While non-state terrorism has grown substantially in many parts of the world since the mid 1990s in Latin America, the insurgent continent par excellence, where radical non-state actors at both end~ of the political spectrum have historically resorted to terror to attain political goals, this scourge has dwindled.
Drawing _on the seminal work of Timothy Wickham-Crowley, this article posits that this baffling trend can be expla1ned as a result of a shift in the cultural repertoires of Latín American revolutionary and other antisystemic groups in the 1990s. The traumatic experiences associated with authoritarian backlash and
repression; a more pragmatic attitude that values democracy, accommodation, and dialogue as political strateg1es; and the rejection by vast sectors of the population of wanton violence as a tool to attain political objectives have subtracted terror from the range of activities (stock) of collective action of former
and_ new radical groups. Groups fighting for change have thus internalized that terror ultimately constitutes an 1neffectual and de-legitimized strategy. Colombia constitutes the exception to this regional trend. There, 1t 1s argued_, terror is widely used as and informed by the perverse logic of armed conflict, whereby armed part1es dehberately target civilians to advance military and political objectives.