Martyrdom would be the best way for the hostage-takers in Peru to secure change, argues Richard Gott
THERE is a long and honourable tradition of guerrilla activity in Latin America that has ebbed and flowed over decades and centuries. Independence from Spain in the early 1800s would never have been successful without the innumerable guerrilla armies that helped to put in place a new world order. Oligarchic, unrepresentative and authoritarian regimes have run most of the continent ever since.
More than a century later, in the 1960s and 1970s, guerrilla groups sprang up everywhere in the (usually) vain hope of repeating the success of the Cuban revolution.
So the Peruvian rebels who have reappeared in Lima with such a dramatic sense of theatre have plenty of forerunners. Indeed, for long-term observers of the continent, there is a sense of having seen all this before: the seizure of hostages, the kidnapping of foreign diplomats, the ransom demands, the reading out of obscure political manifestos. From Uruguay to El Salvador, from Argentina to Nicaragua, these were the steady spectaculars of the 1970s. Embassies strengthened their security, the CIA sent in counter- insurgency and torture teams, and military dictatorships were installed to kill off a generation of young revolutionaries.
In one sense, the actions of the Peruvian group Tupac Amaru are a simple post-modern replay of the past. Today’s rebels reinforce their revolutionary credentials by their willingness to refer back to the triumphs of their predecessors. Tupac Amaru himself sparked off a rebellion in 1780 that reached from the countryside into every Spanish town in the Andes. In the 1960s, Cuban-backed guerrillas invoking the image of Che Guevara tried to do the same, not just in Peru but all over the continent.
Yet today’s revolutionaries seem to owe more to current abstruse theories about culture than to a detailed consideration of historical example. In the 1990s in Peru, and also in Mexico, we have been seeing the emergence of post-modern guerrilla movements that are rather different from those that appeared before. The iconography may look the same – the masks, the weapons, the red flags – but the ideology is different.
The aim of these armed bands is not to seize power and effect a revolution in society through armed struggle, defeating regular armies through guerrilla warfare. That would be a hopeless task. Their more simple purpose, using the weapons of imitation, parody and pastiche, is to cast doubt on the viability of the current neo- conservative ideology that has spread its suffocating blanket over the entire continent. They hope to destabilise the governments of their countries and, from the ensuing chaos, to set them off on a new path.
These guerrillas use the same words and rhetoric as their forerunners, but their slogans have mostly lost their meaning. They still invoke the Cuban example, yet everyone knows that it is many years since Fidel Castro’s regime gave anyone a helping hand. They claim to be fighting “imperialism”, yet in the absence of the Soviet Union, which was once able to provide a counter-weight to the regional superpower, there is no possibility that local resistance movements will be allowed to survive.
Counter-insurgency techniques are more developed than they were 30 years ago. Much of Latin America’s rural hinterland has been drained of population, and small anti- government armed groups can survive as local irritants only in obscure areas. While immense shantytowns can spawn endless recruits for rebel groups, there is no common culture of the kind that Islam provides for the revolutionaries of the Middle East.
Nor is there much opportunity to conduct the classic revolutionary war in which a guerrilla outburst sparks off a larger conflagration. The Zapatistas have been using the 20th-century peasant leader Emiliano Zapata as their emblematic figurehead, in much the same way that the Peruvians have been iconising the 18th- century rebel Tupac Amaru, but these talismanic invocations have had little effect. The notoriously compromised Mexican left has not been able to use the guerrilla challenge to unite its own political forces against the government. When the old and creaking political system in Mexico does break down, it will be to the benefit of the right rather than the left.
The outlook in Peru is equally pessimistic. Peru in the 1990s has been emerging from a 25-year period of crisis in which its traditions, its political institutions and society itself have been dramatically transformed. The country in the process has tried every kind of political recipe, including socialism imposed by military fiat and populism enforced through charismatic corruption.
Springing from nowhere, and without party label or baggage, President Alberto Fujimori has imposed the standard economic programme of the new global world order. As everyone now recognises, this makes the rich richer and the poor poorer.
The grounds for dissatisfaction are legion, and groups such as Tupac Amaru have no difficulty in finding recruits. But the cards are stacked against them. Fujimori has firm international support and remains popular at home.
The rebels’ only real hope of securing change is through martyrdom, and the Japanese government – still uncomfortable with its role as a global political player – has been moving heaven and earth to prevent this. The original rebellion of Tupac Amaru was drowned by the Spaniards in blood. Hundreds of Indians were executed in the towns of the Andes. It was a terrible warning, and there was silence for a generation. But then the Spaniards were gone.