Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside

by Alexander Avina

The 1960s represented a revolutionary moment around the globe. In rural Mexico, several guerrilla groups organized to fight against the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Specters of Revolution chronicles two peasant guerrilla organizations led by schoolteachers, the National Revolutionary Civil Association (ACNR) and the Party of the Poor (PDLP), which waged revolutionary armed struggles to overthrow the PRI. Both emerged to fight decades of massacres and everyday forms of terror committed by the government against citizen social movements that demanded the redemption of constitutional rights. This book reveals that these movements developed after years of seeking legal, constitutional pathways of redress, focused on economic justice and electoral rights, and became subject to brutal counterinsurgencies. Relying upon recently declassified intelligence and military documents and oral histories, it documents how long-held rural utopian ideals drove peasant
political action that gradually became radicalized in the face of persistent state terror and violence. Placing Mexico into the broader history of post-1945 Latin America, Specters of Revolution explodes the myth that Mexico constituted an island of relative peace and stability surrounded by a sea of military dictatorships during the Cold War.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Latin American History, Politics

272 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2014

Reviews

[Dani]

A very interesting look at the development of the peasant guerrilla movement in the 1960s-70s in Guerrero, Mexico. This peasant mobilization does not happen in a vacuum, but instead builds off of political momentum and ideas that date back to the Mexican Revolution. Aviña focuses on Lucio Cabañas (PDLP) and Genaro Vázquez (ACNR) as his window into the exploration of these guerrilla movements. What I thought was very interesting was the exploration of legal forms of resistance, as well as alliance with Mexican Old Left. The failure of these avenues for change leads to the evolution of the need for violent revolution in the face of the repressive PRI regime. I enjoyed Aviña's point about the PDLP's attempt to fuse leftist ideology (Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Focoism) with the realities of campesino grievances unique to Guerrero.

[Nils · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent book that unpacks with great sympathy the deep local roots of several peasant insurgencies in the Mexican state of Guerrero during the late 1960s. A central political thrust of the book, which is clearly succeeds at, is to refute the lie told by local elites that these insurgencies were purely the result of outside, Soviet- and Cuban-inspired agitators. While certainly the leaders of the rebellion were indeed middle class urban intellectuals (some of whom as it happened had spent time studying in Moscow), Aviña shows that the peasant demands these leaders channelled were based in long-standing "utopian" demands for local autonomy and land redistribution, centered on an effort to demand that the government live up to the social reform commitments of the 1917 Constitution and the "political imaginary" (the central theoretical term of the book) formed by the Cardenas regime's land reforms. (The role of the Church and anti-clericalism is almost entirely absent from the book.) While Aviña obviously must acknowledge that these rebellions failed to achieve their political objectives as they were savagely repressed by the state, he insists that the ideals represented continue to live on -- that is, these ideas are "unfailed" in Wenzel's sense. It is also a powerful and important reminder, therefore, of the political legacy and memory that current antinomian movements in Guerrero (including Narcos) can draw in to resists the power of entrenched urban and metropolitan elites.

The biggest weakness of the book is that Aviña writes as an obvious partisan in favor of these unfailed visions of peasant socialism, with the result that he is neither as critical as he might be of the revolutionary ideas themselves (his critique is more or less limited to acknowledging the patriarchal dimensions of these visions) nor to the limitations of a political strategy which ultimately achieved almost none of its goals and got many people killed. Even in the present it is facile for a college professors to sympathize with utopian ideals of insurgents when it is not they who will pay the price for the failures (cf: Syriza), but to continue to sympathize even when one knows the historic outcome seems to border on political irresponsibility: it is sympathy for what we know was a political suicide mission.

[Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clear and focused examination of topic that left wing history does not generally touch on. I do wish the author had included more of a follow-up on the after-effects of the subject material. Great read if you're interested in Socialist movements or counter-insurgency campaigns.

[George Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fantastic read for those of us interested in Cold War in Latin America. When we think of guerrilla warfare and state repression in the 1960s and 70s, we usually think of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Argentina, Venezuela, or Peru. However, here were read that in the "perfect dictatorship" of the PRI, this same sort of phenomena were present and perhaps even more complex.