The Urban Guerrilla

I suggested to them that there were other ways of accomplishing political objectives besides violence. They did not agree with me, and they said that, in fact, any other form of political action in this country would be doomed to failure.

--U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, C. Burke Elbrick

Guerrilla warfare has plagued the hinterlands of Latin America for more than a decade. But the Brazilian kidnapers who seized Ambassador Elbrick two weeks ago and held him captive for 77 hours represent a relatively recent, and rapidly spreading, phenomenon--organized urban guerrilla warfare. Kidnapings, bombings and bank robberies in the great cities of the continent seem to be overshadowing the tactics devised by Mao Tse-tung, Vo Nguyen Giap and Ernesto Che Guevara --all of whom hold that the proper arena for armed revolutionary struggle is the countryside. With the exception of Fidel Castro's Cuba, that kind of warfare has not been notably successful in Latin America. Venezuela fought off a bloody Communist challenge in the mid-'60s partly because rural folk often betrayed the guerrillas. Guevara himself was killed by government troops in 1967, when the Bolivian peasants he sought to stir up gave no support to his cause.

Filling War Chests. Now the guerrillas seem to be turning from bush to big city. Violence in the streets is nothing new to Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia and Uruguay, but all are now feeling the sting of an accelerated and often well-coordinated urban terrorist campaign. The action groups appear to be locally directed, far-leftist, to be sure, but not necessarily Communist. In fact, Moscow, pursuing its objectives in Latin America with trade and aid, often finds the radical terrorists a hindrance. In Brazil, several factions are known to be operating, united only by their desire to overthrow the country's repressive military regime. The scant intelligence available suggests that many of the urban guerrillas are radical, highly nationalistic students between the ages of 20 and 25, convinced of the need for revolution, deeply hostile to their own governments, and to the U.S. as well. Many of them come from the middle class.

The terrorists, often organized into "cells" of three or more operatives, find the teeming cities to be excellent breeding grounds for unrest--and perfect places to hide. What makes urban terrorism particularly attractive to them is the fact that incidents occurring in the cities usually get far more publicity than do those that take place in the countryside--an important factor.

The guerrillas have scored a number of impressive successes. The terrorists who held Elbrick managed in one stroke to embarrass the Brazilian government, set free 15 political prisoners, and seriously impair Elbrick's effectiveness. Indebted to the military regime for securing his release, the ambassador may find it impossible to function as an independent observer in Brazil.

Urban guerrillas are blamed for a long list of other incidents. Since January, 74 Brazilian banks have been robbed, and the government suspects that at least half of the holdups were carried out to refill guerrilla war chests. Almost daily, bombs explode in Sao Paulo, the nation's commercial and industrial center. Last year U.S. Army Captain Charles Rodney Chandler was shot and killed in the city by terrorists who claimed that he was a Viet Nam "war criminal." Dissidents have taken over local radio stations on at least two occasions to broadcast antigovernment propaganda. They also burned three Sao Paulo television stations in one week last month.

The Last Lieutenant. Argentina, also run by a military-dominated government, has been under a state of siege for nearly three months. Terrorists there began attacking military installations in April. Just before Governor Nelson Rockefeller's visit to Buenos Aires on a fact-finding mission for President Nixon last June, they fire-bombed 13 Minimax supermarkets--a chain controlled by Rockefeller family interests. A few days later, four gunmen shot and killed Augusto Vandor, Argentina's leading labor unionist. Uruguay's Tupamaros (TIME, May 16) regularly embarrass the democratic government of President Jorge Pacheco Areco. In June, the Tupamaros set fire to a General Motors building in Montevideo, causing $500,000 in damage. Last week they kidnaped a leading Montevideo banker and announced they would not release him until the government capitulated to the wage demands of 8,000 striking bank workers.

Colombian urban terrorists affiliated with the Army of National Liberation pocketed at least $600,000 in ransom money from kidnapings in August alone. In Bolivia, where 22 dynamite explosions have rocked La Paz and other cities since May, the government last week scored a rare triumph over the guerrillas. Police surprised Guido "Inti" Peredo, the only one of Guevara's lieutenants to survive Che's doomed campaign, in a house in La Paz. Inti died in the clash. In Guatemala City, where terrorists last year assassinated U.S. Ambassador John Gordon Mein and two U.S. military attaches, guerrillas recently blew up a television station. Even relatively untroubled Chile saw its first political robbery this month. Chile's Communist Party denounced the terrorists as "gangsters"; they, in turn, accused the Communists of "passivity and betrayal."

Government security forces have found the terrorists elusive and difficult to stop. Brazil's answer to the new phenomenon has been to tighten the screws: last week the government decreed the death penalty for "revolutionary and subversive warfare." The trouble is that the guerrillas often welcome such responses, since their effect may be to create martyrs and focus attention on causes that might otherwise go unnoticed.

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