Adela Cedillo – författare

The Cold War in Latin America spawned numerous authoritarian and military regimes in response to the ostensible threat of communism in the Western Hemisphere, and with that, a rigid national security doctrine was exported to Latin America by the United States. Between 1964 and 1985, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uraguay experienced a period of state-sponsored terrorism commonly referred to as the "dirty wars." Thousands of leftists, students, intellectuals, workers, peasants, labor leaders, and innocent civilians were harassed, arrested, tortured, raped, murdered, or 'disappeared.'Many studies have been done about this phenomenon in the other areas of Latin America, but strangely, Mexico's dirty war has been excluded from this particular scholarship. Here for the first time is a sustained look at this period and consideration of the many facets that make up the nearly two decades of the Mexican dirty war. Offering the reader a broad perspective of the period, the case studies in the book present narratives of particular armed revolutionary movements as well as thematic essays on gender, human rights, culture, student radicalism, the Cold War, and the international impact of this state-sponsored terrorism.

The Cold War in Latin America spawned numerous authoritarian and military regimes in response to the ostensible threat of communism in the Western Hemisphere, and with that, a rigid national security doctrine was exported to Latin America by the United States. Between 1964 and 1985, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uraguay experienced a period of state-sponsored terrorism commonly referred to as the "dirty wars." Thousands of leftists, students, intellectuals, workers, peasants, labor leaders, and innocent civilians were harassed, arrested, tortured, raped, murdered, or 'disappeared.'Many studies have been done about this phenomenon in the other areas of Latin America, but strangely, Mexico's dirty war has been excluded from this particular scholarship. Here for the first time is a sustained look at this period and consideration of the many facets that make up the nearly two decades of the Mexican dirty war. Offering the reader a broad perspective of the period, the case studies in the book present narratives of particular armed revolutionary movements as well as thematic essays on gender, human rights, culture, student radicalism, the Cold War, and the international impact of this state-sponsored terrorism.

Crossroads of Violence is a history of the intertwined development of the drug trade and socialist guerrilla movements in northwestern Mexico during the 1960s and 1970s. The Golden Quadrilateral, an area encompassing the states of Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and Durango, never fully reaped the benefits of the Mexican Revolution. Both the socialist armed struggle and the drug trade offered hopeful possibilities for the region’s underprivileged classes. Drawing on oral histories and declassified documents, Adela Cedillo traces the rise and fall of these guerrilla movements and criminal organizations, along with the brutal setbacks they faced as the federal government implemented a de facto state of siege. The convergence of the war against guerrilla groups—known as the Dirty War—and the War on Drugs led to the consolidation of a “parallel state”: an informal partnership between elements of the national security apparatus and criminal organizations, whose shared goals were to profit from the drug trade and preserve the ruling party’s hegemony. The legacy of that alliance has shaped Mexico’s political life and the endless War on Drugs well into the twenty-first century.