the pleasure of listening to them on the website. I will thus limit myself to some short comments.
Some of my colleagues, scholars of religion, who were in the audience were somewhat surprised when the first speaker, distinguished anthropologist Cecilia Inés Varela, started discussing how the Argentinian law against human trafficking is an international anomaly. Force, fraud, or coercion should be considered as essential elements of the crime, in accordance with the United Nations TIP Protocol. In Argentina, however, they are merely aggravating factor, meaning that some can be accused of trafficking even if they did not resort to force, fraud, or coercion. The U.S. State Department warned in its last TIP Report that due to the breadth of conduct that can be construed as trafficking in persons, “it was unknown how many of the cases prosecuted under Law 26842 [the anti-trafficking law in Argentina] involved trafficking offenses as defined by international law.” Varela connected this anomaly to an “abolitionist” trend in the field of prostitution, i.e., the attitude according to which there are no free sex workers but all are by definition “trafficked,” a position vigorously contested by sex workers unions in several countries.
Jokingly, some colleagues told me that for a moment they were afraid they had entered the wrong room and this was a conference on anti-trafficking laws rather than on religious liberty. However, the two following speeches clarified why Varela’s speech was relevant and indeed crucial to indicate where the main threats to religious liberty come in present-day Argentina. Varela’s doctoral student, María Vardé, explained how the special anti-trafficking prosecutorial office called PROTEX, incited by anti-cultists, has expanded its activities to accuse new religious movements, and even conservative Christian communities and charities as well as folk religious groups, of “trafficking” when they employ unsalaried volunteers (as all religions do). Indeed, the idea that groups stigmatized as “cults” engage in “trafficking,” based on the Argentinian example, is now being used in other countries as well, including against groups that propose experiences of “sacred eroticism.” Women who freely choose a path involving erotic initiations and experiments in alternative sexuality are also regarded as “trafficked,” no matter how they self-represent themselves.
PROTEX does not always win, though. Felipe González, a representative of the Argentinian affiliate of the Australian new religious movement Jesus Christians, called Cómo vivir por fe (How to Live by Faith), told the story of how PROTEX lost a case in which it had accused them of trafficking. In 2024, PROTEX suffered a similar defeat in the case of the Iglesia Tabernáculo Internacional.
What is the rationale for PROTEX to extend to religious organizations the accusations of “trafficking”? At the end of the day, as I argued in my own lecture, it is all about the old discredited and pseudo-scientific theory of “brainwashing.” In the typical trafficking cases, when prostitutes or enslaved immigrant laborers deny that they are victims, it is argued that their testimonies are irrelevant since they are terrorized and threatened by organized crime. Arbitrarily, and by comparing situations that are in fact not similar, PROTEX and the anti-cultists argue that members of “cults” who deny being victims should not be believed because they live in a situation of “brainwashing” by the “cult” leaders. However, scholars of new religious movements and courts of law in the United States and Europe rejected theories of “brainwashing” applied to religions already in the past century.
Rosita Šorytė, a former Lithuanian diplomat who works with the European Federation for Freedom of Belief (FOB), explained that this strange “resurrection” of the theory of “brainwashing,” which scholars believed they had debunked long ago, is not coincidental. With examples from different countries, she showed that governments and prosecutors, both in totalitarian countries such as Russia and China and in democratic ones such as Japan, France, and Argentina, have their own vested interests to discriminate against “cults” and use “brainwashing” as a convenient pretext, as do the media throughout the world, including in a country normally protective of religious liberty, the United States. She also indicated that, while motivations for attacking “cults” in different countries diverge, arguments are similar because of the action of organized and powerful coordinating agencies that are also active in Latin America.
Argentinian journalist and author Alejandro Agostinelli, who introduced the various speakers, and one of the leading scholars of religion in the country, Alejandro Frigerio, who served as respondent and presented the conclusions, did much more than offering a frame to the conference.
Frigerio offered food for thought, as disturbing as it was important, when he noted that through PROTEX the anti-cult ideology in Argentina has entered inside the government, and that while gender and ethnic differences are appreciated, religious difference keeps being stigmatized and criminalized.
I sincerely hope that these crumbs from an extraordinary conference stimulated your appetite for more. The website is there for you.
