Contemporary Perspectives on Latin American Terrorism

With its long history of political violence, Latin America would seem a likely region for acts of terrorism. Terrorism is certainly a type of political violence and is defined here as the acts of "identifiable groups that attack governmental or other targets for some various short-range purpose and with the longer range goal in mind of sparking the larger society to oppose (usually violently) the existing government and its poli- cies." The purpose of this paper is to examine the occurrence of such terrorism in present day Latin America.