Word: marighela
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...Marighela, a leader for 40 years of the Brazilian Communist Party, became increasingly disenchanted with the Party's failure to take action against the military dictatorship which seized power in Brazil in 1964. Marighela opposed the Party's decision to stand pat, await the restoration of parliamentary democracy, then work to augment its strength within the electoral system. He resigned in 1967 and helped establish the Action for National Liberation, a network of urban guerrilla units in Brazilian cities which engineered a spectacular series of raids and kidnappings, including a 1969 abduction of the American ambassador which forced the dictatorship...
What caused Carlos Marighela to renounce 40 years of his life, turn his back on a party he had led and a set of tactics he had helped develop? The reasons underlying Marighela's abrupt swerve from left tradition can be traced to the transformation in the character of Brazilian political life the dictatorship represented, a transformation that foreshadowed similar metamorphoses in other Latin American nations...
...Carlos Marighela greatly admired Fidel and Che, but he modified their theory markedly in applying it to Brazil. The growth of industrialism under the gorillas meant that Brazilian cities were naturally far more important as arenas of conflict than were Cuban cities. The situation in Uruguay was even more pronounced: fully one-half of the country's two and one-half million people live in Montevideo, the capital, and any revolutionary scenario would have to take that factor in account...
...Marighela intended that the Brazilian revolutionary war would eventually spread to the countryside, where the major battles would be fought, but the struggle was to begin in the cities, both to mobilize people living there and to prevent the military from immediately wiping out the revolutionaries. The new revolutionary war begins in the cities, Marighela wrote, "instead of with rural guerrilla warfare which would have attracted a concentration of enemy forces." The wave of political bank robberies, assasinations, kidnappings and so forth would demoralize the government, increase the repression and the contradictions within Brazilian society, and prepare the country...
Urban guerrilla war has not met with success thus far. Marighela is dead, the Tupamaros are dispersed, and the Chilean people have not yet swung into action, although the Pinochet dictatorship says it expects urban outbreaks. In Argentina, the People's Revolutionary Army is in action, although the situation there is complicated by the curious figure of Juan Peron. The North American sociologists were both right and wrong. Industrialism did not cause revolutionary resistance to disappear, but neither has that resistance gained anything resembling political victory. The successes of urban guerrilla warfare have been almost exclusively informational: The kidnappings...