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From International Socialism, No.43, April/May 1970, pp.7-9.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Rural guerilla activities – like those of their closest precursor, rural bandits – inevitably seem unrelated to broad political or social changes in society as a whole. The tradition of guerilla warfare and social banditry is much older than the particular motives of those currently fighting. And the fight seems to have little effect at all on the society in which it takes place except on very rare occasions. Thus rural guerillas seem to lead a subterranean existence, without great gains and yet, without being completely wiped out; in a sense, they are independent of the society within which they operate.
Urban terrorists, on the other hand, are intimately related to broad movements in mass consciousness; they are produced by such changes, and they cannot survive without the willing collaboration of many urban dwellers. Thus urban terrorism is directly linked to changes in political and social events. The terrorists are the revolutionary anarchist edge of popular discontent and radicalism, forerunners or substitutes for mass political movements.
The shift from a rural to an urban location by important guerilla groups in Latin America is thus of some importance. Necessarily change in recruitment and, above all, in politics, has been involved. The political ideas of the group concerned become much more important than its military ingenuity, and ‘guerilla action’ (if action in an urban area can any longer be called that) becomes only one small part in a political campaign.
The aim of rural guerilla warfare – associated with the names of Che Guevara and Regis Debray – was, as a first priority, to create a rural base, independent of the national or urban political scene and, indeed, independent of the population of the rural areas as well. The establishment of a rural military base would itself begin to transform the political balance, but essentially, politics was subordinate to military tactics. The aim was to build a guerilla army and secure popular approval or acquiescence by showing the vulnerability of the armed forces of the ruling class, not to build a revolutionary party among the population. The guerilla army, it seemed, made a popular revolutionary force redundant. In any case, the revolutionary party could not be built, it was argued, as the history of the Communist parties showed. The city was a corrupting influence; the cadres had to be quarantined against the urban virus. Tough material conditions and military discipline in the most remote rural areas would prevent corruption among the guerillas; isolation and insulation would keep at bay ‘bourgeois society’ until the moment came to destroy it.
But to be properly effective, the guerillas had to be serviced from somewhere. Until they had secured a base capable of meeting their own needs, and were able to capture arms and ammunition in adequate supply from the police or militia, someone had to assist them from outside. In the event, Havana was cast in the role of outside’ sponsor; it filled the vacancy left by the guerillas’ rejection of their own local cities.
Three things have happened to make this strategy doubtful. First, in the classic test case for the strategy in Bolivia, Guevara and his comrades were wiped out, and the Bolivian army was thereby able to secure 18 months’ relative domestic peace. Second, rural guerilla activities elsewhere – in Peru, Argentina, Brazil and Guatemala – have also consistently failed to achieve any major results. And the failure can be traced to the strategy itself. The guerillas were isolated from the rural inhabitants, often by language, colour and culture. The traditional Communist Parties in the cities did not support the movements. So the armies of the Establishment, well armed and financed, proved fully capable, if not of wiping out the guerillas, certainly of rendering them harmless. Finally, Cuba proved unable to give adequate material support to the guerillas. More recently, Cuban policy has shifted away from trying to foster revolution in Latin America and towards concentrating on domestic economic development. The veteran Venezuelan guerilla leader, Douglas Bravo, has accused Havana of ‘working solely to strengthen its economy, and having suspended all help to Latin American revolutionary movements’.
It has been clear for the past two years that Castro has been gradually withdrawing material support from the guerillas. Cuban policy has been returning to the position originally outlined by Guevara before the United Nations Assembly in 1964, when he stressed that
‘We have argued, over and over again, that revolutions are not exportable, that revolutions are created in the hearts of the people.’
Castro himself repeated the same point last July, when he said that the Cuban leadership was not impatient, but would wait almost indefinitely for revolutions to develop independently in other Latin American countries. By inference, it can be guessed that the Cuban attempt to offset Soviet tutelage by expanding the Cuban revolution in Latin America has now been given up in favour of what Moscow wants, ‘peaceful co-existence’. Not that this is the end of the road, for Cuba will no doubt be tempted to go further than ‘peaceful co-existence’ and offset its dependence upon the Soviet Union by reopening friendly relations with other Latin American countries, and perhaps even trying to secure re-entry to the Organisation of American States. The Cuban revolution is being nudged into the same historical niche as the Mexican revolution – events of purely domestic significance.
An element in this change of emphasis by Havana is likely to be a reappraisal of other regimes in Latin America. Of particular importance here are the actions of the new military regimes in Peru and Bolivia, both of which have nationalised major us interests in their respective countries. Since the Bolivian generals, however radical they might be, are implicated in the slaughter of Guevara, reconciliation with Bolivia will take time. But on Peru, Castro made a particular point of recognising that
‘The most notable feature of the case is that in the bosom of a traditional army, of an army that was the bulwark of reaction and of repression in Peru ... there has developed a military movement of quite distinct significance ... that has nationalised a us company, proclaimed an agrarian reform, and expressed clearly the proposal to develop at any cost the Peruvian economy.’
The Soviet Union has sent trade missions to try and recoup some of what the us has lost, so that there may be Soviet pressure added to Havana’s wish to find some way back into Latin America by orthodox means.
This, then, is the background to the movement of guerillas back to the city. For former Guevarists, this means a new stress on the importance of political work, of work among the urban masses, and of depending on local material assistance, all of which supports a turn to nationalism. But urban guerillas – or terrorists – are not at all a new phenomenon in some Latin American countries. Even revolutionaries strongly influenced by Cuba have in some cases felt the need for an urban base. Carlos Marighela persuaded his comrades in the Brazilian Revolutionary Communist Party in 1967 that a campaign in the cities of Brazil was vital, and – until he was murdered – worked mainly in the cities. Better known and of earlier origin are the Tupamaros of Uruguay (named after an 18th century Indian rebel, Tupac Amaru). Created in 1962 among northern rural sugar workers, the Tupamaros quickly saw that in a country like Uruguay, all the parts of which are easily accessible to military forces, they must move for survival to the ‘300 square kilometres of buildings’ in the capital, Montevideo. In July of the following year they began their preparatory work by seizing arms from the Swiss colony’s Club de Tiro. Preparation lasted until August 1968, when they began more directly political actions. They kidnapped the president of the State Factories and Telephones Agency, Ulises Pereira Reverbal (a landowner, friend of, and economic influence on, the Uruguayan President, Pacheco Areco). In June of last year, they destroyed the General Motors administrative building as part of the continent-wide welcome accorded to President Nixon’s emissary to Latin America, Governor Nelson Rockefeller. In September they kidnapped the director of a major bank, Gaetano Pellegrini Giampietro, during a long strike by his employees, as a deliberate attempt to secure support among trade unionists. And last October, in a spectacular coup, 150 guerillas seized the city of Pando (20 miles from Montevideo), attacked its four largest banks, and held the place for 24 hours. The seizure of Pando, however, evoked a massive reaction from the Government, and for the first time police arrests managed to break a major part of the secret cell organisation of the Tupamaros.
The Tupamaros aim was explicitly to change the political consciousness of the urban masses, and to do so by directly influencing strikes and the trade unions. Elsewhere, this aim is less clearly spelt out, and many urban guerillas are only contingently operating in the concrete jungle. In Brazil, the kidnapping of US ambassador, C. Burke Elbrick – in exchange for 15 political prisoners – is only the most spectacular of the coups, but the long-term strategy of such actions is unclear. In 11 Latin American countries (including Bolivia) last year there were urban terrorist actions – bank robberies, bombings, sabotage, kidnapping. Even in Guatemala where what is left of the guerilla base seems to be still rural, after the 1967 wild slaughter of Left-wingers by army units and Right-wing vigilante groups under this year’s winner in the Presidential elections, Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio, the guerillas have increasingly sought to intervene in the urban areas. Two us military attaches and the us ambassador (on August 28, 1968) have been assassinated. Most recently, during the elections, the Foreign Minister and the us Labour attache were kidnapped to secure the release of guerillas held by the Government.
In Chile, the sudden appearance of the Movement of the Left (MIR) startled the Government’s composure. The police claim, from captured documents, that the MIR are following the same phases of development as the Tupamaros – that is, first a phase of preparation by raiding banks and seizing arms; then political kidnapping, assassination and sabotage; finally, the creation of a National Liberation Army and a clandestine government in the mountains. Thus, for the MIR – unlike the Tupamaros – the urban activity is only a prelude to the creation of a rural base, a sort of geographical ‘dual power’. This is called a Vietnamese strategy, as opposed to a Guevarist. But even here the social basis has changed. It is no longer aimed to unite a student leadership with the most backward rural elements, so much as – as Luciano Cruz of MIR puts it: ‘to initiate a major and prolonged war which would permit it (the MIR) to mobilise around itself the most combative sections of the workers, peasants and students’. In addition to these elements, some urban guerillas aim to recruit important sympathisers in the ruling class, in the police, civil service and business. As with the Russian Narodniks, securing such support is vital for the survival of the guerillas, for the tip-off which prevents capture.
Thus, the change from rural to urban needs to be heavily qualified. The change is not one which leads inevitably to proclaiming the necessity for the proletarian dictatorship. But at least, some of the socialists have abandoned the cul-de-sac of rural self-destruction. Their urban activity could elicit a proletarian response of greater significance, or at least, provide the occasion for workers to begin to consider political alternatives. It is most unlikely that the doctrines of urban guerilla warfare can ‘evolve’ into Marxism – after all, it needed the destruction of the Russian Narodniks to produce the Marxists – but some of the guerillas may begin to see the limitations of minority heroism as the Narodnik Plekhanov did. The possibility of this turns very much on the behaviour of Latin American workers, and thus on the overall perspective for Latin America, as well as the behaviour of workers elsewhere.
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