Philosophy of the "Urban Guerrilla"
During the late 1960s the center of gravity in Latin American guerrilla fighting shifted from the countryside to the cities and this soon gave rise to the new doctrine of the "urban guerrilla." The basic idea was of course as old as the hills, and in Latin America in particular there was a hallowed tradition of urban insurrection, assassination and kidnappings. A radical critique of rural guerrilla fighting was provided by the Bolivian Trotskyite leader, Guillermo Lora: the guerrillas in Bolivia (and elsewhere) were an alien body in the countryside. As Guevara wrote in his Bolivian diary: the campesinos were "impenetrable like stones." When one talked to them one could not be sure whether or not they were ridiculing the guerrillas. Revolutionary impatience had been the reason for neglecting political work among the peasants; but, even if the guerrillas had succeeded in raising the banner of truth in a whole district, they would still have failed because they were cut off from the workers in the cities. Guerrilla "impertinence and adventurism," therefore, made a decisive contribution to the defeat of the whole left. As for the Cuban model with Castro as an undisputed leader of the Latin American revolution, this was according to Lora as much an imposition as the Russian Communists' pretensions after 1917 to dominate the international working-class movement.32
Michael Collins and Menahem Begin were "urban guerrillas" as, in a way, were many nineteenth-century revolutionaries. But the nineteenth-century insurgents believed in golpismo, the seizure of power following one short, violent battle. This belief had been shared by the old IRA in 1916. The Irgun believed that the struggle would be a protracted one but it did not develop any specific new guerrilla doctrine. In Venezuela there had been urban terror on a large scale during the early 1960s; in Caracas in 1963 the insurgents came very near to victory. Defeated, they transferred their operations to the countryside. It was only after the spectacular failure of Guevara in Bolivia, and the earlier setbacks in Peru, Venezuela and elsewhere that urban terror in Latin America came into its own. Cuban revolutionary doctrine was inconsistent on the subject; although the towns were rejected as the grave of the revolutionaries, there are occasional references in the writings of Guevara and others to the unjustified neglect of urban operations. Mention has been made of the fact that the Cubans must have been aware of the fact that they owed far more of their eventual success to assistance from sympathizers in the towns than they were willing to admit.
If the Cubans were opposed to "urban guerrilla" warfare but did not altogether exclude it, few of the advocates of urban terrorism rejected rural guerrilla operations in principle. It was simply a matter of different conditions and priorities. They considered their city-based operations either as the first stage of a general insurrectionary movement or as part of an insurrectionary pincer movement based on the cities and the countryside. The starting point for an "urban guerrilla" doctrine was the undisputed fact that the rural guerrilla movements had been unsuccessful on the whole. They pointed to basic social and demographic facts which their predecessors ignored to their detriment. Latin America has not only the highest rate of population growth in the world but also the fastest rate of urbanization and there is an enormous, constant inflow of poor, unskilled, jobless people to the towns.33 Of the population of Argentina, forty-five percent live in Greater Buenos Aires; forty-six percent of all Uruguayans reside in Greater Montevideo. The population of Mexico City and Säo Paulo is nearly ten million, and Rio de Janeiro will have twelve million inhabitants by 1980. In view of these facts, the idea of the countryside "encircling" the cities seemed outdated, however propitious the "objective" revolutionary situation in the villages. "Urban guerrilla" strategy is based on the recognition of the fact that the political-military-economic center of power is in the great conurbations, that it could and should be attacked there, not from the periphery.34
The first, but also the least known of the advocates of this strategy was Abraham Guillen, an "anarcho-Marxist" (Hodges) of Spanish origin, who settled in Uruguay, after working for many years in Argentina. He did not exclude cooperation with the rural milizias but did maintain that in highly urbanized countries revolutionary battles ought to be waged in the urban areas "for the revolutionary potential is where the population is."35 These observations referred primarily to Uruguay and Argentina; in Brazil, on the other hand, revolutionary warfare should preferably be rural (Guillén later revised his views and criticized Marighela for assigning a merely tactical character to the urban guerrillas and strategic significance to the rural guerrillas). Guillén argued that Carlos Lamarca (the other important Brazilian urban terrorist leader) would not have been killed had he stayed among the nine million inhabitants of Säo Paulo instead of venturing into the countryside, where he was betrayed by a hostile population.36 To endure the struggle the small armed minority would have to lead a consistently clandestine existence with the support of the population. Guillén does not clarify how this contradiction, clandestine existence and mass support, might be overcome in practice. Their basic principle should be to live separately and fight together. Urban guerrillas should use light arms, but machine guns and bazookas would have to be employed as well to give them the advantages enjoyed by a highly mobile infantry. They should not try to seize large objectives and engage in "Homeric battles" but concentrate on small, successive actions. As a result of facing a hundred guerrilla cells of five persons, the police would have to cede terrain, especially at night: "If at night the city belongs to the guerrilla and, in part, to the police by day, then in the end the war will be won by whoever endures longest."37
Writing shortly after the Paris events of May 1968, Guillén attributed a leading role in the revolutionary process to the students; he was one of the few Latin American guerrilla strategists to give them first place in the list of revolutionary forces. (Students were, of course, the strongest element in most guerrilla movements but guerrilla strategists usually felt self-conscious about this fact and preferred not to mention it.) The support of eighty percent of the population was needed according to Guillen. If they received such support, the guerrillas could win the war even though imperialism held an overall superiority of a thousand to one; for at a given place and time the guerrillas could still be superior to the enemy in numbers and firepower by five to one. Guillen agreed with the Guevara-Debray thesis about the role of the vanguard. In Brazil there was no working-class vanguard, but there was a Marxist vanguard of professional revolutionaries and, in the final analysis, it was of no importance from which class the cadres hailed. Guillen's impact on the Tupamaros was considerable in the early years of their struggle but he was by no means their uncritical admirer. He repeatedly dwelled on certain errors, tactical and fundamental, which he thought they committed.38 They had rented houses in the cement jungles of Montevideo, thus establishing a "heavy rearguard" and "fixed fronts" for billeting, food, medical supplies and armaments. This exposed them to mass detentions and the seizure of their arms. They had excelled during the first hit-and-run phase of the struggle but then failed to escalate their operations by using larger units. Such advice smacks of armchair strategy. The main problem for all "urban guerrillas" was one of broadening their ranks. While their cadres were few and the scale of their operations small, they were relatively secure. The more numerous they became, the more difficult were the problems of housing and supply, and the easier they could be identified and captured.
Guillén opposed unnecessary violence: in a country in which the death penalty had been abolished, it was self-defeating to condemn to death even the most hated enemies of the people. A popular army that was not a symbol of justice, equality, liberty and security could not win popular support in the struggle against a dehumanized tyranny. Hence his opposition to the Tupamaros' "prisons of the people," to indiscriminate execution of hostages, to the use of violence against subordinates: surely there was little point in defeating one despotism only to replace it by another. Guillén opposed the cult of leadership (of which, however, the Tupamaros w
ere much freer than other Latin American guerrilla movements), and he complained about their ideological shortcomings. In many ways they had become overly professionalized and militarized, and did not really know what kind of revolution they wanted. On the one hand they forbade their members to criticize the pro-Moscow Communists, on the other they gave publicity to conservative nationalists. The kidnapping of the alleged CIA agent Dan Mitrione was a success, his execution a mistake. When the Brazilian consul in Uruguay was kidnapped, his wife appeared as a heroine of love and marital fidelity: "Every cruzeiro she collected" in an appeal for his release "was a vote against the Tupamaros and indirectly against the Brazilian guerrillas." By demanding large sums of money for political hostages, the Tupamaros came perilously close to resembling a political Mafia. There was a historical irony about would-be liberators who indirectly lived off the surplus of the very people they wanted to liberate.
In later years, Guillén became more appreciative of the operations of the Chilean MIR and the Argentinian ERP, who demonstrated their ability to mobilize large masses, and who, unlike the Tupamaros, were more critical of both right-wing nationalism and Communist opportunism. Towards the end of 1972 he was inclined to write off the Tupamaros altogether; they had served as the best revolutionary academy in the world with regard to "urban guerrilla" warfare but their tactical brilliance was unmatched by their strategy and politics. Their supreme command had become centralized, it knew all, said all, did all. Such excessive centralization proved fatal in the end.
Carlos Marighela is more famous than Guillen, partly in view of his active participation in the armed struggle, partly because his Minimanual was banned in so many countries — though it contained very little that was not known to any experienced urban terrorist. After he left the Communist party in 1966 he was primarily concerned with tactical questions. His views on strategy were quite inconsistent: in 1966 he regarded guerrilla warfare merely as one form of mass resistance and did not expect that it would be the signal for a popular rising; he thought that the center of gravity should be in the countryside. Yet he proceeded to act quite differently.39 Three years later he still argued that the decisive battles should be fought in the rural districts (the "strategic area") and that the fighting in the city was tactical and complementary only.40 His own activities were however concentrated on the "complementary" front and he would frequently and incongruously refer to the strategic importance of the great conurbations.
Marighela's basic approach was as radical as that of Fidel and Guevara. Not only was it the duty of every revolutionary to make the revolution, not only was his single commitment to the revolution, not only did the guerrilla constitute both the political and military command of the revolution, "the urban guerrilla's reason for existence, the basic action in which he acts and survives, is to shoot" (Minimanual). Towards the end of his life, he no longer revealed any interest in political goals, let alone political agitation. Robert Moss rightly noted that his later writings read like manuals of military drill, not political manifestos.41 A left-wing Brazilian critic later wrote that the "fetishist attachment" to, and the overestimation of, unlimited terrorism led to confusion, profound mistakes and, ultimately, to defeat.42 Marighela's approach, very briefly, was one of provocation, compelling the enemy to "transform the political situation into a military one." He assumed that, in the process, the government would alienate large sections of the population, particularly the intelligentsia and the clergy. North American imperialism would have to be called in for help, and this would add to the popularity of the insurgents' struggle. The fundamental objective was to shake the basis upon which the system rested — the Rio-São Paulo-Belo Horizonte triangle (whose baseline runs from Rio to São Paulo) — for it was there that the economic, political and military power was concentrated. In Mari ghela's scheme, a great deal of freedom of action was left to the small units; they were to decide whether to launch an attack without reference to the high command. They were perfectly entitled to assassinate not just the commanders of the security forces but also low-ranking "agents." The struggle should proceed on three fronts — the guerrilla front, the mass front (meaning a combat front, not agitation among the masses) and the support network. Ideally, all these fronts ought to be equally effective, but Marighela realized that the revolutionary movement was bound to develop unevenly. He insisted that the constantly expanding guerrilla front carry out a scorched-earth policy to create alarm among the dictators. His aversion to any bureaucratic hierarchy dominated by apparatchiki came to the fore time and again: in the revolutionary organization only missions and operations were to be prized, not rank and position; only those prepared to participate actively in the struggle and bear the sacrifices had the right to be leaders. No complex chain of command, no political commissars or supervisors should be set up; a strategic command and regional coordination groups would direct the military organization. The regional command, in Marighela's scheme, would not be allowed permanent contact with the mobile units: no one should know all about everything and everybody. Like many other guerrilla leaders before him, Marighela stressed the importance of training ("everything depends on marksmanship"). The personal qualities needed by an urban guerrilla were, above all, initiative, unlimited patience, and fortitude in adversity.
The basic unit in the urban guerrilla army "is the Bring group," consisting of no more than four or five people; a "firing team" constituted two such groups operating separately. Motorization was absolutely essential in the logistics of urban terrorism. The great advantages for the urban guerrilla were surprise in attack, a better knowledge of the terrain, greater mobility and speed, a better information network. Basic tactics always employed the hit-and-run principle, to attack and to get away. Attacks should be launched from all directions, in an endless series of unforeseeable operations, thereby preventing the enemy from concentrating his apparatus of repression; combat and decisive battle should always be avoided. Bank raids, Marighela noted, were the most popular form of action: "we have almost made them a kind of entrance exam for apprenticeship in the technique of revolutionary war."43 In addition there were to be ambushes, occupation of schools, factories and radio stations, provided that the withdrawal from fixed targets was well planned. The list of the urban guerrilla's revolutionary assignments was long and varied; he should defend popular demonstrations, liberate prisoners, seize weapons from army barracks, execute agents of the government, kidnap policemen and Americans. Public figures such as artists or sportsmen should be kidnapped only in special circumstances when one could be reasonably sure that popular opinion would favor such action. Transport should be sabotaged, oil pipelines cut, and fuel stocks systematically depleted. Bomb attacks should be undertaken only by those technically proficient, "but they may include destroying human lives." Spreading baseless rumors was part of the war of nerves waged by the guerrilla, and "information" should be supplied to foreign embassies, the U.N., human rights committees and other such bodies. Marighela ended his treatise with some reflections about the political results of urban guerrilla war: the people would blame the government not the terrorists for the various calamities that befell them. He apparently regarded democratic reforms as the great danger on the road to revolution, and he hoped that in the chaos brought about by the "urban guerrilla" war, elections would appear a mere farce and the political parties thoroughly discredited. The future society, as he saw it, would be built not by long-winded speakers and signers of resolutions but by those steeled in the struggle, an armed alliance of workers, peasants and students. The participation of intellectuals and artists in urban guerrilla warfare would be of the greatest advantage in the Brazilian context. Of great importance, too, was the support of the clergy, with regard to communication with the mass of the people. "This is especially true of workers, peasants and the women of the country [sic!]."
It is only too easy to detect major ideological inconsistencies in Marighela's writing. But there is no doubt whatsoever about his fanatical dedication to t
he cause, the burning fervor pervading all his writings, and it was this single-minded advocacy of the revolutionary deed which attracted so many young followers, willing to engage in suicidal operations. In theory, urban terror was only one element in a broader revolutionary strategy, but Marighela was not prepared to wait in vain for the rural guerrilla foci to emerge. So great was his preoccupation with his spectacular exploits in the towns that there was no time and energy left to promote insurgency in the countryside.
Marighela was killed in a gun battle in São Paulo in November 1969; his successor met a similar fate, and Captain Lamarca, the head of the even more militant and action-orientated VPR, was shot two years later. By 1971 the Brazilian security forces had defeated the terrorist challenge even though sporadic operations continued. Economic prosperity may have played a part in this, but the growing modernization of counterinsurgency and the use of torture by the police were more decisive. Debray mentions American financial assistance to the Brazilian police; according to the figures he provides, these grants amounted to a million dollars per year. Latin American guerrillas are known to have seized bigger sums in a single bank raid or as ransom for their hostages. Under torture, even some of the most trusted and steadfast guerrillas betrayed their comrades and, since urban terrorists were far more vulnerable than rural guerrillas once one link of the organizational chain was broken, they suffered irreparable losses. The Brazilian "urban guerrillas" could effect the downfall of a quasi-democratic regime and promote the emergence of a dictatorship which would not hesitate to apply torture and other means of counterterror, but they were not strong enough to survive the backlash. Torture evoked much protest but did not provide new recruits; the terrorists became more and more isolated, their heroism was admired but not emulated; even the left came to consider their action as, at best, pointless.
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