SPECTERS OF REVOLUTION
The 1960s represented a revolutionary movement around the globe. In rural Mexico, several guerrilla groups organized to fight against the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Specters of Revolution chronicles two peasant guerrilla organizations led by schoolteachers that waged revolutionary armed struggles to overthrow the PRI: the National Revolutionary Civic Association (ACNR) led by Genaro Vázquez; and the Party of the Poor (PDLP) led by Lucio Cabañas. Both emerged to fight decades of massacres and everyday forms of terror committed by the government against citizen social movements that demanded the redemption of constitutional rights. This book reveals that these movements developed after years of seeking legal, constitutional pathways of redress, focused on economic justice and electoral rights, and became subject to brutal counterinsurgencies.
Relying upon declassified intelligence and military documents and oral histories, Specters of Revolution documents how long-held rural utopian ideals drove peasant political action that gradually became radicalized in the face of persistent state terror and violence. Placing Mexico into the broader history of post-1945 Latin America, this book explodes the myth that Mexico constituted an island of relative peace and stability surrounded by a sea of military dictatorships during the Cold War.