“January 1, 1959, when Fidel Castro triumphed, began a new era in Latin America.”1 So wrote Herbert Matthews, the New York Times reporter, three years after he interviewed Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra. Indeed, for the next three decades, the Cuban Revolution was a primary driving force of Latin American politics. Castro’s revolution ignited a wave of revolutionary activity that shook the Latin American status quo to its core, posed unprecedented levels of threat to the elites, and caused the United States to take extraordinary measures to protect its interests in the region.
In addition to concrete accomplishments and seductive style, the Cuban Revolution’s timing was another major factor in its impact. The late 1950s to early 1960s was a period of democratic governance in Latin America second only to the period from 1990 to the present; after the fall of several authoritarian regimes in the 1950s, only six of the region’s smaller countries were not governed in a reasonably democratic manner. As a result, media censorship was minimal, and freedom to demonstrate, strike, and organize new political groups, including pro-Castro parties and factions, was optimal in most of the hemisphere. The recent advent of the cheap transistor radio, which even most of the poor could afford, meant that the illiterate masses and those beyond the reach of electricity were able to learn about the revolution in Cuba and be inspired by it. Those with access to television were likely to be even more impressed.
FIDELISMO
While launching the revolutionary measures that would thoroughly transform the island, Castro simultaneously called for revolution throughout Latin America, famously threatening to “convert the cordillera (range) of the Andes to the Sierra Maestra of the hemisphere.”2 Within months of coming to power, he aided exile attacks on several dictatorships. Over the following years, he invited thousands of Latin Americans to visit the island, converting many into advocates of Cuban-style revolution. He established training facilities in Cuba for potential guerrilla fighters and funneled aid to leftist groups throughout Latin America.
The positive accomplishments in Cuba, the style of the revolution, Castro’s repeated calls to arms, and the technology and relative freedom to reach out to most Latin Americans created a climate favorable to the rise of an unprecedented wave of revolutionary activity. Herbert Matthews described this as “something new, exciting, dangerous, and infectious [that] has come into the Western Hemisphere with the Cuban Revolution.”3 That “something” was fidelismo. Fidelismo amounted to acute impatience with the status quo combined with the attitude that revolution should be pursued immediately; no excuses. As Castro put it in his 1962 Second Declaration of Havana, “The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution,” and he meant now.4
As the example of Cuba drove up demands for change, the political agenda in most Latin American countries shifted leftward, fidelista groups and publications proliferated, street demonstrations and strikes multiplied, and walls blossomed with the slogan “Cuba sí, Yánqui no.” Under the impact of the Cuban Revolution, the political party landscape changed: The more progressive elements of mainstream reformist parties such as Venezuela’s Acción Democrática (Democratic Action) and Peru’s Alizanza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) became disillusioned with reformism and broke away, forming their own fidelista groups; the Communist parties, wedded to gradualism and caution, also spun off numerous, often competing fidelista factions. Guerrilla movements were launched in Guatemala, Venezuela, Peru, and elsewhere, and existing rural guerrilla groups in Colombia embraced fidelismo.
Of all the measures that transformed Cuba, agrarian reform resonated most loudly. Over half of the Latin American population in 1960 was rural, and most were landless in countries dominated by large landed estates. The revolutionary transformation of Cuban rural society thus had enormous appeal to the land-starved of the hemisphere. In several countries, landless campesinos mobilized for land reform, in some cases driving out landowners and occupying their estates; the Brazilian Ligas Camponesas (peasant leagues) in particular constituted a major threat to the status quo.
The unprecedented degree of radicalization and mobilization threatened the stability and even the survival of civilian governments in several countries. As military commanders nervously watched pressures for change mount and civilian governments blunder or equivocate in dealing with the rise of fidelismo, they exercised their traditional tutelary role by cracking down on pro-Castro groups and overthrowing and replacing half a dozen governments by 1963. In 1964, the Brazilian military overthrew President João Goulart, whom it accused of fidelista leanings, and established a dictatorship that lasted twenty-one years and served as precedent for state terrorist regimes in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina (Chapter 11).
U.S. RESPONSES
Fidel Castro’s takeover in Cuba opened a new and dangerous theater in the Cold War, and the United States responded to the threat in a variety of ways. One thrust of U.S. policy was to bring down the Castro regime. As we have seen, the United States applied economic pressure culminating in the formal trade embargo and attempted to topple Castro militarily in the Bay of Pigs invasion. The United States honored its pledge to Moscow not to invade the island, but tried to provoke uprisings against Castro and carried out various attempts on his life. Murder plots against Castro involved poison in pens, cigars, and even a diving suit that he used. The most bizarre of the attempts to provoke rebellion involved announcing the second coming of Christ and simultaneously having a U.S. submarine surface off the coast to set off fireworks, prompting a spontaneous uprising against the anti-Christ, Castro. A CIA operative called this “elimination by illumination.” But the greater challenge to U.S. policymakers was how to prevent radical, Marxist revolution from spreading beyond Cuba.
The United States followed three basic approaches to containing Castro’s revolution. One of these was to isolate Cuba within the framework of the OAS (Organization of American States) where the United States exercised disproportionate influence. Arguing that the 1954 Declaration of Caracas (Chapter 8) required sanctioning Cuba for its embrace of Communism, the United States escalated pressure on the member states beginning with a failed 1960 initiative condemning Cuba. But as more Latin American governments were rocked by the impact of fidelismo and several were replaced by hard-line military regimes, U.S. pressure began to work. The culmination was a 1964 OAS resolution requiring all member states to break diplomatic relations and suspend all transportation and travel between their counties and Cuba; only Mexico refused to comply. Thus, Cuba lost the convenience of a physical presence in Latin America’s capitals and the immunity afforded its diplomats, while the travel restrictions discouraged all but the most committed from visiting the island. But isolation did little to reduce the most important influence that the Cuban Revolution exercised: the power of its example.
President John F. Kennedy unveiled a second response to the threat of Pan–Latin American revolution at an OAS meeting at Punta del Este, Uruguay, in August 1961. The Alliance for Progress, a U.S.-financed plan to promote structural change in Latin America, was designed to compete with the allure of Cuban-style revolutionary change. The Alliance called on Latin American governments to strengthen democracy, implement social justice, and accelerate economic development to reduce poverty—in other words, to replicate the Cuban Revolution’s accomplishments but within a framework of political democracy. The Alliance’s goals included annual economic growth of at least 2.5 percent per capita, tax reform, the elimination of adult illiteracy, and investment in health services and housing. Recognizing the great appeal of Cuba’s agrarian reform to Latin America’s rural landless population, the Alliance called for the “effective transformation … of unjust structures and systems of land tenure.”5 But asking Latin America’s elites to give up their large landed estates, pay higher taxes, and jeopardize their power by expanding democracy proved to be a chimera. Rather than pursue reform and give up their prerogatives, the elites and their military allies embraced the third U.S. response to the threat of hemispheric revolution: the military option.
The United States’ post–World War II military strategy for Latin America, imbedded in the 1947 Rio de Janeiro Treaty, was based on the concept of collective hemispheric security against aggression by the Soviet Union. But with the rise of Cuban-i nspired domestic unrest that threatened to destabilize governments, the U.S. focus shifted—in the words of Robert McNamara, President Kennedy’s secretary of defense—to combating “internal subversion designed to create dissidence and insurrection.”6 To meet this challenge, the United States doubled military aid to Latin America and initiated training in counterinsurgency warfare. Instructed by U.S. Green Berets at the School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone, which became notorious for producing dictators and death squad leaders, and at bases in the United States, Latin American officers learned to fight using the guerrillas’ own tactics: living in and off of the jungle, setting traps and ambushes, and engaging in hand-to-hand combat when necessary. Organized into elite units and instilled with a special esprit de corps, these highly trained forces often had the advantage of helicopters for rapid deployment; the latest in sophisticated, lightweight weapons; and new technologies such as infrared aerial photography that could remotely detect even small guerrilla units.
U.S. training went well beyond preparing elite units to fight guerrillas. In both formal classroom settings and informal after-hours socialization in officers’ clubs, U.S. personnel indoctrinated their Latin American counterparts in the anti-leftist, anti-Communist National Security Doctrine, a concept that reoriented military thinking away from external defense toward fighting the enemy within. This enemy was not just guerrillas, but included a much broader category of “subversives.” Officers were taught that Marxists and other fidelistas infiltrated society and lurked in political parties, schools, labor unions, the mass media, the professions, and in the progressive “liberation theology” wing of the Catholic Church (see below). As portrayed during the McCarthy era in the United States, these subversives were not only disloyal to their country, but were also amoral, devious, clever, and capable of taking over existing organizations for their own nefarious purposes. An Argentine army report from the early 1960s reflected this thinking: “The enemy is tremendously dangerous. We are not attacked from outside … but subtly undermined through all channels of the social fabric.”7 Indoctrination in National Security Doctrine would culminate in the state terrorist regimes of the 1970s and 1980s (Chapter 11).
RURAL GUERRILLA WARFARE
Guerrilla warfare took its name from the response to Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1808 invasion of Spain (Chapter 2) when, after the defeat of Spain’s army, Spanish irregulars harassed and skirmished with Napoleon’s army for several years. “Little war” (guerra, or war, modified by the diminutive) was not new in 1808: It was a strategy as old as the earliest use of unorthodox methods of fighting by weaker groups against regular armies. Prior to Castro’s victory, Latin America had experienced guerrilla warfare during the independence movements, the 1910 Mexican Revolution, and Augusto César Sandino’s fight against the U.S. Marines in Nicaragua. But it was the Cuban Revolution that popularized guerrilla warfare and made it the preferred method of insurrection.
Guerrilla warfare in Latin America has been inextricably associated with Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Although Castro led the successful guerrilla insurrection, Che wrote the book, penned additional tracts on the topic, and died leading the highest profile guerrilla campaign after Cuba’s. Published in 1960, the year after Castro came to power, Guevara’s best-felling Guerrilla Warfare broke no new theoretical ground. Rather, it is primarily a “how-to” manual claiming to be based on the Cuban experience. It describes the organization, training, supply, and operation of a guerrilla unit and is full of homilies on the physical and spiritual requirements for guerrilla fighters; advice on selecting weapons, shoes, and knapsacks; instructions for fighting the army; and descriptions of the progressive stages through which the guerrilla force should evolve on its pathway to victory.
The true importance of Che’s book and subsequent writings was their validation of the Cuban method as the correct approach for insurrection in Latin America. Guerrilla Warfare reduced the lessons of the Cuban insurrection to three axioms: “1) Popular forces can win a war against the army; 2) It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for revolution exist; the insurrection can create them; 3) In underdeveloped America, the countryside is the basic area for armed fighting.”8 The first point countered the well-founded belief that the day of caudillo uprisings was over, that only modern armies could overthrow a government. The second addressed Latin America’s Communists, who rejected revolutionary action because, according to established doctrine, the objective condition of heavy industrialization and, consequently, a large and oppressed proletariat had not yet been met in Latin America. The third axiom reinforced the Cuban guerrillas’ conviction that they deserved all the credit for defeating Batista, regardless of the role of the urban resistance.
While clearly encouraging Latin Americans to pursue guerrilla warfare, Che also warned that the struggle would be long and hard, even predicting that “many shall perish” in the cause of revolution. He admitted that the Cuban guerrillas had had advantages that later followers of the model would not enjoy, among them the “telluric force called Fidel Castro” and the fact that the Cuban elites and the United States, caught off guard, had not anticipated a guerrilla victory and subsequent revolution.9 Yet, Che was not entirely candid in his message to would-be guerrillas: As often occurs when the victors in a struggle write the history, they claim a disproportionate amount of credit for success. Explicit in his writings is the idea that the guerrillas alone were responsible for the victory. This argument omits the fact that without the fierce urban resistance that tied Batista’s forces down and allowed Castro’s guerrilla force to develop virtually unopposed in the Sierra Maestra, Fidel Castro would likely be but a footnote in Cuban history. While stating that “the struggles of the city masses of organized workers should not be underrated,” Guerrilla Warfare devotes no more than 2 percent of its text to the so-called external front, or the urban resistance which, it adds, must be subordinate to the rural guerrilla leadership.10 Thus in lionizing the rural guerrillas and denigrating the contributions of the urban fighters, Che not only distorted the history of the anti-Batista struggle, but also presented a flawed model to the revolutionaries of Latin America—one that would lead many to their deaths.
A rash of guerrilla actions broke out in the first couple of years following Castro’s victory. These were quixotic ventures mounted by idealists who thought that packing a gun and a sandwich and heading for the jungle would bring victory. By 1962, better conceived and organized guerrilla movements appeared in several countries. Combating these insurrections required major governmental commitments of resources and troops, and while insurgencies in Venezuela and Peru were readily defeated, the Guatemalan guerrillas continued to fight until 1996. In Colombia, rural conflict reaching back to the late nineteenth century had been rekindled by political developments in the 1940s, resulting in a phenomenon known as La Violencia. Under the impact of the Cuban Revolution, the two main guerrilla groups—the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces) and the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army)—embraced fidelismo and revolutionary objectives. While never threatening to topple the national government, the Colombian guerrillas took control of large amounts of territory and continued fighting well into the twenty-first century.
While these guerrilla movements failed to overthrow governments and carry out revolutions, the authority on guerrilla warfare remained deskbound in Cuba, serving first as president of the National Bank and then, from 1961 to 1965, as minister of industry. Frustrated by the failure of Castro’s industrialization initiative and by the Latin American guerrillas’ lack of success, Che left Cuba in 1965 to pursue his true vocation as a revolutionary fighter. After spending a few months with guerrillas in the Congo—another frustrating experience—he returned to Cuba in March 1966, ready to launch a plan that he and Castro had been developing.
At this point, after seven years of vigorously promoting revolution in Latin America, Castro and Guevara could claim no successes; indeed, the prospects for revolution appeared to be dimming. But true to his character and consistent with his past behavior, Castro responded to adversity by setting a truly maximalist goal: continent-wide, even worldwide revolution. He and Che reasoned that with the United States’ deepening involvement in Vietnam—nearly two hundred thousand troops by the end of 1965 and growing—the outbreak of revolutionary movements throughout the developing world could further tie down U.S. military forces, eventually stretching them to the breaking point and thus dealing a death blow to what they saw as Yankee imperialism. Che called this breathtakingly ambitious plan “two, three, or many Vietnams.” To develop support for his initiative, Castro convened progressive governments and movements from Latin America, Africa, and Asia in the January 1966 Tricontinental Congress.
The Latin American part of the global plan was an extension of the Cuban guerrilla experience. After seventeen months of training and building his forces in the Sierra Maestra, Castro had opened a second front under his brother Raúl, and later two additional fronts in central Cuba—a strategy that led to victory. Castro and Guevara planned to replicate that successful strategy on a much grander scale: Che would launch a guerrilla movement, staffed by veteran Cuban fighters, that would attract revolutionaries from throughout Latin America. After training with the master, those revolutionaries would return to their countries and establish new fronts in a Pan–Latin American guerrilla war.
Despite some well-founded misgivings, the two men settled on Bolivia as the site of the initial guerrilla movement, largely for its strategic value to the continental revolution. Bolivia shares porous borders with five countries, a situation that could facilitate the coming and going of foreign fighters. The principal concern about selecting Bolivia derived from the 1952–1953 Bolivian Revolution. As we have seen (Chapter 8), most of the Indian peasantry received land through direct seizures and the 1953 agrarian reform law. Thus, the promise of agrarian reform that would attract the support of landless peasants was essentially irrelevant to the bulk of Bolivia’s rural population. But the fundamental objective of the Bolivian operation was not to carry out another revolution in that country, but to use some area of Bolivia to train foreign guerrillas for the continent-wide revolution.
Che Guevara entered Bolivia disguised as a Uruguayan businessman in November 1966. Advised by an advance party that had scouted locations, he purchased an isolated large farm in the lightly populated rugged hills of Santa Cruz province for his training site. As the Cubans and a few Bolivians arrived at the site, training proceeded as anticipated for the first month; but soon, the venture disintegrated into a dismal failure culminating in defeat and death ten months later. Che’s Bolivian diary and those kept by three Cuban fighters tell a tale of serious miscalculation and disregard for the most basic rules of guerrilla warfare. As the story developed, it seemed as though Che had forgotten everything he had written in his guidebook, Guerrilla Warfare.
The terrain of the area chosen for the mission was difficult. Rather than jungle, where a leafy canopy would provide cover for the guerrillas, it was hilly and covered with low, thick, spiny vegetation that required the constant use of machetes for passage. Guerrilla Warfare addresses “unfavorable terrain,” indicating that guerrillas can compensate for it by possessing “extraordinary mobility” or being able to cover eighteen to thirty miles per day.11 From its first training march, which took twice as long as planned, the band learned that it could cover but a fraction of that distance on good days and almost nothing in the toughest terrain. Upon returning to the farm, Che and his men found that the Bolivian army had discovered their base. Rattled by that breach, Che decided to begin combat immediately, violating his fundamental rule that the guerrillas establish a liberated zone before engaging in full-scale fighting. While the guerrillas won a few skirmishes, they were quickly put on the defensive. The terrain soon took another toll: In April 1967, the guerrillas—numbering around fifty—accidentally split and never reunited, disoriented by the harsh and unfamiliar landscape.
Although Che’s book deprecated the urban resistance, it did recognize that “external” help for the guerrillas could be useful. In Bolivia, Che received little cooperation from the Communists and fidelistas who might have collaborated. Not only was the Bolivian left fragmented and at war with itself, but because of the predominance of Cubans in the guerrilla unit and Che’s insistence on commanding the operation, it supplied few recruits and no supplies. The heavy Cuban presence also allowed the Bolivian government to depict the guerrillas as a foreign invasion force and rally support for their defeat.
Guerrilla Warfare tells its readers that “a good supply system is of basic importance” and emphasizes the need for proper equipment, clothing, and medicines.12 In contrast to Castro’s band in the Sierra Maestra, which received supplies from M-26-7 operatives in Santiago, Che had no reliable source of supplies. The men’s shoes fell apart, their clothing was shredded by the spiny vegetation, and they had to improvise in order to eat, once being reduced to “a condor and a rotten cat.”13 Che had been asthmatic all his life; in Bolivia, he lost his medication and could hardly function, reducing the group’s already limited mobility. Soon, rather than fighting, the group was forced to focus on surviving.
According to Guerrilla Warfare, “full help from the people of the area” was also essential to guerrilla success.14 Yet Che was unable to recruit a single peasant. In fact, peasants often abandoned their homes at the guerrillas’ approach and, Che believed, informed the military of their presence and movements. Several factors explained this contrast with Castro’s success in recruiting peasant support in the Sierra Maestra. There was no land shortage in the area where the guerrillas operated, so the promise of agrarian reform was irrelevant. The Cubans comprising much of the land looked and sounded foreign, raising peasant suspicion and mistrust. Finally, while the Cubans had prepared by studying Quechua, one of the two major Bolivian Indian languages, the population where the guerrillas operated spoke another native language, Guaraní.
The guerrillas’ downward spiral continued as men drowned in the swift rivers of the region, others deserted, communication with Havana was lost, and morale plummeted. By September 1967, Che faced a new problem: elite counterinsurgency ranger units of the Bolivian army, quickly created and trained by a U.S. mobile team after Che Guevara’s presence in Bolivia was detected. Che noted in his diary’s summary for September: “Now the Army appears to be more effective in its actions.”15 Rangers closed in and destroyed one of the two guerrilla groups in late August. They pinned down the remainder, including Che, on October 8, 1967, killing several and taking the leader captive. Che Guevara was executed the next day by Bolivian army personnel in the presence of CIA operative Félix Rodríguez. The ambitious “two, three, or many Vietnams” strategy died with Che.
LIBERATION THEOLOGY
Che’s death and the failure of his Bolivian mission were heavy blows to Latin American proponents of revolution. Nearly a decade after Castro came to power, they counted no victories, only defeats. But the cause of revolution was not dead: Shortly after the Bolivian debacle, new currents of revolution surfaced, again placing the United States and Latin America’s elites on the defensive.
One of these new currents was liberation theology, a movement within the Catholic Church based on doctrines that emerged from the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) of 1962–1965 and the Conference of Latin American Bishops held at Medellin, Colombia, in 1968. Vatican II called for a realignment of the church from its traditional alliance with the elites to solidarity with the poor in seeking a more just world. The Latin American bishops fleshed out this principle, arguing that the church should embrace a “preferential option for the poor.” They called for the formation of “Christian base communities” headed by priests and committed laypersons where the poor would be taught literacy by reading the bible and organized to seek improved material conditions. Embracing an alternate vision of the change that the Cuban Revolution offered, many priests and laypersons began working and living among the poor and downtrodden.
Conservatives inside and outside of the church considered liberation theology and its practitioners subversive. They viewed writings by leading liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez denouncing “private ownership of the means of production” as synonymous with Marxism. The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the direction of future Pope Benedict XVI, denounced liberation theology for using “concepts uncritically borrowed from Marxist ideology.”16 But liberation theology’s real threat to the status quo was not words; it was the focus of its practitioners on the millions of marginalized persons inhabiting the teeming slums that had proliferated in Latin America’s cities and the impoverished rural landless. Although nonviolent, liberation theology appeared as dangerous to the status quo as some of the currents of armed revolution.
URBAN GUERRILLA WARFARE: URUGUAY’S TUPAMAROS
Che Guevara’s demise and the failure of the maximalist scheme of continental revolution provoked a reexamination of the rural guerrilla approach to insurrection. Of the few new rural guerrilla movements launched after Che’s demise, only two became serious fighting forces that required major efforts to defeat: the Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, FMLN) of El Salvador and the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru. But rather than abandon guerrilla warfare altogether, revolutionaries in southern South America reinvented the approach and applied it to their heavily urbanized countries that lacked the combined mountain and jungle terrain ideal for rural guerrilla warfare. As one leader put it, without urban insurrection, “those countries lacking the geographic conditions favorable to rural guerrilla warfare … would have to discard armed struggle in the process of a revolution.”17
The original urban guerrillas were the Tupamaros, the Uruguayan fighters named for the gaucho bands that fought in the independence wars—who in turn had been named for the most famous Indian rebel during the Spanish colonial period, Tupac Amaru. Uruguay—a small country of 68,000 square miles and a 1970 population of three million—is mostly flat, largely devoted to pasture, and has the least hospitable terrain in all of Latin America for rural guerrillas. Despite its economy based on meat and wool exports, in 1970, it was Latin America’s second most urbanized country, after Argentina, with 80 percent of its population living in cities and towns and fully half in Montevideo, a city of 1.5 million. A Tupamaro observed: “We have a big city with more than three hundred square kilometers of buildings, which allows for the development of an urban struggle.”18
The Tupamaros faced a formidable challenge because Uruguay, along with Chile and Costa Rica, was a bastion of democratic, constitutional government in Latin America. It boasted a tradition of fair and regular elections, broad participation, a stable two-party system, and well-developed individual liberties. Since the time of José Batlle y Ordoñez (Chapter 5), it had been Latin America’s most advanced social welfare state. What the Tupamaros hoped to exploit was the stagnation of the economy, which by the 1960s had resulted in inflation, rising unemployment, deterioration of middle- and working-class living standards, growth of a marginalized sector of slum dwellers, and increasing labor unrest.
Realizing the impossibility of a successful rural guerrilla war in Uruguay, the Tupamaros began organizing even prior to Che’s death. They developed a reputation as romantic, benign revolutionaries based on their initial restraint and on their Robin Hood–style actions to benefit the poor, such as the Christmas Eve hijacking of a food truck and distribution of its cargo in the slums. Led by leftist union organizer Raúl Sendic, the Tupamaros built a diverse force of middle-class professionals and students as well as workers and even members of the armed forces, all of whom led apparently normal lives apart from their clandestine activities. As their numbers grew, they developed an elaborate organization based on a series of columns of thirty to fifty people, divided into small cells of five to ten members designed to operate independently in the case of the column leaders’ capture or death. They also established an infrastructure of supply networks, safe houses, underground clinics equipped for emergency surgery, and support committees.
By 1968, the Tupamaros moved beyond their Robin Hood stage and began kidnapping officials and attacking police stations, drawing their first blood in July 1969. That same year, they established a clandestine radio station and staged “Operation Pando,” the capture of a town of fifteen thousand which they held for several hours while robbing banks and haranguing the population. While continuing their other activities, by November 1969, the Tupamaros began dispensing justice: They placed captives in their “People’s Prison” and held trials of officials implicated in counterinsurgency activities, including U.S. citizen Dan Mitrione, a counterinsurgency trainer whom they eventually executed after a planned prisoner exchange fell through. The government responded with crackdowns and the formation of death squads that pursued not only the guerrillas but leftists in general. By 1970, the future of Uruguay was in doubt as the guerrillas, numbering in the hundreds, achieved what observers called “strategic equilibrium” with the government.
After two years of fluctuating fortunes, the tide turned against the Tupamaros in 1972 when the government declared a “state of internal war,” suspended civil liberties, and launched building-to-building searches in an effort to isolate the guerrillas and force them out of their safe houses. Combined with information extracted from a rebel leader under torture, this approach soon bore fruit. Government forces discovered the People’s Prison in May 1972 and by July had found seventy safe houses, captured over six hundred guerrillas, and killed one hundred more. On September 1, they wounded and captured leader Raúl Sendic, and while a few guerrilla actions continued, the Tupamaros were essentially defeated. Despite their success, the military cracked down on civilian politicians and labor unions, and in June 1973 carried out a coup that led to the establishment of a state terrorist regime (Chapter 11).
Uruguay Today Fact Box
Area: 68,037 square miles
Population: 3,341,893
Population growth rate: 0.27%
Urban population: 95.3%
Ethnic composition: white 88%, mestizo 8%, and black 4%
Religious affiliations (nominal): Catholic 47.1%, Protestant 11.1%, nondenominational 23.2%, Jewish 0.3%, and atheist or agnostic 17.2%
Life expectancy: 77 years
Literacy: 98.5%
Years of schooling (average): 16 years
GDP per capita (U.S. dollars): $21,500
Percentage of population living in poverty: 18.6%
Household income (proportion in the highest and lowest 10%): highest 34.4% and lowest 1.9%
Military expenditures as percentage of GDP: 1.95%
Internet users (percentage of total population): 59.0%
Source: The World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Public Affairs).
Note: GDP, gross domestic product
Though ultimately defeated, the Tupamaros helped revive the stalled momentum of revolutionary insurrection in Latin America. They inspired emulation in Brazil and especially in Argentina, where a powerful urban guerrilla insurgency emerged beginning in 1969. The Tupamaro insurrection was the most promising, or threatening, since Castro’s in Cuba. Its defeat required draconian measures, and it cost Uruguayans eleven years of harsh military dictatorship.
PERU: A MILITARY REVOLUTION
Despite the powerful impact of the Cuban Revolution, only three revolutionary governments came to power in Latin America following Castro’s takeover in Cuba. The success of counterinsurgency operations against rural guerrilla movements and the urban guerrillas that succeeded them, the effectiveness of National Security Doctrine in preparing the armed forces for repression, and the gradual waning of Cuba’s power to inspire revolutionary activity largely accounted for Castro’s failure to achieve his goal of Pan–Latin America revolution. And owing to both internal resistance and U.S. pressure or outright intervention, none of the revolutionary regimes—the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces in Peru (1968–1975), the Salvador Allende government in Chile (1970–1973), and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua (1979–1990)—was able to finish the revolution that it started.
The Peruvian military government, headed by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, carried out reforms amounting to a revolution. Prior to the 1968 coup that brought it to power, the military had given little evidence of a commitment to radical change; indeed, its primary political role since the 1920s had been to uphold elite dominance by preventing the reformist APRA (Chapter 6) from taking power. While Latin America had experienced a few progressive military governments and civilian governments led by military men in the twentieth century, including the Toro and Busch regimes in Bolivia and Perón’s administration in Argentina (Chapter 8), the Latin American military stance in the era of the Cuban Revolution was decidedly reactionary. Thus, the military government in Peru was an anomaly.
Peru in the 1960s was clearly susceptible to revolution. The social structure that thinkers such as González Prada and José Carlos Mariátegui (Chapter 6) had denounced was still intact. Forty percent of the country’s ten million people spoke only native languages, over half were illiterate, and millions of Indian peasants were land-starved while large estates dominated the countryside. Large U.S. corporations—including Cerro de Pasco Corporation, the Grace Company, and International Petroleum Company (IPC)—had dominated the economy since the early twentieth century (Chapter 6). Peru reflected the impact of the Cuban Revolution in various ways: increased demonstrations and strikes, creation of fidelista groups and parties, guerrilla movements launched in 1963 and 1965, and Indian occupations of haciendas in the Andes.
Peru Today Fact Box
Area: 496,225 square miles
Population: 30,444,999
Population growth rate: 0.97%
Urban population: 78.6%
Ethnic composition: Amerindian 45%; mestizo 37%; white 15%; and black, Chinese, Japanese, and other 3%
Religious affiliations (nominal): Catholic 84.1%, Protestant 12.5%, and none 2.9%
Life expectancy: 73.48 years Literacy: 94.5%
Years of schooling (average): 13 years
GDP per capita (U.S. dollars): $12,200
Percentage of population living in poverty: 25.8%
Household income (proportion in the highest and lowest 10%): highest 36.1% and lowest 1.4%
Military expenditures as percentage of GDP: 1.28%
Internet users (percentage of total population): 40.9%
Source: The World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Public Affairs).
Note: GDP, gross domestic product
Botched negotiations between the government of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1963–1968) and IPC over the corporation’s legal status and exploitation rights sparked the coup that launched the revolution. A leaked copy of the agreement revealed major concessions to the company—the number one symbol of Yankee imperialism in Peru—and damaged the Belaúnde government beyond repair. When it overthrew Belaúnde on October 3, 1968, the military immediately nationalized IPC and named its state-owned successor Petroperú.
Given the circumstances, the expropriation of IPC was not unexpected, but the Velasco government’s succeeding actions shocked Peruvians and foreigners alike. In contrast to the general Latin American military resistance to revolution, the Peruvian armed forces embraced and led the revolution. What was different about Velasco and his military colleagues? In fighting the recent guerrilla insurgencies, the military became keenly aware of the socioeconomic conditions plaguing Peru’s rural majority. Courses on Peruvian reality offered to the officer corps by progressive academics reinforced that lesson. And the driving forces behind the regime’s policies were colonels, who were less wedded than their superiors to the military’s traditional role of guardian of the status quo. Thus rather than focusing on repression, the Peruvian military carried out structural reforms designed to preempt Cuban-style revolution.
The revolution really began on June 24, 1969, when Velasco announced a sweeping agrarian reform law that he said “will end forever an unjust social order.”19 Rather than attack the backward Andean haciendas, relics of the colonial period widely condemned for their inefficiency and social injustice, the regime first targeted the irrigated capitalist plantations on the coast that produced important exports of sugar and cotton. In doing so, the military sought to reduce the wealth and power of the Peruvian oligarchy, known as the “forty families,” many of whom were heavily invested in the modern, efficient coastal plantations. Agrarian reform soon reached the Andes, where large tracts of land were turned over to hacienda workers and communal indigenous villages (ayllus). Despite mass expropriations of landed estates, the land available for distribution was insufficient to satisfy peasant demand in several areas of the Andes. Still, by 1976, nearly half of Peru’s agricultural surface had been distributed and the traditional backward Andean hacienda had largely disappeared.
In 1970, the military government enacted its General Law of Industries, which sought to recast industrial relations and make workers co-owners of the manufacturing plants where they worked. The law required all manufacturing firms with at least six full-time employees to establish an “industrial community” in which workers would incrementally acquire company shares until they achieved 50 percent ownership; in addition, they were to benefit from profit sharing. By offering workers the benefits of ownership, the industrial community was designed to increase productivity as well as dampen class conflict. Despite owners’ resistance, by 1974, some three hundred thousand workers were involved in industrial communities.
The 1974 Social Property Law embodied the regime’s most complete vision for a new Peru. The blueprint reflected Christian Democratic concepts of communitarianism and drew on Yugoslav practices of worker self-management. The plan envisioned four economic sectors: the state sector, comprised of nationalized firms in mining, petroleum, and heavy industry; the industrial communities; small privately owned factories and businesses; and a “social property” sector that was to include firms in all areas of the economy, run by workers. This complex formulation was touted as “neither capitalist nor communist.”
The Peruvian military revolution was profoundly nationalistic. It aimed to build a weak state into one capable of overmatching the power of the national oligarchy, to end Peru’s economic and political subservience to the United States, and to transform a society fragmented by race, geography, language, literacy, and income into a true nation. Agrarian reform, the industrial community, and the enactment of the social property concept sought to further all three of these goals.
In addition, Velasco emphasized Peru’s quest for independence from U.S. domination by realigning the country’s foreign policy. He established diplomatic relations with the USSR, Communist China, and despite the OAS prohibition, with Cuba. Peru also joined the Nonaligned Movement, a group of countries that asserted independence from both the U.S. and the Soviet blocs. Velasco refused to compensate IPC for its expropriation, claiming that the corporation owed more in back taxes than it was worth. Most troubling to the U.S. government, the Velasco government signed a trade pact with the USSR involving major supplies of weapons, including MiG jet fighter planes, giving the Soviets their first military presence in Latin America beyond Cuba. The United States ended military aid, and Peru responded by expelling the U.S. military mission. The United States thus faced a unique situation in Peru: a military regime carrying out revolutionary change that, if done by a civilian government, would have resulted in forceful U.S. intervention—as would occur in Chile and Nicaragua.
The military government addressed the problem of economic dependency in a very innovative way that recognized the need for foreign investment while channeling it in ways beneficial to developing countries. In a 1970 speech, Velasco articulated his view of reciprocity: “We are not a group of weak nations at the mercy of foreign capital. They need our raw materials and our markets. And if we need capital and advanced technology, the evident bilaterality of these needs must lead to new arrangements that protect the present and future interests of Latin America.”20 This concept, known as the Velasco Doctrine, was adopted as policy by the shortlived Andean Pact, a common market comprised of the six Andean countries from Venezuela to Chile.
Under the Velasco Doctrine, foreign capital was invited to invest in needed areas on a temporary, phaseout basis, in partnership with domestic capital where possible. The Andean Pact allowed a maximum annual profit repatriation to the investing company of 14 percent. When the total investment had been recovered, ideally within fifteen years, the majority share of the enterprise would become state property. These regulations would provide necessary capital and technology without requiring the Latin American countries to permanently surrender their resources to foreign interests. The Velasco Doctrine—Latin America’s most comprehensive approach to resolving the colonial legacy of economic dependency—was unable to prove its efficacy as Chile pulled out of the Andean Pact in 1976 and other countries followed.
By 1974, the military revolution was beginning to wind down. Many Peruvians considered the social property concept both extreme and vague, and a decree nationalizing the Lima press caused alarm. Though not particularly repressive, and despite its policies designed to elevate Peru’s poor, the Velasco government was unable to institutionalize political support. Serious economic problems surfaced, requiring austerity measures. General Velasco suffered serious health problems and as his condition worsened in 1975, a moderate fellow general, Francisco Morales Bermúdez, led a bloodless coup and replaced him as president. While land distribution continued for a while under Morales, the social property sector was eliminated and the industrial community law was narrowed to only the largest firms. The dream of a new Peru gradually faded, but the 1968–1975 military regime had the distinction of leading one of Latin America’s most ambitious and sincere attempts to cope with underdevelopment and social injustice in the twentieth century.
CHILE: REVOLUTION BY THE BALLOT BOX
Along with Uruguay and Costa Rica, Chile had the longest and strongest democratic tradition in Latin America. By the late 1930s, elite political power had declined to the point that parties of the left, center, and right drew roughly comparable numbers of votes in national elections and were fairly evenly represented in Congress. But developments in the mid-1960s unraveled that balance of power as pressure for change mounted.
A country whose rural areas were dominated by great estates, Chile was highly susceptible to the Cuban Revolution’s call for agrarian reform. Previously barred from rural areas, urban-based labor and left party cadres redoubled their efforts after 1959 to recruit estate workers into still illegal agricultural unions and to generate demands for agrarian reform. The conservative Jorge Alessandri administration (1958–1964) attempted to preempt the rising demand for land in 1962 by enacting a modest agrarian reform law that did nothing to appease the landless.
Such was the transformation of Chilean politics that both major presidential candidates in 1964 promised revolution. Reformist Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva was elected in a contest between a socialist revolution, advocated by his rival Salvador Allende, and his own “revolution in liberty.” Congressional elections the following year confirmed the leftward movement of the country’s political landscape and landowners’ loss of their traditional control of their workers’ votes. Rather than their normal one-third or more, the right parties won only 7 of 45 seats in the Senate and 9 of 147 in the Chamber of Deputies, leaving them virtually powerless in Congress. Meanwhile, a left-wing anti-system party that embraced violence for taking power, the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario (Movement of the Revolutionary Left, MIR), was founded in 1966 and a year later the Socialist Party, historically a broad-based reformist party, declared itself Marxist–Leninist and, like the MIR, accepted the validity of revolutionary violence. Chile was primed for revolution, but it would not occur by the method that Castro and Che Guevara advocated.
Frei’s reforms failed to stabilize Chile. His administration enacted an aggressive agrarian reform law and legalized rural unions in 1967, while instituting significant reforms in the urban arena and “Chileanizing,” or taking half ownership of the U.S.-dominated copper industry—the main source of Chile’s export revenues. To mobilized urban and rural workers, the pace of reform was too slow to satisfy their Cuban-inspired thirst for change, while the elites felt endangered by reforms they considered extreme. The fortunes of the right revived in the 1969 congressional elections in reaction to the Frei reforms, particularly those in the countryside that stripped numerous wealthy families of their traditional estates. Buoyed by its relative success, the right, constituted as the new Partido Nacional (National Party, PN), nominated former President Alessandri as its presidential candidate for 1970. Organized as the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity, UP), a coalition of the Socialist and Communist parties and four small non-Marxist parties, the left nominated Socialist Allende for his fourth presidential campaign. With the Christian Democrat candidate placing third, Allende defeated Alessandri by the narrow margin of 36.5 to 35.2 percent. Thus fueled by the impact of the Cuban Revolution, revolution came to Chile via the ballot box.
Allende’s platform was straightforwardly socialist: He promised extensive nationalizations throughout the economy, acceleration of agrarian reform, and income redistribution in order to move Chile as rapidly as possible toward socialism while preserving the country’s political democracy. As no other country had transitioned from capitalism to socialism without undergoing a revolutionary insurrection (Russia, China, and Cuba) or being militarily occupied by a socialist country (Eastern Europe, controlled by the Soviet Union following World War II), the Chilean experiment was closely watched throughout the world. It raised the critical question: “Is there a peaceful road to socialism?”
Chile Today Fact Box
Area: 284,211 square miles
Population: 17,508,200
Population growth rate: 0.82%
Urban population: 89.5%
Ethnic composition: white and nonindigenous 88.9%, Mapuche 9.1%, and other indigenous 1%
Religious affiliations (nominal): Catholic 66.7%, Protestant 16.4%, and other or none 16%
Life expectancy: 78.61 years
Literacy: 97.5%
Years of schooling (average): 16 years
GDP per capita (U.S. dollars): $23,500
Percentage of population living in poverty: 14.4%
Household income (proportion in the highest and lowest 10%): highest 42.8% and lowest 1.5%
Military expenditures as percentage of GDP: 2.04%
Internet users (percentage of total population): 65.8%
Source: The World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Public Affairs).
Note: GDP, gross domestic product
Having invested heavily to prevent Allende’s election, the U.S. government maneuvered during the two months between the September election and his scheduled inauguration in November to prevent his taking office. As Allende had not won a majority of the vote—the norm in Chile’s multiparty elections—Congress would elect the president; this was traditionally a mere formality, as it had always elected the candidate who received the plurality of the popular vote. Nonetheless, U.S. President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, plotted to thwart this Chilean tradition by getting the non-UP congressional majority to deny Allende the presidency, but failed when the Christian Democrats refused to go along. The second part of the two-track strategy sought to foment a military coup to forestall an Allende presidency, but given the Chilean military’s long tradition of nonintervention, this approach likewise failed and Allende donned the presidential sash on November 3, 1970, forewarned of the U.S. government’s hostility.
Early in his administration, Allende promised to deliver “a revolution a la chilena with red wine and empanadas (meat and onion pies)”—the traditional drink and food consumed by the pueblo on festive occasions.21 His first year in office lived up to that promise. He reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba in defiance of the 1964 OAS resolution, enacted a series of populist measures to benefit the poor and middle classes, accelerated the agrarian reform that Frei had begun, and nationalized the remaining U.S.-owned copper mines without compensation. Facing an obstructionist majority in Congress and a hostile judiciary, he had to be creative in extending state ownership of the economy. He took advantage of the nervousness of capitalists, both foreign and domestic, who were willing to accept low buyout offers for their properties, and used obscure laws to expropriate other industries and businesses, to the point that the state controlled important sectors of the economy within a year. Nonetheless, by that time, there were signs of trouble ahead for Allende and the UP: Nationalizations and populist programs had used up most of Chile’s hard currency reserves, the Nixon administration had initiated a credit boycott, and the opposition parties had formed an alliance that opposed the government’s every move.
Allende made more progress on his agenda during his second year in office, accelerating the expropriation of Chile’s large landed estates while continuing to extend state control over the nonagricultural economy. However, problems mounted: The U.S. government funneled millions of dollars to opposition parties and media through the CIA; Congress refused to approve budgets and began impeaching members of Allende’s cabinet; Chile’s chronic inflation began to accelerate; and a lengthy visit by Fidel Castro contributed to hardening the opposition’s resolve to undermine the government. Constant confrontation led to growing polarization.
Contributing to the country’s polarization were a growing mass mobilization and the government’s ambivalent response to it. Throughout rural Chile, impatient hacienda workers, often prompted by members of the UP parties or the MIR, seized estates rather than wait for agrarian reform to give them the land. Urban workers likewise occupied dozens of factories and businesses that had not been officially expropriated. This “hypermobilization” of rural and urban workers posed a difficult dilemma for the Allende administration. On one hand, the president had the constitutional responsibility of enforcing the law, which guaranteed private ownership rights barring a valid expropriation order. On the other hand, the workers were Allende’s primary constituency, and he was understandably loath to use the force of a “people’s” government against the people. The government’s response reflected the president’s ambivalence: some properties were returned to their owners, while others remained in the workers’ hands.
A turning point in Chile’s experiment with democratic socialism came in October 1972. The country’s large-scale economic associations—including the national societies of agriculture, mining, industry, and commerce—had long acted as lobbyists and pressure groups in the political arena. But in response to President Frei’s reforms and the drastic decline in the right-wing parties’ representation in Congress following the 1965 election, they took on a larger role in defending their interests. They expanded their membership by recruiting smaller-scale landowners, miners, industrialists, and business owners, while retaining traditional elite control of the organizations.
As their very survival came into question under Allende’s program of establishing socialism, the leaders of these organizations, known as gremios (or guilds) in Chile, took action. A government project to nationalize the trucking industry led to a truck owners’ strike in October 1972, and the gremios launched a mass movement based on strategies borrowed from labor unions and left-wing parties. Subsidized by the CIA, they carried out a “bosses’ strike” that created shortages of food and other essentials throughout the country and virtually shut down the economy. Accompanying the strike were “marches of the empty pots” carried out by women in upper-class neighborhoods. The strike lasted a month and was resolved only by a gesture designed to reassure the population that order would be restored: the appointment of three military officers to Allende’s cabinet.
Both the UP and the opposition placed their hopes for a resolution of the growing bitterness and polarization in the March 1973 congressional election. The UP aspired to gain a majority and thus have a Congress supportive of the president’s agenda, while the right-wing National Party and centrist Christian Democrats hoped for the two-thirds necessary to impeach Allende and remove him from office. But the election resolved nothing: UP candidates received 44 percent of the vote to 56 percent for the opposition. While the UP could take satisfaction in improving on Allende’s 36.5 percent in the presidential vote, the election did not end the deadlock with the opposition-controlled Congress. Having failed at the ballot box, some within the opposition decided that more drastic measures were necessary to keep Allende from finishing his six-year term.
In a May 1973 address to Congress, Allende assessed the progress made on his goal of moving Chile toward socialism: 3,570 rural properties expropriated, leaving few that exceeded the legal limit on size; two hundred of the country’s largest enterprises nationalized, accounting for 30 percent of national production; and 90 percent of banks and a third of wholesale distribution under government ownership. But the UP could take little satisfaction from that report, as conditions continued to deteriorate. Beset by runaway inflation, mounting deficits, and shortages of essential goods, the economy was approaching collapse. Street violence, incidents of sabotage and assassination, the rise of a right-wing militia, and the creation of neighborhood vigilance patrols reflected the growing instability that was undermining Chile’s democratic foundations. By June, the sense of crisis was so palpable that a limited military uprising broke out; although easily suppressed, it put Chileans on notice that the military’s tradition of nonintervention hung in the balance.
Again with covert U.S. support, the gremios launched a second bosses’ strike on July 25, 1973, this time intending to destabilize the country and force the military to act. By August, the only thing standing between Allende and a coup was army commander General Carlos Prats, a firm constitutionalist and upholder of the noninterventionist tradition. Increasingly isolated within the military establishment, Prats resigned on August 22 after officers’ wives scattered chicken feed on his lawn. The same day, the Chamber of Deputies of the National Congress issued a thinly veiled call for military intervention. Allende replaced Prats with General Augusto C. Pinochet, who dutifully took the oath to uphold the Constitution. As conditions continued to deteriorate, Allende decided on September 10 to hold a plebiscite on whether he should continue in office or resign. However, before he could announce the plebiscite, the army under General Pinochet along with the navy, air force, and national police rose in a bloody coup, cut short the Chilean experiment, and provided a resounding “no” to the question, “Is there a peaceful road to socialism?”
NICARAGUA: REVOLUTION BY INSURRECTION
Following Che Guevara’s death, the flame of revolution sputtered but was revived by the rise of liberation theology, urban guerrilla war, and the Peruvian and Chilean revolutions. But with the coups against Allende and Velasco, a climate of reaction spread across Latin America. The Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and the military government in Uruguay, both established in 1973, were followed by another state terrorist regime in Argentina in 1976 (Chapter 11), dashing the hopes of revolutionaries. Thus when the Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua in 1979, Fidel Castro and fellow revolutionaries were heartened, while the elites of neighboring Central American countries and the U.S. government were alarmed.
With the exception of Guatemala, which had been unsettled since the 1954 CIA-sponsored invasion and coup, Central America was less affected in the 1960s by the Cuban Revolution than were the larger, more developed countries of South America. Like most of its neighbors, Nicaragua was relatively backward economically and, as a result, had developed few of the social groups, labor and student organizations, and left parties capable of responding to the stimuli coming from Cuba. Moreover, the Somoza family had run the country with an iron fist since 1936, using its National Guard to repress dissidents and maintain control. Yet the Cuban Revolution had an early and direct impact on Nicaragua that in the long run would bring revolution to power.
Like many Latin American leftists, Carlos Fonseca Amador, a member of Nicaragua’s illegal Communist Party, visited Cuba. Impressed by what he saw and discouraged by the Communists’ gradualism, he broke with the party and, with his friends Tomás Borge and Silvio Mayorga, founded the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front, FSLN) in 1961. Named for General Augusto C. Sandino, the hero of the resistance to the U.S. Marines’ occupation of Nicaragua in the 1920s and early 1930s (Chapter 6), the FSLN was Marxist, fidelista, and nationalist. It adopted rural guerrilla warfare as its method of insurrection. The Sandinistas discovered through experience what Che Guevara had omitted in his story of the Cuban insurrection: the value of an urban resistance. In contrast to Cuba, in Nicaragua there was little urban resistance to Somoza in the early 1960s, allowing the National Guard to focus on the fledgling FSLN and inflict losses in every encounter. But where other guerrillas failed, the Sandinistas persisted.
A 1972 earthquake that killed ten thousand people and leveled most of Managua is generally credited with weakening the Somoza regime by bringing to light its corruption and venality. Ignoring the victims, the National Guard tended to their own families, openly looted damaged businesses, and sold donated relief supplies. Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza, the current dictator, added to his personal fortune with enormous profits on land deals and reconstruction. These actions drove down Somoza’s support among the elites and created for the first time a substantial civic opposition, formalized in 1974 as the Unión Democrática de Liberación (Democratic Liberation Union, UDEL) and led by newspaper publisher Pedro Joaquín Chamorro.
Following an extended period of underground recruiting and organizing, the Sandinistas returned to action in a dramatic way that departed from the rural guerrilla script. They captured and held the guests at a 1974 Christmas party hosted by a Somoza cabinet minister until the dictator freed some prisoners, paid a ransom, and agreed to have newspapers publish an FSLN manifesto. This brazen act demonstrated the regime’s vulnerability and led to heightened repression.
Stymied by the repression and frustrated by the slow pace of progress, the Sandinistas soon broke into three factions, each pursuing a different strategy: One continued the rural guerrilla approach, another focused on Managua and the other cities, while the third reached out beyond the original Marxist base for new recruits. Following the January 1978 assassination of UDEL leader Chamorro at the hands of Somoza henchmen, riots and uprisings against the regime broke out across the country. Somoza responded with the full power of the National Guard, including air strikes and the shelling of cities: The regime had gone to war with its own people. Sensing an opportunity for victory, the FSLN factions reunited, recruited substantial numbers of new fighters, and by May 1979 announced a final offensive. President Jimmy Carter unsuccessfully sought Somoza’s resignation so as to find a reliably pro-U.S. replacement. When the dictator finally resigned and fled, his National Guard dissolved and FSLN fighters rolled into Managua on July 19, 1979.
The Sandinista victory belatedly validated the Cuban prescription for insurrection, but with major revisions. Realizing that Che’s formula would not work in Nicaragua—that the guerrillas alone were not capable of creating the conditions for revolution—the Sandinistas had taken the time and effort to build a peasant base of support and branched out from the rural guerrilla approach when other opportunities looked promising. After investing eighteen years in their quest for power, they set out to create a new, post-Somoza Nicaragua.
With the National Guard gone, its own Sandinista army intact, and the prestige and popularity it earned from toppling the forty-three-year Somoza dynasty, the FSLN in 1979 was in a position similar to that of Castro following the defeat of Batista: It could take the country in the direction of its choice. It was widely anticipated that the Sandinistas would follow the Cuban path of radical economic and social change and realignment in foreign policy. Contrary to these expectations, the Sandinista revolution embraced moderation. In politics, it followed two central principles: pluralism and participatory democracy. In economic policy, while nationalizing certain sectors, it left over half of the country’s assets in the private sector. In social policy, it invested in social programs such as food subsidies, rent controls, public health, education, housing, and social security while creating mass organizations of workers, youth, women, and farmers, along with Comités de Defensa Sandinista (Sandinista Defense Committees), loosely modeled on the Cuban Comités de Defensa de la Revolución. In foreign policy, the Sandinistas charted a course of nonalignment rather than an alliance with the Communist bloc.
Several factors explain the Sandinistas’ relative moderation. In reaching out beyond its original Marxist base in the 1970s, the FSLN incorporated numbers of more pragmatic, less dogmatic members. The revolution’s timing was also important: It coincided with a growing skepticism even among Marxists about Soviet-style economics and with the rise of perestroika (economic reforms) in the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc. Based on Cuba’s anemic post-1959 economic development, Castro allegedly advised the FSLN to preserve a substantial private economic sector. Finally, unrelenting U.S. pressure under President Ronald Reagan may have influenced the government toward moderation to avoid a return of the U.S. Marines.
While the Sandinistas clearly exercised the strongest influence of any group in the post-Somoza provisional government, they worked with a cross-section of groups including the bourgeois UDEL. Outside the government, opposition to the Sandinistas flourished: Multiple political parties, to the right and left of the Sandinistas, operated openly and legally along with opposition media and the Superior Council of Private Enterprise. This picture was clearly at odds with Reagan’s characterization of Nicaragua as a “totalitarian” state.
Moving to institutionalize the post-Somoza political structure, the governing junta called presidential and congressional elections in 1984. The Reagan administration declared in advance that the election would be fraudulent and pressured the right-wing parties to boycott in order to undermine the election’s legitimacy. In what international observers declared a fair election, Sandinista Daniel Ortega was elected president and the FSLN won sixty-one of ninety-six congressional seats while three right-wing and three Marxist parties split the remaining thirty-five.
Nicaragua Today Fact Box
Area: 50,336 square miles
Population: 5,907,881
Population growth rate: 1%
Urban population: 58.8%
Ethnic composition: mestizo 69%, white 17%, black 9%, and Amerindian 5%
Religious affiliations (nominal): Catholic 58.5%, Protestant 23.2%, and none 15.7%
Life expectancy: 72.98 years
Literacy: 82.8%
Years of schooling (average): no data
GDP per capita (U.S. dollars): $5,000
Percentage of population living in poverty: 29.6%
Household income (proportion in the highest and lowest 10%): highest 41.8% and lowest 1.4%
Military expenditures as percentage of GDP: 0.63%
Internet users (percentage of total population): 14.5%
Source: The World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Public Affairs).
Note: GDP, gross domestic product
The final step in institutionalizing the revolution was drafting a constitution. The 1987 constitution was adopted after two years of open meetings around the country and intense deliberation and debate. The document defined Nicaragua as a social democracy based on an elected government, political pluralism, a mixed state-private economy, and nonalignment in foreign affairs. In contrast to Cuba’s 1976 constitution, the Nicaraguan enumerated inviolable individual liberties as well as social, economic, and cultural rights. Insofar as the 1987 constitution embodied the goals of the Nicaraguan revolution, it is clear that the country had chosen a new path to the future and a much more moderate one than Castro followed in Cuba.
While retaining a substantial private sector in the economy, the government nationalized some enterprises, primarily in banking, insurance, mining, transportation, and forestry. These changes brought the state sector to around 45 percent of the total—a figure common for Latin America at that time. At least half of the expanded state sector came from the expropriation of Somoza’s extensive holdings, which included agricultural land, the national airline, processing and manufacturing plants, urban real estate, and construction firms. Two agrarian reform laws altered Nicaragua’s predominantly agricultural economy. By 1988, state holdings accounted for 13 percent of total surface, large private holdings 12 percent, cooperatives 15 percent, and small- and medium-sized producers owned 60 percent of agricultural land. Thus in another contrast with Cuba, peasants and modest farmers held the dominant position in a capitalist agricultural economy.
The Sandinistas’ moderation did nothing to shield them and their revolution from the Yankees that Sandino had fought decades earlier. Reagan viewed Nicaragua through Cold War lenses: You were either with us or against us, and the Sandinistas’ opening of diplomatic relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union was proof enough for him that the FSLN was a tool of Moscow and Havana. He began financing and organizing the counterrevolutionaries (or Contras)—many of them former members of the Somozas’ National Guard—to serve as U.S. proxies in an undeclared war against a country with which the United States retained correct, if chilly, diplomatic relations. He praised the Contras as “freedom fighters” and called them “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.”22 By early 1982, the Contras began attacking from their refuge in Honduras, targeting not only people but also the new rural schools and clinics that were at the heart of the government’s social program. Over forty U.S. military exercises were held in neighboring Honduras, with the primary purpose of bringing massive amounts of weapons and supplies into the country which departing U.S. troops left behind for the Contras. After the United States mined Nicaragua’s harbors in 1984, Congress balked at financing the war and Reagan turned to illegal means of supporting it, including the bizarre “Iran–Contra affair.” To counter the Contras, who by 1987 had some fifteen thousand fighters in the field, the Nicaraguan government was forced to build up its regular army to sixty thousand troops and create a large militia. This was effective in pushing the Contras back, but it drained the treasury, requiring the government to divert resources from its popular social programs. The war also produced mounting combat casualties, leaving many families grieving and war-weary.
Reagan’s proxy war was effective at undermining the initial popular enthusiasm for the revolution. But to ensure that disenchantment would be channeled into anti-Sandinista votes in the 1990 presidential election, the United States openly spent at least $7.7 million from the congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy and covertly spent another $5 million in support of Violeta Chamorro, widow of the publisher whose 1978 murder launched the death spiral of the Somoza regime. The U.S. investment totaled approximately $8.50 per voter. The dual strategies paid off: Chamorro defeated Ortega, 55 to 41 percent. Just as surely as if the Marines had invaded or the CIA had orchestrated a coup, the United States ended the Sandinista revolution and an experiment in social democracy that, ironically, resembled the desired outcome of the long-dead Alliance for Progress.
The Cuban Revolution’s appeal to many Latin Americans led to mass mobilizations and the destabilization and replacement of civilian governments. The United States responded by attempting to prevent revolution from spreading beyond Cuba. After the failure of several guerrilla outbreaks, Che Guevara himself led the ambitious guerrilla venture in Bolivia. Following Che’s 1967 death, liberation theology introduced a new, nonviolent strain of revolution and in South America, revolutionaries adapted guerrilla war to their predominantly urban settings. Despite years of ferment, revolutionary governments took power in only three countries. The governments in Peru, Chile, and Nicaragua implemented transformative policies that brought substantive change, but all three revolutions ended before finishing their work.
FURTHER READING
Anderson, Jon Lee. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. 2nd ed. New York: Grove Press, 2010.
Berryman, Phillip. Liberation Theology: Essential Facts about the Revolutionary Movement in Latin America—and Beyond. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.
Bitar, Sergio. Chile: Experiment in Democracy. Translated by Sam Sherman. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1986.
Bonachea, Rolando E. and Nelson P. Valdés, eds. Che: Select Writings of Che Guevara. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969.
Brands, Hal. Latin America’s Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Castañeda, Jorge G. Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. Translated by Marina Castañeda. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Castro, Daniel, ed. Revolution and Revolutionaries: Guerrilla Movements in Latin America. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1999.
Domínguez, Jorge I. To Make a World Safe for Revolution: Cuba’s Foreign Policy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Guevara, Ernesto “Che.” Guerrilla Warfare. Edited by Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies, Jr. 3rd ed. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1997.
James, Daniel, ed. The Complete Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara and Other Captured Documents. 1st Cooper Square ed. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000.
La Feber, Walter. Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.
Philip, George. The Rise and Fall of the Peruvian Military Radicals, 1968–1976. London: Athlone Press, 1978.
Porzecanski, Arturo C. Uruguay’s Tupamaros: The Urban Guerrilla. New York: Praeger, 1973.
Walker, Thomas W., ed. Revolution and Counterrevolution in Nicaragua, 1979–1990. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991.
Wright, Thomas C. Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution. Rev. ed. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.
NOTES
1. Herbert Matthews, The Cuban Story (New York: George Braziller, 1961), 273, 274.
2. Hugh Thomas, Cuba, or, the Pursuit of Freedom, 2nd ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 1293.
3. Matthews, The Cuban Story, 185.
4. Fidel Castro, The First and Second Declarations of Havana: Manifestos of Revolutionary Struggle in the Americas Adopted by the Cuban People, ed. Mary-Alice Walters, 3rd ed. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2007), 72, 73.
5. Peter Dorner, Latin American Land Reforms in Theory and Practice: A Retrospective Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 11.
6. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, ed. Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies, Jr., 3rd ed. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1997), 26.
7. Martin Edwin Andersen, Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War” (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 44.
8. Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, 50.
9. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “Cuban Exceptionalism?” in Che Guevara Speaks: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. George Lavan (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 26.
10. Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, 51.
11. Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, 66.
12. Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, 103.
13. Daniel James, ed., The Complete Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara and Other Captured Documents, 1st Cooper Square ed. (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 199.
14. Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, 52.
15. James, Complete Bolivian Diaries, 219.
16. Paul E. Sigmund, “The Development of Liberation Theology: Continuity or Change?” in The Politics of Latin American Liberation Theology: The Challenge to U.S. Public Policy, ed. Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth (Washington, DC: The Washington Institute Press, 1988), 21, 22.
17. Leopoldo Madruga, “Interview with Urbano,” in Urban Guerrilla Warfare in Latin America, ed. James Kohl and John Litt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 285.
18. “30 preguntas a un Tupamaro,” in Tupamaros: estrategia y acción, ed. Antonio Mercader and Jorge de Vera (Montevideo: Editorial Alfa, 1969), 57 (author’s translation).
19. Susan C. Borque and David Scott Palmer, “Transforming the Rural Sector: Government Policy and Peasant Response,” in The Peruvian Experiment: Continuity and Change under Military Rule, ed. Abraham F. Lowenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 179.
20. Shane Hunt, “Direct Foreign Investment in Peru: New Rules for an Old Game,” in Lowenthal, Peruvian Experiment, 312.
21. Thomas C. Wright, Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution, revised ed. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 137.
22. E. Bradford Burns, At War in Nicaragua: The Reagan Doctrine and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 35.