Latin American Guerrilla Movements

Origins, Evolution, Outcomes

Dirk Kruijt, Eduardo Rey Tristán, Alberto Martín Álvarez, Dirk Kruijt, Eduardo Rey Tristán, Alberto Martín Álvarez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429534270
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Organized around single country studies embedded in key historical moments, this book introduces students to the shifting and varied guerrilla history of Latin America from the late 1950s to the present. It brings together academics and those directly involved in aspects of the guerrilla movement, to understand each country's experience with guerrilla warfare and revolutionary activism.

The book is divided in four thematic parts after two opening chapters that analyze the tradition of military involvement in Latin American politics and the parallel tradition of insurgency and coup effort against dictatorship. The first two parts examine active guerrilla movements in the 1960s and 1970s with case studies including Bolivia, Nicaragua, Peru, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Part 3 is dedicated to the Central American Civil Wars of the 1980s and 1990s in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Part 4 examines specific guerrilla movements which require special attention. Chapters include Colombia's complicated guerrilla scenery; the rivalling Shining Path and Tupac Amaru guerrillas in Peru; small guerrilla movements in Mexico which were never completely documented; and transnational guerrilla operations in the Southern Cone. The concluding chapter presents a balance of the entire Latin American guerrilla at present.

Superbly accessible, while retaining the complexity of Latin American politics, Latin American Guerrilla Movements represents the best historical account of revolutionary movements in the region, which students will find of great use owing to its coverage and insights.

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ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF THE LATIN AMERICAN GUERRILLA MOVEMENTS

Dirk Kruijt, Eduardo Rey Tristán and Alberto Martín Álvarez

Introduction

In Latin America, the Cold War period was not only characterized by dictatorships, military juntas and coups d’état. It was also a time of revolutionaries and insurgents, students taking up arms, pious churchgoers converted into rebels, radical priests transformed into guerrilleros, slum dwellers turned members of underground sabotage cells, peasants joining insurrectional movements and armed civilians combating military and paramilitary forces. Young people became radicalized, youth wings of political parties joined the underground resistance and liberation movements appeared in nearly all of the countries in Latin American and in several Caribbean island states.

From the late 1950s to the late 1990s, one wave of rebel movements after another swept across Latin America where organized groups of the armed Left, guerrilla movements or ‘political-military organizations’ (as they called themselves), both great and small, contested the existing political, social and economic order. The peak period of most of the region’s guerrilla organizations was between the mid-1960s to the late-1980s. And although peace was eventually restored in Central America in the 1990s, while one insurgent movement signed a peace agreement in Colombia as late as 2016, the other is still engaged in warfare (August 2019).

The region’s guerrilla forces tried to overthrow right-wing authoritarian regimes and military dictatorships and sometimes even democratically elected governments in order to establish revolutionary utopias of a socialist nature. In the 1960s, guerrilla movements were created by leftist intellectuals, student movements, communist party splinter groups and disillusioned military officers. And then there was the overwhelming influence of the Cuban Revolution, whose successful insurgency encouraged revolutionaries in other countries in the region to tread the revolutionary path and transformed young people into left-wing rebels. Exiled refugees—intellectuals, politicians and revolutionaries—escaping from the military regimes of the period were welcomed on the Caribbean island. Until the late 1980s, Cuba trained and supported guerrilla movements in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. Guerrilla movements inspired by the Cuban example but with little or no direct support from the island also emerged in Mexico and in other countries.

Furthermore, in the 1970s and 1980s academic and religious ideologies accelerated the process of radicalization. It was the time of dependency theory at universities and liberation theology in churches. Entire generations were influenced by the anti-imperialist arguments of dependency theory and the radical appeal of a new interpretation of the Bible by theologians and priests.

The introduction to this book, which has the aim to analyze the origins, evolution and outcomes of the guerrilla movements in all of the aforementioned countries, addresses more general considerations on the influences and inspiration behind the wave of insurgency in Latin America in the 1960s and its transformation during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The intention is to trace the region’s time-honored tradition of revolts, rebellions and revolution, and the use of both regular and irregular warfare, while also attempting to evoke the Zeitgeist, the ideas, beliefs and sentiments of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—a period marked by worldwide decolonization, armed national liberation movements and insurgency and counterinsurgency wars in Latin America, Asia and Africa. These were the decades not only of the Cold War and the struggle between capitalism and socialism, between the First and Second World, but also of the Non-Aligned Movement (NOAL) in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the so-called Third World that, in the wake of the Cold War, would come to be known as the Global South.

Those decades were also marked by the New Left wave, a cycle of radical mobilization and revolutionary ambitions that transformed the Western Left—albeit in different ways and assuming varied organizational and operational guises—in Europe and the United States. Similarly, it coincided with the wave of independence (‘liberation’) movements and wars of independence (‘liberation’) in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. Accordingly, the idea of one far-reaching revolutionary wave is the central idea of this book.

Between 1959 and the turn of the century, revolutionary organizations defying the established system of power emerged in all of the region’s countries. Without judging their successes, failures, achievements or limitations, their coincidence in time indicates that they formed part of a general cycle of mobilization in which the guerrilla organizations in each country were expressions of a Zeitgeist that affected the entire region at the same time; namely, a cycle that, in turn, pertained to the wave of international political violence of the period.

A Tradition of Dictatorship and Rebellion

Rebellions and revolutions have been some of the leitmotifs of Latin American politics throughout its history. Irregular warfare—what is now usually called guerrilla warfare—is a long-standing tradition. The colonial regime established on the continent also contributed its fair share to engendering opposition. The indigenous people fought long and hard against the Spanish conquistadores in Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala and Peru. Following the region’s pacification at the end of the sixteenth century, colonial armies and militias waged war against indigenous guerrilla groups attacking Spanish settlements in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Paraguay and on the northern frontier of Mexico. Throughout the eighteenth century, Spanish expeditions were sent to the southern borders of Chile and the northern frontiers of Mexico. Several decades before the Independence Wars, the Peruvian Quechua rebel Túpac Amaru II and the Bolivian Aymara insurgent Túpac Katari took up arms against colonial rule and routed the Spaniards, before their indigenous rebel forces were subsequently overpowered by larger counterinsurgency armies.

Revolutions, rebellions and guerrilla and counterinsurgency campaigns were some of the defining traits of post-colonial Latin America, guerrilla and counterinsurgency warfare continuing into the nineteenth century. In Haiti (the then French colony of Saint-Domingue), black slaves and mulattos, among others, revolted in 1804. After overpowering the forces raised by the plantation owners and declaring their independence, they then went on to defeat a French relief force that had been sent to restore the plantocracy. The last country to achieve independence was Cuba in 1902, nearly a century later and after three consecutive guerrilla wars of national liberation and an invasion by US marines in 1898.

In the main, the Latin American wars of independence were fought by both regular and irregular armies. Some of the region’s greatest war heroes were self-styled military commanders and former local or regional militiamen who raised private armies, enlisting foot soldiers from among the poor and the indigenous communities, as did many of their successors. Former military leaders often became warlords and sometimes even heads of state or presidents for life. In Brazil, in addition to the regular army there was a paramilitary force, to wit, the National Guard, in which local bigwigs (coroneis in Portuguese) served as commanders. A similar system of local warlords (caudillos in Spanish) with quasi-private armies existed in the Spanish-speaking republics. As in Brazil, they were regional military and political bosses who sometimes assumed the presidency or plotted against presidential adversaries. The region’s post-colonial states, frequently led by military men turned politicians, were governed by a hybrid political system based on violence and coercion. The military historian Loveman, who has analyzed the regimes of exception in nineteenth-century Latin America, uses the term ‘constitutional tyrannies’ as the forerunners of the ‘constitutional dictatorships’ in which the military establishment acted as the ‘fourth branch of government’ (Loveman 1993, 398–405). They governed societies with deep divides between the elites and the emerging urban middle classes and a vast mass of underprivileged people and indigenous peasants.

Authoritarian rule and widespread poverty and social exclusion brought about unrest, protest and insurgence. Indigenous Mexican guerrilleros rebelled against taxes and exploitation in Yucatan—thus sparking the Caste War (1848–1855). Peruvian General Cáceres launched a three-year guerrilla campaign in which he recruited indigenous peasants to fight against the Chilean occupation force during the Pacific War (1880–1881). During the War of Canudos in the 1890s, a messianic revolt led by destitute settlers in Brazil’s poverty-stricken northeastern region was crushed by the army. The Mexican Revolution was the theater of peasant armies and guerrilla fighters under General Zapata. In the late 1920s, General Sandino launched a guerrilla campaign against US marines in Nicaragua. The ‘self-defense’ guerrilla armies in Colombia during the 1940s can be considered as the precursors of the successive waves of guerrilla warfare affecting the country. And during the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, armed miners and the police trounced the regular army.

World War II was followed by rapid urban development in the region. But this did not alter the persistence of deep-seated social inequalities between the well-heeled urbanites and the urban slum dwellers, mostly first-generation migrants, and the underprivileged living in rural villages and indigenous communities. The memories of far-right rulers and military governments, which had kept the population in line using coercion and repression, and the social divide persisting in most Latin American countries contributed to the insurgency of the armed Left during a period conditioned by Cold War geopolitics, even in apparently modern societies governed by democratically elected presidents. This goes a long way to explaining why the influence of the Cuban Revolution became so widespread, why dependency theory attracted so many followers and why liberation theology radicalized so many believers. It was the cultural wellspring of the emerging ‘political-military movements’, with militant ideas about ‘liberation’ and ‘social justice’, during the decades of the Cold War and in the following years.

The Cuban Revolution and the Latin American Guerrilla

The Cuban Revolution (1959), itself the result of rural and urban guerrilla warfare, radically changed the repertoire of revolutionary action throughout Latin America and the Caribbean (Martín Álvarez and Rey Tristan 2016). According to the historian Hobsbawm (1994, 262),

No revolution could have been better designed to appeal to the left of the western hemisphere and the developed countries, at the end of a decade of global conservatism; or to give the guerrilla strategy better publicity. The Cuban Revolution had everything: romance, heroism in the mountains, ex-student leaders with the selfless generosity of their youth—the eldest were barely past thirty—a jubilant people…. What is more, it could be hailed by all revolutionaries.

Cuba gave voice to generations inspired by anti-imperialism, national liberation and social justice, especially radical middle-class youths still at secondary school or university. It sparked immense enthusiasm among young leftists, young communists and even disenchanted young military officers, but especially among the student movements. Militant leaders were invited to Cuba to attend conferences, public meetings with representatives of other revolutionary movements or private discussions with Cuban officials. Many of them asked for military training and political advice. Except for the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), Sendero Luminoso (PCP-SL) in Peru and the Mexican guerrilla movements, the leaders of all of the relevant political-military organizations at the time sought Cuban support or were invited to the island.

As of 1959, the Cuban leadership created an intelligence and liaison agency which, after operating under a number of different names, would eventually be known as the Departamento América.¹ In that sense, Cuba functioned as a catalyst for the entire region, disseminating ideas and repertoires of collective action, strategies and tactics among emerging or existing movements, and setting itself up as a successful example. For many movements, Cuba’s model of guerrilla warfare—the rural foco approach as described in the military writings of Che Guevara—served as a paradigm, especially in the 1960s. It supplanted the slow and patient actions of the existing communist and socialist parties by the promise of a historic political and military victory by means of the immediate, resolute and swift action of a handful of committed revolutionaries.

Cuba’s influence cannot be underestimated. In the early 1960s, the collective enthusiasm of Cuban society, the easy-going approach of Cuban officials, the intoxicating effects of interviews with the glorious heroes of the rebel army, perhaps even with the iconic Fidel or the fascinating Che, were seductive and long-lasting. Just one of the many examples is a veteran Brazilian guerrilheiro, trained in Cuba in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who recalls how proud he felt to be one of the future leaders at the forefront of his nation:

He who went to Cuba thought he’d be back as guerrilla comandante…. There was an intense mythology about it because the Cubans encouraged the idea to the organizations of Latin America that, when you went there, spent there a period, and endured training, you would return half Che Guevara, half comandante.²

While, following his death, Che Guevara attained the status of a civil saint due to his exemplary heroism, abnegation, willpower, self-sacrifice and martyrdom, younger generations of guerrilla leaders travelled to Cuba to consult Fidel Castro on political and military matters. In later years, Castro, given his age, reputation and experience, was regarded as a revolutionary oracle and visionary strategist. He was a father figure for the Central American guerrilla comandantes, in El Salvador and Guatemala at war, and in Nicaragua in power, and for the future military socialist Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

Cuba, albeit the most significant, was not the only influential country. Latin American revolutionaries also sought inspiration from Vietnam, China, Algeria (Cuba’s first ally on the African continent with which it signed an agreement on mutual support and intelligence sharing in 1963) and Tanzania which, like Algeria, was a sanctuary for African liberation movements during the 1960s. For their part, the early Central American insurgen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Origins and Evolution of the Latin American Guerrilla Movements
• 2 Cuba and the Latin American Left
• PART 1 First Revolutionary Ripple: The Imitation of the Successful Example
• PART 2 Second Revolutionary Ripple: The Adaptation of a Non-Viable Model
• PART 3 Third Revolutionary Ripple: Learning From Experiences and New Influences
• PART 4 Special Cases
• Index