Guerrilla Warfare

by Walter Laqueur

  Mention has been made of the support, both propagandists and financial, given to the insurgents by Axis powers; some leaders of the rebellion, including the Mufti of Jerusalem himself, settled in Germany during the war. But the same was true of nationalist rebels from other parts of the globe, such as, for instance, Subhas Chandra Bose. It would be mistaken to exaggerate the significance of such collaboration with the Axis countries. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were the natural allies for these rebels because they were "anti-imperialist," meaning anti-British, and because it was widely believed that the days of the Western democracies were numbered. Hitler and Mussolini were popular figures among nationalist rebels not alone in Palestine, just as, after the defeat of the Axis, Stalin and Mao were to have so much appeal. Nationalist movements were primarily concerned with their own cause; whether they turned "right" or "left" depended on the general political constellation. Authoritarian regimes had of course greater attraction as models than the democracies because, their "anti imperialism" quite apart, they seemed far more dynamic and purposeful.

  Latin America

  The most colorful incidents of guerrilla warfare at a time when small wars seemed to have gone out of fashion took place in Latin America. Among them were Pancho Villa's and Emiliano Zapata's operations in Mexico, Luis Carlos Prestes's "long march" in Brazil, and the Sandino rebellion in Nicaragua. Of these movements, only the last was guerrilla in the strict sense of the word, although it bears repeating that to apply purist standards with regard to guerrilla warfare is as misleading as the indiscriminate use of the term in general.

  Porfirio Diaz, who had started his career as a partisan leader in the struggle against Emperor Maximilian and who had subsequently ruled Mexico for thirty-five years, was overthrown in 1911. A decade of civil war and anarchy ensued and it took another decade until central state power reasserted itself. In 1911, too, the Manchu dynasty was overthrown in China with similar results. But whereas China for the next twenty years was ruled by warlords, the Mexican situation was different inasmuch as there were more horse thieves in Mexico at the time than soldiers, which made for a warlordism of another sort. (The effective strength of the Mexican army in 1911 was eighteen thousand troops, quite insufficient to keep order in Mexico's many provinces.) Most of the Mexican caudillos to emerge in the interregnum were not military men by training but local chiefs who imposed their leadership by force of personality.

  To review the main developments of these years, the ever-changing alliances and frequent betrayals, the campaigns and the intrigues, or even simply to list the names of the main protagonists, would be to write the history of that chaotic decade. Zapata and Pancho Villa, the two most important guerrilla leaders, had their bases in the south and north respectively; Zapata's "Liberation Army of the South" in his native Morelos, Puebla and Guerrero, Villa's "Division of the North" in Chihuahua and Durango. Villa had been a popular bandit, his politics, in as far as they went, vaguely populist. He was a local hero, a crude and frequently cruel man, brave, a patriot, and in his way a radical. Zapata, a peasant leader, thirty years old at the time of the revolution, made his name in the struggle against the hacendados who had illegally acquired land belonging to small farmers. "The land free for all, land without overseers and masters, this is the war cry of the revolution." He sponsored an agrarian reform program (the "Plan of Ayala") that was subsequently adopted in its essentials by his rivals, and he was also the author of several memorable phrases such as "Men of the South, it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees," and "Seek justice from tyrannical governments not with your hat in your hands but with a rifle in your fist."80 However, the struggle in Mexico was complex, it was not a clear-cut confrontation between the forces of reaction and the party of the revolution. Once the Diaz regime had been overthrown and Victoriano Huerta had been exiled, all the chief protagonists in the conflict were men of the left, or in any case left of center. A good many vested interests were involved in the struggle for power and it was not always readily obvious who were the most consistent and radical revolutionaries. Zapata distrusted, not unjustly, the urban leaders and civil servants who, he suspected, would sabotage, or at least water down, agrarian reform. But Zapata's urban critics claimed, again not quite unfairly, that Carranza, Zapata's major foe, was also committed to agrarian reform. In contrast to Zapata, Huerta had the support of sections of the urban working class. Furthermore, the acts of brigandage committed by Zapata's men made orderly agrarian reform very difficult indeed. Pancho Villa's interest in politics was minimal and capricious; he hated foreigners, especially North Americans and Chinese, he fought for the government and against it, he entered an alliance with Zapata which never really worked, and when a leading Zapatista writer published an article critical of Villa, he had him shot by way of rebuttal.

  Pancho Villa was the more spectacular guerrilla fighter. Within six months his little army swelled from eight to eighty thousand; this figure included the raiders' women, who frequently participated in the fighting. Villa's "Division of the North" defeated the government forces in several battles at Torreon in the summer of 1914. It was the most important achievement of his military career; in later years he was to put even larger armies into the field, and seized (and lost) countless cities, but he could never hold his gains for any length of time. He was in substance an audacious buccaneer and master of the ambush and hit-and-run attack who vainly sought to excel as a regular army general. His successes in open field battles were largely thanks to the advice he received from Felipe Angeles, a French-trained general who was his artillery commander. Villa was at his most potent when he could play his old guerrilla game; he eluded General Pershing's expeditionary force which had been sent to Mexico to punish Villa for raiding Columbus, New Mexico, and murdering American civilians. When he chose to fight an able Mexican general such as Obregon at Celaya in 1915, he suffered heavy losses and this despite numerical superiority. The Villistas were better equipped than the Zapatistas; Villa usually did not lack money and he liberally nationalized (and resold) horses and cattle wherever he went. But for all his astonishing tenacity and ability to reassemble new bands after each defeat, he never quite recovered his strength after 1915. After finally making peace with the government in June 1920, he was given an estate of twenty-five thousand acres, and his seven hundred followers were also offered land, a time-honored Latin American manner of settling a dispute in the case of a draw.

  Zapata, a mestizo like Villa, began his career as the head or the defense committee in his native village, and emerged during the last year of Díaz's rule as the supreme revolutionary chief in the state of Morelos. His army may have been the poorest in the Mexican civil war, suffering from a chronic lack of money, arms, ammunition and supplies, yet it was also the one most adept at employing guerrilla tactics. Whenever the government forces attacked in strength, as in 1913 and again in 1916, the Zapatistas just melted away in small groups to reassemble in neighboring districts. The government troops would seize the towns and major villages, only to withdraw after a short while on account of severe casualties from malaria, dysentery and, of course, innumerable small ambushes. The government could mobilize an army of forty thousand against Morelos, but it could not permanently station them there. Unlike Pancho Villa, Zapata hardly ever concentrated his troops and was reluctant to fight in open battle. Only once his modest army had greatly expanded did he besiege and occupy towns such as Cuernavaca, Puebla and eventually Mexico City. At the height of his power in 1915, when Zapata withdrew from Mexico City, he had (nominally) some seventy thousand men under his command. A year later their number had dwindled to five thousand. There was much revolutionary enthusiasm, but discipline was lax, officers were unreliable and unpunctual; if the government forces committed horrible excesses in their pacification campaigns, the Zapa tistas also burned, raped, plundered and killed civilians and prisoners. From time to time Zapata would express regret about these abuses, but he knew that he could not really restrain his followe
rs. His army was not a centralized body, but consisted of units of several dozen or several hundred men, acting most of the time independently. The composition of these units would constantly change, for the guerrillas would be released to work their fields during the agricultural seasons.81

  Eventually, the central government reasserted itself and the bands grew weaker. By 1920 the guerrilla war came to an end; the year before, Zapata had been lured into an ambush and assassinated. Felipe Angeles was executed a few months later and Car ranza was shot in 1920. Pancho Villa was murdered by private avengers three years after he had retired to his large ranch, and Obregon was killed by a religious fanatic posing as an artist who wanted to draw him.

  The Mexican revolution, like others, devoured its children; among the few to escape unscathed was Adolfo de la Huerta who became an opera singer in his North American exile. But the revolution itself was not abortive; there was no return to a Porfirian dictatorship; agrarian reforms were carried out and, in fact, gathered additional momentum in the 1930s. Granted, the guerrillas, whether of the south or the north, could not provide any political leadership for the country; their resistance movements were regional, entirely wanting in organizational ability and the necessary minimum of political sophistication. Villa, for all his populist-radical slogans was, after all, only a bandit-cum-caudillo, and the Zapatistas had little support in the towns and could not transform themselves into a broad, national movement. Zapata led his peons through the desert, but like a more monumental leader, did not live to witness their arrival in the promised land.

  The Prestes Column

  The military coup which occurred in São Paulo in July 1924 seemed at the time no more than just another coup of which Latin America has seen so many. It collapsed after a few weeks and would hardly be remembered today but for the initiative of a twenty-six-year-old captain, Luis Carlos Prestes, who decided to move with a column into the interior of the country. There he hoped to continue his struggle, shake the country out of its apathy and perhaps trigger off an eventual general insurrection. The attempt failed, but not before the Coluna Prestes, made up of about a thousand men, had covered some sixteen thousand miles in a giant raid unprecedented in military history, traversing Brazil from north to south, from east to west (and vice versa), while fighting government troops. When Prestes with six hundred and twenty of his men crossed into Bolivia in February 1927, he was still undefeated. His mounted column (it reportedly used as many as a hundred thousand horses during the campaign) originally consisted of regular army officers and soldiers, but about half of them were killed, wounded or fell ill and were replaced by volunteers. The column thwarted innumerable attempts by government troops to surround and capture it and had to fight, moreover, the Cangaceiros of the north, bandit groups which had been given official status as counterguerrilla units by the central government; it found these enemies far more dangerous than the government troops which showed little fighting spirit. The Coluna Prestes with its vaguely revolutionary watchwords had the passive support of the populace, but the general insurrection it had hoped for simply did not get off the ground. It was a heroic episode without political effect and all that remained was the folk myth of the Cavaleiro da Esperanca, the Knight of Hope and his companions, a symbol of the struggle for a new and better Brazil.

  The ideological makeup of the coluna presented a picture almost as curious as a map of its raids; it was a mixture of revolutionary nationalism compounded of both extreme left-wing and rightist philosophies. In terms of this, the future paths chosen by its leaders are peculiarly enlightening. Several of them took part in the Vargas coup in 1930 and in this roundabout way rejoined the political-military establishment to become in due course generals and ministers. Prestes, on the other hand, turned to the Brazilian Communist party, serving as its secretary general. But the very man who had shown such exceptional skill as a guerrilla leader became the left's chief opponent of guerrillaism when in the 1950s and 1960s it had a revival.82 Brazil in the 1960s was in many ways an altogether different country, with great conurbations, a modern industry and a growing working class; a rebellion in the backlands must have appeared even less promising than forty years earlier. But this alone may not be sufficient to explain Prestes's disenchantment with guerrilla tactics; it also reflected the general Communist aversion to this kind of warfare, a subject to which we shall have to return in a separate context.83

  Sandino

  Whereas Prestes's long march was the unexpected sequel to a traditional Latin American military coup, Augusto Cesar Sandino's guerrilla movement in Nicaragua grew out of an equally traditional civil war, a confrontation between conservatives and liberals. Sandino, a mestizo of upper-class origin who had spent some years in Mexico and was strongly influenced by the heady wine of Mexican revolutionism, became after his return the leader of an armed band within the liberal camp. When in the summer of 1927 a compromise was reached between the two sides which gave the liberals most of what they had asked for, they laid down their arms. Only Sandino, the most radical leader among them, declared his intention of continuing the struggle until a truly democratic regime was installed and the American marines, which had intervened in Nicaraguan politics on and off since 1909, were once and for all withdrawn.84

  Nicaragua, a sparsely populated country with mountains, many forests and few roads, was in many ways admirably suited for guerrilla warfare. The social structure was conservative-traditional and a populist leader was bound to gain the sympathy of the poor villagers. Saudino's campaign lasted for five years, and with a force never exceeding a thousand men he imposed his rule over large sections of the country, establishing to all intents and purposes a countergovernment, even levying its own taxes. He adopted guerrilla warfare only by trial and error; in the beginning there were tactical mistakes for which his force had to pay dearly. But he quickly mastered the guerrilla approach, and once he had done so, all attempts to destroy his scratch little army came to nothing. The government force, the Guardia Nacional, was small and ineffective and the U.S. Marines, a few thousand at most, forever failed to catch up with Sandino in the impassable forest. Attempts to bomb him from the air were no more successful. Sandino made peace with the government in 1933 after the last marines had been evacuated and once the liberals had again come to power. He was assassinated by political enemies within the year.

  Sandino (El Uberador) became, like Prestes, a legend in his own lifetime; his operations were closely studied by later generations of Latin American guerrilla leaders. Not that he was without blemish as such; there was the usual high incidence of professional murderers and robbers in his ranks, the familiar atrocities. Yet service was well rewarded — every sergeant was made a general, or at least a colonel — and there was great emphasis on military pomp. Sandino's social radicalism, while shocking in the eyes of his contemporaries, was exceedingly mild in retrospect; he was not a socialist, just a radical caudillo with a populist program. True, hardly ever before in the history of Latin American guerrillaism had the anti-American element been so pronounced. As Castro attracted the Argentinian Guevara, so Sandino was joined by radical militants from Honduras and Guatemala. Lastly, Sandino looked for, and found, some support among the native Indians, who had hitherto been neglected by both the political establishment and opposition alike. But if in its immediate effect the Sandino revolt did not entirely fail, it did in its longer-range purpose; under the dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty Nicaragua became politically one of the most backward countries in Latin America with a small clan monopolizing political and economic power to the detriment of every other section of its society.

  The Spanish Civil War

  When the Spanish Civil War erupted in July 1936, it was widely expected that large-scale partisan warfare would be one of its chief characteristics both in view of the specific character of the war and because Spain was the country with the richest guerrilla tradition of all. When the war ended, it was clearly apparent that the assumption had been altogether mistake
n and there was much mutual recrimination bearing on who carried the blame for this sin of omission. The Communist leader Enrique Lister (Manuel in Malraux's L'Espoir) wrote in 1965 that it was the fault of the indecisive Republican government not to have organized a powerful guerrilla movement in Franco's rear. The Anarcho-Marxist Abraham Guillen, on the other hand, who had fought in the civil war to become later an ideological mentor of the Tupamaros, wrote in 1969 that the Russians were the guilty party because they had always pressed for frontal attack.85 Both Lister and Guillen were right, but neither version provides a full explanation. The Spanish Republican government of the day gave guerrilla warfare low priority because the main task facing it was to create a regular army as a defense against Franco's troops. Since most regular army officers were anti-Republican, this was a formidable undertaking. The problem facing Madrid was very similar to that confronting Lenin and Trotsky in 1918: not to give additional encouragement to the irregulars of whom there were too many anyway, but to weld them into a regular army and to create a central command. The Russian advisers in Spain did indeed press for "confrontation," in accord with their military doctrine, but they also established schools for guerrilla specialists on Spanish soil. These institutions were run by the Soviet secret police who trained their students for acts of sabotage to be carried out by individuals or small units — but not for guerrilla warfare. These operatives, more often than not, would be foreigners, figures like Kashkin or Jordan in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, who could not possibly have played the role of a Mina or an Empecinado among the Spanish peasants. Over a thousand men were trained in the six guerrilla schools and eventually a special unit, the 14th Guerrilla Corps, was established.86 But all this refers to missions of very short duration, to "diversionist acts," not to the organization of guerrilla units. Robert Jordan's three-day mission to blow up a bridge (described in Hemingway's novel) was quite typical.