Historical Look at Terrorism in Latin America

Warontherocks.com reported…
Terrorist violence in Latin America during this period was driven by the campaigns of a number of secular Marxist/Maoist organizations, most notably the Shining Path in Peru, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Violence dramatically subsided in the mid-1990s, after a number of governments waged successful—and often quite violent—counter-terrorism campaigns. (On a side note, the graphic also shows the tendency of global terrorism to migrate over time. As we see in the chart, global terrorism has migrated from Western Europe in the 1970s, to Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, and to the Middle East and South Asia where it currently resides.)

The second graphic is a snapshot of terrorism in Latin America in 2013. Currently, terrorist violence is largely confined to Colombia, where both the FARC and the National Liberation Army of Colombia (ELN) are still quite active. However, while levels of violence in other countries are small in comparison to Colombia, some still face challenges from armed organizations, namely Peru (remnants of the Shining Path) and Paraguay (Paraguayan People’s Army, or EPP).
The first graphic shows the most active regions in terms of total number of terrorist attacks since 1970. In the 1980s and 1990s, Latin America was the epicenter of global terrorism. In the first of those two decades, the region experienced more terrorist attacks (17,293) than all other regions combined (13,643), and nearly four times as many as the next most active region—Western Europe (4,729). Read Article – see graphics