A Manual for the Urban Terrorist

It is necessary for every urban guerrilla to keep in mind always that he can only maintain his existence if he is disposed to kill the police and those dedicated to repression, and if he is determined to expropriate the wealth of the big capitalists, the latifundists and the imperialists.

--Carlos Marighella Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla

INFLUENCED by Fidel Castro's successful revolution, Che Guevara went to Bolivia and tried to launch a similar movement from the sparsely populated hinterlands. Too late, Che discovered that the country's peasants were more likely to betray than to befriend guerrilla fighters. Unable to count on aid from the people he was hoping to convert, Che was trapped and later executed by Bolivian soldiers in 1967.

The lesson was not lost on a strapping, green-eyed Brazilian mulatto named Carlos Marighella. A longtime Communist and former member of Brazil's congress, Marighella had no quarrel with Guevara's goal of overthrowing the established order--just with his tactics. Marighella believed that the proper approach was to terrorize Latin America's crowded and vulnerable urban areas. It is easier, he reasoned, to fade into a teeming city than to elude an army patrol in a rural district where the peasants distrust all strangers. Marighella put his ideas into a 55-page work of revolution, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla.

Though Marighella, like Guevara, was eventually hunted down and killed, his book has been widely circulated among city-dwelling terrorists in many parts of the world. Justly worried about its pernicious influence, authorities have banned it in much of Latin America. In France, it was published in July and quickly outlawed. In the U.S., the Minimanual has been making the rounds of radical groups in mimeographed form and in extensive excerpts in underground newspapers.

In the Minimanual, Marighella enjoins urban terrorists to carry out executions "with the greatest cold-bloodedness, calmness and decision." He particularly recommends "the killing of a North American spy, of an agent of the dictatorship, of a police torturer, of a fascist personality, or a stool pigeon, police agent or provocateur." To finance revolutionary endeavors, he suggests robbing banks; trying not to overlook anything, he goes so far as to advise "locking people in the bank bathroom, making them sit on the floor." For the urban guerrilla's arsenal, Marighella recommends "Molotov cocktails, gasoline, homemade contrivances such as catapults and mortars for firing explosives, grenades made of tubes and cans, smoke bombs, mines, conventional explosives, plastic explosives, gelatine capsules."

The most important section of the Minimanual presents what Marighella calls "action models." He suggests that kidnaping be used to "exchange or liberate imprisoned revolutionary comrades," and that the victims range from "a notorious and dangerous enemy of the revolutionary movement" to artists and sports figures whose abduction may be "a useful form of propaganda." In a section headed "Ambush," he notes that the principal object is "to capture the enemy's arms and punish him with death." In "Sabotage," he observes that "a little sand, a trickle of any kind of combustible, a poor lubrication, a screw removed, a short circuit," can all go a long way. Under "Street Tactics," Marighella suggests everything from "marching down streets against traffic" to "throwing bottles, bricks, paperweights and other projectiles from the top of apartment and office buildings." He adds: "Snipers are very good for mass demonstrations."

Marighella's emphasis on terror as a tool for disrupting society borrows, of course, from the destructive spirit of anarchism, with its "propaganda of deed." The current upsurge of terrorist actions, in fact, strongly recalls the last decades of the 19th century, when an anarchistic reign of terror spread a blanket of fear over Europe and the U.S.

Like Marx, Lenin loathed anarchists as undisciplined romantics who disdain all authority. Yet he borrowed some of their ideas. In words that Marighella might have used as a model, Lenin urged revolutionaries "to arm themselves with anything they can lay hands on (a rifle, a gun, a bomb, a knife, a stick, a kerosene-drenched rag to set fire with, a rope or a rope ladder, a spade to build barricades, barbed wire, nails against cavalry, etc.). To start training for war immediately, by means of practical operations: killing a spy, blowing up a police station, robbing a bank to provide funds for the uprising, etc." Concluded Lenin: "Let every detachment train for action--be it only by beating up a policeman."

As the old political structures began crumbling, Lenin's tactics were successfully grafted onto the guerrilla movements that arose in such places as China, Cuba and Viet Nam. But the theorists of these movements, including Che, his follower Regis Debray and Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth), generally overlooked the urban guerrilla and concentrated on the peasant.

According to the Minimanual, the urban guerrilla should "be a good walker, be able to stand up against fatigue, hunger and heat, never act impetuously, have unlimited patience, remain calm and cool and, above all, not get discouraged." Marighella recommends that this durable soul get in shape by "hiking, camping, mountain climbing, rowing, fishing and hunting." Additionally, he notes: "It is very important to learn how to drive, pilot a plane, handle a motorboat and have some knowledge of electronic techniques."

Along with the dos are some don'ts. Under the heading, "Seven Sins of the Urban Guerrilla," Marighella lists "inexperience, boasting, vanity, exaggeration of his strength, lack of patience, anger and a failure to plan properly."

To reduce the chances of betrayal, he recommended the formation of "firing groups" consisting of no more than four or five persons. "No firing group can remain inactive waiting for orders from above," writes Marighella. "Its obligation is to act." Who is eligible for Marighella's firing groups? Just about everybody, including students, since they are "politically crude and coarse and show a special talent for revolutionary violence," and women, for their "unmatched fighting spirit and tenacity."

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Marighella did not live long enough to see many of his ideas put into practice. Last year, after his followers kidnaped U.S. Ambassador C. Burke Elbrick, Brazilian police set up an elaborate ambush for Marighella. Two Dominican priests who had harbored Marighella on numerous occasions were arrested and forced to arrange a meeting with him. When Marighella's trusted bodyguard, Gaucho, appeared to case the rendezvous site, he saw two couples necking in a Chevrolet, laborers languidly unloading materials at a construction site, bricklayers working on an unfinished building across the street. Gaucho gave the all-clear sign, and Marighella, carrying a briefcase and wearing a brown wig, swung into view. He saw the two familiar Dominicans, waiting in a blue Volkswagen across the street, and climbed into the car.

Immediately the bricklayers pulled weapons from their work clothes, the laborers streamed from the construction site, the passionate couples broke their clinches and reached for their guns. All were police. The fusillade lasted a full five minutes. A dentist unwittingly drove down the street and was fatally struck by two bullets. A policewoman who had been "necking" in the Chevrolet was mortally wounded. Police bullets killed both of them, for before Marighella could whip his gun out of his briefcase, he was riddled with five slugs. Two days later, Marighella was buried in pauper's grave No. 1106 in Sao Paulo's Vila Formosa cemetery.

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