![]() Guerrilla groups, often Cuba-inspired and at times Cuba-supported, began to operate in such countries as Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Uruguay in the 1960s in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Brazil, and Argentina in the 1970s and in Peru again in the 1980s. The focus of this annotated bibliography, however, is on the Latin American guerrilla insurgencies that emerged with the Cuban Revolution and subsequent efforts throughout the region by dissident factions, usually Marxist in ideological orientation, to overthrow governments deemed capitalist and reactionary. Similar tactics were employed by Peruvian irregulars led by Andrés Avelino Cáceres against Chilean invaders during the War of the Pacific (1879–1883) and in a number of other cases of 19th- and early-20th-century internal conflicts in the region (e.g., Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia). The term “guerrilla” gained currency in Spain in the campaign by patriots to harass Napoleon’s forces in the early 1800s. For the most part, however, guerrilla warfare was dominated by hit-and-run actions by small units, greatly overshadowing other weapons in the insurgent arsenal. As insurgency has played out in the region since the 1950s, several groups, notably FMLN in El Salvador and FARC in Colombia, progressed to the use of large military units, and all used terror as a shaping mechanism to intimidate and to remove resisting local actors and government structures. Insurgency in Latin America, though employing a variety of violent and nonviolent tactics, is usually associated with guerrilla warfare grounded in Marxist ideology and committed to overthrowing the state through violence.
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