Popular Revolutionary Army

The Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) is a left-wing insurgent group whose emergence and attacks sharpen the novel’s portrayal of Mexico as a theater where domestic conflict, Cold War fears, and the War on Drugs converge. The evidence gives only a brief account of the group itself; its significance lies chiefly in how officials interpret its growth and use that interpretation to justify security policy.

Emergence and Early Attacks

The EPR emerged in June at a memorial service in Guerrero for peasants killed by right-wing militias. Weeks later, it launched simultaneous attacks on police posts in Guerrero, Tabasco, Puebla, and Mexico itself. The attacks killed sixteen police officers and wounded another twenty-three, marking a rapid escalation from its recent emergence.

Hobbs’s Assessment

John Hobbs treats the EPR’s attacks as evidence of a potentially expanding communist insurgency. He thinks the Vietcong began on a smaller scale, and argues that the rebellion is spreading north from Chiapas, with the economic devastation of the Mexican Peso Crisis and the dislocations associated with the North American Free Trade Agreement contributing to the conditions behind that spread. These are Hobbs’s assessments, not an independent account of the EPR’s membership, program, or internal organization.

Hobbs offers Mexican intelligence counterparts assistance against the EPR, but they decline, wary of perceived U.S. interference. He interprets that refusal as shortsighted. His concern belongs to a broader security argument in which communist movements across Central America and Mexico are framed as a threat requiring urgent action.

The War on Drugs as a Channel for Aid

The novel connects the insurgency to a policy workaround: military assistance that Congress would not authorize openly to fight the Zapatistas and the EPR is funded as support for Mexico’s campaign against drug traffickers. The package includes seventy-five Huey helicopters and twelve C-26 airplanes, which are to be quietly transferred to the Mexican army for use in Chiapas and Guerrero. The passage presents this transfer as a way to pursue counterinsurgency under the publicly acceptable cover of the War on Drugs, rather than as direct aid against left-wing insurgents.

Narrative Significance

The EPR’s limited but consequential appearance shows how the language of national security can turn a new insurgent threat into a justification for policies pursued through another stated purpose. Hobbs’s account emphasizes the group’s attacks and the possibility of regional spread; the resulting policy response makes the drug war a conduit for military action against political insurgencies. The distinction between the declared mission and the intended use of the aid is central to the episode’s portrayal of covert power.