ABSTRACT
During the Cold War era, Mexico experienced a prolonged wave of political violence from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s, whose iterations have lasted until today. The combination of revolutionary global trends, authoritarianism, and state violence against the Left propelled the emergence of more than 40 guerilla organizations in the country. There are several aspects that make the Mexican experience an exceptional case. Mexico was the only Latin American country that had a revolution in the first half of the twentieth century, which in turn fueled the formation of a stable political system where civilian power subdued the military. At a time when anticommunist military dictatorships dominated the region, in Mexico a populist government led by the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) waged a so-called dirty war against the revolutionary Left. This paper explores the causes of the armed conflict, the legacy of revolutionary violence, and the political-military currents of the Left—namely armed socialist agrarianism, guerrilla militarism, pobrismo (poor people’s politics), Castro-Guevarism, Maoism, and insurrectional communism.
