Ideas do not reflect nations. They create them, subterraneously, or, as in the case of El Salvador, abruptly, propelled by a strong and impetuous political will. Using this principle, Yvon Grenier challenges the dominant explanation of the causes of revolt in El Salvador. He demonstrates that the ideas and ideologies of insurgents, not structural patterns, are the keys to understanding the roots of insurgency. Grenier's focus is the emergence of insurgency in El Salvador (roughly, the 1970s), a period too often confounded with subsequent periods of the revolutionary cycle.This new information, complex portraits of real people, reveals the inadequacies of simple socioeconomic structural explanations, such as poverty, and exploitation by a narrow elite, to explain the course of an entire movement.