“Latin American Insurgencies.” In Latin America and Caribbean Contemporary Record. Gorritti 1991 and Bagley and Palmer 1989 couch their analyses of guerrilla activities and government responses in the context of the importance of civilian democratic control to overcome such threats, while they, along with several chapters in Castro 1999 and Loveman and Davies in Guevara 1985, review insurgency dynamics in case studies of the major country examples.īagley, Bruce, and D. Gott 1971 provides a journalist’s fine-grained, often sympathetic review of the state of guerrilla activities in the 1960s, including the most detailed case studies of the period. Guevara 1985 and Debray 1967 provide rationales and justifications for revolution from the practitioner’s and contemporary sympathetic interpreter’s perspective, as do some of the chapters in Castro 1999, while Wickham-Crowley 1992 offers the most comprehensive comparative overview of insurgent etiology derived from the theory of revolution literature. As of 2011, the only guerrilla insurgencies still active are operating in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.Īlthough the edited volume Castro 1999 includes reviews of early examples of insurgencies, including the Tupac Amaru indigenous uprising in highland Peru against Spanish control in the 1780s and the Caste War in the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico in the 1840s and 1850s, most work on the subject concentrates on the 1960s to 1990s, when guerrilla groups proliferated in the region. In fact, following peace agreements in Uruguay with the return to democracy in 1985 and in El Salvador in a United Nations–brokered accord in 1992, former guerrilla groups reinvented themselves as political parties and won presidential elections in 20, respectively. Although successful only in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas drove the repressive Somoza dictatorship from power, several other guerrilla insurgencies have had a major impact on the countries in which they operated. Guerrilla groups, often Cuba-inspired and at times Cuba-supported, began to operate in such countries as Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Uruguay in the 1960s in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Brazil, and Argentina in the 1970s and in Peru again in the 1980s. The focus of this annotated bibliography, however, is on the Latin American guerrilla insurgencies that emerged with the Cuban Revolution and subsequent efforts throughout the region by dissident factions, usually Marxist in ideological orientation, to overthrow governments deemed capitalist and reactionary. Similar tactics were employed by Peruvian irregulars led by Andrés Avelino Cáceres against Chilean invaders during the War of the Pacific (1879–1883) and in a number of other cases of 19th- and early-20th-century internal conflicts in the region (e.g., Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia). The term “guerrilla” gained currency in Spain in the campaign by patriots to harass Napoleon’s forces in the early 1800s. For the most part, however, guerrilla warfare was dominated by hit-and-run actions by small units, greatly overshadowing other weapons in the insurgent arsenal. As insurgency has played out in the region since the 1950s, several groups, notably FMLN in El Salvador and FARC in Colombia, progressed to the use of large military units, and all used terror as a shaping mechanism to intimidate and to remove resisting local actors and government structures. Insurgency in Latin America, though employing a variety of violent and nonviolent tactics, is usually associated with guerrilla warfare grounded in Marxist ideology and committed to overthrowing the state through violence.
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