Toward a Global History of Latin America's Revolutionary Left

Abstract

This volume is the latest contribution to a growing literature on the Latin American revolutionary Left, defined by Tanya Harmer and Alberto Martín Álvarez as antireformist forces who supported or engaged in armed struggle starting in the late 1950s and 1960s. The book traces some of the global connections that shaped Latin American revolutionary groups as well as those groups' global impacts. The contributors' use of seldom-tapped archives in Beijing, Moscow, Prague, and various Western European sites sets the volume apart from most studies of the Latin American Left.The first section focuses on Cuba's promotion of armed revolution and its interaction with other countries and movements in the 1960s. Michal Zourek, Blanca Mar León, and James G. Hershberg examine the Fidel Castro government's relations with Algeria, Brazil, China, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. The second section traces the armed Left's connections with Western Europe between the 1960s and 1980s. Chapters by Gerardo Leibner, Eduardo Rey Tristán, Arturo Taracena Arriola, and José Manuel Ágreda Portero examine solidarity work among European leftist and social democratic parties, grassroots activists, publishers, and nongovernmental organizations.The book broadly supports the findings of prior scholarship on the Left. The newly consulted sources confirm that the Soviet Union and most Moscow-aligned Communist parties opposed armed struggle and that this position contributed to the well-known conflicts in the Cuban-Soviet and Sino-Soviet relationships. They also confirm the importance of Latin American initiative. Far from being puppets of external sponsors, armed revolutionaries acted of their own accord and controlled most of their own decisions. Latin Americans were also crucial in the growth of global solidarity networks, as other recent research has stressed.The chapters do add new details that enrich and sometimes qualify this picture. For example, Zourek documents Czechoslovakia's role in providing logistical aid to help Cuba's Latin American trainees return to their home countries. This story nuances the image of Soviet bloc countries as uniformly opposed to armed revolution. Czechoslovak aid was reluctant, however. Officials agreed to help as a way of keeping tabs on Cuba and because the Cubans were likely to pursue their efforts even without Soviet bloc support. The Cubans themselves financed the operation. And neither the Czechoslovaks nor the Cubans controlled Latin American guerrilla campaigns: “it was local revolutionary movements who were in charge” once the trainees returned home (p. 46).Some other Communist parties supported certain guerrilla movements, as when the Italians aided guerrillas in Venezuela and Brazil (in the latter case, in defiance of Brazil's official Communist party). Leibner argues that some Italian Communists were sympathetic to Latin American guerrillas given their own memories of resistance to fascism. They also deemed armed struggle a more viable option in Latin America than in Europe. But their support ceased when they began to fear that Latin American guerrillas were inspiring armed adventurism in Italy.Another highlight is Taracena Arriola's memoir of his time representing the Guatemalan guerrillas in Europe in the 1980s. He makes a strong case that European organizing and pressure campaigns helped force the Guatemalan regime to the negotiating table. The chapter is rich with detail. For instance, he recounts that his commitment to building a European solidarity network was inspired by the Vietnamese and Southern Cone revolutionaries who had done so previously. We learn how Amnesty International initially refused to get involved in Guatemala but was persuaded thanks to the work of organizers in Paris. Taracena Arriola also shows how events in Guatemala led to internal conflicts within the solidarity network by the mid-1980s, as the genocidal counterinsurgency made a guerrilla victory unlikely and as some Europeans were convinced by the new facade of democracy erected in Guatemala.As the book's title implies, it aims to encourage further research. Harmer and Martín Álvarez's introduction and Van Gosse's afterword are explicit about many of the unanswered questions, and I would add some others. Latin American revolutionaries' interactions with Vietnam, Algeria, and China have received relatively little attention, and their ties to other Third World countries even less. The same goes for relations among Latin American revolutionary groups. There is also much work still to be done on the global circulation of feminist and antiracist ideas, liberation theology, and differing conceptions of socialism. The political organizing work of certain armed groups, and how that work was shaped by global exchanges, remains neglected amid the overwhelming focus on their armed actions. The present volume offers a model for investigating these and other questions.