These books present different dimensions of what may become the most formidable challenge to traditional Latin American regimes of this generation, the urban guerrilla movements. Already such movements have had important political consequences in Argentina, Brazil, and Guatemala, and the Tupamaros played a significant role in the collapse of Uruguay’s democratic heritage.
Both writers are by profession journalists. Guillén, a Spaniard by birth, fought against Franco and escaped from a Spanish jail under sentence of death, making his way in 1948 to Buenos Aires, where he wrote under various pseudonyms for Argentine papers until his imprisonment in 1961. Eventually he fled to Montevideo, where he is now an Uruguayan citizen. Guillén’s book, admirably edited and translated by Donald C. Hodges, is actually a collection of excerpts from his wide-ranging and prolific writings based on marxist-anarchist foundations. María Esther Gilio, an Argentine journalist, has based her book on interviews taken in Montevideo while reporting on Uruguay. She describes deteriorating social and economic conditions in Uruguay, and the often fantastic escapades of the Tupamaros, including the seizure of a small town (Pando) outside Montevideo, and their subsequent torture and prison escapes.
Guillén, whose writings are practically unknown in the United States, is presented as a principal theoretician for the Latin American guerrilla movements, particularly the urban ones, but whatever his influence on them, his emphasis in this volume is more evaluative and critical than theoretical. He is concerned primarily with a rehash of revolutionary marxist history, mostly outside Latin America, and secondarily with polemics on tactical and strategic questions of urban insurgency. Consistent with his anarchistic assumptions, Guillén mounts almost as strong an attack on Soviet “revisionist, bourgeois, nationalist totalitarianism” as on, more expectedly, “yanqui imperialism.” He observes that in the Soviet Union “the Communist Party takes the form of a church, the Secretary of the Party is a virtual pope and the state has absolute powers before which man is less significant than in the presence of the gods of the Greco-Latin religions.”
What Gilio describes, Guillén explains and evaluates. He argues that revolution can be made only when the ruling class has lost prestige from wars, social and economic crises, or financial speculation and immorality, those acts which incarnate all the crimes, disgraces, miseries, and frustrations suffered by the popular classes. He criticizes the Tupamaros for committing acts as distasteful to the Uruguayan public as those committed against them by their regime, and cautions that the movement is “perilously close to resembling a political Mafia,” whose “prisons of the people” do more harm than good to their cause. Hostages, he argues, for the purpose of exchanging political prisoners has an immediate popular appeal, but they focus unnecessarily, not as the Tupamaros maintain on a system of “parallel government,” but on a parallel system of repression. Ransom terms must be moderate enough to be met, and executing a prisoner because excessive demands are rejected, is counter-productive. Execution is tolerable only when a government rejects moderate demands, for the regime then assumes responsibility for the death. The execution of Dan Mitrione by the Tupamaros, Guillén observes, failed to accomplish a political objective, and indeed was a reversal for the Tupamaros in “their newly acquired role of assassins,” a role enthusiastically communicated to Uruguayans by their media. “In a revolutionary war, any guerrilla action that needs explaining to the people is politically useless: it should be meaningful and convincing by itself.”
As useful as the books are, both fail their purported purposes. Gilio provides little information on the structure of the Tupamaro movement, and leaves the reader to induce their strategies from her colorful but selective narrative accounts. Her book is limited, at least for social scientists, by what appears to be considerable literary license in reconstructing dialogue and events without satisfactory documentation. Moreover, only about half the book deals directly with the Tupamaros, the remainder describing what by United States, Argentine, and perhaps once Uruguayan standards are the appalling conditions in the country’s penal and mental institutions, and the plight of the aged, the poor, and the orphaned of Montevideo. Guillén fails to provide a systematically conceived philosophy of guerrilla warfare beyond that implicit in his anarchistic assumptions, although his critical comments on the strengths and weaknesses of specific movements are revealing. Hodges has edited the writings around theoretically interesting topics, and Guillén himself in the preface observes that “even I could not have made an anthology as complete and balanced as his.” But the excerpts often fail to rise to the challenge, a failure perhaps predestined by the brief and often unrelated snippets reproduced in the book. These reservations aside, both books make some strong points which can no longer be ignored by Latin Americanists, and for anyone yet unaware or unconvinced of the distinctive, sophisticated innovations of the Latin American urban guerrilla movements, a reading of Guillén is absolutely essential.
