CARTAGENA, Colombia -- The right may have won some of the wars in Latin America, but the left clearly has been better at winning the history. Until the history is more honest, however, the wars likely will continue to occur.

Single-minded narratives about rapacious imperialists and oligarchs helped create the destructive dictatorship in Cuba and the emerging one in Venezuela. It also helps explain the failure of many democratic leaders in Latin America to condemn the two.

Those are two obvious examples, but more subtle ones are under way in many of the more seemingly enlightened countries in the region -- and are more serious for their broadening influence.

In Argentina, the succeeding husband and wife governments of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, aided by the courts, have reopened investigations into the "dirty war" of disappearances and torture under right-wing military juntas of the 1970s and '80s. Having lived in the country then and been threatened and harassed many times by the military's insidious intelligence services, I can vouch that what transpired was awful.

A truth commission headed by the wise, liberal writer Ernesto Sabato detailed most of the abuses 26 years ago. What the Kirchners are doing is rewriting history by largely omitting the responsibility held by leftist terrorist groups and youth members of their own Peronist party. These groups bombed and killed, creating such fear that the Argentine public overwhelmingly called for the military to overthrow a weak government and crack down.

In those years, similar radical groups provoked the bloody coup in Uruguay, went far beyond the mandate of elected leftist President Salvador Allende in Chile, and launched indiscriminate wars in Central America. I worked as a reporter in all those places, too, and, to be sure, the origins of those conflicts lay in part in class injustices. But also true is that the poor often didn't share the aims of the revolutions, and violence by the left became an end in itself.

Preventing impunity is good, but that applies to left-wing terrorists as much as to right-wing "death squads."

A similar narrative bias surrounds efforts at peace agreements. In the current conflict in Colombia today against leftist guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, pressure is growing on the outgoing Colombian government of Alvaro Uribe and his American backers to seek a political solution.

The leftist intellectuals and human rights activists in Latin America, the U.S. and Europe who are applying the pressure -- and later will write the histories -- either implicitly or explicitly blame the government for the violence. And surely it has some blame. But what these critics either blindly or cynically refuse to address is the question of what to do when the guerrilla side prefers to fight.

The prototype of what the critics would like to see happened 20 years ago this week. Coincidentally, it was in Colombia with another insurgent faction, the M-19. This was the group that had seized the Colombian Supreme Court building in 1985, leading to the deaths of more than 100 people, including several judges, in a battle with the army. Five years later, the M-19 turned in its arms, and today a former guerrilla, Gustavo Petro, is running for president as head of the leftist Polo Democratico party. Another former M-19 guerrilla is a governor. Still more are in Congress, and rank-and-file members are integrated throughout society.

The lesson from the M-19 peace agreement, however, is that it was possible only after neither side could see victory and the guerrillas were worn down. The two did not negotiate as equals. The government demanded and got a cease-fire. Still, officials in Bogota lived up to a pledge to call a constitutional convention. An M-19 presidential candidate was assassinated, apparently by right-wing rogues, but the government's commitment to fairness was such that the M-19 stayed the peace course.

The M-19 peace agreement and a later one in El Salvador proved that political solutions are possible in Third World wars. But today in Colombia, the FARC has shown that it wants war. It has no reason not to. As Mauricio Cardenas of the Brookings Institution notes, "The FARC has drug money and the support of Hugo Chavez in neighboring Venezuela, who shares their same aims."

A historical narrative that doesn't include the left's responsibility for violence and other ills misleads new generations of youths tempted by new revolutions. That, in turn, forces the generals to return.