Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla

                           Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Marighella, Carlos.

      [Minimanual do guerrilheiro urbano. English]

      Minimanual of the urban guerrilla / Carlos Marighella.

                 p. cm.

       Originally published: 1972.

       ISBN 978-1-934941-30-0

 1.  Guerrilla warfare.  I. Title.

       U240.M34713 2008

       355.4'25--dc22

                                                                                                        2008021854

Introduction

Guerrilla warfare has a long and extensive military history. While the name itself (it means “little war”) dates to the French invasion of Spain in 1808, guerrilla methods of warfare have been used with varying degrees of success since before the time of Christ. The Bible mentions the Maccabaean Rebellion of 166 BC and points out that Judas Maccabaeus established a base of operations in the Judean desert, from which to launch lightning hit and run raids using lightly armed fighters. In 58 BC, the Gaullic leader Vercingetorix launched an uprising against Roman rule that lasted for almost six years. Vercingetorix depended upon small highly mobile units to destroy isolated Roman detachments and to cut off the legions’ supply lines.

In the 18th century, as armies began to become dependent upon transportation systems and fixed supply lines, guerrilla warfare was practiced more often and more successfully. During the American Revolution, Francis “The Swamp Fox” Marion took to the interior of South Carolina and held off whole units of British troops under Cornwallis and Tarleton. When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, bands of guerrillas led by Espoz y Mina fought on for five years, draining French resources and tying up thousands of French troops. And during the American Civil War, a band of partisans under Colonel John Singleton Mosby harassed Union armies all over the South. “Mosby’s Rangers”, who numbered at times less than 250 men, cut telegraph wires, decimated isolated Union forces, and even managed to capture the Union General Stoughton in his tent.

Perhaps the most famous instance of guerrilla warfare came during World War I, when a group of Arab Bedouin raiders under the command of T.E. Lawrence shot up the Turkish supply lines and pinned down large numbers of troops. The guerrilla campaign earned the amateur British soldier the moniker “Lawrence of Arabia”. In 1918, the British themselves became the target of guerrillas, when Irish Republican Army “flying columns”, led by Michael Collins and Cathal Brughe, forced England to grant independence to the Irish Free State.

The IRA’s campaign marked a turning point in the aims and tactics of guerrilla movements. Until that time, guerrilla actions most often served as adjuncts to the actions of a regular Army, and guerrillas focused their actions on weakening an invading or occupying army so it could be defeated by a friendly army—a tradition carried on by the partisan units of World War II. After the Irish victory in 1920, however, guerrilla warfare came more and more to be viewed as an instrument of insurrection and resistance.

The earliest guerrilla “war of liberation” came in the 1910’s, when Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa launched guerrilla uprisings in an attempt to topple the Mexican government. In the aftermath of World War II, Jewish settlers under Menachem Begin, in the British Mandate of Palestine, formed the Irgun Zvai Leumi to harass the British occupation army and establish the state of Israel. In Kenya in the 1950’s, the Kikuyu tribe organized the Mau-Mau guerrillas to attempt to overthrow the British colonial government, and in the 1960’s, General George Grivas formed the guerrilla organization EOKA in an attempt to unite the island of Cyprus with the military government of Greece.

Most modern guerrilla movements—the IRA, the Zapatistas, the Irgun, the Mau-Mau, EOKA, the Kurdish rebellion, the Afghan mujahadeen—were traditional patriotic-nationalist movements, formed in response to local conditions and owing very little to foreign aid or ideologies. They attracted little notice from military theoreticians, and left few if any written guidelines concerning the guerrilla methods they used. It was the small number of Communist-led guerrilla movements in China, Vietnam and Latin America, however, that attracted the most attention from military authorities, and it has been the Communist-led guerrillas that have been the most vocal about theory and tactics. Since the 1960’s, therefore, the word “guerrilla” has, rightly or wrongly, become almost synonymous with the word “Communist”. Nearly every modern theorist on guerrilla warfare has been Leftist in orientation, and it is within this tradition that we find Carlos Marighella and the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla.

The first of the major “revolutionary guerrilla warfare” theoreticians was Mao Zedong. Mao summed up his guerrilla doctrine with the aphorism, “The enemy advances, we retreat. The enemy stops, we harass. The enemy retreats, we advance.”

The Vietnamese school teacher Vo Nguyen Giap also applied the tactics of “people’s war”, concluding, “Is the enemy strong? One avoids him. Is the enemy weak? One attacks him.” Giap’s book on guerrilla strategy was entitled People’s War, People’s Army.

If one name has been indissolubly linked with the theory of guerrilla warfare, however, it has been that of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Guevara, an Argentinean medical student, developed his guerrilla tactics during the two-year rebellion against the Batista government in Cuba, and, after the Communists seized power, put down his experiences in a booklet entitled simply Guerrilla Warfare.

Guevara’s success inspired a number of imitators, and guerrilla movements were launched in Venezuela, Peru, Guatemala and Colombia. This wave of rural guerrilla activity, however, produced one crushing defeat after another. Guevara himself was killed while leading a team of guerrillas in Bolivia. The other guerrilla movements in Latin America were outgunned, outmaneuvered and lacked popular support, and quickly fell into oblivion.

The failure of rural guerrilla warfare sent shock waves through the militant wing of the Latin American Communist movement. It was at this time, on the brink of defeat, that Carlos Marighella, a Brazilian, recalled the strategy that had been followed by resistance movements like the IRA and the Irgun and proposed a different method of guerrilla warfare, one that depended not upon isolated bands hidden in the mountains or jungle, but on small secretive groups of fighters who operated in the large modern cities, in the very center of the government’s power. Thus was born the strategy of the urban guerrilla.

Marighella And The Brazilian Guerrillas

Carlos Marighella was born in the Brazilian state of Bahia in 1911. He was an engineering student at the Salvador Polytechnic when the Brazilian economy collapsed in 1929. Radicalized by the Depression, Marighella joined the Brazilian Communist Party.

In November 1935, the Communist Party managed to recruit several renegade Army units and staged an abortive uprising in the Brazilian towns of Natal and Recife. The uprising was quickly crushed, but it made an impression upon Marighella, who was by this time an important Party figure. In 1946, he was briefly elected to the Brazilian Congress on the Communist Party ticket, but his parliamentary career only left him more convinced that only military struggle would topple the Brazilian regime.

The Communists, however, were opposed to any armed action, preferring instead the seizure of power through political mobilization. Marighella became a constant critic of the Brazilian Communists, arguing that their byzantine political alliances and their debates over doctrinaire questions were pointless and unproductive. In 1952, Marighella was elected to the Brazilian Communist Party’s Central Committee, where he continued to press for militant action.

In 1964, a coup d’etat led by Marshal Humberto Castelo Branco seized power and imposed a military government on Brazil. Civil rights were suspended and police powers were expanded. In response, Marighella resigned from the Communist Party in August 1967 to begin a guerrilla campaign to topple the regime. Marighella and the Communists would remain implacable enemies for the rest of his life.

In February 1968, Marighella organized the Acao Libertadora Nacional (“National Liberation Action”), an urban guerrilla group dedicated to the overthrow of the Brazilian military government and to the defeat of what he referred to as “North American imperialism” in Brazil. The ALN carried out a series of raids on arsenals and banks to obtain money and weapons, and then launched a full-scale urban campaign. Marighella’s guerrillas ambushed Army personnel and assassinated members of the regime, but their most widely-publicized actions were the kidnapping of several foreign diplomats (including the United States Ambassador) and their exchange for captured and imprisoned guerrillas.

In 1969, after almost two years of fighting, Marighella systematized the tactics being carried out by the ALN and put them into booklet form—the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. Shortly after, in November 1969, Marighella was surrounded by the Sao Paulo police and killed in a shootout. He was fifty-eight years old.