Father Twomey's pioneering work with USAID

With a 1964 grant, the Jesuit's team at Loyola New Orleans helped train young Central American leaders

Faculty and students of the Inter-American Center at Loyola University New Orleans, 1964. Photo by Russell J. Creeson. Loyola University Special Collections and Archives, via Louisiana Digital Library.

As President Trump and Elon Musk work to dismantle USAID, I find myself wishing Father Louis J. Twomey, SJ, whose biography I am writing, were here to speak about the difference the agency has made in the lives of people in the developing world.

Although he is best known as a voice for labor and for civil rights, Father Twomey felt that the most important achievement of his career was a project that he initiated through a USAID grant: the Inter-American Center at Loyola University New Orleans, which trained young leaders from Central America from 1964 to 1971. (Twomey died in 1969.)

It was in the spring of 1962, just a few months after President John F. Kennedy established the agency, that Twomey first approached USAID with the idea for the Inter-American Center. USAID was sufficiently impressed with his proposal to commission a feasibility study, which in turn led the agency to fund the IAC’s official launch on June 30, 1964.

Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs was instrumental in gaining the USAID contract. He described it on the House floor as “the first of its kind in our Government’s efforts to provide leadership training for potential leaders in the developing nations of Latin America.”

In the feasibility study, Father Twomey and his colleagues listed several practical goals for the center, with these two being topmost:

1. To service at Loyola University in New Orleans carefully chosen representatives from the various institutions in both the public-and private sectors of Latin America, but principally from the emerging leadership groups, with a program of education dealing with the social, economic and political problems of the peoples of the Western Hemisphere;

2. To give these selectees an opportunity to study the workings of democratic institutions and to provide them with the academic background and analytical tools needed to strengthen and improve the socio-economic and political structures of their respective countries.

The IAC led six-week seminars for groups of about thirty-five students. Oklahoma U.S. Sen. Fred R. Harris in a March 1967 speech praising the program from the Senate floor, described the students as “all members of homogeneous groups from the following institutional sectors of their society. Leaders of credit unions and cooperatives, secondary school educators, leaders of university student groups, leaders of rural communities, civic affairs leaders, leaders of planning groups, and health and welfare personnel.”

The center’s guiding ethic, as described by Father Twomey, was to give students the tools that they would need to help their communities cope with the rapid pace of social change in the modern world:

The objectives [of the program] are predicated on the possibility of developing within each participant an understanding and an analysis of the fact that change, rather than stagnation, is a fundamental characteristic of society; that change is accelerating throughout the world at varying rates; that the speed of that change can be influenced within certain limitations; and that change from a traditional to a modern society is the critical problem that leaders from the developing nations are called upon to solve. …

The motivating philosophy at Loyola University Inter-American Center is predicated on the belief that once people learn to identify, analyze and solve problems on the community level in a democratic manner, then they are prepared to exercise their role as citizens in the larger area of sectional, national and regional problems.

Among the IAC’s graduates was Mauricio Quixtan, who, upon completing the program, “started a Mayan-language radio program to help thousands of Indians around Guatemala City who cannot understand Spanish,” according to a 1966 newswire story. In 1984, Quixtan would make history when he was elected to Guatemala’s Constituent Assembly, making him the first representative of an all-indigenous political party to be elected to a national office in that country. His achievements there included helping establish Guatemala’s constitution.

Many other Guatemalan IAC graduates likewise found success in politics, as Stephen M. Streeter, associate professor of history at McMaster University, observed in his study of the Alliance for Progress’s activities:

Participants included teachers, campesinos, union organizers, university students, radio broadcasters, government officials and potentially influential politicians, mostly from the Christian Democratic Party. Follow-up surveys conducted by USAID revealed that most of the Guatemalan participants had benefited enormously from the Loyola Program: in certain municipalities as many as one-third of the local mayors elected in the mid-1960s had been trained at Loyola. The most famous Loyola graduate was the Christian Democrat Vinicio Cerezo, who served as president of Guatemala from 1986 to 1991.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune covered an Inter-American Center graduation in 1966. Felix S. Nuñez, mentioned below, is second from left in the photo; Father Twomey is at far right.

IAC graduates also had a positive impact in other areas of culture. Felix S. Nuñez, a high-school teacher who was valedictorian of the 1966 IAC class, became a zoologist and started the first-ever foundation in Panama to preserve the country’s primates. Mauro Canu, an indigenous Maya schoolteacher from Guatemala, helped translate the New Testament into the Kaqchikel language. Honduran Ana Ruth Zuñiga developed women’s-leadership programs in her home country, later becoming Honduras’s consul general to the United States. And Panamanian indigenous Ngäbe Chief Camilo Ortega Acosta helped achieve official state recognition for his people.

Another pioneering aspect of the IAC was its support for graduates’ projects in their home communities. It became the first USAID-funded initiative to promote development through microfinancing, at a time before the term microfinancing had even been coined. A fact sheet sent by the IAC to Look magazine on July 10, 1968, stated,

A special service of the Center is the provision of “mini-grants,” modest sums of money given by various companies to assist students to put into action some of the techniques they have learned at Loyola. More than 800 self-help projects have resulted. The Center’s files contain hundreds of letters from trainees who have organized schools, literacy programs, libraries, etc.

Father Twomey’s visionary work with the Inter-American Center thus made it among the very first in the long line of USAID projects organized by Catholic nonprofits. Indeed, until Trump, with Musk, cut off the agency’s funds last week, the top recipient of USAID grants was Catholic Relief Services. Given that Twomey centered his life and work around the social teachings of the Church, I feel certain that, if he were here today, he would call the attack on USAID an attack on the Catholic Church’s ability to conduct the humanitarian assistance that is part of the mandate given it by Jesus Christ.

Thanks to the paid subscribers who, with my Kickstarter backers, enable me to continue my work on my Father Twomey biography, A Priest in Good Trouble. If you are not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one—and in any case, please support my work with your prayers. Thank you and God bless you.