Guerrilla Warfare Read online

  The same pattern recurred in the Pumacahua rebellion; he had been a commander in the Spanish army in the campaign against Tupac Amaru. His one advantage was that he had Creole support, and his force, unlike that of his predecessor, succeeded in occupying several important towns such as La Paz, Arequipa and Puno. But discipline among his troops, too, was lamentable, and once the Spanish had managed to concentrate a small force, they defeated him with the greatest of ease.3 There were other risings but they all failed, primarily because the Indians made the same mistake as the European peasants in the Jacqueries; they were moderately successful while fighting in small groups, but the moment they tried to concentrate their forces and to imitate regular armies, they became a target that could only too easily be outmaneuvered and destroyed. The Indians fought bravely, but they needed the Creoles for military leadership and organization. In general, whenever Indians and Creoles made common cause, the prospect for victory was immeasurably greater.

  What has been said about the Indians applies a fortiori to the Negro slave revolts of which there were several, especially toward the end of the eighteenth century, partly under the influence of the French Revolution.4 With one famous exception they all collapsed for lack of internal solidarity, lack of weapons, insufficient military know-how and, above all, the absence of effective military leadership. The striking exception was, of course, Toussaint l'Ouverture's rising in San Domingo. It succeeded because it had a leader of genius, and because the general level of education under French rule was higher than elsewhere; no Indian leader would have been able to compose beautiful declamations in the style of the French Revolution. Toussaint also received foreign help, mainly from the British, and the French forces sent out against him were decimated by tropical disease. But insofar as guerrilla warfare is concerned, the war waged by the "Black Jacobins" offers little of interest; they did not, as a rule, conduct guerrilla warfare but defeated the French precisely because their leaders were able to establish a fairly effective regular army with all its trappings.

  The officers called themselves generals, colonels, marshals, commanders, and the leaders decorated themselves with scraps of uniforms, ribbons and orders, which they found on the plantations or took from the enemy killed in battle. . . . The insurgents had developed a method of attack based on their overwhelming numerical superiority. . . . They placed themselves in groups, choosing wooden spots in such a way as to envelop their enemy, seeking to crush him by weight of numbers.5

  Héedouville, the French commander, was a veteran of the Vendée campaign, and if he found coping with the insurgents so difficult, it still stemmed principally, their greater numerical strength notwithstanding, from their not behaving like Chouans. After Toussaints treacherous arrest by the French, the movement degenerated into a race war culminating in the massacre of the white inhabitants of the island.

  The Latin American wars of independence involved much guerrilla fighting; "pure" guerrilleros were rare, but then regular warfare was also quite irregular by European standards. More often than not the campaigns consisted of a mixture of regular and guerrilla warfare. Among the more prominent guerrilla bands were the montoneros of the La Plata region, the Almeydas of New Granada, the guerrilla bands of Central and Upper Peru, and the units commanded by José Antonio Paez in Venezuela.6 They varied greatly in outlook and social background; the montoneros were mostly gauchos following their local leaders, the Almeydas were the private army of a Creole clan, while the guerrillas of Central Peru consisted similarly of middle-class Creoles and Mestizos whose property and families had suffered at the hands of royalists and who sought revenge. "They were joined by delinquents, by bandit chiefs and their followers . . . who used guerrilla operations as a means of personal plunder."7

  Paez, one of Bolivar 's most able commanders, started his military career in mid-1809 when, while driving a herd along a highway in Venezuela, he encountered a slave revolt. He joined them, became their leader, and eventually had some two thousand lancers under his command. These savage bands were held together by no ardent idealism or ideology but simply by the prospect of plunder, a fact freely recognized by their leaders. Bolivar temporarily dominated the guerrilla bands by promising them land after victory, but they still went on robbing and plundering without waiting for war's end.8 Slogans such as "independence" meant not so much national independence and unity, but independence from Spanish law and taxation; it was a rebellion against authority in general and it resulted in the transitory emergence of dozens of small, short-lived, semianarchist republics. Their revolutionary convictions were not always very deep; the great guerrilla leader Bores went over to the royalists from one day to the next without much compunction. The contribution of the guerrilleros to the war effort was on the whole a modest one, with the possible exception of Venezuela, where Bolívar succeeded in coordinating their operations during the crucial years. What the guerrillas lacked was not so much arms and provisions — the Spaniards were not much better equipped — but staying power, elementary discipline, cohesion, and leadership. They operated haphazardly, and whether, on balance, more for harm than for good remains debatable. Looked at in historical perspective, their chief significance lay in their setting a pattern for many years to come. A few hundred peons led by their hacendado or a local caudillo armed with machetes would rise against the local government; there were many variations on this theme, but usually those who followed him were mainly out for plunder. The political label was of importance, for it provided immunity against capital punishment.9 European commanders quickly adjusted themselves to local customs. Garibaldi's biographer'notes, quite matter-of-factly, that his hero "remained for 36 hours in Gualeguaychu [in 1845]. For the inhabitants, they were 36 hours of terror, about which their descendants still speak to day. Garibaldi's men looted the town, causing great destruction."10 In Italy, Garibaldi would have shot soldiers found looting.

  Guerrilla warfare frequently was the high road to political and economic power; yesterday's brigand could well become tomorrow's government minister, amassing a fortune on the way. The spoils were, of course, shared with his followers and the great prize was always land. This is not to say that patriotism or social protest were totally absent as motivating forces; as far as the leaders were concerned, political goals and ambitions always featured prominently. But, on the whole, political motivation played a lesser role among guerrilla movements in Latin America than in Europe.

  There were some signal exceptions, above all the Mexican revolts between 1810 and 1815 led by two clergymen, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and José Maria Morelos.11 They fought not only for national independence, but also for far-reaching social reforms, such as the abolition of the tribute paid by the Indians, and the establishment of a republic. While the bulk of the army — "Generalissimo" Hidalgo had an army of sixty thousand — was Indian, the leadership was Creole (native-born of European descent), and the religious element was a factor of considerable importance. (The battle cry was "Long live our Lady of Guadalupe, death to bad government.") Hidalgo and Morelos were eventually captured by the royalist forces and executed. Both were posthumously rehabilitated; Hidalgo has forever been inscribed in the history of his homeland as the "father of Mexican independence," Morelos had a province named after him, which one hundred years later was to become the scene of Zapata's operations. Great popular leaders, their genius was not in the military field, and it is doubtful whether it is really permissible to regard them as guerrilla commanders at all, as some historians have done. They would, in fact, have fared much better if they had applied guerrilla tactics instead of besieging (or defending) big cities. The forces under them, however, were more numerous than the enemy's and the temptation must have been great to defeat the other side in a few decisive battles rather than in protracted partisan warfare. But irregulars cannot as a rule seek conclusive battles; the failure to accept this simple truth has spelled doom time and again to popular movements in Latin America just as in other parts of the world.

  F
ifty years later, Mexico again became the scene of a major war. The Spanish and French armies which invaded Mexico in 1861-1862 encountered resistance from Mexican irregulars almost from the beginning (the blockade of Santa Cruz by Juarez's forces). The French contingents were led by veterans of the North African campaigns such as Bazaine, and before long counterguerrilla units were set up under the command of Stoecklin. Their anabasis to Mexico City was beset by every manner of hazard — rain, bad roads, shortage of supplies, yellow fever — but the capital was taken in June 1863, and by the end of the following year about three-quarters of the country was in their hands and they controlled all major cities. Only the state of Guerrero was still held by Juarez. Juarez's forces, weak as they were, adhered to time-honored guerrilla tactics, harassing the French lines of communications, refusing to accept battle, always retiring, biding their time.12

  The subsequent course of events need not be retold in detail. Napoleon III decided to withdraw his forces in January 1866; poor Maximilian, a charming man but weak and vacillating, lost control and was eventually captured and executed. Napoleon's decision came not because his army had been defeated; their losses had been insubstantial. The Mexican forces improved somewhat in the course of the war and they received considerable help from the United States, while Escobedo, one of Juarez's generals, was the first to use the machine gun in battle. But the Mexican soldiers, often unpaid, lacked both training and fighting spirit, the various guerrilla units would not coordinate their efforts, and individual marksmanship was poor. Not that French morale was very high either; Porfirio Díaz, subsequently president of Mexico, had three hundred French deserters in his little army. During the last phase of the war there was a tacit understanding between the French and Profirio Díaz that the former should not be molested during the evacuation. The French, in short, suffered no military defeat and the Mexicans were lucky in that the French emperor changed his mind in midcourse about what was anyway for him no more than a minor adventure. Maximilian could have fortified his position by calling for equal treatment to be granted to the Indians and by building up a new regular army, but he failed to do either. Having outlasted the enemy, Juarez returned in triumph to his capital.

  It would be tedious to enumerate the long series of armed conflicts in Latin America during the second half of the nineteenth century. There was much guerrilla activity in Venezuela in the 1860s; when Crespo entered Caracas in 1892, his forces were composed mainly of guerrilla units. Again, in the Brazilian civil war in the 1890s, guerrilla warfare was the rule rather than the exception; passing reference need only be made to Gumercindo's hit-and-run attacks, and his raid of seven hundred and fifty miles to Santa Cater-ina.

  The Peruvian general Andrés Caceres fought a three-year guerrilla war against the victorious Chilean army in the Andean regions of Peru from 1881 to 1883 (Campaña de la Brefia); this campaign was later studied in the Austrian war academy as an excellent illustration of successful mountain warfare.13 But the most protracted guerrilla war took place in Cuba; it lasted from 1868 to 1878 and again flared up in January 1895, leading eventually to war between Spain and the United States. In the Cuban war more than national independence was involved; the neglect of the smaller farmers was an important issue, the question of slavery being another. Like all Cuban guerrilla wars including Castro's campaign, Oriente, the eastern province of the island, was the central scene of operations. The rebels numbered some ten to twenty thousand men and, unable to face the Spanish army in open combat, engaged for the most part in acts of sabotage. "It was less a war than a breakdown of order . ., a formalization of the violent banditry that had gone on through much of the early 19th century."14 Two outstanding leaders emerged, the mulatto Antonio Maceo, and Maximo Gómez. This inconclusive war lasted for a decade; despite some initial successes, the rebels failed to raise the standard of revolt in prosperous western Cuba. As the war continued, dissension spread in the guerrillas' ranks, and by concentrating strong forces and conceding some of the rebels' demands, the Spanish induced them to accept an armistice.

  When, two decades later, fighting broke out again, the old military leaders Máximo Gómez and Maceo were still very much to the fore. But the inspiration for the independence movement now came largely from the ideologists, from José Martí most especially in his North American exile. Nonetheless, the moment fighting started, effective control passed into the hands of the guerrilla captains. As in the 1870s, the insurgents depended to a great extent on money and arms from the United States. In contrast to the desultory fighting of 1868, the guerrilla war in 1895 was far more ferocious; the insurgents were stronger—numbering about thirty thousand men organized in some thirty bands. They threatened to burn down the plantations and to make the island uninhabitable. Eventually, some forty thousand guerrilleros faced eighty-five thousand Spanish troops, of which, however, only about half were battle-ready, the rest suffering from yellow fever and other diseases. (About two thousand Spaniards were to die in battle but many more of this or that tropical sickness.) The war went badly for the Spanish until General Valeriano Weyler, the toughest and most effective Spanish soldier of his time, was made commander in chief. Weyler responded to terror with counterterror, sealing off the eastern part of the country more or less effectively by means of ditches, walls and blockhouses; he used reconcentraciones (concentration camps) to remove civilians from the battle areas. From a purely military point of view, Weyler was winning the war by 1896, but it was by no means total victory and, as far as Spain itself was concerned, the war had gone on for too long already and become too costly. The economy of Cuba, above all the sugar crop, was in ruins under the double onslaught of guerrillas and the government troops. There was anti-Weyler campaign in Madrid, and, more damaging yet, he had an exceedingly bad press in America, preparing the ground for U.S. military intervention in Cuba. Eventually Weyler had to go and Blanco, his successor, was easily defeated by the American expeditionary force in 1898. Antonio Maceo was killed in the fighting, but Gomez lived to become a general and to enter Havana at the head of his troops. As peace came, the politicans once more took over and the guerrilla army was disbanded.15

  Guerrilla warfare in Latin American history took many forms: wars of national liberation; struggles of landless peasants and small farmers against large landowners; fighting between local chieftains for political power. A remarkable example of the Vendean type of guerrilla warfare against political and social change with strong religious undertones is the affair of Antonio Conselheiro in Canudos.16 Conselheiro was a primitive mystic who fell out with the Church authorities and attacked the Brazilian Republic because it had arrogated to itself jurisdiction over marriage and burial. He regarded the victory of the Republic in 1889 and the proclamation of religious tolerance as the work of Satan in the guise of Masonry, Protestantism and Positivism, about which admittedly, he had only the haziest notions. In 1893, at the age of sixty, he decided to seek refuge in a little place in the Brazilian hinterland about two hundred miles from Bahia where the police would never be able to find him. This was Canudos, formerly an old cattle ranch which had become a miserable shantytown of several thousand inhabitants virtually cut off from the outside world. Two Italian Capucine monks who visited Conselheiro and his followers in May 1895 reported that it was the hotbed of a dangerous political as well as a religious sect. The Rio de Janeiro republicans came to look on it as the center of restorationist plots which had to be destroyed.17 In truth, Conselheiro's followers, thejaguncos (a term originally meaning ruffians), were not so much fanatic royalists as adherents of a messianic folk movement, caring only about their "simpleminded, visionary religion, a crude mixture of Catholic rites, African witchcraft and Indian superstition." The population was made up, according to da Cunha, of the most disparate elements, ranging from the fervent believer who had voluntarily given up all the conveniences of life elsewhere, to the solitary bandit who arrived with his blunderbuss on his shoulder in search of a new field for his exploits. "Under the spell of
the place, all these elements were welded into one uniform and homogeneous community, an unconscious brute mass."18

  The clash with the authorities began with a quarrel about cheap building material for a church which the jaguncos had appropriated; a small force of about one hundred soldiers sent out by the governor of Bahia was surprised by the rebels and routed. The governor asked for federal help, but a second expeditionary force of some five hundred and forty men fared even worse. They were ill prepared for a long march through unfamiliar country and faced the accurate fire of snipers whom they could not even see in the impenetrable undergrowth: