Specters of Revolution chronicles the subaltern political history of peasant guerrilla movements that emerged in the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero during the late 1960s. The National Revolutionary Civic Association (ACNR) and the Party of the Poor (PDLP), led by schoolteachers Genaro Vázquez and Lucio Cabañas, respectively, organized popularly-backed revolutionary armed struggles that sought the overthrow of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Both guerrilla organizations materialized from a decades-long history of massacres and everyday forms of terror committed by local-regional political bosses and the Mexican federal government against citizen social movements that demanded the redemption of constitutional rights. The book reveals that these revolutionary movements developed after years of exhausting legal, constitutional pathways of redress (focused on issues of economic justice and electoral rights) and surviving several state-directed massacres throughout the 1960s. As such, the peasant guerrillas represented only the final phase of a social process with roots in the unfulfilled promises of the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the dual capitalist modernization-political authoritarian program adopted by the PRI after 1940.

The history of the ACNR and PDLP guerrillas, and the brutal counterinsurgency waged against them by the PRI regime, challenges Mexico's place within the historiography of post-1945 Latin America. At the local and regional levels parts of Mexico like Guerrero experienced instances of authoritarian rule, popular political radicalization, and brutal counterinsurgency that fully inserts the nation into a Cold War Latin American history of state terror and "dirty wars." This study simultaneously exposes the violent underbelly that underscored the PRI's ruling tenure after 1940 and explodes the myth that Mexico constituted an island of relative peace and stability surrounded by a sea of military dictatorships during the Cold War.