Maria Eugenia Vásquez Perdomo’s ethnographic exorcism of the ghosts from her clandestine past, and her struggle to uncover the early experiences that shaped her decision to take up arms, are riveting. Although relatively few others of her generation took the radical step of becoming revolutionaries, Vásquez Perdomo’s life is nonetheless broadly representative of the experiences, desires, and frustrations of a generation of Colombians (and Latin Americans more generally) who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. I tested this assumption at a recent dinner with two Colombian friends, reading to them the author’s assertion that “In the 1970s, Marxism as a tool for analysis and research was the order of the day . . . we began in the first semester with Professor Vasco’s course on historical materialism, in which we read Lenin’s . . . ,” and before I could finish, my friends in unison supplied not only...
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