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During the last two centuries, the military in Latin America has been involved in politics in a characteristic duality of professionalism and political ‘calling’, by political armies of the right and the left. In both cases, a kind of ‘military mystique’ prevails, but its content is different. In both cases, the military justifies its involvement as a consequence of its necessary correcting and transforming vanguard role in politics and society. The two characteristics of dual functions (internal and internal security) and dual pathways (professionalism and political missions) are a revolving theme in this article.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the period of the Cold War was characterized by coups d'état, revolts by competing military juntas, and anti-communist dictatorships. It was also a time of revolutionaries and insurgents, students taking up arms, churchgoers converted into radical rebels, Catholic priests and nuns transformed into guerrilleros, slum dwellers becoming members of underground leftist movements, and peasant associations joining insurrectional movements. Young people became radicalized, youth wings of political parties joined the underground resistance, and liberation movements appeared in nearly all of the countries in Latin American and in several Caribbean island states. Rather than provide any hypothesis about this insurgency and military counter-insurgency, this article draws attention to an additional layer of oral history by reviewing older, original documents and recording extensive interviews with key figures, giving voice to several operatives who hold direct insights into the workings of these movements over a long period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Che Guevara's life as a public figure (1959-1967) coincided with the golden years of the Cuban Revolution. Ernesto Guevara became Che Guevara, a glorified revolutionary guerrilla comandante and theoretician of guerrilla warfare in this short period. Especially during the sixties his texts on guerrilla strategy were studied and applied by many insurgents in Latin America and the Caribbean. Paradoxically, he supervised or was directly in charge of three ill-fated guerrilla campaigns in Bolivia/Argentina (1963/64), the Congo (1965), and again Bolivia (1966/67). The themes of this article are (1) a discussion about the use and evolution of the rural foco approach, for many followers the guiding doctrine of armed insurgency; (2) Che's three guerrilla campaigns and the reasons for failure; (3) the rural foco approach as implemented by other Latin American guerrilla leaders; and (4) some concluding remarks about post-foco guerrilla warfare in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]