The message of the Cuban Revolution for a generation of young Latin American leftists was to put aside reformist politics and take up arms. North Korea vowed to support all those who heeded that call. Its intervention came at a time when many young radicals sought a personal transformation, one that would allow them to participate in the crucial historical juncture they believed themselves to be living through. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Latin American militants sought this transformation in secret training camps in North Korea, with the hope of returning to their home countries new subjects, with the physical and mental attributes necessary to make revolution. Between 1964 and 1970, North Korea provided military training to at least nine revolutionary groups in seven Latin American countries: Venezuela, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Brazil, Guatemala, and Mexico. This chapter provides an in-depth overview and assessment of North Korea’s efforts to support revolutionary struggle in Latin America.

This chapter introduces the first framing contest under examination in the book: victims versus perpetrators. The chapter starts with the story of Diana, who joined the FARC to escape abusive stepbrothers, only to fall into an abusive relationship with a commander, whom she later fled. Diana never enrolled in a government reintegration program, and after the peace process, she was welcomed back into the FARC reintegration in order to receive benefits. However, she did not stay long, soon leaving to take her chances in Bogotá, where she could be anonymous and not expose her children to what she saw as toxic rhetoric in the FARC camp. This chapter examines three key components that build resonance in the guerrillas’ victimhood frame: the campesino identity, gendered victimhood, and the concept of self-defense. Using supporting quotes and stories from the other 112 interviews, this chapter examines in detail the guerrilla frame of victimhood in Colombia, illustrating how collective victimhood works as a cohesive force to keep members inside the group and is especially effective at convincing women that they have nowhere else to go.

This chapter examines planned revolutions, which emerge from deliberately organized and orchestrated rebellions. Planned revolutions contain several key, interrelated elements. First, regardless of their declared ideological beliefs, all self-declared revolutionaries are essentially nationalist. Two other, related elements characteristic of planned revolutions are those of leadership and the party. Planned revolutions will not appear unless several highly dedicated individuals commit themselves to planning, organizing, and leading a takeover of power. Sooner or later, the cabal gives rise to a political party or a guerrilla organization whose chief, often only, mission is to lead a revolution. The party sees itself as the revolution’s vanguard. Among the planners involved in this vanguard, usually an individual with greater ambitions, or better organizational skills and opportunities, or through sheer chance, emerges as its leader. While planned revolutions cannot succeed without the work of an organized revolutionary party, the party’s leader becomes the face of the revolution, and, if the revolution succeeds, he then becomes the leader of the country. The October 1917 Russian revolution, and the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban revolutions belong in this category. As starkly evident by Che Guevara’s failed movement in Bolivia, not all attempts at revolutionary capture of power succeed.

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 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.