South America and the Global 60s

An extensive literature has discussed the implications that the global 60s had for the Left in different parts of the world. Most approaches agree that the 1960s opened up fresh possibilities for the emergence of a novel global political movement called the New Left that challenged the political assumptions of the traditional Left. However, the main features of this new political movement have been a matter of debate around the world. While for Jeremi Suri, the global unrest was linked to an elusive “international language of dissent” furthered by a new generation of young people (the post-World War II baby-boomer generation) socialized in universities, for Immanuel Wallerstein and others, 1968 marked the beginning of a revolutionary cycle comparable to that of 1848. But, in contrast to that earlier cycle’s critique of the old regime of the nineteenth century, this mobilization focused on questioning the global hegemony of the United States and emerged in reaction to the traditional Left’s failure to stop that process.⁶ Although in the long term, New Left activists ultimately failed to achieve their aims, according to Wallerstein their efforts were justified by their belief that their actions would be more effective.

Both approaches reveal a tension in the literature of the 1960s. While some emphasize the relative vagueness of the supposedly global counterculture, others insist on the political dimension and revolutionary nature of the movements of the 1960s. Although these two dimensions should not necessarily be seen as antithetical, this antagonism has shaped much of the debate on the 1960s, as is illustrated by Kristin Ross’ study on the memory of the French May, May ‘68 and its Afterlives.⁷

Most of the approaches on Latin America, however, have put forward a much less antagonistic view of the relationship between the New Left and the traditional Left. Jeffrey Gould and Eric Zolov – in regional approaches – and Vania Markarian, Victoria Langland, and María Cristina Tortti – in studies that look at specific cases – have all suggested that, while conflicts did exist, there was also some convergence between this “movement of movements” (intellectual trends, aesthetic sensibilities, popular culture expressions, and new behaviors, social movements, political organizations, armed political groups) that the New Left embodied, on the one hand, and the traditional Left, on the other.⁸

Initially, these groups emerged as a reaction against the traditional Left. Their main criticism had to do with the traditional Left’s inability to come up with strategies for mobilizing the masses in a way that would create enabling conditions for the revolution. This generation was also very critical of Soviet socialism and stressed the Latin American nature of the revolution as opposed to traditional leftist views that were Eurocentric in their approach to politics. Lastly, these groups sought to organize lower-class sectors from rural areas and urban slums, which had been relatively ignored by the traditional Left. Besides these political differences, there was a distinction that arose from the strong generational imprint that these movements had. From the way they dressed, their cultural products, and their lifestyles, it was evident they sought to be part of the “language of dissent” described by Suri, but this gesture had deep political implications that went far beyond Suri’s superficial view.⁹

While they disagreed over strategy, the old and new Left nonetheless had many points in common in terms of their ultimate aims, and there were certain aspects of a highly hierarchical internal political culture that marked significant continuities between the two.

In this sense, this study seeks to put into a broader context the emergence of armed groups and to contribute to an understanding of how their members were part of that “movement of movements,” as they engaged in a wide range of innovative experiences in social and cultural spheres in each of their respective countries, where the old and new Left had specific configurations, which differed from those in Europe and the United States.

In addition to this historiographical discussion, I would like to put into question the geography of the 1960s. As with the nineteenth-century revolutions, 1968 is conceptualized to a large extent with a focus on Western Europe and the United States. The vast majority of studies acknowledge the role of the Third World and its struggles in the unrest that stirred the First World. However, these aspects are limited to a mere context and are not included as part of the same network of circulation of ideas and actors.¹⁰ But events in Europe and the United States were also influenced by what was happening in Latin America. One of the most popular icons in central countries during the year 1968 was the image of Che Guevara. Beyond the romantic nostalgia evoked by Guevara’s life, the impact of his image illustrates the weight that Latin America’s recent history had in the ideas and political strategies that fueled the global 60s. In this sense, it is necessary to reconstruct the place that the Southern Cone had in the global 60s, as the emergence of these actors cannot be explained from the centrality of what happened in Europe and the United States. On the contrary, several major local events that played a role in shaping this political generation also impacted the global 60s. From Che Guevara’s Bolivia campaign, with the networks it spawned in the Southern Cone and the emergence of the Tupamaros with their urban guerrilla proposal that was better suited for more urbanized societies, to the debates on the transition to socialism under the Unidad Popular government, all of these developments affected the more radical sectors of the New Left in Europe and the United States.

In sum, the 1960s were global but studies of this period, for the most part, seem to downplay the active role played by the countries of the periphery in the generation of ideas and repertoires of contention in the countries of the center. Studying this experience can thus provide greater insight into the global nature of the 1960s, enable a reflection on the role of processes that have been largely overlooked by the bibliography on the subject, and, lastly, propose new approaches to the tension between the New Left and the traditional Left under which these issues have been examined.

Political Violence and the Left in Latin America

One of the most salient characteristics of this political generation was its defense of revolutionary political violence as a legitimate and necessary form of collective action for countering the advancing hegemony of the United States that thwarted any attempt to bring social change through peaceful and legal means. This option does not only have to do with the global unrest of the 1960s. To a large extent the radicalization that emerges among young people and lower-class sectors in the mid-1960s is one more layer in a process that had been building up through several experiences during Latin America’s Cold War.

In his influential study The Last Colonial Massacre, Greg Grandin draws on the revolution/counter-revolution dynamics in twentieth-century Latin America to describe the emergence of the New Left as the last response to a series of failed attempts to bring about social change that were effectively contained by state terrorism practices, as epitomized by the coup against Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala staged by local elites with U.S. support in the context of the Latin American Cold War.¹¹

As of the end of the democratic Spring of the late 1940s, the United States began to view any left-leaning political expressions and labor organization efforts in Latin America with increasingly hostile eyes.¹² The overthrow of Árbenz in Guatemala with major involvement from the CIA marked a watershed moment in the role played by the United States in the region, which continued with the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and was firmly consolidated with the 1964 coup d’état in Brazil. For South America, the Brazilian dictatorship ushered in a new form of authoritarian political regime based on a new role played by the armed forces, trained in the national security doctrine, which was to be replicated in the coming years in most of the countries of the Southern Cone. It also gradually shattered the reformist expectations that the Alliance for Progress had generated at the start of the decade.

Many intellectuals and activists who eventually embraced armed struggle in the late 1960s were forming their opinion on the role of the United States in the decade spanning from the coup in Guatemala to the coup in Brazil. Guevara’s phrase “Cuba will not be Guatemala” is representative of this generation of activists who witnessed the growing interventionism of the United States that sought to stifle various alternatives of social reform, and who came to view armed struggle as the only possible response to that interventionism. Cuba must be considered against this backdrop. Revolution raised expectations among groups of activists who were already becoming radicalized in reaction to U.S. intervention in Latin America and the economic crises of the industrialist projects that had begun before Cuba in the context of the Cold War. Revolution offered replicable models that in South America were viewed with favorable eyes, but also from a critical distance, as will be shown in this book. Although several authors, such as Hal Brands in his recent study, have stressed Cuba’s centrality, the individual paths taken by the activists studied here show that Cuba was not the starting point. Rather it was one moment in a process of radicalization whose origins could be traced back, as Grandin posits, to the mid-1950s.¹³

Beside their connection with the Latin American Cold War, the explanations for left-wing violence have also prompted heated debates both in academia and in national public spheres. During the dictatorships, these groups were stigmatized, accused of being foreign agents, and used to justify the authoritarian backlash that the military regimes claimed was necessary to defend national security. In the context of the democratic transitions, the violence of these groups was mostly interpreted as the result of an ideological fanaticism that fought against another fanaticized minority formed by the military. This narrative portrayed civil society as a hostage in a polarization between actors that were removed from society and ideologically alienated from it. Different variations of this kind of narrative have been used in experiences as diverse as those of Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Guatemala.¹⁴

It was also in the context of the transitions to democracy that the subject began to be of interest to academics, essayists, and journalists. While the body of works focusing on the subject is so extensive as to make a thorough review difficult, the most relevant moments and approaches for explaining the ways in which armed struggle was perceived as of the 1980s must be highlighted.¹⁵ In a climate of positive expectations regarding the return to democracy, a significant number of studies emphasized the anti-liberal nature of these groups. In the debates of the time, these practices were condemned by the general public and some sectors of the human rights movements even avoided the subject as they were reluctant to bring up the most controversial aspects of the political violence in which some left-wing groups had engaged.¹⁶ Most academics were influenced by the model of democratic breakdown proposed by Juan Linz, and focused on the ways in which the emergence of such groups contributed to the process of political polarization that eroded the region’s democratic regimes. In Linz’s model, based on their ideology, these organizations were characterized as actors disloyal to democracy, whose actions spurred a process of political polarization that tended to undermine democratic procedures, creating a political environment in which sectors at the center of the political spectrum – who were thought to be key for the preservation of stable democratic regimes – failed in their leadership role.¹⁷

In addition, several academic works insisted on the ideological influence of the Cuban Revolution and the ways in which the intellectual mood of the 1960s set the tone for a radicalization that was largely portrayed as alienated from the political process and which fueled the increasing polarization. For instance, in his book on the breakdown of democracy in Chile, Arturo Valenzuela argued that radical left-wing groups furthered a “self-fulfilling prophecy” as they not only denounced the inevitability of an authoritarian reaction with their maximalist discourses and practices, they also ultimately weakened center forces that would have been the only ones capable of overcoming the polarization faced by Chilean democracy.¹⁸ Similar arguments were put forward by Luis Eduardo González for Uruguay and Liliana de Riz for Argentina.¹⁹ In all of these cases the crises of democracy that preceded the coups were explained as being rooted in multiple causes, but when it came to armed leftist groups the descriptions focused on the major role that ideology had played in pushing them away from a democratic culture in which their views would have led the fate of these societies down a better path.

Starting in the 1990s, new studies, based on oral history and written sources, centered their attention more specifically on the armed actors themselves, offering an interpretation more focused on the internal life of these organizations than on their role in the crises of democracy. An early example of these is Richard Gillespie’s book Soldiers of Perón: Argentina’s Montoneros, published in Spanish in 1987, which emphasized the intersection of middle-class Catholic nationalism with Marxism to explain the emergence of this organization and its subsequent militarist deviation.²⁰ Other historians followed his example, attributing a significant role to the ideological aspects and cultural identity dimension of these new organizations in explaining their emergence, as well as the moments of increasing political isolation that had resulted in relatively irrational actions. This line of work was particularly prolific in the case of Argentina. In analyzing the military development of these organizations, authors such as Pilar Calveiro, Hugo Vezzetti, and Vera Carnovale highlighted the part played by ideology and internal culture.²¹

Along with these works, an abundant literature of testimony emerged, largely in the last two decades, which seeks to recover the experience of the militants who were active during this period. This literature, based mainly on testimonial accounts and produced by academics who are also activists, contributed to expand the chorus of voices engaged in the discussion of the issue of political violence. These approaches called attention to the weaknesses of the democracies of the 1950s and 1960s that the political and intellectual works seem to disregard.²²

All of these studies on ideology and culture were useful because they reconstructed the language and ideas of armed groups in the pre-coup period. Most, however, failed to provide elements to historically approach the ways in which such groups developed their proposals. Despite the diversity of views that they represented, they all shared a methodological principle that entailed ignoring the possibility of a link between ideological and cultural processes and political and economic transformations, which had been the focus of the academic studies conducted in the 1970s. This resulted in ideas being understood as coherently organized bodies, disconnected from the contradictory historical processes in which they emerged and from the structural changes that were affecting these societies. This type of approach made it difficult to comprehend the sinuous and conflicting paths taken by the left-wing and center-left activists and parties studied in this book, many of whom had supported reformist projects in the mid-1950s and had gone on to adopt radical postures in the late 1960s, while backing electoral initiatives even as they took up arms, and that, as of the 1980s and in the context of re-democratization, resumed their political activities through non-violent means.

In this sense, the 1980s marked a starting point for a way of thinking about political violence in academia that still influences us today and which consisted in conceiving ideology and culture as an autonomous sphere without major links to other social, economic, and political processes on which these ideas and identities were built.

By contrast, the first authors – for the most part sociologists, who in the late 1960s and in the 1970s had sought to explain this phenomenon of political violence, had always pointed to structural frameworks derived from the process of modernization or the crisis of the Latin American industrialist model. Texts such as Political Order in Changing Societies by Samuel Huntington and Why Men Rebel by Ted Gurr provided significant theoretical inspiration for sociologists of modernization who explained the anomic behavior of this political generation as the result of the divorce between the middle classes’ expectations of upward social mobility and the limited material possibilities of underdeveloped societies.²³ Or, in the framework of the Latin American dependency theory in its various forms, they all explained the radicalization of sectors of the middle classes as resulting from the crisis of the model of import substitution industrialization and the increasing demands that the state could not satisfy.²⁴ Even in Guillermo O’Donnell’s first works, the radicalization of certain sectors of the Left is presented as the result of the “stirring of the lower classes” as these countries transitioned from the populist or welfare models of the 1950s to the authoritarian bureaucratic states that would ultimately be consolidated in the 1970s.²⁵ These studies, marked by structural sociological approaches that established diverse connections between political regimes and economic processes, provided important contextual insights for understanding the radicalization of the Left, but they failed to address the concrete paths taken by that radicalization.

In short, left-wing radicalization in the region was described, either as an inevitable structural consequence, or as the result of ideological convictions that for some spurred dictatorial authoritarianism. In this dichotomic view, those who have insisted on the more structural phenomena have tended to assign a central importance to local causalities, while those who emphasized ideological or cultural aspects have focused on the influence that the global context had on local processes.

I seek to combine the structural approaches of the 1970s, with the most recent political and cultural approaches, toward understanding the unique ways in which the ideas of the global 60s were read and reinterpreted in this part of the globe, and to provide insight into how this regional movement was shaped by the dialog between the inside and the outside. More precisely, the aim is to recreate the ways in which this political generation gradually built its political categories, based on the socioeconomic conditions and the political opportunities that the conflict with the state created or precluded. In this sense, the ideological or cultural definitions adopted by these groups must not be viewed as fixed aspects that were determined once and for all, but as symbolic resources that these movements took up, reinterpreted, and adapted depending on the historical circumstances.

In my research, the methodological tools for analyzing such dynamics from a historical perspective are inspired essentially on the reading of the works produced in the field of sociology of social movements. These are relevant to the case studied here, because they offer categories for examining the conflict dynamics that occur between social movements and the state in contemporary societies.²⁶ In this sense, categories such as “political process,” “structure of political opportunities,” and “protest repertoire” developed by social movement studies are useful for organizing an analysis of the relationship between the state and the methods of struggle implemented by these organizations. Moreover, recent studies conducted under this paradigm, which have contributed to an understanding of the complex dynamics between state repression and social protest in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, and the development of armed leftist organizations, may also have implications for this research.²⁷ Also, the more recent contributions that have stressed the ethical and emotional dimensions of the development of social movements, offer valuable insight for examining the historical processes of construction of these groups’ identities, where subjectivity coexists with specific rationalities.²⁸ Thus, while this is an eminently historical study, I will take certain categories used by social movement researchers and apply them to the examination of the origin, development, and resignification of the violent practices and representations adopted by these organizations.

I also seek to examine the political violence of the Latin American Left, and more specifically of the Southern Cone Left, through a transnational approach that transcends the national-foreigner dichotomy in which this subject has been primarily discussed. Generally speaking, the international dimension was used as an argument to invalidate an opponent’s positions. The Right denounced the antinational nature of left-wing movements, whether they acted legally and illegally, due to their affinity with communist countries, and attributed their growth to the alleged influence of the Soviet Union and Cuba. The Left, for its part, explained the growth of civil and dictatorial authoritarianism as the result of the influence of U.S. imperialism on national political processes. While this is not the place to assess the effect that each of these international actors had on national processes, what I am interested in highlighting here is the negativity that characterized the analysis of the connections between domestic and non-national actors.²⁹ This has certainly impacted the ways in which issues connected with political violence have been addressed in national historiographies. Although transnational exchanges were evident for any analyst in the region – and in the cases studied here most activists of the period proclaimed explicitly that their revolutionary project was continental – as evidenced by the literature reviewed above, these political processes have thus far been explained, for the most part, in national terms, or through comparative approaches that ultimately reinforced national differences without addressing the ways in which these regional dialogs were constructed.³⁰

Some works have proposed research lines that have reflected on the circulation of Latin American actors in the context of the Cold War.³¹ The studies of Southern Cone militaries conducted by Ariel C. Armony and John Dinges are good examples of how the national security doctrine led to a circulation of ideas, practices, and resources in the region that was a departure from the traditional practices of the national armies.³² Other works have highlighted the role of Cuba in the circulation of cultural and political actors from the region.³³ The recent study by Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile, and the Inter-American Cold War, offers the most interesting and innovative approach with respect to the methodology and contents of my research.³⁴ In studying Allende’s foreign policy, Harmer provides a “multidimensional, comprehensive, and decentralized perspective” involving various actors connected with the states of Brazil, Chile, Cuba, the United States, and the Soviet Union, along with Chilean left-wing political parties, Brazilian extreme right groups, and a range of regional actors. All of these groups participated in the unique scenario of the global Cold War that was the Inter-American system. For Harmer, thinking in terms of a system entails focusing on a closer examination of multilateral relations as opposed to bilateral ones. In this way, it is clear that several different aspects of U.S. bilateral relations with Mexico, Peru, and, in particular, Brazil were strongly influenced by the policies implemented by Washington for Allende’s Chile. Moreover, in her approach to the Inter-American system she not only looks at states, but also at political actors and networks that imprinted certain dynamics to the process. In this sense, Harmer’s contribution is significant because of the perspective for understanding the unique political dynamics of the region and for considering non-state actors in that system.³⁵

My aim is to reconstruct the specific ways in which ideas, political and social movements, and networks connected with crucial historical events originating in the Inter-American system shaped the transnational development of a political culture with strong revolutionary undertones, which influenced these militants in their choice of violent options. The historical reconstruction of these processes provides an understanding of how the tension between the limitations of the Cold War and the ideas of social change proposed by various political and social actors set the tone of the debate on the need for political violence in the 1960s and 1970s.

The lasting significance of these movements has to do with the fact that they were instrumental in forging a common path for a range of left-wing organizations that, starting in the 1960s, had been gradually distancing themselves from the international experiences of socialism, communism, and Trotskyism, and which, as a result of their decision to take up arms and their close relationship with the Cuban Revolution, had been contributing to create a Left delimited by a historically-determined space: Latin America. The impact of that political culture marked a significant stage in the construction of a Left that identified with the continent’s history, leaving universalist aspirations behind, and which today seems to be playing a key role in Latin American politics.³⁶ The meetings and experiences shared during the 1960s and 1970s by these Southern Cone militants and the ways in which they tried to adapt in the 1980s are important elements toward explaining the present situation of contemporary Latin American Left. Although the policies of the recent progressive governments differ from the maximalist agendas of the 1960s, there are many aspects that originated in that period and were recast during the transitions of the 1980s, when several survivors began to combine some of their political intentions of the 1960s with liberal democratic values associated with the human rights organizations and other social movements.

The Southern Cone and the Emergence of Modern Authoritarianism

In contrast to other regions, such as the Caribbean, Central America, or the Andean region, the Southern Cone had not been a significant space of joint collective action for the leftist organizations of the region. However, the political dynamics of the 1960s and early 1970s brought these militants together. This was a major development. It was true that the region had a common history, including their colonial past, successive waves of reforms that transformed the oligarchic regimes of the first half of the twentieth century without the need for a revolution – in contrast to Mexico – and high levels of social development in the context of Latin America in the 1960s.³⁷ But, while there had been attempts at integration agreements since the beginning of the twentieth century, the region lacked a strong tradition of shared identity.³⁸ Moreover, until the 1960s, the region’s political processes did not merit it being classified as a discrete area of South America.

A search on WorldCat reveals that in the 1970s the term “Southern Cone” was used mainly as a category of analysis in connection with the dictatorial experience. Prior to that, we find it used only in an early testimonial novel published in the 1960s by Uruguayan writer Hiber Conteris, under the title Cono Sur (Southern Cone). The novel tells the story of a Bolivian refugee’s experience in Uruguay at the beginning of the decade and anticipates what would happen in the coming years.³⁹ The idea of the Southern Cone as a distinct region gained increasing currency as scholars began to reflect on the cycle of authoritarian regimes that was inaugurated by Brazil with its 1964 coup d’état, continued by Argentina in 1966, furthered by Uruguay and Chile with their 1973 coups, and fully consolidated by Argentina with a new coup in 1976, and which spread military dictatorships across the territory of the Southern Cone with the firm support of conservative civilian sectors. This authoritarianism was not of the traditional sort found in scarcely urbanized societies, nor was it a populist authoritarianism: it rested, among other things, on the neutralization of social movements through repression. Neither was it an authoritarianism based on a cult of personality, as regimes were backed by the military, or a police dictatorship that sought to restore order, as its aim was to radically transform the lives of these countries. It was precisely the unprecedented nature of this new form of authoritarianism that led scholars to reflect on this phenomenon from a regional perspective.⁴⁰

It is in this context that armed groups started acting regionally. The military, which already had a common ideological component that drew on the national security doctrine, and which in the 1960s had suggested forms of joint action under the Organization of American States (OAS), also began to act on a regional scale, deploying a repressive plan called Operation Condor, which involved illegally crossing national borders to control, kidnap, and murder political opponents in neighboring countries.

In this sense, the establishment of the JCR is the result of an awareness of the regionalization of political processes that begins to emerge in the 1960s and would later be adopted by a number of very diverse actors – the military, trade unions, political parties of the center, and human rights organizations – which, in the coming decades, would develop forms of coordination.

Building on prior contributions to the subject, as reviewed above, I have set out to map the origins and the development of a transnational political culture that emerged from dialogs and meetings among militants of the region’s New Left from the mid-1960s to the 1976 coup in Argentina. This political culture would later be linked to the outcome of local political experiments, movements of exiles across the region, and the growing regionalization of authoritarianism.

While initially considered part of the “New Left,” these groups – which in the mid-1960s were still unable to articulate a political alternative – gradually converged in a regional dialog that led them to strengthen their proposals and boost their political influence in each country. As activists were forced to leave their countries in the face of escalating repression and the establishment of authoritarian regimes, they came together in exile, and their joint regional experience spurred the circulation of ideas and individuals, thus contributing to fully develop a body of common ideas among militants from different countries.

In these movements across borders the groups constructed a shared conception of Latin Americanism and a criticism of the viability of liberal democracy in the context of underdevelopment and the Cold War. They also advocated a form of political violence that was linked to a particular morality where politics were understood in terms of good and evil, social change was reduced to an aspect of revolutionary will, and political commitment was associated with individual sacrifice.

For the purposes of this investigation I will use the term political culture to refer to a diversity of aspects ranging from ideology, morals, sentiments, class, subjectivities, and art, and which, at the same time, cannot be reduced to just one of these individualized categories. This notion of political culture is drawn from cultural history contributions. These works have helped understand how political activism is constructed historically from different political cultures. In a study of the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt – one of the first to develop this approach – defines the notion of political culture as follows: “The values, expectations, and implicit rules that expressed and shaped collective intentions and actions.”⁴¹ This research seeks to follow the ways in which each of these aspects was incorporated and reinterpreted in the construction of a particular political culture that included and furthered the development of a group of armed organizations in the Southern Cone.

Four aspects have been selected to trace how different elements came together to form a transnational political culture: actions, ideas, and interpretations of the regional political process, experiences that built a common political subjectivity, and transnational identity. This will first involve looking at the ways in which these groups with diverse ideological origins converged through a common repertoire of radical practices in a series of shared political ideas and interpretations of the events that were unfolding in the region. By drawing on concepts such as structure of feelings, or emotions, we will then look at how various events that occurred in the region had repercussions on the constitution of this political generation. Lastly, the book will examine the processes of regional exile to determine how these Southern Cone militants gradually came together, forging ties among groups from different countries that helped construct the idea of a transnational community.

These approaches offer possibilities but they also, admittedly, present certain limitations. On the one hand, they clearly enable us to think of these national processes in broader contexts. But as with any delimitation of scale, it entails emphasizing certain aspects and disregarding others. In this case, the experience of these militants traveling across the region largely concerns middle-ranking members and leaders of these organizations more than the rank-and-file of these groups. These militants were, for the most part, middle-class in origin and, to a lesser extent, urban working-class. It was middle-class militants who had the material and intellectual resources to move with relative ease in neighboring countries. In these movements across national borders we find few rank-and-file militants from rural areas or urban peripheries involved in the period’s unprecedented social mobilization experiences. In this sense, the project places greater emphasis on the political involvement of middle sectors as opposed to other, lower-class actors, whose mobilization can be traced better at the local level.⁴²

In terms of the sources used, the scale of the subject of study has imposed a research strategy that is relatively eclectic, adapting heuristic criteria to the degree of development of each country’s archives. Generally speaking, the project was based primarily on written sources and to a lesser extent on oral sources. Three types of written sources were used for this study: (1) internal and public documentation of the organizations researched and news and cultural magazines close to the organizations; (2) state documents; and (3) written testimonial accounts from members of the organizations.⁴³ Each of these types of sources presents specific methodological problems that require a critical analysis of the conditions in which they were produced and the target audience of each source. Testimonial accounts have an added difficulty in that special attention must also be paid to the post-dictatorial context in which such accounts were given, as they generally tended to highlight aspects connected with political repression by the state and to minimize aspects related to the organization’s own violent and illegal practices.

Many of these are unpublished sources, not previously used, which constitute a significant contribution to the study of the emergence and development of left-wing political violence in the region. Adopting a transnational approach also offered the possibility of rereading several sources that have been used to study national cases, but which are interpreted differently when compared with similar sources from neighboring countries. Although initially the aim was to rely heavily on oral history, a number of factors connected with the situation of the potential interviewees and the scale of the project led to a minimization of the role of oral accounts in the research. This study also draws on previous interviews conducted by colleagues in the region.⁴⁴

Writing about the movements of militants across national borders is not a simple task. Recounting their history presents a number of difficulties that are both methodological and narrative. There is a real risk of producing a regional narrative that minimizes the importance of national scenarios. Also, the simultaneity of multiple meeting processes can result in a narrative that in its attempt to cover every process is rendered historically incomprehensible. For these reasons, the narrative will be delimitated by focusing on transnational meetings in certain national spaces at key moments of this regional history. Each of these transnational meetings will be studied to identify the ways in which emotions, ideas, and transnational loyalty ties contributed to create a transnational political culture. Each chapter deals with a different period, in which militants from various countries met in a particular city: Montevideo in the mid-1960s, Santiago from 1970 to 1973, and Buenos Aires from 1973 to 1976. Each experience furthered the expansion of a network of militants and the development of a common political culture.