Latin American Guerrilla Movements

Organized around single country studies embedded in key historical moments, this book introduces students to the shifting, and varied guerrilla history of Latin America from the late 1950s to the present.

"This volume comes from the hand of three of the best researchers on revolutionary movements in Latin America. The time elapsed and the partial end of the last guerrilla violence in Colombia with the accumulated knowledge allow the rigorous research that is reflected in this book." Manuel Alcántara, Full Professor, University of Salamanca, Spain and Director of FLACSO Spain "A pioneering, comprehensive, analytical book on guerrillas / insurgency in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Cold War and the guerrillas set the way for political systems in the region and beyond. Counterinsurgency and guerrilla wars left narrow margins for democratic developments in Latin America between 1959 and 1990. A profound observation on twelve national cases. A new and excellent contribution from Dirk Kruijt, Eduardo Rey Tristán and Alberto Martín Álvarez." Francisco Rojas Aravena, Rector of the United Nations University for Peace, Costa Rica "The editors have compiled a well written and much needed comprehensive scholarly analysis of the Latin American revolutionary guerrilla movements that played a crucial role in the political history of the region in the 20th century. It is particularly important that they have acknowledged the seminal role played by Cuba in this process." Gary Prevost, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, College of St. Benedict and St. John's University, USA "This impressive collection of essays improves our understanding of the origins, evolution, and outcomes of Latin America's guerrilla movements. The volume brings together a top-notch group of political scientists, historians, and sociologists from Latin America, the United States, and Europe, who have dedicated their professional lives to the study of the region's New Left. It should be on everyone's reading list." Michael E. Allison, Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science, The University of Scranton, USA "Nothing exemplifies the tensions and contradictions of Latin America's quest for peaceful coexistence better than the history of the guerrilla movements that dominated its political life in the second part of the 20th century. Kruijt, Rey Tristán and Martín Álvarez have brought together a volume offering the most comprehensive overview so far of a phenomenon that in its origins, development, demise and aftermath expresses the troubled dynamic between democratization and violence that in different ways continue to plague Latin America society as it enters a new millennium." Bernardo Arévalo de León, Latin American Director of Interpeace "We have long been overdue for a volume that updates our understandings of guerrilla movements in Latin America. This work more than fills that gap. Drawing on the unrivaled expertise of leading scholars with intimate knowledge of the field, Latin American Guerrilla Movements excels in providing us with deep and probing insights and analyses into the successes and shortcomings of guerrilla movements. This is a required work to understand the Latin American revolutionary left and how it developed in this way." Marc Becker, Professor of Latin American History, Truman State University, USA, and author of Twentieth-Century Latin American Revolutions "The book Latin American Guerrilla Movements: Origins, Evolution, Outcomes, edited by Dirk Kruijt, Eduardo Rey Tristán and Alberto Martín Álvarez, will become a must-have for researchers, students and those interested in guerrilla action and revolutionary political violence in Latin America. Through 18 chapters written by experts, the work analyzes the different guerrilla waves experienced by Latin America both nationally and from a regional perspective. It is an essential collective work to get an understanding of the 'spirit of the political age' that infected Latin America since the Cuban Revolution, and which involved more than four decades of guerrilla activity." Salvador Martí i Puig, Coordinador del Grau de Ciència Política i de l'Administració, University of Girona, Spain "This book is an essential guide to an extraordinary period of recent history, one in which two generations of young Latin Americans took up arms as guerrillas in the hopes of seizing power and building Utopian futures in their countries. For historians, scholars, diplomats, and anyone else seeking an authoritative analysis of the revolutionary wave that convulsed Latin America from the 1950s to the 1990s, Latin American Guerrilla Movements is certain to become indispensable reading." Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life "We are faced with a book that, clearly, was very necessary. Aimed at a plural audience, whether experts in the field or people interested in the Latin American guerrilla phenomenon, the added value of this work is twofold. On the one hand, the work proposes the diverse and complex analysis of the guerrilla phenomenon. The authors observe both the stages through which the armed struggle takes place in Latin Americafrom the 1960s to the 1990sas well as the specificities shown by the Central American, Andean and Southern Cone scenarios, among others. The above, without incurring the traditional functionalist bias. Also, the work is markedly pedagogical. It perfectly integrates a rigor and depth in the analysis with a simple and illustrative language." Jerónimo Ríos Sierra, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Professor of Political Geography, Geopolitics, and Latin American Studies, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain "Unparalleled in scope and depth, this comprehensive volume offers scholars, students, and broader audiences a authoritative understanding of the cycle of guerrilla movements and leftist revolutionary projects in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. The book brilliantly explores and explains the genesis and dynamics of these movements, speaking to their enduring relevance for Latin American politics into our present time." Kees Koonings, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Development Studies, Utrecht University, the Netherlands "In this fine collaboration, the three editors now unite their own formidable writings on revolutionary groups and trajectories in several Latin American nations with the fine contributions of many other scholars. The result is a book which raises the scholarly bar, to a new tier of both depth and excellence in studies of the region's guerrilla activism. Taken as a group, the sheer region-wide scope is reason enough to celebrate the book. Yet taken as individual offerings, riches abound in the chapter-by-chapter arguments and evidence laid out by this assemblage of careful scholars. Many root their arguments in interviews and other primary-source materials not previously explored, which provide newer and firmer groundings for their national studies. And each chapter is never less than original and excellent in analysis of the revolutionary case(s) that it explores." Timothy Wickham-Crowley, Georgetown University, USA "Dirk Kruijt, Eduardo Rey Tristán and Alberto Martín Álvarez gather a group of Latin American, European and American specialists, with the goal of telling the story of guerrilla movements in Latin America, from the 1950s to date. Besides taking a historic walk through the years of the Cold War in Latin America from the triumph of the Cuban revolution, highlighting political and social processes, one of the main contributions of this book is that it provides an analysis on the origins and evolution of political violence in the different regions and countries of the subcontinent: Central America, the Andean region, the Southern Cone, the Caribbean, Brazil and Mexico. Its originality stands not only in that it offers a compared perspective from new views, but it also makes a balance of the ach…