After the Second Vatican Council, CELAM held two conferences which were important in determining the future of liberation theology: the first was held in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, and the second in Puebla, Mexico, in January 1979. The Medellín conference debated how to apply the teachings of Vatican II to Latin America, and its conclusions were strongly influenced by liberation theology, which grew out of these officially recognized ideas. While the Medellín document is not a liberation theology document, it laid the groundwork for much of it, and after it was published, liberation theology developed rapidly in the Latin American Catholic Church.