The conclusion of the peace agreement in Colombia with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in 2016, the country’s largest rebel group, provides a new opportunity for lasting peace. Yet as we know from previous long-running civil conflicts, new armed actors mobilize and security concerns are likely to persist even after major actors put down their weapons. In this chapter, we critically examine the counterinsurgency campaign that was a factor in bringing about the opportunity for a negotiated peace. We also examine the ongoing barriers to peace and security, including corruption, victimization, and armed actor territorial control. We then describe and contrast the distinct approaches of two different subnational USAID peacebuilding programs designed to support the government’s plan for peace.

This chapter explores the complicated question of ethnicity in Guatemala’s thirty-six-year armed conflict, a war primarily driven by economic and political grievances, but one that culminated in state “acts of genocide” against Maya communities. The war’s “ethnic component” was a significant concern of counterinsurgency strategists and guerrilla forces alike. This chapter examines ethnic dynamics both in the state’s counterinsurgency war and within opposition movements through an episode that put a public spotlight on the subject: the army’s capture and exploitation of guerrilla member and K’iche’-Maya organizer Emeterio Toj Medrano in 1981, followed by his remarkable escape. The case illustrates state efforts to exploit and exacerbate ethnic tensions on the left, and to try to prevent indigenous support for revolution. It also highlights the possibilities and challenges inherent in broad and multiethnic alliances among Guatemalan opposition movements. Attention to this subject helps us to understand the history of Guatemala’s civil war, and the fraught and unsettled “peace” that has followed it.

This chapter will examine the transnational militant political culture that emerged from the constriction of political space, socioeconomic crisis, and increased social polarization during the late sixties and early seventies. The elements of this political culture can be briefly described as follows: a Latin Americanist view supported by regional exile experiences; a set of ideas initially critical of the traditional left; and, lastly, a model activist associated with the idealized figures of the revolutionary soldier and the proletarian. This political culture was not merely the result of a number of preformed ideas. Rather it resulted from the interaction of previously held ideas and the political process that these activists had to face. It was in that process that these activists gradually developed a unique political culture, which was built in the course of the regional exchanges that were born of the uncertain historical contingency of local processes that often led them to places that were inconceivable in the mid-1960s.

This chapter examines friendships and their political importance among leading members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PRNP) and the Community Party USA (CPUSA) from the late 1930s to 1945. This was a time of heightened repression against the PRNP and also a time when the CPUSA had adopted Popular Front politics. They key figures in the chapter are Pedro Albizu Campos and Juan Antonio Corretjer, leaders of the PRNP, and Earl Browder and Consuelo Lee Tapia de Lamb from the CPUSA. The men's friendships developed in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where they were imprisoned, and continued in New York City. The chapter illustrates what we can learn about how parties and political activists function beyond or in contradiction to their printed statements by paying attention to how personal relationships affect politics and vice versa.

Sociologist Andrés Guerrero famously examined how nineteenth-century liberal legislation in Ecuador created a “ventriloquist’s voice” that mediated Indigenous expressions of resistance to exclusionary governing structures. The assumption is that intermediaries purportedly spoke out in defense of subaltern rights but in reality only desired to advance their own interests. Intermediaries allegedly added another layer of exploitation to an already marginalized and silenced population. Careful studies, however, reveal that Indigenous activists did advance their own agendas, both alone and in collaboration with sympathetic urban allies. Recovering subaltern voices, nevertheless, is complicated by a lack of the written archival documentation that typically forms the basis for scholarly examinations. This lack of sources is not the fault of local organic intellectuals, but rather a result of the racist attitudes of a dominant class who did not find the thoughts and actions of Indigenous people worthy of preservation. This essay examines the gap between the perception of both domestic and international surveillance operations and the realities of rural mobilizations.

On the afternoon of July 25, 1927, a young shepherdess set fire to a hillside on Florentino Serrudo’s estate, launching the greatest insurrection of indigenous peasants since the Federal War of 1899 – and the first in Bolivia to be labeled “communist.” This chapter takes seriously the fears that the Chayanta (Bolivia) rebellion of 1927 generated among landlords, state officials, and the press, and examines the dynamics of mobilization, the formation of alliances among indigenous caciques, artisans, and intellectuals, and the state response. It shows that in the years before the Chayanta uprising, rural caciques from indigenous communities and radical artisans and intellectuals in the cities of Sucre and Potosí formed a political alliance based on a shared commitment to rural education, communal land ownership, and redistribution of wealth and power. This incipient alliance sought to erase ethnic and class hierarchies in order to build a more democratic society, and largely succeeded in blocking further landlord advance in the southern Bolivian countryside.

The 1947 upheavals on haciendas outside La Paz were facilitated by a coalition between indigenous peasants and urban anarchists. Three factors were essential to this alliance. First, the urban anarchists’ own politics – their libertarian socialist vision, their attentiveness to both “ethnic” and “class” demands, and their organizational federalism – proved conducive to coalition building. Second, prior rural mobilization had created local leaders and networks that would form the rural bases for the coalition; those rural actors would also help to redefine the urban anarchist left, conferring it with a more antiracist and autonomist emphasis. Third, a series of coalition brokers bridged traditional divides of language, ethnicity, and geography. This account qualifies common dismissals of the Bolivian left as mestizo-dominated and class-reductionist while also illuminating the process through which the alliance developed. It concludes that ideologies and human decisions are often just as important as structural circumstances in determining the potential for popular coalitions and militant mobilization.

This chapter examines the migration of nearly 200,000 Caribbean immigrants – from Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Grenada, Aruba, and Curaçao – to Cuba in the 1920s and early 1930s. Jamaicans and Haitians, more than others, were perceived as threats to Cuban culture and national security, and between 1925 and 1933 the Gerardo Machado government encouraged the expulsion of Antillean workers and the nationalization of labor. Caribbean immigrants played a surprisingly important role in the organization of workers in the sugar industry and had a significant role in the sugar worker mobilizations of the early 1930s that culminated in the 1933 Revolution. The young Cuban Communist Party made great efforts to recruit and address Haitian and Jamaican workers, and West Indian immigrants were strikingly visible in labor agitation and resistance as well as in the strikes and mill occupations that accompanied the Revolution of 1933.

Many of Latin America’s twentieth-century leftists struggled against class exploitation and imperialism while also confronting racism, patriarchy, and other oppressions, and while seeking to build more democratic organizations and societies. Revolution, for them, meant not just the seizure of state power or a change in property relations, but a whole series of transformations in social life. These practices and visions did not merely emanate from formal leaders. This volume understands the formation of the left as a contested historical process in which rank-and-file actors, not simply top party leaders, played vital roles. Oppressed groups within the left, or whom the left sought to organize, often exercised important influences on left ideology and practice. Leftist women and indigenous people, in particular, helped reshape leftist politics in a number of the cases examined here. Uncovering the negotiations over power, platforms, and everyday practices on the left is essential to an accurate understanding of past revolutionaries’ successes and failures. Those stories, in turn, hold important lessons for peoples struggling for emancipation in the twenty-first century.

This chapter explores the popular organizing that arose in Mexico’s southwest state of Guerrero during the Cold War. It concludes that the movement’s identification with the language of nationalism and economic and social expectations that arose with the revolution of 1910 distinguishes it from many of the contemporary Marxist-inspired movements in Latin America. Following a series of government assaults on peaceful protesters demanding democratic inclusion, the teacher-activists who had led the initial opposition – Genaro Vázquez Rojas and Lucio Cabañas – each founded an armed guerrilla movement. While these both remained small, the chapter argues that they enjoyed the support of a broader base that hid them, fed them, and suffered the consequences of unrestrained government violence. Guerrero was, ultimately, the site of Mexico’s guerra sucia. This history also helps us understand the disappearance of Ayotzinapa’s teachers-in-training in 2014. Those students attended a school distinguished for producing radical opposition leaders since its post-revolutionary inception, including, during the Cold War, Lucio Cabañas.

This study examines how Salvadoran women shaped revolutionary praxis, thus challenging prior academic accounts that have situated armed struggle and socialism in opposition to feminism. The Association of Salvadoran Women (AMES), an organization composed of combatants, peasants, and exiles, redefined revolution to mean the overthrow of both capitalism and patriarchy. The sites of feminist praxis included guerrilla territories in El Salvador, refugee camps in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and solidarity networks in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the United States. Within the guerrilla territories, AMES members actively participated in community councils, an experiment in popular democracy, and generated a feminist praxis that linked the exigencies of wartime survival to the long-term liberation of women. At the international level, Salvadoran women collaborated with other radical women from Latin America and the United States in order to push their organizations in more feminist directions. This study is the first detailed analysis of AMES and offers a novel interpretation of the rise of Salvadoran feminism.

This paper aims to recover the history of the Congress of Latin American Women held in Santiago de Chile in November 1959, using it as a snapshot to illuminate the various political currents within the Cuban delegation. At a time of rapid polarization and shifting alliances, the ideal of transnational, Latin American solidarity appealed to women activists from both Cuba’s “Old,” Marxist Left and the “New,” insurgent Left, despite their many differences. This common ground helped establish elements of cooperation between some women of the 26th of July Movement and women affiliated with the pre-revolutionary Communist Party. Although the well-known Federation of Cuban Women was established as a result of the alliances developed through participation in the Congress, these transnational, “Latin Americanist” origins of the FMC have largely been forgotten.