At least since December 1956, when Fidel and Raúl Castro, together with a young Argentine doctor, later known as Che Guevara, sailed from Mexico’s port of Tuxpan to Cuba and into history, the region has seen innumerable attempts by small left-wing revolutionary groups to take power through armed uprisings. They have all invoked heroic precedents from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the impossibility of proceeding otherwise under brutal right-wing dictatorships, such as Batista’s in Cuba, Somoza’s in Nicaragua, and military-oligarchic complexes in Guatemala, El Salvador, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, and elsewhere – including Colombia.