We dedicate this book to the memory of several dear Latin American friends and compañeros who died in 1991 and 1992 -- Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Agustín Cueva, César Jerez, and Gregorio Selser -- and in tribute to 1992 Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchú, one of Latin America's outstanding women, also a dear friend and compañera. Since the written works of our late colleagues are, by and large, not available in English, it seems especially fitting to memorialize them in this book, one of whose main goals is to make available the best Latin American analyses to English-language readers. In any case, we wish our readers to know about these giants of Latin American intellectual and cultural life.

Luis Cardoza y Aragón was one of the leading Guatemalan and Latin American writers of the 20th century. He was a founding father of Guatemala's cultural life during that country's ten years of spring, the 1944-1954 democratic Revolution. He lived in exile in Mexico ever since the CIA's 1954 intervention ended that brief spring. The magic of indigenous Guatemala was revealed to the world through Luis' voluminous works of literature and analysis, among them, La revolución guatemalteca (1955), Guatemala: Las lineas de su mano (1965), El Río (1986), Miguel Angel Asturias, casi novela (1991), as well as innumerable essays. I met Luis almost the first time I went to Mexico, in 1967, and from then on, never made a trip to Mexico without passing at least one wonderful afternoon with Luis and (until her death in 1988) his wife Lya in their house in Coyoacán. Luis has accompanied me during these many years of writing about Guatemala, always a source of inspiration, and of challenge to my assumptions when they were too easy. I last saw Luis in August of 1992, a short week before his death; even on his sickbed at the age of 88, this Guatemalan brujo (or sorcerer) was lucid, precise, razor-sharp, and passionately caring as ever, as we ranged in one hour from Guatemala to the crisis in Cuba to the new world order to the health of mutual friends. As I left, his last words deflected attention from himself: "You're looking very well, I see." Mexico will never be the same for me without those afternoons with Luis.

Agustín Cueva, Ecuadorian by birth, also lived most of his adult life in Mexico. He was central to the intellectual community that has made Mexico our hemisphere's Paris, and to the uniquely Latin American analysis of Latin America and the world. Continentwide, Agustín's work has been regarded as a point of reference; he has taught and inspired an entire generation of Latin American sociologists to think critically, through his many books and critical essays -- El desarrollo del capitalismo en América Latina (1977), Las democracias restringidas de América Latina(1988), and América Latina en la frontera de los años 90 (1989) to mention only a few. He was also a great teacher. I remember a 1988 Congress of Central American Sociologists in Guatemala, where hundreds of university students were awakened from decades of military dictatorship and intellectual self-censorship by Agustín's electrifying critique of the rightward trend sweeping Latin American sociology. Even in his last year, he remained ever the critic, ever the defender and teacher of a Latin American viewpoint, a central figure at several international conferences. For me, Agustín was also a close friend since the late 1970s. However firm in his beliefs, he was always gracious, warm, respectful, and modest. Just before he moved back to his native Ecuador, where he died a few months later in May 1992, I went to see him in Mexico, knowing it would be for the last time. I had asked him for an article for this book, which he promised to try to send; but mainly, I wanted to thank him for all he had given over the years to me and to so many others of my generation.

Father César Jerez, like Luis Cardoza y Aragón, was a Guatemalan who spent much of his productive life outside his native country. I first knew him as head of the community of Jesuits working among the popular classes in Guatemala City's impoverished Zone 5 in the early 1970s. As Guatemala moved toward its second wave of civil war in the mid-1970s, César worked among the poor in his native village, quickly coming to be feared by the army and the rich. He was falsely accused of using grass-roots organizing after the 1976 earthquake to bring arms into the community; in reality, he was accused of fulfilling a Christian option to serve the poor. He spent the rest of his life in other Central American countries -- from 1976 to 1982, as head of the Jesuit regional organization, in El Salvador, during the early years of that country's civil war; and the rest of the 1980s in Nicaragua, where he served as Rector of the Universidad Centroamericana, bringing to bear all of his own academic training and practical experience. Two years after the November 1989 assassination of Ignacio Ellacuría in El Salvador, César was to have taken Ellacuría's place as Rector of El Salvador's Universidad Centroamericana, when he suddenly died during a visit to Colombia. Internationally, César is known largely for his work in Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution, which he carried out with unequaled skill, distinction, and passion. Yet I also knew him, and history will also know him, as a Guatemalan. Ever patient, ever hopeful as we talked yearly in his office at UCA (generally between seven and nine a.m.), he unraveled for me many great secrets of Guatemala's social upheaval. Even from abroad, he was instrumental in moving the Guatemalan Church toward breaking through the wall of silence, in articulating what he called the grito desde adentro, the cry of the people.

Gregorio Selser, the incomparable Argentine writer and journalist, fled the Argentine military dictatorship for Mexico in 1976; during the next 15 years, he filled the pages of Mexico's leading newspapers with his piercing analyses and critiques of U.S. intervention in Latin America. He wrote over 40 books, including an early biography of Nicaragua's Sandino, critical studies of U.S. dollar diplomacy and the Alliance for Progress, and specific studies of U.S. interventions in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Chile, Nicaragua, and Panama. Generous, direct, and impassioned, Gregorio befriended me when I had begun to write about Central America in the 1970s, and after that we exchanged anecdotes, information, and interpretations every year or two in Mexico or at conferences. When I visited him and his wife Marta in the summer of 1990 in their apartment that doubled as an archive, he was already ill; even as he continued with a massive new project documenting two centuries of foreign intervention in Latin America, he asked for ideas about places (perhaps even in the U.S.) to donate his voluminous personal library. An Argentine/Mexican who gave his heart to Central America, Gregorio is remembered with special affection in Nicaragua -- to borrow Claribel Alegría's wonderful image, as Don Quixote, an errant knight of the pen, a champion ready to defend any of the Latin American damsel republics.

We also dedicate this issue as a very special tribute to Rigoberta Menchú, Nobel Peace Laureate of 1992. Rigoberta is a Guatemalan indigenous woman of humble origin, treated as subversive by her government and forced to live in exile because of her tireless struggles for human rights, indigenous rights, and social justice. Her courage was forged by seeing her own mother, father, and one brother assassinated in the early 1980s. Like Rosa Parks in 1950s Alabama, Rigoberta is the conscience of her nation -- but beyond that, a prophet in her time. For me during recent years, she has been not only a symbol of hope but also a source of endless wisdom and incisive analysis. There is something wonderfully collective about Rigoberta. Indigenous people throughout the hemisphere have felt empowered by her Nobel award. Guatemalan citizens, emerging from decades of military-imposed silence, poured into the streets in the tens of thousands to celebrate the prize, experiencing it as an award to each one of them. In the U.S. as well, upon hearing of the prize, many of us called to congratulate each other, as if each of us had received the award.

In bidding farewell to Guatemalans Luis and César, to Agustín, who wrote about indigenous America, and to Gregorio, the universal Latin American, I try to imagine the words with which they would have greeted Rigoberta's Nobel Prize. A vivid symbol of César's cry of the people, Rigoberta has picked up the banner they valiantly held high for so many decades, and is carrying it forward into the 21st century.