Comparing Failed Revolutions: Recent Studies on Colombia, El Salvador, and Chiapas

Landscapes Of Struggle: Politics, Society, and Community in El Salvador. Edited by Aldo Lauria-Santiago and Leigh Binford. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. Pp. 336. $22.95 paper.)

Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics In Colombia. By Steven Dudley. (New York: Routledge, 2004. Pp. 253. $27.50 cloth.)

Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas. By Karen Kampwirth. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Pp. 279. $28.00 paper.)

Vanguard Revolutionaries in Latin America: Peru, Colombia, Mexico. By James F. Rochlin. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003. Pp. 291. $55.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.)

Las Abejas: Pacifist Resistance and Syncretic Identities in a Globalizing Chiapas. By Marco Tavanti. (New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. 300. $85.00 cloth.)

Revolution in Latin America has been marked by failure. In the post–World War II era only two revolutionary regimes have made it into power, and one of these (in Nicaragua) was voted out of office after little more than a decade. The other, in Cuba, has survived because it has refused to grant its citizens full political rights or hold free elections. Although consequently enduring, the Cuban revolution is hardly a success story. Its political legacy has been authoritarianism; its economic legacy, poverty. If the revolutionary project is about an egalitarian quest for social justice, then what is striking to any rational observer is its pragmatic bankruptcy.

Despite the obvious, much of academe continues to celebrate the tradition of armed revolt in Latin America. The reasons for this are not easily explained. Certainly one factor is that, within Latin America, a university student-infused subculture of film, popular literature, rock music and gimmickry has romanticized revolution. Within the United States, graduate students and professors studying the region invariably discover U.S. complicity in political violence and economic exploitation. Finding this morally repugnant, they embrace the 'right' of the oppressed to find justice through a collective violence of their own. As David Stoll has hypothesized in his controversial study of Rigoberta Menchú, embracing the revolutionary cause of the oppressed fulfills, for many North American academics, a moral need.¹

The overwhelming majority of revolutionary movements in the postwar era have been crushed by the State. Employing an ever-increasing arsenal of sophisticated surveillance and intelligence technology, military and security apparatuses have easily outgunned and dismantled insurgencies in nearly all urban settings. Rural insurgencies have proven more resilient, but since the mid-1980s even these have greatly waned. The resource curve for the powers-that-be has been particularly striking since the early 1980s, when hefty increases in funding under Ronald Reagan helped bring on-line a host of new technologies—digital-based, satellite-interfaced surveillance systems, path-breaking communications interception, and highly proficient night-vision and detection equipment, among them. If successful revolution was made difficult with the advent of better transportation infrastructure and communications in the late nineteenth century, today it is all but impossible. Even rural insurgencies can now be fairly easily snuffed out, especially when the State has no qualms about exterminating part of the civilian populace in the process. Torture, too, is integral to information-gathering—for the simple fact that it works. Finally, the power of mass media, especially the statistical analysis of polling data coupled with television, has equipped the State with a level of refined propaganda that could have made Josef Goebbels blush.

There is, in the contemporary age, a revolutionary dialectic. When insurgent forces rouse a populace with promises of liberation and carry out their first acts of redemptive violence, they invariably trigger a massive retaliatory strike on the part of the State (which often employs at this juncture unsavory characters and allows for acts of sadism). This, in turn, produces a revolutionary surge, as the populace is alienated by the initial bloodletting and aligns with the revolutionaries in a quest for self-defense and empowerment. The problem...