Hauptinhalt

In Memoriam: José Luis Rocha (1967-2023)

José Luis was one of the brightest minds I have ever met, a thinker who inspired to change the world. I first met him in 2006 in Managua, when he was a researcher at Nitlapan Institute and a columnist and researcher at Envío, a well-known journal of the Central American University (UCA). In 2012, his wife Wendy received a PhD scholarship and brought her family to Marburg. Convinced that he would continue writing, I suggested that he submit his next manuscript as a dissertation. At this time, he was already one of Central America´s most renowned sociologists: he had published numerous book chapters and spoken at conferences in more than a dozen cities in Europe and the Americas. In 2012 we joked that, as the younger of the two of us, I would be his Doktormutter (“doctoral mother”). He submitted his dissertation on the “Unauthorized Migration of Central Americans to the United States as an Act of Civil Disobedience” in 2016, and it was an excellent and impressive piece of work.[1] It was published in Spanish in 2017 (La desobediencia de las masas: la migración no autorizada de centroamericanos a Estados Unidos como desobediencia civil, San Salvador: UCA Editores).

After completing his university studies in theology and psychology in the 1980s, José Luis decided to become a priest. He joined the Jesuit Order and worked for many years in communities affected by war and displacement in Honduras. He later resigned from priesthood, returned to Nicaragua and decided to devote his time and effort to research. He worked on a diverse range of topics, including youth gangs, economic development, civil society, poverty, neoliberalism, corruption, and the dynamics of migration in Central America and beyond. As a scholar, he combined his passion for social justice with academic rigour and engaging prose. A passionate and inexhaustive writer, his work came out of socialist humanism, and through his columns in Envío, he created concise yet poetic key texts for understanding political and social developments in Central America.

I often think back to when we thought it might be good to spend a few years in Germany until the situation in Nicaragua calmed down. Unfortunately, things turned out quite differently and the Ortega-Murillo regime´s cycles of vengeance and repression against the country’s own citizens have overshadowed his life both academically and personally in recent years. He continued to be a leading and eloquent voice of resistance, and wrote the books Autoconvocados y conectados. Los universitarios en la revuelta de abril en Nicaragua (2019, Self-convened and connected. University students in the April revolt in Nicaragua) and Tras el telón rojinegro. Represión y resistencia (2021, Behind the red-black veil. Repression and resistance). José Luis was forced into exile by the Ortega-Murillo regime, working under precarious conditions without the possibility to relocate to Nicaragua. The 2020 book on “El debate sobre la justicia maya. Encuentros y desencuentros del pluralismo jurídico en la Guatemala del siglo XXI (2020, The debate on Mayan Justice) testifies to his ongoing productivity. 
At the end of December, he returned to Guatemala from a research trip to Costa Rica with a virus and died quickly and unexpectedly from pneumonia. He was a poet, writer and brilliant mind who will never leave us, even after he passed away.

A couple of months ago, he was appointed as a member of the Nicaraguan Academy of Language. The title of the speech he delivered on this occasion is emblematic: La lengua es un arma cargada de pasado. Language is a weapon loaded with past.

Anika Oettler, 19 January 2024

 [1] Available here: https://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/ubfind/Author/Home?author=Rocha%2C+Jos%C3%A9+Luis&