ABSTRACT
“Revolution” comes from the old French word revolvere – to turn back, to return – suggesting that this overthrow of an exploitative and outmoded aristocratic order was no more than a return to an original authority that belonged to a sovereign people. Thus, revolution returns a people to itself, returns to the people their natural sovereignty, even if it is the act of revolution itself that constitutes the people retrospectively as a national ethnos, as scholars of nationalism argue. Foquismo was taken up by revolutionary vanguards across Latin America and the African continent. A later wave of foquismo unfolded in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s and was considerably more successful. The politics of the popular front and of foquismo found fertile ground in Latin America because of the economic infrastructure imposed upon its countries by centuries of Spanish colonialism and United States neo-colonialism.
