Document created: 4 June 04
Air University Review, September-October 1971

Urban Insurgency in Latin America

Charles A. Russell 

Major Robert E. Hildner

In several areas of Latin America, one of the most interesting developments in recent years has been the steady movement of insurgent forces from a rural to an urban environment. Whether nationalist or Marxist in ideology, these guerrilla elements appear to have abandoned serious efforts to create insurgent bases in the Countryside. Rejecting the dictates of leading guerrilla theoreticians such as Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and Régis Debray—all of whom urged the creation of rural—based guerrilla cadres—many insurgents of the late 1960s and early 1970s have opted more and more for urban terrorism. Instead of a rural guerrilla force capable of expanding and, in the words of Mao, ultimately “surrounding the cities,” present-day insurgents have reversed the sequence of events. Operations are now initiated and developed within a nation’s urban areas, turning these and not the countryside into the real focus of any revolutionary activity.

As an interesting by-product of this strategic change, the peasantry, traditionally considered the backbone of any guerrilla movement, has been largely discarded in favor of urban-dwelling, politically conscious, and Marxist-influenced middle-class students and intellectuals. This tendency seems clear from the experiences in many Latin American states over the past five years, and there is no indication of any change. Thus it would appear useful to consider why a strategy so radically different from the traditional guerrilla strategy should have been adopted, whether it may be expected to continue into the future, and the impact it may have on currently accepted tactics and techniques for countering insurgent operations.

The change to an urban focus appears attributable to a combination of factors. Primary among these are an increasingly sparse rural population resulting from continued and accelerated urbanization; the presence in most metropolitan areas of a growing, articulate, and quickly aroused cadre of students and young intellectuals willing to embrace terrorism and urban insurgency as the most effective means for toppling governments they consider corrupt and ineffective; the nonadaptability to urbanized societies of guerrilla tactics created, designed, and tested for use among a dense rural population; and the conspicuous failure of recent rural-based efforts at guerrilla warfare and the significant success achieved by urban terrorist groups.

While urbanization has long characterized many nations of Latin America,¹ within recent years this trend has accelerated, Rural dwellers formerly willing to remain part of an often semifeudal agrarian society are now being drawn to the urban areas in increasing numbers. Products of the so-called “transistor revolution,” these people have become aware of the possibility for a better life in the cities. Attracted by the prospects of employment, improved living conditions, and the opportunity to create a better life for their children, many migrants from rural areas see the cities as a means of escape from the grinding poverty of the Latin American countryside.  Further stimulating this rural-to-urban population flow is a land tenure system which vests 90 percent of all arable land in the hands of less than 10 percent of the people.³ Denied any real possibility of owning land and often tied to a large landholder through the system of debt peonage, many rural dwellers take the first available opportunity to migrate toward the city. When these pressures are combined with the area’s generally inhospitable rural geography (tropical jungle, arid upland plains, mountains, etc.), the net result is an underpopulated countryside (often with less than two or three persons per square kilometer) and overpopulated urban centers.⁴

Today Latin America as a whole is more than 50 percent urban. Many nations (for example, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela) have metropolitan populations ranging from 57 to 70 percent of the national total.⁵ In some countries (Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay) one or two cities alone account for 42 to 47 percent of the total population.⁶ Within highly urbanized nations such as these, rural-based insurgency stands relatively little chance of success, simply because the countryside lacks the population base to support it. Whether would-be insurgents follow the precepts of Mao, wherein guerrillas supposedly merge with the peasantry, or support the Castro-Guevara-Debray thesis, in which a mobile guerrilla “foco” rejects close ties with any peasant group,⁷ both schools of insurgency theory look ultimately to the rural populace as a prime source of recruits and logistic support. In the sparsely populated Latin American countryside, assistance of this type simply is not available. The plaintive comments of Guevara in his now famous diary, covering the l966-67 Cuban-backed insurgent effort in Bolivia, testify clearly to the critical nature of this support.

In this same context, as is evident from the experiences of insurgent leaders in many Latin American countries, including Guatemala, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Colombia, the rural population is sparse and primarily Indian in ethnic background. Innately conservative and extremely suspicious of any influences from outside the local community, these Indian peasants are often an extremely difficult group for the guerrillas to influence and motivate. The sudden appearance of numerous armed strangers in their midst frequently leads to peasant notification of local authorities. Thus, the ultimate result of efforts to influence these peasants is often the arrival of governmental counterinsurgency forces rather than the creation of support for the insurgent cadre.

Closely correlated with the urbanization trend is a concentration of radical student and intellectual elements within most metropolitan centers. Latin American cities, traditionally the focus of education and intellectual activity, today contain the major universities, most of the literate citizenry, and the vast majority of the student population.⁸ Educated primarily in the law, humanities, and medicine, the students frequently have difficulty integrating into a society that needs technicians, engineers, and skilled artisans. These students, the product of a university system still strongly influenced by Marxist economic and political doctrine, form a highly articulate and volatile group. When their political radicalism and desire for needed social change are coupled with frequent governmental lethargy and inactivity, they become ideal targets for recruitment into revolutionary groups. Often students see organizations like the Tupamaros in Uruguay, the Popular Revolutionary Vanguard (VPR) in Brazil, the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) in Venezuela, and the Liberation Armed Forces in Argentina as the only effective media for initiating change and eliminating governments they consider corrupt and ineffective.

As the students are mainly from an urban background (at the University of Buenos Aires 76 percent of the students are from the City of Buenos Aires), ⁹ they are able to function very effectively within an urban terrorist environment. Familiar with the city and its customs, they meld easily into metropolitan-based insurgent groups; their effective integration into a rural guerrilla organization is substantially more difficult. In this connection, the comments of guerrilla leaders are informative, Guevara states in his diary that the city-bred insurgents joining his forces in Bolivia had to overcome not only the difficult physical adjustments required for survival in the bush but also wide cultural, linguistic, and even class differences between themselves and the peasantry. Similar problems plagued urban-educated members of the FALN in Venezuela, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) in Peru, and the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) in Guatemala.

In addition to functioning more effectively in an urban than in a rural situation, the students and young intellectuals who form the cadre of most metropolitan insurgent groups find innumerable other advantages in an urban environment. Among the more significant are easy access to

—terrorist targets: foreign embassies, diplomatic personnel, local government and police officials, business firms, etc. Recent operations of the Uruguayan Tupamaros and the Brazilian VPR illustrate the relative ease with which diplomats can be kidnapped or assaulted and foreign businesses destroyed. In contrast to rural guerrillas who may have little impact upon the central government for some time, kidnapping a diplomat or destroying a foreign business immediately focuses world attention on the insurgents and their demands. Of equal importance is the fact that such acts embarrass the government and undermine public confidence in its ability to provide protection for its citizens and for the important income-producing tourist trade.

—funds  to support insurgent operations. Readily available for robberies and assaults are banks and foreign business firms. In attacks on these targets the Tupamaros forces alone have netted more than six million dollars.¹⁰ In contrast, the rural guerrilla frequently has to obtain financing through long and often insecure channels.

—food. Whereas the rural guerrilla often has to live off the land, as Guevara did in Bolivia, the food source for an urban insurgent is often as close as the nearest local market place.

—medical supplies and services. For the rural insurgent, medical supplies are always in short supply. For the urban terrorist, pharmaceuticals are readily available for purchase or theft, and sometimes medical students at local universities provide skilled surgical assistance when needed.

—arms. Even in such basic areas as arms procurement, the urban guerrilla has a significant advantage. Whereas the rural insurgent normally must obtain additional weapons from an enemy killed in combat, or through shipments smuggled into the Country from abroad, the cities offer his urban counterpart innumerable opportunities to obtain weapons. When these cannot be purchased openly or through the black market, the urban guerrilla can attack police stations, armories, gun clubs, and similar lucrative targets.

intelligence. In the critical field of intelligence collection, the student-manned urban terrorist organization also is at a substantial advantage over the rural guerrilla. Composed primarily of individuals from middle- or sometimes upper-class families, student groups generally have personal or family connections extending into many echelons of national government. Through these associations and those of friends and supporters, they are often able to obtain quite accurate information on governmental countering operations.¹¹

While urbanization and the ready availability of a radicalized student force in metropolitan areas have been important factors in the movement of insurgent cadres from the countryside to the cities, also significant has been the failure of guerrilla theoreticians to make those tactical and strategic modifications necessary to take advantage of this development. In general, this failure is attributable to an apparent inability on the part of the Castroites (Guevara-Debray) and the Maoists to understand that experiences wholly valid in one geographical and demographic situation may be totally invalid in another. Thus, both the Cuban and Chinese Communist strategies were predicated upon the development of a rural guerrilla movement in a densely populated countryside.¹² By insisting on the development of rural insurgencies and dogmatically applying their experiences to nations with an underpopulated countryside, the Communists have experienced a series of resounding failures ranging from the disastrous Cuban-led guerrilla “invasion” of northern Argentina in 1963 to the breakup of the Cuban-backed Venezuelan and Guatemalan insurgencies, the failure of the 1965 Maoist and Castroite effort in Peru, and the Cuban fiasco in Bolivia which resulted in Guevara’s death.

In connection with these failures, it is interesting to note that, despite vigorous indorsement of rural-based insurgencies by the Communist strategists of both China and Cuba, these two powers split decisively on the overall strategy for implementing such operations. Severely criticizing the inadequate preparations made by Castroites in both Peru and Bolivia, the Chinese have chided the Cubans for failing first to create several secure base areas to support guerrilla operations (a concept integral to Maoist guerrilla philosophy and expressly rejected by Castro, Guevara, and Debray); for failing to give the peasantry sufficient political indoctrination; and for failing to create an effective insurgent support apparatus through a united front of the peasants, workers, and poorer bourgeoisie.¹³

Convinced that their philosophical approach was sound, however, the Cubans devoted little effort to a study of these factors or the basic geographic and demographic situation in which an insurgency was to be created. Rather they continued to insist on the primacy of their concept of rural over urban insurgency and the fact that cities were the deathbed of revolution and could never be its focal point.¹⁴ Nevertheless, as is clear to any observer of the Latin American scene, the opposite is true: rural insurgency has steadily declined, while its urban counterpart continues to grow in scope and intensity.

With available evidence indicating a continued increase in city-based terrorism in Latin America, can this trend be expected to continue well into the 1970s? If so, will it require a change in current counterinsurgency techniques, which are now focused largely on operations against rural guerrillas? The answer to both questions seems to be yes.

Based upon Cuban revolutionary doctrine, which has undergone relatively little change in recent years, guerrilla warfare remains the accepted medium for achieving rapid and lasting social change within the hemisphere. While heretofore those aspects of this doctrine concerned with insurgency have stressed the primacy of rural over urban operations, this position has changed significantly within the past two years. Quite probably this change was generated by a variety of influences, prominent among which must have been (1) the dismal record of Cuban-supported rural insurgent operations over the past ten years; (2) the contrasting success of urban terrorism carried out by radical revolutionary groups; and (3) the recent ascent to power, via the electoral process, of the Allende government in Chile. With the success of Allende’s via pacifica, which had been a frequent target for Cuban criticism, and the failure of its own rural guerrilla strategy, the Castro regime seems to have reassessed its position of supporting only rural insurgent operations.

One of the first indicators of this reassessment was Cuban endorsement of the urban terror tactics of the FAR in Guatemala, tactics which in 1968 resulted in the death or wounding of several officers assigned to the U.S. Military Advisory Group and later the assassination of U.S. Ambassador John Gordon Mein. This endorsement of urban terrorism accelerated in 1970 with the publication of Carlos Marighella’s “Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla” in the January-February issue of Tricontinental.¹⁵ As the official organ of the executive secretariat of the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL), an organization headquartered in Havana and dominated by Cuba, Tricontinental purveys the “official” Cuban line of insurgent strategy and warfare. Marighella, a dissident former member of the Brazilian Communist Party and founder of the urban terrorist National Liberating Action (ALN), was well known for his opposition to the Cuban thesis of rural guerrilla warfare, Accordingly, the printing of Manghella’s “Mini-Manual” in Tricontinental constitutes a substantial change in Cuban thinking as well as an official public blessing and endorsement of the new tactics. Further, since the “Mini-Manual” now serves as the urban terrorist’s equivalent of Guevara’s  “revered” text on rural guerrilla warfare, its publication in Tricontinental carries an even greater significance.

Without batting an ideological eye, Cuba continued its endorsement of urban terror tactics on through the remainder of 1970 and into 1971. While still paying some lip service to the few largely inactive, sputtering, and ineffective rural insurgencies (in portions of Colombia, Venezuela, and Bolivia), the press kept the emphasis on the importance of urban terrorism. Following publication of Marighella’s “Mini-Manual,” the next issue of Tricontinental (March-April l970) contained a 15-page article on the Tupamaros in Uruguay.¹⁵ Although strongly endorsing the efforts of this group, the author endeavors to show that their operations are simply an offshoot or urban adaptation of the Guevara-Debray thesis of a rural guerrilla “foco.” Despite the fact that the two concepts are in no way similar and notwithstanding express rejection by the Tupamaros of the Guevara-Debray viewpoint, the author still tries to meld the two in order to show that the Tupamaros are acting in accordance with Cuban guerrilla theory. Thus, although Cuba has now strongly endorsed the utility of urban terrorism as a major element in guerrilla warfare, the Castro government is not yet fully prepared to admit that its past support for rural-based guerrilla operations was a serious error. Instead, it would rather show urban insurgency as merely an expansion on the basic strategy of guerrilla warfare already laid down by Guevara and Debray in their “foco” concept.

While using such semantic sleight of hand in trying to take credit for successes of the Tupamaros and other urban insurgent groups, Cuba has strongly supported these groups throughout 1970 and so far in 1971. In the pages of Tricontinental as well as those of Granma and Verde Olivo (organs of the Cuban Communist Party and Army respectively), the Castro regime has continued to praise the efforts of such varied urban insurgent groups as the Armed Commandos of Liberation in Puerto Rico, the urban-oriented sector of the Revolutionary Armed forces in Guatemala, the Popular Revolutionary Vanguard in Brazil, and the Argentine Revolutionary Movement. When Cuban assistance and support (which easily could include training and funding) to these and similar groups are combined with the natural advantages already possessed by most urban insurgent groups, it would appear more than likely that this form of guerrilla warfare will continue to expand in scope and intensity well into the 1970s.

While urban terrorism unquestionably poses a very real and current problem for several Latin American governments, the less evident but equally effective technique of peaceful penetration by Communists into a nation’s social and governmental structure should not be ignored. The recent electoral success of the Communist-Socialist front in Chile has done much to restore life to this technique, which recently had been under severe criticism by the more activist revolutionaries of Cuban and Chinese Communist persuasion. Strongly endorsed by the “orthodox” Moscow-oriented Communist parties of Latin America, this less spectacular method of operation may over the long run pose an equal or greater danger to Latin American democracy than the current emphasis on urban terrorism.

As the shift from rural to urban-based insurgency continues, it will have a significant impact on current counterinsurgency strategy and tactics. Virtually all current counterinsurgency doctrine is formulated on the premise that counterinsurgent forces will be fighting a rural-based guerrilla movement whose basic strategy follows the Maoist dictum of first taking the countryside and then engulfing the cities. The counterinsurgent strategy developed to meet this threat involves the employment of conventional military forces to deny the guerrillas access to their external sources of supply, to expel their armed forces from a selected geographic area, and to establish military control over that area. Additional aspects of this strategy include eliminating the infrastructure or underground organization within the area which has supported the guerrilla and then, through a combined program of pacification, civic action, and psychological warfare, winning the support of the populace for the counterinsurgent cause so they will actively participate in continued denial of the area to the insurgent. An integral and central part of this overall strategy is clearing and holding successive amounts of terrain and a continuing effort by the counterinsurgent forces to draw the guerrillas into a position where they must engage in conventional military action. Conventional military action allows the superior firepower of the counterinsurgent armed forces to be brought to bear with maximum effectiveness, thus insuring the destruction of the military forces of the guerrilla movement.

Conventional counterinsurgency tactics and techniques, such as search and destroy and cordon and search operations, air interdiction and air mobility, isolation of the guerrilla from the population through the establishment of fortified villages or hamlets, and other similar programs--all have been developed in response to insurgency that is primarily rural-based. Even those programs designed to identify and neutralize the insurgent infrastructure, such as the Phung Hoang program in Vietnam, are of secondary importance in relation to the main goals of destroying the insurgents’ armed forces and winning the support of the people.¹⁷

While these tactics and techniques are valid and have proven effective in dealing with rural-based insurgencies, it takes little imagination to see they are almost totally ineffective against urban insurgents who are so enmeshed in the population that it is virtually impossible to identify, isolate, and neutralize them. Conventional military forces, then, even those trained in specialized counterinsurgency techniques, are ineffective in that situation because they cannot deny the guerrilla terrain, they cannot isolate him from the population, and they cannot force him into a position where they can employ their most effective weapon—superior firepower.

Those adjunctive programs designed to win “the hearts and minds” of the people are similarly of limited effectiveness because the need for popular support is not as critical to the urban insurgent as it is to the rural-based guerrilla. Since the urban guerrilla does not depend on the population at large to any great extent for food, arms, medical supplies, money, or intelligence, its support is not a prerequisite for success. In fact, the urban insurgent may well be able to operate effectively even if the bulk of the urban population opposes him, since it is as difficult for the population in any given urban area to determine who is guerrilla as it is for the counterinsurgent forces. This has been evident in the inability of various Latin American nations to locate and rescue the victims of guerrilla kidnappings, despite the victim’s and his captors continued presence in the urban environment. Operational effectiveness in the absence of widespread popular support is illustrated by the Tupamaros in Uruguay, who draw their support primarily from intellectual, student, and upper-middle-class groups rather than from the middle and lower classes which constitute the bulk of the urban population.

If, then, regular military forces employing traditional counterinsurgency tactics and techniques designed to combat rural guerrillas are either ineffective or cannot profitably be employed against an urban insurgency, the burden of combating the urban guerrilla movement fans on the local metropolitan police and those internal security or paramilitary forces which arc responsible to some degree for the exercise of the police function. In effect, counterinsurgency becomes a police problem, not a military problem. Unfortunately, most urban police departments, not only in Latin America but in most major cities throughout the underdeveloped world, are unprepared to cope with urban insurgency of any significant proportions. Small in numbers, often underpaid, ill-equipped, and poorly trained, the police are nearly overwhelmed by the task of maintaining a semblance of law and order in urban areas swollen beyond capacity by the influx of a rootless peasantry escaping from the grinding poverty of the countryside. Such police departments have neither the capability nor the resources needed to carry out a successful counterinsurgency program.

In combating an urban insurgency, regardless of whether it emanates from the left or right of the political spectrum, the role of intelligence is paramount. The success of any urban counterinsurgency program is tied directly to success of the intelligence effort because the urban insurgent holds no terrain and maintains no formally constituted conventional military forces. His organization is essentially covert and clandestine and normally is highly compartmentalized as a security measure whereby each person’s knowledge of the underground structure is restricted to that which is necessary for him to perform his function. This is designed to prevent a roll-up of the entire organization if a member is captured and turns informant or if any element of the organization is penetrated by security forces. The urban guerrilla, able to move with relative freedom, capable of plausibly explaining his presence in virtually any part of the city, and possessing a natural and legitimate cover for his activities, is extremely difficult to identify and isolate. To attack him successfully requires a successful attack on his underground structure. Thus the counterinsurgent must depend on his intelligence to tell him who the insurgent is, where he is located, and what his plans, intentions, and capabilities are.

All this information, essential for the successful neutralization of the urban insurgent movement, becomes available only through a comprehensive and sophisticated intelligence program that penetrates the insurgent organization at every level. Most police departments and internal security agencies often lack, among other things, both the training and experience necessary for the conduct of a successful intelligence program simply because, until faced with the task of combating an urban insurgency, there was little need for them to have any more than a rudimentary knowledge of intelligence techniques and methodology. Until now, police departments and internal security agencies needed only low-level informants who could provide information related almost exclusively to criminal matters or to surveillance of relatively overt political opposition groups. This is no longer the case. To counter urban insurgency effectively requires a massive intelligence effort, the most important aspect of which is the use of reliable, carefully selected, and well-trained informants who can and will penetrate the urban guerrilla movement and provide the information necessary for its neutralization. The training required to identify, assess, recruit, train, manage, and utilize such informants far exceeds even the most sophisticated intelligence training normally given such departments and agencies.

If Latin American countries are going to be faced with increasing or intensified urban insurgency in the coming decade, there must be a major change in the type of counterinsurgency training and assistance given them. Rather than concentrate on improving the quality and size of their conventional military forces and gearing training in counterinsurgency tactics and techniques to cope with rural-based insurgency₀ emphasis and priority must be placed on improving the quality and effectiveness of their urban police departments and those other internal security agencies which will bear the brunt of the urban counterinsurgency effort. The size of the police and internal security forces must be increased significantly; salaries must be kept comparable to civilian pay so as to attract qualified personnel; equipment, particularly communications equipment, must be modernized, mobility vastly improved, and inexpensive but efficient information storage and retrieval systems developed.

Training should be greatly expanded, particularly in those areas of direct usefulness in countering urban insurgency, such as intelligence, counterintelligence, crowd and riot control, and psychological warfare. Serious consideration should also be given to streamlining police organization and simplifying command and control over all elements engaged in the counterinsurgency program. It is essential to establish specialized intelligence components whose personnel have been intensively trained in information collection methods, including the use of technical surveillance devices, and in the techniques used to develop, recruit, train, manage, and utilize sophisticated informants. Particular attention should be given to “professionalizing” police and internal security forces, to preclude any wholesale loss of qualified personnel as a result of political changes in the government and to preclude the promotion of personnel based on political influence rather than on ability or merit. Since the police will have primary responsibility for detecting and neutralizing urban insurgency, failure to properly train and equip them to meet this responsibility will have the gravest of consequences. We firmly believe that urban insurgency cannot be defeated without a well-trained, well-equipped, and effective police department.

The importance and effectiveness of “professionalizing” the police and establishing a unified police command were demonstrated during the Venezuelan insurgency of l958-l963. The government was hampered in its attempts to cope with urban insurgency in Caracas because the city was made up of several political subdivisions, each with its own police In addition, national police responsibility was divided among three agencies—the Policía Técnica Judicial (PTJ), the Dirección General de Policía (DIGEPOL), and the Policía de Tránsito (Traffic Police). In both the PTJ and DIGEPOL, the overriding consideration in personnel selection was political loyalty and party standing. The situation improved significantly with the replacement of the officers in charge of the police academy and the personnel section of the municipal police in the latter part of 1962 and the establishment of a unified police command for the Caracas metropolitan area in mid-1963. The former head of the armed forces intelligence service was placed in charge of the new command, and a police coordination committee, embracing both national and municipal officials, was created. Both these actions had a marked impact on the capability of the Caracas police to deal with the insurgents.¹⁸

Although the primary responsibility for meeting the threat posed by urban guerrillas rests with the police and other internal security forces, this does not mean that conventional military forces have no role in combating urban insurgency. On the contrary, the military can and will play an important role in any urban counterinsurgency program; but that role, rather than being primary as in the case of rural insurgency, will be secondary and supportive of the primary role assumed by those agencies responsible for the exercise of the police function. Conventional military if forces can be used in a variety of ways support the overall counterinsurgency program. In a tactical sense, they can be used strengthen border controls to preclude outside intervention and deny the insurgent an external source of supply. They can also be used to guard fixed installations likely to be priority targets of urban guerrilla groups, assist in riot and crowd control, develop and implement highway control measures, perform civic action and public works designed to win popular support for the government, and provide military equipment and facilities to enhance police communications and mobility. In a strategic sense, conventional forces can be stationed within easy reach of urban areas, thus psychologically inhibiting the urban insurgent from resorting to unrestricted violence and terrorism for fear of military intervention.

The value of having conventional military forces in close proximity to centers of urban insurgency must be weighed against the psychological damage to the counterinsurgent cause should they be employed. One of the major advantages of combating an insurgency with police forces is that it permits counterinsurgent propaganda to treat the insurgents as nothing more than violence-prone criminals rather than as ideologically motivated revolutionaries. This criminal image is difficult to sustain once conventional forces are employed.

Perhaps the most important area in which the military can assist the police is that of training, particularly in the field of intelligence. Intelligence has always been an integral part of conventional military operations, and the military normally has experienced intelligence officers as well as training programs in-being that can readily be adapted for use by the police and internal security forces. In addition to providing training in the techniques of intelligence, experienced military intelligence and counterintelligence officers can be used to augment police intelligence units until such time as the latter have acquired the training and experience to handle it them-selves. Such use of the military would contribute materially to a fully integrated police/military counterinsurgency effort.

The prospect of increased use of urban insurgency and terrorism by subversive revolutionary groups in Latin America during the coming decade is very real. Should this pattern prove successful, we do not believe it unreasonable to anticipate its use by dissident groups in underdeveloped nations elsewhere in the world.

The advantages inherent in waging an urban-based insurgency combine to make urban insurgency extremely attractive to those groups intent on overthrowing the existing political and social order. Although countering urban insurgency is a difficult task, it is not an insurmountable one, provided existing counterinsurgency tactics and techniques are revised and emphasis is placed on equipping and training police and internal security agencies to carry the primary responsibility, with the military assuming its secondary and supportive role. As unpalatable as this may be to the military, which has long enjoyed primacy in the field of counterinsurgency, it is essential, since we doubt any urban counterinsurgency effort conducted by police and other internal security agencies can succeed without the wholehearted cooperation and support of the conventional military establishment.

Directorate of Special Investigations, Hq USAF

Notes

1.Frank Bonilla, “The Urban Worker,” in Continuity and Change in Latin America, ed. John J. Johnson (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1964).

2. For a concise discussion of the motivators involved in rural-to-urban migration, see Irving Louis Horowitz, ‘‘Electoral Politic, Urbanization and Social Development in Latin America,” in Latin American Radicalism, ed. Horowitz, de Castro, and Gerassi (New York: Vintage, 1969), pp. 140-76.

3.Thomas F. Carroll, “The Land Reform Issue in Latin America’’ in The Dynamics of Change in Latin America, ed. John D. Martz  (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965), p. 174.

4.Preston James, Latin America (New York: Odyssey Press, 1959), p. 868: “The fact is that in Latin America the thinly populated areas are becoming more thinly populated, and the areas of concentrated settlement denser. It is in the cities, or in the densely populated areas around the cities, that one finds the greatest number and variety of economic opportunities .… It is to the city, and if possible the largest city, that the countryman wants to go …this  trend toward increased urbanization, taking people away from the empty areas toward the more densely crowded spots, is a basic fact.’’

5.Horowitz, p. 147.

6. Ibid., p. 146.

7. Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp 24, 26, 41.

8. K. H. Silvert, “The University Student,’’ in Continuity and Change, pp. 206-26.

9. Ibid., p. 213.

10. El Mercurio, Santiago, Cuba, 14 November 1970, p. 1, and the Star, Washington, D.C., 14 November 1970, p. A-2. On 13 November Tupamaro elements robbed a branch office of the Bank of the Republic in Montevido, Uruguay, taking $6 million in jewels and $48,000 in cash.

11. Arriba, Madrid, Spain, 2 February 1971. p. 12.

12. Castro, for example, focused his guerrilla activity in Cuba’s Oriente Province, an area where 60.2 percent of the population is rural, the highest in Cuba. Antonio Núñez Jiménez, Geografía de Cuba (Havana: Editorial Lex, 1960), p. 191.

13. For the importance of these concepts in Maoist doctrine see Mao Tse-tung. Selected Works, Vol. II (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), pp. 93-10l, and Vol. I, pp, 13-19. For an analysts of the failure of the Peruvian insurgency see Héctor Béjar, Peru 1965: Notes on a Guerrilla Experience (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969). This book was published originally in Spanish as Peru 1956: Apuntes Sobre Una Experiencia Guerrillera.

14. Debray, pp. 68-69.

15. Tricontinental, Havana, Cuba, OSPAAAL, nr 16, January-February 1970.

16. Tricontinental, nr 17, March-April 1970, pp. 45-60.

17. Phung Hoang Advisor Handbook, Headquarters U. S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, Saigon, Republic of Vietnam, November 1970, pp. 2-3. It is interesting to note that the introduction to this handbook states that the primary operating element of the Phung Hoang program is the RVN National Police and not the military forces, although the military does have an important but primarily supportive role in the program. “Phung Hoang” is the term given to the Republic of Vietnam’s program to detect and neutralize the Viet Cong infrastructure (VCI). The VCI is the Communist shadow government which provides money, recruits, supplies, intelligence, and support of the Phung Hoang program is called “Phoenix.”

18. For an excellent analysis of the police role during the 1958-63 insurgency in Venezuela, see D. M. Condit et al., Challenge and Response in Internal Conflict, Vol. III, The Experience in Africa and Latin America  (Washington: American University, Center for Research in Social Systems, 1968), pp. 484-88.

Charles A. Russell (J. D., Georgetown University; M. A., American University) is Chief, Analysis and Dissemination Branch, Counterintelligence Division, Directorate of Special Investigations, Hq USAF, where he has served since 1951. With Major Hildner, he has lectured at Air Command and Staff Command and USAF Special Operations School on insurgency in the underdeveloped world and the role of counterintelligence in counterinsurgency.

Major Robert E. Hildner (M.S., University of Colorado) is Chief, Western Hemisphere Section, Analysis and Dissemination Branch, Counterintelligence Division, Directorate of Special Investigations, Hq USAF. He served in counterintelligence with Office of Special Investigations in Japan, 1962-65, and Commander, OSI Detachment, Da Nang Air Base, Republic of Vietnam, for a year; and preceding his current assignment was Chief, Middle East, Africa, South Asia (MEAFSA) Section of his present branch.