Palmer in Miami Herald on Colombian Peace Agreement
David Scott Palmer, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed on the significance of a treaty between the Colombian government and the biggest guerrilla group in the country.
Palmer was quoted in a July 20, 2016 story in the Miami Herald entitled “As Long, Bloody Chapter Ends In Latin America, Was It Worth It?”
From the text of the article:
“Most of the folks who founded these guerrilla movements were inspired by Cuba, and a lot of them trained there,” said David Scott Palmer, a Boston University political scientist and the author of half a dozen books on Latin America. “Castro’s call to make the Andes the Sierra Maestra of South America was certainly not an idle threat.”
And the timing of would-be revolutionaries could be confusing and seemingly contradictory. “Shining Path, the radical Maoist organization that was one of the most brutal in Latin America, started its ‘people’s war’ in 1980 at the very moment Peru was going through its first-ever democratic election with universal suffrage,” noted Palmer, of Boston University.
“By 1976, 16 of the 20 countries in South America were under military or authoritarian governments,” said Boston University’s Palmer. “Was that progress? I think it’s very hard to put a label on the time of the guerrilla movements and say it was good or bad.”
Palmer is the author of more than 40 articles and book chapters on such topics as the Latin American military, democracy and its challenges, “informal politics” in highland Peru, guerrilla movements in Latin America and Nepal, the Peru-Ecuador border dispute and its resolution, and the consequences of asymmetry in U.S. relations with Peru. He has published several recent articles on Shining Path and the 2011 Peruvian elections in readers and online publications. You can read more about him here.