CIAO DATE: 09/02

Nongovernmental Terrorism in Latin America: Re-examining Old Assumptions

Abstract

For years nongovernmental terrorism in Latin America was considered to be an epiphenomenon of the Cold War, and consequently explained in terms of that war. The persistence of terrorism throughout the region in the 1990s not only has indicated that many of our assumptions concerning the causes of terrorism were misleading, but also has lead scholars to reexamine the phenomenon of nongovernmental political violence. This paper investigates the validity of a number of hypotheses recently explored in the literature by applying a pooled time series cross-section regression analysis to data from seventeen Latin American countries between 1980 and 1995. Findings indicate that nongovernmental terrorist acts in Latin America are more likely to occur in countries characterized by widespread state human rights violations. Likewise, evidence is found that nongovernmental terrorism in the region tends to be more prevalent in countries characterized by electoral and associational liberties than by restrictive dictatorships. Association between economic performance or structural economic conditions and the incidence of terrorism is not substantiated by the findings.

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