Customer Reviews

Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America

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If you're interested in recent revolutions and revolutionary movements in Latin America (or elsewhere, for that matter), Wickham-Crowley's book can't be beat. It's a model of clear thinking and writing, and it's amazingly comprehensive in scope. The book condenses a phenomenal amount of research on a dozen major guerrilla movements in Latin American, and presents a compelling analysis as to why only the Cuban and Nicaraguan movements successfully seized power. (Hint: It helps when your enemy is a brutal dictator whom nearly everybody -- including middle- and even upper-class people -- despises.) This book is must reading for anyone interested in contemporary Latin America, guerrillas, or revolutions.

Revolution is a hard topic to write about, at least in any sort of useful, scientific fashion. Problems start with defining revolution and thus deciding what events to include, but they certainly don't end there. Wickham-Crowley never shies away from making clear, well-deliniated definitions, even if it means including or excluding controversial events. This alone makes this book a useful addition to the literature of revolution.
The author confines his study to revolution in Latin America, but this hardly confines him; Wickham-Crowley studies nearly a dozen revolutions, and could easily have included a dozen more. Indeed, despite, or perhaps because, this is a narrow, scientific study, Wickham-Crowley's observations on revolution can easily be applied to revolutions around the world and throughout history. Readers will be struck, for example, by the similarity of these revolutions to, say, the French Revolution or the Iranian.
Be prepared for a dense read. This book is full of charts, graphs and statistics, and much of the book consists of a statistical analysis of such factors as the age of revolutionaries and revolutionary leaders, social class, and level of education. Although this is precisely what makes this difficult to read, however, it is also what gives the book so much validity and usefulness.

Wickham-Crowley's work examining revolutionary movements in Latin America is perhaps the finest text of its kind. Writing in clear yet copiously researched prose, Wickham-Crowley creates an interesting, useful paradigm for understanding insurgency in Latin America.

I would recommend it to students of Latin American politics, revolutionary movements, and readers looking for a more systematic, rather than dogmatic, exploration of the topic.