“The way to make a revolution will not be taught by Cuba”: The Making of a Poor Peoples' Revolution in Guerrero, Mexico, 1967–74

After decades of relative political stability and exponential economic growth, Mexico's one-party state began to face serious challenges to its institutionalized revolution. By 1960, the nation had witnessed a national railroad workers strike and regional instances of peasant unrest. In the state of Guerrero, civic attempts to break the one-party domination of the Mexican government at the regional level faced the first of a series of citizen massacres. Believing that nonviolent, electoral tactics proved futile, former rural schoolteachers Genaro Vázquez, Lucio Cabañas and a number of campesino (peasant) supporters took to the hills by the mid-1960s intent on launching a protracted guerrilla struggle in order to obtain political and socioeconomic change in Guerrero and throughout Mexico. Focusing on Cabañas and his peasant guerrilla Party of the Poor (PDLP), this paper will analyze the various revolutionary traditions and influences that constituted the guerrilla's multi-faceted “revolutionary imaginary”—an imaginary that bridged Cuban Revolution-inspired New Left guerrilla tactics, guerrerense subaltern political cultures, and the unfulfilled promises of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Writing against scholars who collectively portray such guerrillas as militarist, utopian (and petit-bourgeois) zealots responsible for corrupting short-lived post-WWII Latin American social democracies, my essay will highlight the need to acknowledge the hidden transcripts and political cultures that nurtured movements like the PDLP in order to demonstrate that guerrilla warfare emerged as a viable political option only after authoritarian nation-states shut down “legal” channels.