ERNESTO 'CHE' GUEVARA

Ernesto Guevara worked as a dentist in Argentina until the 1950šs when he became involved with Fidel Castro and his insurrection against the regime of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. Che was one of the few original guerrillas who landed with Castro and began the struggle from the Sierra Maestra. He believed that insurrections and eventually continental revolution could be spread by cadres of professional guerrillas, and worked to foster guerrilla movements in other parts of Latin America. Che himself went to Bolivia in 1966 with a handful of Cubans and immediately headed for the hills. He made no attempt whatsoever to build a support network in the cities and completely ignored the Bolivian Communist Party. His plan was to attract Bolivian recruits by armed actions against the Bolivian army, train the recruits and send them out to work in wider and wider areas of the countryside, and finally incite the entire country to rebellion. Once this was done and power seized, Bolivia would act as a center for the spread of revolution to the rest of the South American continent. The United States, having already sent almost a third of its standing army to Vietnam, would inevitably be dragged into a war it could never win and dared not lose.

The problem was that Che had last visited Bolivia in 1953, and the situation had changed markedly since then. Governmental land-reform schemes had made landowners of most of the peasantry Che had hoped to recruit. They were not interested in joining a foreigner who did not even speak their language and wanted to redistribute land that had already been redistributed. Chešs message fell on deaf ears. His partisan force reached a maximum strength of 41 in March 1967 -- 18 Cubans, 20 Bolivians, and 3 Peruvians. Meanwhile, the Bolivian Army, reinforced by US Special Forces advisors and working with an increasing degree of peasant collaboration, closed in on him. He was captured and killed in October 1967.

CARLOS MARIGHELLA

Carlos Marighella was born in 1911 in the state of Bahia in eastern Brazil. He joined the Brazilian Communist Party in 1930 and worked as an agitator and organizer. He rose quickly through the ranks despite spending the war years in jail, and became a member of the Central Committee of the Party in 1952. He traveled to China in 1953, where he met Mao Zedong and Zhu De.

After a military coup dšetat in 1964, the Brazilian Communist Party went underground. Marighella disagreed with other Party leaders on the tactics to adopt and was eventually thrown out of the Party in 1967 when he traveled against orders to Havana to attend a conference on Latin American solidarity.

There was widespread social unrest and economic upheaval in Brazil when he returned to Brazil at the end of 1967. Marighella was convinced of the need for armed struggle to unite the revolutionary forces and organized the ALN in February 1968. He directed the ALNšs activities and worked with other urban guerrilla groups, notably the VPR and MR-8 movements. Marighella was killed in a police ambush on 30 November 1969. The ALN, deprived of his charismatic leadership and organizational ability, fell apart within a year of his death.

Carlos Marighella was a prolific writer of essays and articles on revolutionary method. His most famous work, the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, was written in Sao Paulo in June 1969. This book has since been translated into twenty different languages and is a handbook for terrorist movements all over the world. It is the official training manual of the Italian Red Brigades, the German Red Army Faction, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army. The book is less than 60 pages long and is divided into 39 short parts dealing with different aspects of urban guerrilla warfare. For the most part, it reads almost exactly like a standard military tactical notebook, complete with mnemonic formulas to help the trainee terrorist remember important points. The book remains a concise summary of guerrilla tactics and organization but there is nothing particularly innovative or unexpected in it.

ANDREAS BAADER and ULRIKE MEINHOF

The turmoil on the campuses of French and German universities in 1968 and 1969 had several effects, one of which was to radicalize certain individuals on the fringe of the student New Left. Andreas Baader and his Œrevolutionary brideš Gudrun Ensslin found that simple protest marches and slogans were not the solution for the problem posed by prosperous, secure, materialistic Western society. They began to accumulate followers, acquire weapons, and rob banks in order to 'make the Revolution'.

Ulrike Meinhof gave up a successful career as a radical-chic journalist to join her friend Gudrun Ensslin in remaking West German society. She soon became one of the gangšs leaders after plotting a successful raid to free Andreas Baader. Meinhof and Ensslin snatched Baader from the local library where he had been allowed to go under guard to work on a book. They killed a librarian and wounded two guards in the process, and made good their escape in a silver-painted Alfa Romeo sports car. The Red Army Faction or Baader-Meinhof Gang, as it was now known, continued to rob banks and steal weapons throughout the 1970šs, aided by a large network of middle-class intellectuals and fellow-travelers.

In June of 1972 Baader and Meinhof were captured separately and imprisoned, but the active members of the gang continued their activities. Ulrike Meinhof hanged herself from the bars of her cell on 8 May 1976. Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin committed suicide in their cells on 20 October 1977 when they learned that the Mogadishu hijacking had failed and they would not be freed as one of the ransom demands.