Guerrilla Warfare

by Walter Laqueur

  In retrospect it is easy to understand the reasons tor these misjudgments. After the initial upsurge in the early 1960s, the tide turned against the guerrillas almost everywhere in Africa. The ANC-ZAPU units which had infiltrated into South Africa were destroyed, SWAPO activities were largely ineffective, the MPLA campaign in Angola collapsed in 1966, and Roberto Holden's GRAE was largely inactive after its initial operations in the early sixties had petered out. Frelimo failed to prevent the building of the Cabora Bassa Dam. Only in Guine-Bissau, PAIGC made progress; the number of guerrillas there increased from four thousand in 1964 to (allegedly) ten thousand in 1970. After ten years of strife, the three Angolan independence movements had altogether some ten to fifteen thousand fighters, and the Portuguese armed forces had fewer casualties in a decade than the French in Algeria had in a single year. The leaders of the African guerrilla movements spent far more time attending international congresses than in stepping up guerrilla warfare. The Liberation Committee of the OAU was taken to task in 1967 for incurring "excessive administrative expenses and subsidizing certain individuals.

  In view of these and other weaknesses, the eventual successes of the liberation movements against Portugal seem almost inexplicable. But however small the guerrilla forces and infrequent their operations, they enjoyed certain distinct advantages such as secure bases in neighboring African countries, sufficient financial help from the OAU, the Soviet bloc and China, and a steady supply of arms. Frelimo and the MNLA were as well armed toward the end of their war as their Portuguese opponents, save that they had no artillery (which was useless in the bush) and no air force (which would have been of limited assistance only). Above all, they were facing the poorest European nation, which could ill afford to pay for a protracted guerrilla war in colonies which, with the exception of Angola, were of little economic value. Even the suppression of a small insurrection such as the Mau Mau had cost some hundred and thirty million dollars, while the Algerian war cost anything from five to ten billion dollars. The very presence of guerrillas in neighboring African countries made the stationing of considerable forces necessary (a hundred thousand men in the three main colonies), and this the Portuguese simply could not in the long run afford. By 1970 the Portuguese had spent two billion dollars on their colonial wars. Furthermore, there was considerable international pressure which the Portuguese notwithstanding all their defiant gestures could not ignore. The Portuguese commanders knew, in brief, that they were fighting a rear-guard action, and this scarcely made for any great enthusiasm or high morale.

  Attention has been drawn to the intense rivalry between the Soviet Union and China in Africa. During the cultural revolution and for several years thereafter, the Chinese were almost totally preoccupied with their domestic affairs, and by the time they returned to the African scene in 1971-1972, the Soviet Union had made considerable strides in winning support in most major African liberation movements. But how deep was Soviet and Communist influence? Radical African leaders have frequently described themselves as "Marxist-Leninists"; on the other hand, they have claimed that their movements were "authentically African."58 They have declared at one and the same time that their movements had no official ideology, yet that only "scientific socialism" could serve as their lodestar. Such contradictions are more apparent than real. While individual leaders had acquired the rudiments of Marxism in European universities, this certainly did not apply to their followers, and in any event, the problems facing the guerrilla movements either during their struggle, or after victory, were such as neither Marx nor Lenin, nor even Mao, had ever envisaged. Eventually military leaders came to power both in those African countries in which the transition had been peaceful and the others which had fought for their independence. The poor countries were still poor after independence, the rich remained rich, and the importance of ideological pronouncements should not be overrated.

  Latin America

  Guerrilla operations in Latin America reached their climax in the early 1960s. They were mainly concentrated in the countryside, but with the failure to establish secure rural bases (Argentina and Brazil in 1964, Peru and Venezuela in 1965, Bolivia in 1967), urban terrorism became the fashion, principally in Uruguay (MLN — the Tupamaros), Brazil (ALN), and Argentina (ERP and Monteneros). The political doctrine and overall strategy of these movements are discussed elsewhere,59 but the causes of success and failure remain to be analyzed.

  The chances of guerrilla warfare in Latin America were excellent in many ways. Capitalist development in the continent had few achievements to its credit but all its defects were only too manifest. There was poverty, glaring exploitation and widespread anti-Americanism. The establishment was not usually noted for its social conscience or its reformist fervor. A comparatively large class of intellectuals violently opposed the status quo, looking on the urban slum dwellers and landless peasants as their revolutionary reservoir. There was a long history of political violence, and Castro's victory had given fresh hope to all revolutionaries; victory was possible, after all, even in a single country. The ruling strata were weak, disorganized and devitalized, the forces of repression inefficient. In short, there was a revolutionary situation with all its classic ingredients, "objective" and "subjective." There was no lack of discontent nor of idealism; there was mass support on the part of the younger generation in the universities and even in sections of the army. And yet, without exception, the guerrillas failed to reach their goals and the intriguing question is why.60

  An analysis of the development of guerrilla movements in Latin America indicates above all that they were nearest to victory in the least repressive countries such as Venezuela and Uruguay. Bolivia was a military dictatorship when Guevara tried to establish his foci there, but President Barrientos was a populist of sorts with considerable backing among the campesinos. The new upsurge of guerrillaism in Colombia in 1975 occurred precisely at a time when the relatively liberal government of the day was engaged in carrying out a policy of reform. The insurrection in Venezuela in the early 1960s, spearheaded by the MIR and the Communists (who together established the FALN — Armed Forces of Liberation) and the urban terrorist operations of the UTC, came closer to success than in any other country in the continent. But even they had no real mass basis, as the results of the 1963 elections proved. The brutal character of many guerrilla operations antagonized the masses and isolated the insurgents. Usually the guerrillas assumed that the regime could be overthrown with one forceful push (golpe). The inevitable setbacks caused splits in their ranks; if the Tupamaros' strategy of provocation in Uruguay at least brought about the downfall of liberal democracy and the rise of a military dictatorship, the Venezuelan guerrillas did not carry even that much weight.

  It is difficult to generalize about Latin American guerrilla movements because conditions varied so much from country to country, and the movements themselves were so disparate. Some countries were predominantly rural, others primarily urban; the Guatemalan MR-13 was launched by young officers, the Tupamaros by students, the Venezuelan guerrilla groups by political parties. In Peru and Colombia there was a connection with spontaneous peasant uprisings; in Venezuela the Communist party supported the guerrillas, elsewhere it opposed them. Yet for all these differences, certain staple patterns emerge:

  1. If the guerrillas were inspired by Castro's victory and had assimilated its lessons, the government forces had also learned from the Cuban example. Initially unprepared for counterinsurgency, they became quite adept at it; sometimes they knew more about it than the guerrillas themselves. The armies were built up and modernized, the use of helicopters made guerrilla activities in the open country very hazardous indeed. Moreover, as Malcolm Deas has noted, soldiers in Latin America are not as unpopular as policemen — the army has a different relationship with the population. "No Latin American army had the combination of vices to be found in Batista's army."61 But the establishment had not only learned from the military' tactics used by the guerrillas; in Peru, farreaching agrarian re
forms carried out by the army stole the guerrillas' thunder and a sizable part of their forces went over to the government, or at least became a loyal opposition.

  2. In most Latin American countries (as in the Arab world, Ulster and Africa), there was not just one guerrilla movement but several; their internal splits and the tortuous relations between nationalist, pro-Moscow Communist, Trotskyite and Maoist parties were an ever-present source of friction. On rare occasions the guerrilla movements would make common cause: in February 1974 the Bolivian ELN, the Tupamaros, the Chilean MIR and the Argentinian ERP set up a Junta of Revolutionary Coordination (JCR). But far more often there would be disunity, internal strife and purges. The Colombian ELN was notorious for the acts of terror committed in its own ranks; the commander Jose Ayala was shot by his own men, and Fabio Vasquez had many of his rivals liquidated, sometimes by "war tribunal," sometimes without such legal niceties. There were bitter, though less bloody mutual recriminations among the Venezuelan, Peruvian and Bolivian guerrillas. Above all there was the Communist problem. The Cuban revolution had developed in its early phase quite independently of the Communists, but in other Latin American countries the revolutionary potential usually belonged to one political party or another, and no incipient guerrilla movement could afford to ignore this elementary fact of political life. The guerrillas (with the notable exception of Uruguay) became involved in sectarian in-fighting on ideological, organizational or simply personal lines.*

  3· Following the Cuban example, the guerrillas at first envisioned the countryside as their main field of action, yet strategic considerations quite apart, they found it unexpectedly hard to rally the support of the peasants. There were exceptions, such as Hugo Blanco's POR in Peru, although this created problems of its own, for while the campesinos were willing to defend their homes and land, they were reluctant to operate outside their immediate neighborhood. The leaders of the guerrilla movement were, for the greater part, city people of middle- or upper-class origin, young men (and in a few cases, women) who spoke, quite literally, an altogether different language from the peasant population, which belonged to all intents and purposes to another race. Just as the mestizo leadership of the Angolan MPLA did not understand the tribal tongues of their own warriors, so the Peruvian and Bolivian city revolutionaries were at a frustrating loss to communicate with their Indian recruits. For all their enthusiasm, they also found it anything but easy to adapt themselves to the hard life of the countryside; they were genuinely shocked by the miserable lot of the peasants, but at the same time they shared the contempt for manual labor deeply rooted in Latin American (and African) society. Since as revolutionaries they had to live, work and fight side by side with peasants and manual workers, this instinctive attitude, which only a few of them could completely overcome, did not exactly make for smooth relations with the toiling masses. Although any number of sound tactical reasons could be cited for the later withdrawal of the guerrillas from the country areas, there is no doubt that on the whole they were only too happy to get back to a city milieu more familiar in every respect and certainly less arduous.

  4. The peasants (campesinos) had a tendency to adopt a wait-and-see attitude rather than embrace the revolutionary cause on sight. If the guerrilleros successfully defied the government forces, they could count on at least the passive support of the rural population. But if they suffered a setback and it appeared that the forces of law and order were after all stronger, there would be no help for the insurgents and they would find themselves betrayed to the authorities. And even if the peasants were prepared to join in their fight, they would do so, as mentioned already, only within the district in which they lived. This has been one of the traditional weaknesses of rural guerrilla warfare; peasants cannot easily be turned into professional revolutionaries willing to give up their ties and roots.

  5. The guerrillas were caught on the horns of several dilemmas from which there were no easy disentanglements. Guerrilla ideologists have claimed since time immemorial that rugged and forest country is the most favorable for guerrillas. But if the country was too rugged or the forest too thick, the guerrillas would be hard put to it to get supplies. If they retreated into remote, unpopulated areas that were not easily accessible, they would be secure but ineffectual — as Guevara had noted. If they opposed elections (as in Venezuela), this would damage their image as staunch fighters for democracy. If, on the contrary, they contested elections, they would be defeated — as in Uruguay — and by extreme reactionary forces at that. If they waged guerrilla warfare in small elitist conspiratorial groups, consisting primarily of students (or recent graduates), they would be reasonably safe from detection, but the moment they tried to broaden their urban base and "mobilize the masses," they would expose themselves to infiltration by enemy agents.

  6. A successful guerrilla movement could weaken or bring about the overthrow of a relatively democratic regime, or an ineffectual autocracy. The strategy of provocation predicted that the democratic regime would be replaced by a reactionary and ineffective military dictatorship which would within a short time antagonize the middle class and especially the intelligentsia so that, as in Cuba, the guerrillas would gain the support of the majority of the population. But not all military dictators were as inadequate as Batista; others showed far greater determination and ruthlessness. Through terror and counterterror, they succeeded in paralyzing or altogether destroying the guerrilla movements (Guatemala, Brazil). Antiguerrilla murder squads came into being and torture was practiced with considerable effect.62 Worldwide public opinion was enlisted against these atrocities, but appeals and manifestos from foreign lands showed diminishing returns and were in any case a poor substitute for guerrilla victory. This raises the general question of the strategy of destroying the stable image of the government and creating a "climate of collapse." Modern governments, as Robert Taber has observed in his War of the Flea, are highly conscious of "world opinion," they do not like to be visited by human rights commissions,

  their need of foreign investment, foreign loans, foreign markets, satisfactory trade relations, and so on requires that they be in more or less good standing with a larger community of interests. Often too, they are members of military alliances. Consequently, they must maintain the appearance of stability, in order to assure the other members of the community that contracts will be honored, that treaties will be upheld, that loans will be repaid with interest, that investments will continue to produce profits and be safe.

  The weakness of this strategy is that it usually works only up to the point where the terrorist ceases to be a mere nuisance and becomes a real danger to the regime. Once this point is reached, the state — however concerned it may be about the U.N., a human rights commission and adverse publicity in the press — will react in kind, cruelly, unhampered by laws and conventions or humanitarian considerations. Once the Brazilian ALN and other such groups opted for individual terror, the government responded with all but indiscriminate counterterror. Terrorists, sympathizers, and no doubt some innocent people as well disappeared without a trace. There were no trials and no death sentences, which made it all the more difficult to organize protests at home or abroad. Despite the only too justified outcries about repression and torture, the stable image of the government was not destroyed; the terrorist movement collapsed, not the state.

  7. When fortune smiled on them, the guerrillas were on top of the world; victory appeared to be just around the corner. But they were not good losers, even though they knew most of the time, certainly in theory, that their struggle would be long and punishing. They had been spoiled by the Cuban example; by temperament, most Latin American guerrillas were golpistas, burning to topple the system with one big shove. Psychologically, they needed quick results, and if these did not come, there would be despondency and mutual recrimination. They were capable of great sacrifice and exertion for a short time, but not of sustained effort or of fortitude in adversity. This applies to both rural and urban guerrillas. The rapid suc
cess of the Guatemala army in November 1966, of the Peruvian security forces against Hugo Blanco (1963) and Hector Bejar (1965), the collapse of Douglas Bravo in Venezuela and of the Bolivian guerrillas, are a few of the many examples. The one exception was the Columbian ELN under Fabio Vasquez which continued its struggle for more than a decade with varying success; but most of the time they operated in remote areas and were no real threat to state security.

  With the defeat of the rural guerrillas, action was transferred to the cities with great initial effect. From 1968 to 1972 hundreds of banks were attacked in Brazil and Uruguay, stores were robbed, political leaders assassinated, businessmen and foreign leaders were kidnapped, "enemies" were executed or kept in "people's prisons." After the defeat of the urban guerrillas in Brazil and Uruguay, Argentina in 1974 became the chief scene of such action. The objective was not alone to spread fear and confusion, but to establish a "parallel government" comparable to that of the Soviets in Petrograd in 1917.