Guerrilla Warfare

   The success of Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution in 1959 inspired guerrilla movements across Latin America, as did the teachings of such revolutionary theorists as Regis Debray and the Argentine-born Che Guevara. The movements drew heavily from the urban middle class, and most of the members were young-under 30 and sometimes under 20. Of groups that operated in urban settings, a large percentage of members were women. Young people were attracted to the cause, not only by the romance of being revolutionaries but also by a number of material issues that included bleak employment prospects, sensitivity to social injustice, and the growing abandonment of hope for peaceful social change. Although some groups purported to be Castroist, Trotskyist, Peronist, or some combination, ideology seems not to have been an important factor in the decision of which group to join. Indeed, the most successful groups, the Montoneros in Argentina and the Tupamaros in Uruguay, were known for ideological impurity.

   Groups first appeared in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Paraguayan groups—the Movimiento 14 de Mayo para la Libertad Paraguaya (M-14, 14th of May Movement for Paraguayan Liberty), the Vanguardia Febrerista (February Vanguard), and the communist Frente Unido por la Liberación Nacional (United National Liberation Front, FULNA)—were composed of young exiles who waged war against the regime of General Alfredo Stroessner from across the border in Argentina and Brazil. Early Argentine groups, following the Cuban example, also took their struggle to the countryside. Among them were the Uturuncos (“Tigermen”), the Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo (EGP, People’s Guerrilla Army), the Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas (FAP, Peronist Armed Forces), and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR, Revolutionary Armed Forces). These rural movements failed, however, as did their counterparts in Bolivia and Ecuador. They were no match for the military and police trained in counterinsurgency and were often betrayed by local informants. One of the victims of local informants was Guevara himself, who on 8 October 1967 was executed in Bolivia.

   Guevara, like Castro, had been a cult hero of the guerrilla movement. His death, though by no means diminishing his mystique, led many guerrillas to rethink their rural strategy. By 1970 the FAP and the FAR had moved their operations to the city. Meanwhile, the Montoneros, the Tupamaros, and the Chilean Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR, Movement of the Revolutionary Left) had been established as urban organizations. Most of the Brazilian groups were urban as well, including the Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN, National Action for Liberation), Carlos Lamarca’s Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária (VPR, People’s Revolutionary Vanguard), and the Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro (MR-8, 8th of October Revolutionary Movement). Unlike their rural counterparts, urban guerrillas could take part in operations (bombings, bank robberies, kidnappings, assassinations) and then blend back into society. Exceptions to this change in strategy were the Argentine Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP, People’s Revolutionary Army), which, Guevarist at heart, returned to the countryside, and a rural front created by the Partido Comunista do Brasil (PC do B, Communist Party of Brazil). Of the Brazilian guerrillas, the PC do B group, only 69 members strong, gave the military the most trouble, holding out for three years.

   The urban guerrillas built impressive organizations. By 1975 the Montoneros fielded anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 combatants. (Their military adversaries estimated their numbers to be higher.) During the same period, their tactical operations increased in frequency, technical expertise, and scale and were eventually directed at military targets. The Tupamaros took a similar route, making leaps (saltos) to increasingly higher levels of warfare. In the end, however, the guerrillas, both rural and urban, never attracted a mass following and found themselves fighting a lost cause.