The General and the Priest — Forbidden love in the fire of revolution. A novel by Fred Blitstein.

As an idealistic young American in the 1960s, Blitstein arrived in Colombia to study the movement of Latin America's rural Indigenous poor from their mountain villages into desperate urban slums. Instead he was engulfed by the rebellion, corruption and political violence sweeping the region — and by a friendship with a priest who refused to stand aside.

He returned to the United States, earned a Masters and a PhD in Government and Urban Studies from Claremont Graduate University. He then built a consulting practice that took him back across Latin America for decades — the Amazon, the high Andes, the ruins of lost civilizations, the teeming cities of Colombia and Peru. Somewhere in those years, this story was born.