The introduction begins with the story of Domitila, a young campesina who escaped to the mountains at night to train for the coming insurrection. Guarding her secret, she endured beatings from her father, who accused her of promiscuity. After her father discovered the revolver hidden underneath her pillow, he affords her a form of respect that he had previously reserved for men. Through Domitila’s personal story, I explain the conditions that drove rural workers to organize, the dramatic rise of state repression against unarmed movements, the left’s radicalization, the subsequent formation of the insurgency, the outbreak of the civil war (1980–1992), women’s organizing in the guerrilla territories and in multiple countries abroad, and the postwar battles to remember an insurgent past. I also contextualize El Salvador within a regional and global Cold War history. After the major actors and temporal scope are identified, I explain how dominant narratives, many rooted in Cold War paradigms, have contributed to the erasure of revolutionary women within feminist histories. I offer an alternative framework and methodology – rooted in dialectical approaches, oral history, and movement archives – that takes seriously the political contributions of revolutionary women.

The chapter examines how diverse forms of rural insurgency (i.e. banditry, caudillismo, millenarianism, revolutionary uprisings) were depicted in literature from the tapering off of the civil wars to the Mexican Revolution. Rural insurgency was a paramount preoccupation for letrados of the period, not only because of the material challenges that it posed to the imposition of agrarian capitalism and the sovereignty of the nation-state, but also because rural insurgency tapped into the cultural capital of rural societies (e.g. kinship, networks of patronage), forms of leadership (e.g. caudillismo), heterodox versions of Catholicism to articulate dreams of social justice (e.g. millenarianism). Hence, rural insurgency was considered, by its mere existence, an existential challenge to the very notion of a modern capitalist nation-state. However, the chapter examines how, at the same time that literature served as a sort of “prose of counterinsurgency” (Ranajit Guha), it was also a site of reflection on the dilemmas attending the constitution of a modern polity and culture.

The chapter addresses the launch of the PKK’s rural insurgency in 1984; although the circumstances did not favour armed rebellion, the PKK still managed to launch an armed uprising in rural Kurdistan and survive the challenging initial years to become deeply entrenched across the region by the end of the 1980s. On the ground, the PKK exhibited much ideological flexibility when framing its political project to potential supporters. The chapter also addresses some of the strategic errors the PKK made in this period, such as failed efforts to impose conscription on Kurdish youths and the massacres of civilians associated with the state-backed paramilitary forces, the Village Guards, outlining some the heterogenous motivations for participation in the VG and some of its unanticipated consequences. It also explains how Öcalan came to dominate the movement, through the party education system and the killing of potential rivals within the PKK. It also empirically examines how the PKK obtained local support, through forms of insurgent service provision and intertwining itself into the community by building familial ties and developing a consistent local presence.