THINKING ABOUT MOVEMENT-WAVES: CULTURAL REPERTOIRES AND THEIR DIFFUSION
In writing about “waves” of social-movement activity we should begin with a reflective question: what is implied when one purports to detect a “wave” of change within a particular area of society? And that leads directly to the obvious second question: waves of what? In fact two matters come together here, since the first and more basic issue, before we consider waves, is that of social movements themselves and their cultural repertoires (of contention), to use the term that Charles Tilly introduced several decades ago (Reference Tilly1978: 151–58, 224–25). In that work he wrote of the actual, often varied repertoires of tactics which social movements, located in particular times and places, employ in order to bring pressure for change upon the powers that be. In so doing, Tilly also alerted us to the appearance over time of new tactics of protest and, quite often, the disappearance of older ones, within particular protest milieus.
In the years since Tilly's book, the scholarly community in its study of all types of social movements has not been silent about repertoires and their spread. Many writings about cultural (or tactical) repertoires have followed Tilly in trying to describe and explain the specific ways in which social movements “move” when in active opposition to existing conditions. Also like Tilly, they have often employed the modifier “culture” to describe those varied tactical choices to which movement activists routinely resort. The word “culture” gives us a clue as to where these studies would direct themselves, for especially over the last two decades of research and writing, such scholarly interests have also drawn upon an even earlier area of study called the “diffusion of innovations.” In the hands of many scholars, these two fields of study have now thoroughly merged, but in a delimited manner: these writers are not concerned with new physical technologies moving across societal borders—the classic focus of that literature—but rather with the diffusion of new ways of “doing” social-movement activism.Footnote 1
By the early 1990s, scholars had begun to address directly the question of “The Cross-National Diffusion of Movement Ideas” (the title of McAdam and Rucht Reference McAdam and Rucht1993). Students of movements came to explore this set of ideas for a wide variety of social movements and in diverse national contexts (e.g., Koopmans Reference Koopmans1993; Wang and Soule Reference Wang and Soule2012; Pampel and Hunter Reference Pampel and Hunter2012; Weyland Reference Weyland2009). Some of these efforts focused on refining and further developing and measuring related concepts, like the “modularity and transferability of repertoires” (Wada Reference Wada2012).
My concern here, in a like vein, is the diffusion of one novel element in the realm of movement repertoires: the temporally concentrated pattern, in the decade immediately following the Cuban Revolution, wherein many leftist revolutionaries and communist parties throughout Latin America resorted to the strategy of guerrilla-style warfare against incumbent regimes. The mere existence of such groups was certainly not novel, but as Régis Debray (Reference Debray and Ortiz1980 [1967]) pithily put it, this sweeping shift in their revolutionary strategies constituted a “revolution in the revolution.”
I argue that the concept of the “cultural diffusion of tactical repertoires,” and also the related and recent scholarship concerning “waves of change,” will enable us better to understand the dynamics by which four successive eras of varying revolutionary activism characterized Latin America in the decades covered here: (1) the emergence of a host of region-wide guerrilla movements as, or after, the Cuban Revolution crystallized; (2) the decline or disappearance of the great majority of such insurgent organizations and inclinations as the decade of the 1960s came to an end; (3) the appearance or re-energizing of guerrilla-style activism in selected nations after the early 1970s; and (4) the more or less complete end of all politically important insurgencies as the century came to an end (with the important exception of Colombia).
My underlying assumption and assertion is that the first movement-wave I have identified, from 1958 to 1970 or so, cannot be readily understood as responses to structural features of polity, economy, or society, at either the national or the international levels of analysis.Footnote 2 Nor can it be persuasively interpreted as responses to the changing political opportunity structures of threat or opportunity.Footnote 3 Despite many powerful and often largely structural analyses of revolutionary (guerrilla) movements in the literatures (Goodwin Reference Goodwin2001; Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992; Reference Wickham-Crowley and Foran1997), we can begin with this premise because our focal matter here is the basal organization of guerrilla-movement activism in various national contexts. A rather less focal matter here concerns the varying growth-spurts in organizational size and activism that followed (or not) after such initial organizing was already in place. I am not concerned in this paper with the topic often pursued in many other writings, viz: which rural-based, revolutionary (guerrilla) movements have managed to seize state power, and which have not (see Wolf Reference Wolf1969; Guevara Reference Guevara1985: essays by Loveman and Davies; Goodwin Reference Goodwin2001; Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1991, chs. 5, 7; 1992, chs. 8, 11, 12; 1997: 56–59).
Instead, I wish to direct our attention to the study of culture, here understood in its classic sociological sense, as a system of collectively held beliefs that serve to guide human behaviors, and are often imbedded in acts and artifacts. My argument points to certain intelligible patterns of cultural change, quite literally in the minds and orientations of those who came to gather and organize like-minded persons into the core leaderships/cadres that were the seedbeds of each guerrilla-style revolutionary organization in the region. For such an argument to hold water, I will need to document in at least rough form the manner in which such novel cultural orientations spread to, and appeared within, such revolutionary groups.
I also note for the historical record that the pan-regional spread of new political forms, ideologies, institutions, and processes is most certainly not a Latin American novelty, beginning only with 1960s guerrilla warfare. Indeed, the history of Latin America is rife with exemplars of “institutional mimesis” that “leapt over” national borders and came to be embraced region-wide, or nearly so: foundational constitutional forms and laws of the early 1800s that heavily borrowed from the United States; the adoption of late-nineteenth-century liberal economic policies borrowed often from Great Britain (for Central America, see Mahoney Reference Mahoney2001); the concentrated spread of women's suffrage in the middle-third of the twentieth century (Ramirez, Soysal, and Shanahan Reference Ramirez, Soysal and Shanahan1997); and the (again) concentrated passage of gender-quota laws for legislative representation which began to spread rapidly across the region in the 1990s (Htun Reference Htun, Domínguez and Shifter2003). In a like manner, I argue, the appearance and rooting of a new element in the cultural repertoire of the pan-regional, Latin American left—guerrilla-style insurgency and sometimes urban terrorism—coincides closely with the Cuban Revolution's success of early 1959.
Many of the principals involved in the early to mid-1960s regional insurgencies evinced their specific admiration for the Cuban revolution as their model: within Peru, Héctor Béjar of the ELN (Army of National Liberation) and Luis de la Puente Uceda of the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left); Douglas Bravo and others of Venezuela's FALN (Armed Forces of National Liberation); members of the Guatemalan FAR (Rebel Armed Forces); and Carlos Fonseca Amador, founder of Nicaragua's Sandinistas (Debray Reference Debray and Blackburn1970: 93; Béjar Reference Béjar1970: 60–61; La Prensa [Lima], 19 June 1965: 1; Maspero Reference Maspero1968; El Nacional [Caracas], 25 May 1964; Guerra Borges Reference Guerra Borges1964: 11; Fonseca Reference Fonseca Amador1982: 32).
Still more importantly, that particular repertoire element came to “monopolize” the revolutionary imaginations (see Pettee Reference Pettee1938: 78) of the most-radical (and younger) revolutionaries as early as 1960, and beyond, so much so that guerrillera memorist Angela Zago could later confess to having been unaware that her fellow Venezuelans were not all revolutionaries like her (1972: 93). Indeed, several of the rather numerous—because they survived—ex-guerrillas of Venezuela penned rueful memoir-comments about how utterly they had been swept up by their revolutionary passions.Footnote 4 The Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) actually founded and for years supported the guerrillas of the FALN, but later its leader Guillermo García Ponce spoke ruefully of “the illusion of a rapid and heroic triumph … [and] mechanical transplants” (Valsalice Reference Valsalice1973, 3). Former guerrilla and ex-PCV member Teodoro Petkoff later regretted “absurd deformities in our actions [that] awakened the hatred in the population toward us,” perhaps because he and his comrades “intoxicated ourselves” in reading about guerrillas in China and Vietnam, even though those highly rural exemplars were bad analogues to largely urban Venezuela (Gall Reference Gall1972: 16; Reference Gall1973: 5). Américo Martín, formerly of the other Venezuelan guerrilla organization, the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left), noted in a post-war conversation with Alfredo Peña that, in retrospect, his actions had been “crazy,” and that it was “a tragic mistake into which all fell. From the ideological point of view, the foquista concept led to a new orthodoxy, and from the political point of view to a frightening lack of flexibility” (Peña Reference Peña1978: 5, 82).
Cultural-repertoire elements are rarely created from scratch, out of some social analogue to the “primordial soup” of our planet's biohistory, and the same applies here: the military tactic of guerrilla-style insurgency is about as old as human warfare itself. That is certainly no novelty per se, and the only true novelty lies in its “importation” into use within the civil wars and revolutionary wars of roughly the last two centuries (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley and DeFronzo2006). Well before Cuban events of the 1950s, multiple strategists crafted military theories about the strategy of insurgency, including Sun Tzu (sixth century BCE.), von Clausewitz, Lenin (in his 1906 essay “Partisan Warfare”), Mao Zedong (Reference Zedong and Griffith1961), Võ Nguyên Giáp (Reference Stetler1970), and T. E. Lawrence. Walter Laqueur (Reference Laqueur1976), for his part, has explored a huge list of actual insurgent exemplars across their long history.
We therefore need to look more closely at our second, companion concept—diffusion, specifically cultural diffusion. In a sense, the very long history of technological diffusions across humankind can be understood simply as special instances of cultural diffusion. In what follows, therefore, my focus will be near-exclusively on the processes whereby the particular element of “armed insurgency” in the cultural repertoire of Latin American radicals was propagated in two largely discrete eras.
First, I want to stress a point I have made in previous writings, that there is no profit in applying this set of ideas to the largest single, and still extant, revolutionary organization in Colombia, the FARC (for Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).Footnote 5 The FARC's origins are not imitative of Cuban events, but instead clearly lie within the context of Colombia's horrifically lethal period now known simply as La Violencia (usually dated 1946 to 1964). In no way can the FARC's trajectory be subsumed under the analytical rubrics which I explore below, for it is almost totally intelligible—Allemann's analogous German phrase: “ganz und gar”—as a direct outgrowth of La Violencia and the responses to it by Colombia's rural populace and later its armed forces (1974: 242–44).Footnote 6
“KICK-STARTING” THE FIRST WAVE OF REVOLUTIONARY INSURGENCY
As documented in fine-grained, even excruciating, detail elsewhere (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: ch. 2, app. A), the focal group throughout 1960s Latin America who were seized by the new model for revolutionary change were young, university-educated students and recent graduates who typically already had organizational roots in parties of the moderate to extreme left within their nations.Footnote 7 Such well-educated persons in all likelihood had already been deeply exposed to Marxist thought within the universities. They were far and away the most important “cultural carriers” of this new revolutionary strategy, and thereafter tried to gain support for their revolutionary efforts, worldviews, and goals from various peasantries in the region.Footnote 8 This pattern of the intelligentsia's special receptivity to revolutionism and Marxism was long ago established by Karl Mannheim (Reference Mannheim1936: 136–46), and confirmed in great empirical detail by Alvin Gouldner (Reference Gouldner1979), and later by Wickham-Crowley (Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: chs. 2, 9, and apps. A, B). Forrest Colburn (Reference Colburn1994) thoughtfully explored it as a form of global cultural diffusion and also interpreted its subsequent decline in popularity. The particular social locations of the intelligentsia are thus a starting point and basic premise for my analyses that follow, and the study of these recurring historical patterns indicates that we should not be surprised if and when such (mostly) privileged persons fervently pursue policies that are oriented toward the perceived benefit of the lower classes, whether in this world or the next.Footnote 9
Beginning at the Beginning: Military Training for Guerrilla Warfare
Most analysts would identify the Cuban Revolution, specifically the efforts and successes of Castro's 26th of July Movement from 1956 into 1959, as the focal model that set off the first wave of insurgency across Latin America.Footnote 10 That revolutionary model “spawned” a host of imitators across Latin America, far more than most scholars have closely examined.Footnote 11 Since we have already dismissed the notion that Castro and his colleagues invented the military strategy of insurgency out of whole cloth, whence did it arise, and more specifically, how did they “learn” to fight guerrilla-style warfare? The answer is readily available: Castro and his incipient rebel group began training in Mexico no later than 1955 under the tutelage of Alberto Bayo, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, helped in this regard by financial support of perhaps $100,000 from former, ousted Cuban President Carlos Prío Socarrás (Sweig Reference Sweig2002: 19–20; Thomas Reference Thomas1971: 888).
Words and Manifestoes
After Castro's ascent to power in January 1959, the process whereby the same principles were directly and indirectly propagated to other revolutionary hopefuls in Latin America rapidly took shape. Let us deal with an indirect mode first: published manifestoes and handbooks. By 1960, Che Guevara had already published his extensive analysis, titled Guerrilla Warfare (full text in Guevara Reference Guevara1985). In its opening pages he outlined the foco theory of revolution in its three key components, closely paraphrased as follows: popular forces can defeat the incumbent regime's armed forces; the guerrilla nucleus can create rather than await the objective conditions for revolution; and the countryside should be the arena for revolutionary struggle. In April 1961, just as Cuba was declaring itself “socialist,”Footnote 12 Che published the article “Cuba: Exception or Vanguard?” in Verde Olivo, in which he argued that the Cuban case was not to be viewed as unusual or a one-off example. It was followed two years later by his tactical and strategic mini-handbook for revolution, “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,” in Cuba Socialista (both reprinted in Guevara Reference Guevara and Gerassi1968: chs. 9, 21). The import of Che's writings was made visible when government troops that overran guerrilla encampments in various 1960s insurgent settings in Latin America regularly found copies of them (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 31).
Finally, the words from or biographies of a number of Latin America's 1960s insurgent leaders testified that the Cuban insurgency was the model that inspired them in this newly perfervid approach to revolutionary activism; they constitute a virtual who's who, including Héctor Béjar and Luis de la Puente of Peru, Douglas Bravo of Venezuela, Carlos Fonseca Amador of Nicaragua, and Régis Debray and Che himself (who both later turn up in Bolivia).Footnote 13 As Debray put it, “Cuba descended like a clap of thunder on scepticism and legalism” (1970: 93; Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 30–31, and sources cited therein). Indeed, Shirley Christian described the Nicaraguan and other Central American revolutionaries at this time as idolizing Che to such a degree that those studying in Moscow were expelled from the USSR for such sentiments (Reference Christian1985: 28). That many 1960s radicals were seized by an idea that led them to decide to take new avenues for radical action is now beyond dispute; as Che himself once put it, “Generally, guerrilla warfare starts from a well-considered act of will” (quoted in Laqueur Reference Laqueur1976: 335).
Passing on the Lessons of Insurgent Practice
Next we may consider the direct effects of the Cuban revolution as a model. The “military education” of the rest of the first wave of insurgents did not stop with “book-learning,” which actually dwindled in importance relative to the outright military training in Cuba of various Latin American radicals to “prep” them for a return to their home countries to energize their own variations on “the Cuban model.”Footnote 14 Lamberg says simply, “Practically all the guerrilla chiefs repeatedly visited Cuba” and “it is scarcely hypothetical to assert that they underwent intensive training” (Reference Lamberg1971: 46). As I have argued elsewhere, such training was especially notable when a large group of such activists trained together and returned to their nations as a single cohort seeking to go down “the Cuban road”; this was the experience of Colombia's ELN, the leaders of Peru's MIR, and others (Lamberg Reference Lamberg1971: 113; Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 31). The numbers of Latin American revolutionaries trained in Cuba in the 1960s were estimated by a variety of observers, and probably totaled two to three thousand.Footnote 15 These are substantial numbers when we apply the standard military rule of thumb: an effective counterinsurgency requires ten regular soldiers for each insurgent. Perhaps typical of such “visits” were the travels to Cuba of the three topmost Guatemalan insurgents in September 1962 (Allemann Reference Allemann1974: 175).
Finally, there is evidence that “military mimicry” of the (perceived) Cuban Revolution across Latin America began very quickly. For example, we cannot rule out the influence of Cuban events on quite early, military-rooted uprisings in both Guatemala (November 1960) and Venezuela (two in mid-1962).Footnote 16 As early as 1961, Colombia's MOEC also initiated an insurgency near Marquetalia (Chaliand Reference Chaliand1977: 60).Footnote 17 Even closer to the key event, within mere months of Castro's entry into Havana in early 1959, and even before Che published any of his influential writings, Nicaragua's Rigoberto López Pérez formed a rural insurgent column, reportedly “with the strong support of Che” himself (Black Reference Black1981: 76). Most striking of all as an early model of military mimicry, Carlos Fonseca Amador, founder of the Sandinistas, described the “Cuban people's rebellion … [as having] influence even before its victorious outcome” (Reference Fonseca Amador1982: 32).
CAPPING THE CULTURAL WELL: THE MORE OR LESS ABRUPT END OF THE FIRST WAVE
We say it shortly and to the point: with Che's death in the Bolivian jungle there ended the organizational and developmental stage of the rural guerrilla movements and of guerrilla war in general.
———Robert Lamberg, Die castristiche Guerilla in Lateinamerika (Reference Lamberg1971: 32)The death of Che Guevara did indeed end the appeal and soon the reality of 1960s guerrilla insurgencies in Latin America.Footnote 18 In the face of the huge guerrilla revival that came later, it would have been easy for even casual observers during the later 1970s and 1980s to dismiss Lamberg's observation, but that would have been facile. The German scholar was one of the most expert comparative analysts of the Latin America insurgent movements of the 1960s, and we should not confuse our 20/20 hindsight with having a greater perceptiveness than his. At that juncture in time, few informed observers on either the left or the right would have taken issue with his argument. Nor will I do so here; rather, I want to enrich it with further arguments and evidence.
First, the mid-to-late 1960s in Latin America witnessed increasingly vehement splits between the supporters of continued guerrilla-style insurgency and the Soviet-line communist parties, their timing and intensity varying from nation to nation. (Remember that those same communist parties had often been supporters and allies, and even originators of guerrilla warfare a few short years before, even if in some places support and alliances were more tenuous than in others.) A pair of comments from Guatemalan FAR insurgents in the later 1960s indicates how acerbic things had by then become within that “alliance”: one FAR spokesperson dismissed the PGT (the Guatemalan communists, formally the Guatemalan Labor Party) as a “wishy-washy debating club” (Kiessler Reference Kiessler1975: 406); the FAR further declared that, during multiple years of struggle, while the FAR had suffered hundreds killed, and Guatemalan civilians thousands, “The PGT … contributed the ideas and the FAR, the dead” (Mercier Vega Reference Mercier Vega1969: 129).
Second, those insurgent-versus-communist divisions in part paralleled and reflected the well-known split between Fidel Castro's government and the Soviet Union, which widened during the mid-1960s. After all, Castro's government had by then been training and praising various (though not all) guerrilla insurgents for several years, even as those same guerrillas found themselves ever more at odds with their nations’ communist party co-religionists, even those who had once been their strongest allies. Fidel consistently reinforced and amplified his support for guerrilla insurgency during the years 1965 to 1967, precisely the period during which Soviet-line communists were increasingly parting ways with insurgency. The failure of the Bolivian Communist Party (PCB) to provide any aid to Che's Bolivian foco of 1966–1967 was merely one instance of a growing trend: In Guatemala, from 1966 into early 1968, the FAR guerrillas split with the PGT, at first gradually and then decisively.Footnote 19 In Venezuela from 1965 into 1968, the FALN guerrillas gradually lost the support of their communist (PCV) founders. In Peru, the Communist Party (PCP) gave no support but verbal endorsement to the short-lived 1965 insurgencies (Lamberg Reference Lamberg1965a; Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 37–42, 192–205). And later in the 1960s, in Colombia, tensions grew between FARC and the country's Soviet-line communists (PCC).Footnote 20
In parallel fashion, within Cuba itself, support for the insurgent strategy seemed to be trumping support for the USSR.Footnote 21 Guerrilla warfare was ringingly endorsed at Fidel's Tricontinental Congress of 1966,Footnote 22 and again at the 1967 gathering of OLAS, the Organization for Latin American Solidarity, and the region's guerrilla representatives were key attendees at both of those highly visible events. At the OLAS gathering, Fidel's closing-speech comments were especially fierce, where he attacked the USSR, the Venezuelan communists, and finally the region's array of Soviet-line communist parties, tarring the last groups as a “mafia of pseudo-revolutionaries” (Lamberg Reference Lamberg1971: 31).Footnote 23
Things were soon to change sharply, however. Over the next few years, Fidel and Cuba moved slowly but steadily back into the Soviet Union's camp, and 1968 was the key year for signaling that reversal. In that year, Cuban writers publicly denounced Debray's foquista-oriented historical descriptions of Cuban revolutionary events. In a speech of 26 July, Fidel began to soft-pedal his role as the leader of Latin America's revolutionary movements, and also the attendant claim that the path of the guerrilla was the only way forward for the nations and peoples of Latin America (Ratliff Reference Ratliff1976: 35). Many observers have seen one public address as the key moment in Cuba's 180-degree turnaround: Fidel's speech just one month later, on 23 August, in which he endorsed and defended the Soviet Union's invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia (Aguilar Reference Aguilar1970: 9).
Even where and when the Cubans were still involved with various national insurgencies, their presence and contacts with the locals were not always convivial. This was particularly notable in Bolivia, where the local communists’ chief, Mario Monje, sought but was denied control over Che's incipient foco there in late 1966. He thereafter refused Che's group any type of organizational support, and thereby elicited the epithet “mierda” (shit) from Fidel for his non-efforts (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 204–5, and sources; Lamberg Reference Lamberg1971: 124). Fritz René Allemann reports details of another hostile relationship, from the diary of a Cuban volunteer working with the Venezuelan FALN guerrillas during 1966 and 1967, who disparaged the FALN for its virtual absence of military efforts even though it was constantly appealing to Fidel to send them more money. FALN chief Douglas Bravo went so far as to suggest aloud in 1967 that Fidel preferred to buy more automobiles for himself instead of supporting people up in the hills (Allemann Reference Allemann1974: 155–56). By 1969–1970, Cuba had withdrawn almost all of its rhetoric and support for guerrillas in neighboring countries, and both Bravo and the leader of the Fidelista Colombian ELN, Fabio Vásquez Castaño, publicly turned against Fidel. An interesting index of Castro's declining revolutionary internationalism soon followed: by 1969–1970, the national governments of Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Peru had all asked that the economic embargo against Cuba be lifted (Lamberg Reference Lamberg1971: 103, 34).
Explaining the End of the Foco Model
Leftist critiques of Che Guevara's and Régis Debray's (Reference Debray and Ortiz1980 [1967]) “model” for revolutionary strategy and change had already begun to gather by the mid-1960s. They derived from two sources—one set cultural-ideological, the other practical-political—which together constituted decisive rebuttals to those who still endorsed further propagation of the foco model of revolution. Kurt Weyland (Reference Weyland2009) has provided us with conceptual tools that can help us think more clearly about the initial spread of the Cuban model, but as it happens, they also help us to clarify the “braking” process on that diffusion, proceeding from roughly 1966 through Che's death in October 1967, which soon, and more or less completely by 1970, ended the appeal of the foco strategy in Latin America.
The new cultural-repertoire element of guerrilla insurgency, which had so seized Latin America's left as early as 1959, can be understood as deriving from the radicals’ emotionally induced, selective perceptions of events in Cuba and also, and more importantly, of events and institutions and opportunities within their own nations’ polities and societies. To make my own use of the terms that Kurt Weyland employed in a different historical context (Europe and Latin America, 1848), I would argue that the left-wing activists within Latin America applied to their own countries misleading “cognitive heuristics”—essentially, selectively truncated worldviews, or “cognitive shortcuts” (Weyland Reference Weyland2009: 408–9)—which led them to believe that “the Cuban road” was one that could be readily traveled within their own nations. One can put this in simpler language: “The thought processes of future guerrillas were probably remarkably neat: if Cuba can carry out a socialist revolution under the very nose, and against the resistance, of yanqui imperialism, then why not here as well…?” (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 31–33, quote on 32).
Yet by the mid-1960s and beyond, competing worldviews about the possibilities for revolution began to gather from a number of quarters. First, as I showed above, the Soviet-line communist parties of the region came more and more to withdraw from the “armed struggle,” arguing that the “objective conditions for revolution” (the stock language of Marxian revolutionaries) no longer existed, if they ever had, and hence a more practical, rational, moderate path was called for, not more armed struggle (for nation-by-nation details, see Lamberg Reference Lamberg1971, passim; and his earlier treatment, Reference Lamberg1965a).
Secondly, other, different, and competing revolutionary ideologies were increasingly present and available for radicals to ponder as the 1960s progressed: Vietnam rose ever more vividly into the hearts and minds of all revolutionaries, and copies of Mao's “Little Red Book,” first published in 1964, were distributed all over the planet by the later 1960s. The revolutionary-strategic views of both Mao Zedong (Reference Zedong and Griffith1961) and Vietnam's Võ Nguyên Giáp (Reference Stetler1970) could never be reconciled with the “quick-fix” approach to revolutionary success that Che's foco theory clearly promoted.Footnote 24 The guerrillas in Venezuela later said that they had “intoxicated” themselves with, not just Che's words, but also readings about Mao and Vietnam (Gall Reference Gall1973, 5); eventually the contrast between those disparate words and strategies must have sunk in.
As a third element, we may introduce a second concept from Weyland's work, that of “rational learning” (2009: 406–8). He employs that concept as a kind of explanatory “foil” for his other concept, “cognitive heuristics,” and argues that no processes of rational learning can persuasively account for the spread of revolutionism in Europe in 1848. My concerns here are precisely the reverse, however, for I would assert that a process of rational learning was precisely the “antidote” to the un-thoughtful, emotion-driven, and indiscriminate spread of guerrilla-style insurgency that swept through 1960s Latin America.Footnote 25 As most of the smaller such efforts evaporated within a year or less, or were readily suppressed in a similar time-frame (Peru 1965; case studies in Saíz Cidoncha Reference Saíz Cidoncha1974; and Berardo Reference Berardo1981; Che in Bolivia from December 1966 to October 1967), that contrary, rational assessment came to be impelled by that very host of failed insurgencies, and slowly began to sink into the minds of the revolutionary left. If we take the perspective of rational learning that I adopt here, then Che's death in Bolivia should best be understood as just one element among others in the laundry list of failed guerrilla ventures in 1960s Latin America. But if we add to that analysis Weyland's “cognitive shortcuts,” then that single movement's end, and that single revolutionary's demise, took on huge emotional significance for stifling the non-rational elements which had promoted insurgent formations throughout the early to mid-1960s. Only survivors can tell us such stories, and the words of numerous Venezuelan ex-guerrillas as of the later 1960s and beyond, as I recounted above, suggest a kind of rueful “rational-learning,” an epiphany in which the insurgents up in the hills awakened to Venezuela's actual political realities. As guerrillera-memoirist Angela Zago (Reference Zago1972: 93) candidly put it: “What a strange thing: it had never occurred to me that there are Venezuelans not in this struggle.”
THE SECOND “WAVE”: THE LIMITATIONS OF THE CULTURAL-DIFFUSION APPROACH AND THE PATIENT FANNING OF REVOLUTIONARY EMBERS
The End of Cuba-Oriented Cultural Diffusion
As this section's heading suggests, there were several crucial divergences from the 1960s patterns just discussed. I will argue that the model of “cultural diffusion,” which served us so well in interpreting patterns of 1960s insurgencies, mostly fails us if we wish better to grasp the near-explosive growth of “new” insurgencies after 1970 in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru, and also the persistence and expansion of the Colombian insurgencies, which still have never been completely suppressed after nearly a half-century of activity. There are some ways in which other processes of cultural diffusion remained highly active and relevant, notably in the realm of heated conversations about correct revolutionary strategy, particularly within the Sandinistas of the mid-1970s, and in the deep, often violent tensions between Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and other Peruvian leftists. But these are of modest import when contrasted with the massive cultural impact of the Cuban revolution in the first decade following its success.Footnote 26
If the language of “cultural diffusion” fails us here, then we must also dramatically reduce any deeper assumptions about a “second wave” of guerrilla organizing, from 1970 to 1990. Those two terms lie within a semantic field in which lateral imitation and interactions are simply assumed to be much in play, or where a single “master model” (like “Cuba 1959”) has influenced multiple imitators. Neither one of those concept choices adequately captures the collective experiences of the five major national experiences of Latin American guerrilla warfare, from 1970 to 1990, which I will discuss. It is more accurate to their various trajectories to term them, instead, a “cluster” of cases, without presuming either type of cultural diffusion to have been deeply operative.
That said, I would still argue that there are certainly clear “spillover” influences among the three cases from Central America, a pattern of cross-fertilization in which the Nicaraguan Sandinistas’ model is the most important of the three given its “early” success in 1979. I would add that direct, material Cuban influences did not become irrelevant during the 1970s and 1980s. Revolutionaries from El Salvador and Nicaragua repeatedly visited Cuba; massive guerrilla-directed aid flowed to El Salvador, much less so to Nicaragua and still less to Guatemala, all through Cuban channels (Moroni Bracamonte and Spencer Reference Moroni Bracamonte and Spencer1995, esp. ch. 9; Kruijt Reference Kruijt2008). Furthermore, the Cuban authorities were apparently crucial in finally getting the three disputatious wings of the Sandinistas truly to cooperate in the movement to oust Somoza. There were elements of cultural commonality beyond similar Cuban connections. For example, a key guerrilla umbrella group, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), was clearly an imitator of the then-just-formed Salvadoran umbrella-group the FMLN (Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation), right down to their creating a unity document virtually identical to that of the FMLN (Camacho and Menjívar Reference Camacho, Menjívar, Camacho and Rafael1985: 38–41).
Yet neither Peru nor Colombia can be included within that triad of mutual influences. Furthermore, Peru's Shining Path repeatedly declared its ideological allegiance to Mao and Maoism from their most radical eras—the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1975) and the rule of the “Gang of Four” after Mao's death (1975–1978)—and its long-term and patient organizing strategy is certainly a clearer echo of China than of Che. Finally, as is so often the case with Colombian events, the long-term trajectory of its key group, FARC, appears to be sui generis within this group of five, just as it was during FARC's 1950s prehistory and its formal organization in the mid-1960s (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 39–40, 134–35, 145–46, 201).
The Rise of Prolonged Popular War
Given the pre-1970 “disappearance” of the foco-strategy as the only model for regional revolutions, I argue that it is no coincidence that those guerrilla insurgencies initiated or surviving after 1970 had not tried to “light a fire” quickly and in the style of foquismo, but rather were demonstrating extreme patience and long-term, sub-rosa preparation for the coming storm. They were also talking the talk of “prolonged popular war”Footnote 27—guerra popular prolongada (sometimes GPP), as one faction of the Sandinistas came to name itself (Jung Reference Jung1979: 79). In the years 1967–1974, the Sandinistas pursued “accumulation of forces in silence,” while Guatemala's ORPA (Revolutionary Organization of the People in Arms) has told us of its “eight years of silent organizing” (Tirado Reference Tirado1983: 42; ORPA Reference Fried, Gettleman, Levenson and Peckenham1983).
In this last regard, we can see a striking parallel found across at least four of these five major national cases of insurgency during the 1970s (in particular), and not in just the case of Nicaragua: the long-term, patient preparation for soon-to-come armed struggles. Sendero Luminoso became the most famous for its ultra-patient, long-term organizing in Peru, not unleashing its first military and terroristic attacks until 1980 (Palmer Reference Palmer1986). Yet, as I note below, such patient laying of groundwork was also the signature strategy of both the EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor) and ORPA in, respectively, the northwestern and central-west highlands of Guatemala. In both Peru and Guatemala, one arguable gain from those sustained efforts was that the indigenous peoples of certain regions in each nation came to provide deep and wide support for the insurgencies. This was all the more notable because in both nations the indigenous speakers of native tongues had been demonstrably unsupportive of 1960s guerrilla movements, save in isolated cases (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 147–50, 217–18). In Colombia, in slight contrast to the other cases, the main loci of guerrilla activity during this period were not being (re-)born but rather were shifting: out of the well-populated coffee centers that virtually delimited their 1950s and 1960s armed activities and into largely jungle areas of eastern Colombia (notably in Caquetá). There they, too, could work on their “development” efforts over long periods and suffer relatively few unwanted, direct engagements with or intrusions by the incumbent regime's armed forces (see ibid.: 125–27, 295–96).Footnote 28
If we look very closely at the experiences of the five nations with major insurgencies in the years 1970 to 1990—Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, and Colombia—we can say several things about them with great confidence. First, the cultural-diffusionist impact of “Cuba 1959” became ever more irrelevant to their ongoing struggles and strategies, even if at some earlier point in time some of their older generation of revolutionaries—notably Carlos Fonseca and Tomás Borge of Nicaragua, and Salvador Cayetano Carpio of El Salvador—had once looked to Cuba as a model, perhaps even the model (Fonseca 1982: 32–34; Nolan Reference Nolan1984: 22).
Second, if we stipulate 1970 as the year for declaring “dead” the guerrilla-as-revolutionary model for Latin America, as Robert Lamberg, Jean Lartéguy (Reference Lartéguy1970: 261), and many others did, we can see how thoroughly misleading or erroneous that declaration is for these five nations. That empirical reality of continued (or new) and expanded insurgencies also links up to the increasing irrelevance of “Cuba-as-model” for understanding the long-term historical trajectory of armed revolutionary struggle in all five of these nations. In each of them, the specific historical arc of armed struggle against incumbent regimes fits badly with any argument that gives decisive importance to the Cuba 1959 model in shaping that struggle's patterns.
Instead, each of these nations arguably was building upon its own trajectory, a kind of national history and culture of armed and other forms of collective resistance. Already for Nicaragua of the 1940s and 1950s, Nolan describes intermittent armed resistance as the “normal” pattern of politics (1984: 14–16). Then and thereafter, the actual year-by-year pattern of armed opposition to incumbent Nicaraguan rulers shows merely a disconnected series of ups and downs. These were related to the rule and depredations committed by the Somoza family dynasty from the 1950s until 1979, with the key upward inflections coming after the 1972 earthquake and Somoza Debayle's subsequent looting of relief funds, and the early 1978 assassination of a key opposition news publisher, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro.Footnote 29 In El Salvador, the historical variations in armed and other political resistance activities from the 1930s up to the late 1970s have been meticulously explored by Paul Almeida and obviously have their own dynamic, utterly decoupled from Cuba 1959 effects (2008; see also Baloyra Reference Baloyra1982). In Guatemala, FAR-related remnants of both the Edgar Ibarra Front and the “Western Regional” group throughout the 1970s engaged in long-term silent organizing following the military and political disasters the FAR suffered between 1966 and 1970. By the mid-to-late 1970s, those two groupings emerged in fuller, larger, and more actively insurgent form as, respectively, the EGP and ORPA.Footnote 30
In Peru, the guerrilla did indeed “die” in the short-lived insurgencies of 1965. Earlier reportage (Palmer Reference Palmer1986: 127–29) mistakenly suggested that Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, the jefe máximo of Peru's Sendero Luminoso, had been part of the ELN's segment of that 1965 insurgency, headed by Héctor Béjar. Instead, as processes of intra-Communist Party (PCP) sectarian reorganization and fission proceeded, beginning with a 1964 party split, Guzmán and his followers first sided with the pro-Chinese block (PCP-BR [Bandera Roja—Red Banner]), but he then formed his own “Red Fraction” within that group. He was expelled from that party in the late 1960s and his group thereafter came to be called Sendero Luminoso/Shining Path, derived from a new name, “The Communist Party of Peru in the Shining Path of Mariátegui.” They ideologically embraced 1970s-generation “Gang-of-Four Maoism,” and made subsequent quiet preparations, especially in the northern parts of Ayacucho Department, for the ignition of insurgent activities in 1980 (Palmer Reference Palmer1986; McClintock Reference McClintock1982).Footnote 31 As all serious analysts have noted, all of these senderista activities were fueled by purely internal, highly ideological considerations. This analysis is validated by Sendero's decision to begin its violent insurgency just as Peru was returning from military rule to a system of highly competitive electoral democracy, one that was open to a variety of left-wing party contenders.
In Colombia, the various guerrilla forces as of 1970 had seen both advances and setbacks, but were otherwise apparently unaffected by the vicissitudes affecting the region's many foco-oriented insurgent failures. The years around 1973–1974 are a low point (Ratliff Reference Ratliff1976: 118), but by the later 1970s and into the 1980s their collective numbers are surely in excess of five thousand combatants, and by 2002 the FARC alone may have reached eighteen thousand strong. Guerrilla groups could not have fielded anything even close to these numbers in the later 1960s (Chaskel and Bustamente Reference Chaskel and Bustamente2012: 70; see also Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 210–13, for all five nations up to 1990).
Third, I have carried out my own macro-political analysis of why these five nations, in particular, were the ones that witnessed 1970s–1980s insurgencies so much larger than their 1960s predecessors, probably at least ten times as many combatants each in Guatemala, Colombia, and Peru. I pointed to the persistence of “old-style” closed polities in the early 1970s, which tended to push more of the populace into the wing of the armed opposition. Those old-style polities persisted in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Colombia, but probably nowhere else in mainland Latin America (see also Goodwin Reference Goodwin2001: chs. 5–7).Footnote 32 Both El Salvador and Guatemala exhibited and sustained long-term regimes in which their militaries ruled the polity collectively, in a de facto alliance with their national, highly conservative upper classes. In Nicaragua, the last Somoza deepened his control of the economy and of the patrimonial-praetorian regime his father had created, with himself as a mafia-style head of party, government, and armed forces alike (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 269–71, 280, 288–89). I include formally democratic Colombia here because the National Front coalition effectively closed the polity to outsiders, with especially loud allegations of fraud raised by the ANAPO party after the 1970 presidential election results were announced.Footnote 33 Such an old-style polity certainly did not persist in Peru, 1970s birthplace of Sendero Luminoso, but in that nation the hermetic cell-structure and intense ideology of the Shining Path dovetailed with Andean subsistence crises to provide that particular insurgency with intense “human fuel” (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 227–30, for all cases from 1956 to 1990).
Each of these movements probably dwarfed anything witnessed region-wide during the 1960s, and overall their sheer size and intensity can be understood largely in terms of the three elements I have just discussed. Other types of analyses that I have provided elsewhere about greatly varied peasant support for the insurgencies of the entire era of 1956 to 1990 should be understood as complementary to the arguments just made here. They help us to understand the intra-national, rural distributions of peasant support and non-support for insurgents in different regions more than they account for the overall size and intensity of national insurgencies (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: chs. 6, 7, 10).Footnote 34
CONCLUSIONS: THE END OF THE SECOND-WAVE GUERRILLA MOVEMENTS?
In Nicaragua, the revolutionaries had seized power by 1979, but none of their contemporaries have ever managed to do so. We know in retrospect that the early 1990s did not truly witness the end of the other four, second-wave guerrilla movements in Latin America. For in Colombia the insurgency still proceeds in truncated, geographically marginalized fashion, a statement that could be extended also to Peru, where surviving fragments of Sendero and other groups are still visible.Footnote 35 Yet that qualification must not be overstated, for the sheer reduction in absolute numbers of active combatants or groups and armed actions in each of these five nations, excepting perhaps Colombia, makes them smaller today, sometimes vanishingly smaller, than in the early 1980s.
We may identify two key political features that largely, though not completely in some instances, ended the period of active insurgency that the second period produced in certain Latin America nations: the installation or deepening of democratic electoral systems, and the systematic military suppression of insurgents’ capabilities.
The Counterrevolutionary Impact of Novel or Deepened Electoral Democracy
My previous analyses, those of Jeff Goodwin and Theda Skocpol (Reference Goodwin and Skocpol1989), and other observers before that (e.g., Loveman and Davies in Guevara Reference Guevara1985) all lead us to the same explanatory conclusion: competitive electoral democracies are bad news for the hopes and dreams of those pursuing revolutionary armed struggle. Goodwin and Skocpol put the argument most neatly: “The ballot box may not always be the ‘coffin of class consciousness’ … but it has certainly proven to be the coffin of revolutionary movements” (Reference Goodwin and Skocpol1989: 495). More precisely, while the insurgent groups may survive as political organizations (and a few have thrived), they have only truly done so, here and there, by “coming down from the hills” and transforming themselves from revolutionary insurgents into competitive political parties. This makes them into profoundly different political “creatures”; leftists they may still be, but they are no longer violent revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the incumbent regime by force, in anti-institutional ways.Footnote 36
In 1984, El Salvador began moving toward a system of electoral democracy it had never known, particularly with regard to the military (or coup-minded civilians) actually respecting honestly counted ballot-box results. Ever more inclusive presidential and legislative elections in 1984, 1985, 1988, and 1989 gradually took the steam out of the FMLN's insurgency, even though, through much of that decade, it was probably the most active and broadly supported revolutionary movement in all of Latin America. The end of the decade showed the effects most clearly, as the civilian branch of the revolutionaries began to “break away” from its control by, or alliance with, the FMLN guerrillas, in order to stand candidates for national elections (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 284–86). In 1992, the FMLN itself signed peace accords with the government. The years since have witnessed the FMLN becoming a full-fledged, successful political party, which finally won the presidency for its candidate Mauricio Funes in 2009. Both outcomes would surely have been unthinkable to most observers in the 1980s.
In Guatemala, presidential elections were held from time to time from the 1970s onward, but only with highly truncated party-competition and the military's effective control over subsequent policies, and military men typically stood in and won the presidential elections. Yet the Guatemalan regime's ultra-violent and indiscriminately terroristic counterinsurgency practices, especially but not exclusively during 1982–1983 after General Efraín Ríos Montt took power in a coup, were soon followed by relatively open and fair election in 1985 that gave the presidency to a somewhat reform-minded civilian, Vinicio Cerezo. His election began a continuing process that promoted a downward arc in the size and importance of the Guatemalan guerrilla movement, which had already been reduced by more than half by the ferocity of the early-1980s counterinsurgency. The year 1985 and subsequent years of open electoral competition have not erased the problematic character of Guatemalan democratic institutions, but they have remained enormously more open than previously, and this set of changes gradually drew the life-force out of the collective group of insurgents, the URNG, which sealed its own peace accord with the government in 1996 and has now joined the political system (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992, 290–91; anonymous CSSH reviewer's comments).Footnote 37
In Peru, the public support for Sendero's approach to revolution seemed to wane during the course of the 1980s, judging by a number of objective indicators. Highly competitive national elections in 1980, 1985, and 1990 brought successively new men to the office of president, and the Senderistas displayed their ideological extremism by violent and at times terroristic attacks, even on groups located on the radical left of Peru's highly competitive system of politics (McClintock Reference McClintock and Eckstein1989). In Colombia, the polity gradually began to open up as the National Front coalition's monopoly on the presidential office and its doling out of legislative seats formally ended in 1974, and as it informally dissolved over the decade that followed. The 1984 presidential victory of maverick politico Belisario Betancur was one notable inflection in the Front's decay, and a second came with the formation of a Constituent Assembly, elected in 1990 to rewrite the Colombian constitution beginning in 1991. In that election of delegates, the M-19 (ex-?)guerrilla-group not only fielded its own delegates, but outpolled both the Liberals and Conservatives (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 293–96).
Yet two basic flaws of Colombia's nominally democratic system remained into the new century, and persuasively explain why that nation has been least successful of all in eradicating its long-term insurgency. The military often seemed to pursue its own policies vis-à-vis counterinsurgency, without clear control by the executive branch. The judicial system, for its part, has shown itself incapable of trying, convicting, and punishing those responsible for a long series of violent, often lethal attacks on members of the left, many of them ex-guerrillas, who have tried to re-enter the normal routines of a democratic system, especially party-formation and electoral competition. Such was the fate of many members of the Unión Patriótica, formed by ex-guerrillas under a Betancur amnesty program of the later 1980s (Chernick Reference Chernick, Eckstein and Wickham-Crowley2003; Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 295; Goodwin Reference Goodwin2001: ch. 7).
The FARC (and also the ELN) remain today roughly where the FARC was a full quarter-century ago (Arango 1984). In sheer numbers and its “control” of large swathes of the Colombian national territory, the FARC remains by far the most impressive, continuing insurgency in all of Latin America. Yet in its utter inability to pose any substantial political challenge to the continuity of the formal organs and processes of Colombian democracy it has been thoroughly marginalized. This is in large measure because it controls only those parts of the national territory where very few Colombians actually live. Jacobo Arenas, a key FARC leader, once said simply that most of the guerrillas were in the jungle and “do not have direct contact with the population” (Arango 1984: 42).Footnote 38
Military Suppression and Intelligence-Driven Successes
We must remember the European history lesson imparted years ago by Charles Tilly: “In general, when a European state trained its full repressive power on its internal enemies … the enemies subsided” (Reference Tilly1978: 114). In the cases before us here, the levels of violence that the twin contenders for power can bring to bear upon one another—whether assisted by foreign aid or not—are highly relevant to the size, intensity, and continuity of the national insurgencies. The three cases from Central America—Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala—are interesting in this regard. All three faced major insurgencies, and in the later 1970s the Carter presidency had either reduced or cut off extensive U.S. military aid to them, or would soon do so. Yet despite those similarities, the outcomes were obviously divergent, given the Sandinistas’ July 1979 seizure of power (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 272, 281–82, 316–18).
In both El Salvador and Guatemala, two of the most “signature” periods of regime versus insurgent violence—the Salvadoran FLMN's attempt at a nationwide, “final” insurrection from late 1980 into January 1981, just before Ronald Reagan became U.S. president, and Efrain Ríos Montt's ferocious 1982–1983 counterinsurgency campaign in Guatemala—occurred when U.S. military aid was not yet a factor in regime-support. Instead of U.S. military aid, in both nations the key factor in the eventual suppression or stalemating of the national insurgencies may have been the vehement anticommunism within the militaries. The militaries would neither break off their campaigns against the guerrillas nor stop supporting incumbent regimes due to their de facto political alliances with the deeply conservative upper classes (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1992: 280, 286–87, 288–89).
Their levels of intransigence may have been paralleled somewhat in the Colombian armed forces, which, as I have noted, also often engaged in counterinsurgency activities despite, not because of, official government policies. In Peru, under two elected governments of the 1980s, especially that of Fernando Belaúnde, the first new president after a dozen years of military rule, the armed forces committed multiple rural massacres of civilians in its counterinsurgency efforts. Yet the government overall scored greater political successes against Sendero and other insurgent groups following the 1992 autogolpe Footnote 39 of President Alberto Fujimori (elected in 1990). There were accusations of continuing terrorism and human rights violations committed by the government's armed forces, including the much-feared Sinchis and novel paramilitary groups. These atrocities became part of the revelatory investigations and truth-commission findings that followed Fujimori's dictatorship, and he himself was later prosecuted.
Finally, several nations of this era saw intelligence-driven “coups” that constituted grave, perhaps fatal setbacks for various insurgencies. First, a kind of “network analysis” of phone and other records helped the Guatemalan government to deliver a severe blow to the urban support-group of ORPA, from which it probably never recovered (Wickham-Crowley Reference Wickham-Crowley1991: 138). In Peru, intelligence activities led to the 1992 arrest of Sendero's leader, Abimael Guzmán, in a dance studio of an upper-class residential area of Lima. He was subsequently imprisoned for life following a 1992 trial, and at least one re-trial in 2004–2006. In Colombia, a 2008 ploy executed by Colombia's security forces enabled them to free more than a dozen hostages from a FARC stronghold.
The peculiar Colombian case aside,Footnote 40 Latin America is unlikely to see another wave of insurgencies, whether of the type propagated by the 1960s followers of Che and the “Cuban Road,” or the strategy of guerra popular prolongada favored after 1970. The critical barrier to such ventures will be the continuity of formal, electoral democracies. The absence or erasure of such institutions might create insurgency-favoring conditions in this or that nation of Latin America, but I suspect never again in the region as a whole. If the maintenance of democracies is the key to a regional future largely “empty” of important left-wing guerrilla movements, then perhaps my thinking has been thoroughly unoriginal, after all: Che himself warned radicals never to start a revolutionary guerrilla movement against an elected government.Footnote 41
