Stephen Ferry was teaching a documentary photography workshop in Cartagena when he saw an image that revealed how very little he knew about violence in Colombia. The photograph depicted a town reduced to ashes after members of the National Liberation Army (ELN), a guerrilla group founded in 1964, blew up an oil pipeline. The experience was a negative epiphany that made him grasp the destructive impact …
Read MoreThe collection entitled Guatemala, la infinita historia de las resistencias, represents a turning point in our understanding of that country’s turbulent and ultimately tragic late 20th century. Its eleven chapters—with the exception of two on the city—are dedicated to the core of the conflict: the indigenous countryside. Compiled by Guatemalan sociologist Manolo E. Vela Castañeda, the book definitively shifts the spotlight …
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“There are no just wars. There are only just causes.” I was sitting in the modest home of a former FMLN guerrilla woman in a rural village in the northeastern corner of El Salvador. It was 2001, and I was nearing the end of my second year-long stint in this small Central American nation, interviewing more than 200 Salvadorans, mostly from rural areas, about their experiences during the civil conflict of the 1980s. …
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As graduate students in Harvard’s Department of Government, Shannon O’Neil and I read from the same interminable Mexico reading list handed to us by our mentor, Professor Jorge Domínguez. A few years later, in 2002, we became good friends in Mexico City. Alejandro Poiré, a fellow Domínguez student, was then Chair of the Political Science Department at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM), where I was a faculty member. He provided Shannon with an office during her Fulbright stint, and so ITAM fast became an ongoing seminar for a gringa and this Mexican-American pocho to learn about …
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Another book about violence in Colombia? At first glance, it would seem superfluous to add one more title to the already extensive bibliography that…
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