Description
Political murder has served the powers of domination in Latin America rather well, and its use shows no sign of abating in the early twenty-first century. Such murder generally seeks to eliminate the bearers of ill tidings for hegemonic relationships, to kill the messengers of change. There are other traditions of political violence in Latin America, but the most widely exercised form of political murder has been carried out by states, elites, or their proxies. These groups killed the leaders of popular movements, revolutionaries, intellectuals, activists and labor organizers, crusading priests, anyone they considered the cause of social or political unrest. What is more, the practice has broadened through "dirty wars," assasination writ large, into the wholesale slaughter of so-called "subversives." It has mutated into the attempt to kill the rank and file as well, to move beyond killing the messenger to exterminating anyone who might heed the message. This could easily be (as Dr. Green's first book) a study of Colombia alone, infamous as a dangerous place where forces of the status quo have employed political murder on a vast scale for decades. Rather, this study offers a comparative overview that examines the parallel experiences of many Latin American countries.
