Commentary No. 21, August 1, 1999
"Guerrillas as Entrepreneurs"
A strange thing is happening. Guerrillas are becoming entrepreneurs. The word guerrillas comes from the Spanish term "guerra" ("war") and was originally meant to indicate armed forces that engaged in hit-and-run warfare in defense of territory against a foreign invader. During the Second World War, the resistance forces in Nazi-occupied Europe were engaging in guerrilla warfare. But the term has long been extended to describe armed groups engaged in warfare against their own government.
The motivations can be multiple. Some guerrillas use an ideological justification: they wish to replace the existing regime with a different kind of government. The Chinese Communists, when they were in Yenan, were this kind of guerrilla movement. Some guerrillas use an ethno-national justification. They wish to force the government to permit the secession of a region, or at least the autonomy of a region. The Kurdish forces in various Middle East countries are this kind of guerrilla movement. And some guerrilla movements are simply the expression of a group of people who wish to seize power for their own glory and profit. It is of course not always easy to distinguish the motivations. Furthermore, the people against whom the guerrillas are fighting regularly ascribe motivations to the guerrillas that are different from those the guerrillas claim publicly for themselves. But this is standard political rhetoric/propaganda.
One of the characteristics of a state in the modern world-system is that it claims the exclusive legitimate right to the use of violence within its frontiers. For any state, guerrillas are illegitimate, and indeed immoral. States seek to suppress guerrilla forces. The main problem of guerrilla forces is how to survive against the efforts of the state to suppress them. What is it that guerrillas need to survive? First of all, they need some sort of popular support. As Mao Zedong said, they need to be like "fish in the sea." The list of guerrilla movements that have failed because they couldn't muster some active support from the populations in their zone is long indeed. One famous example is the failure of Che Guevara to establish a guerrilla base in Bolivia, leading to his death and the elimination of his group.
But popular support is not enough. Guerrillas are engaged in warfare. And warfare requires weapons. Weapons cost money, these days a lot of money. So guerrillas need money. One of the reasons the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa was never able to mount a serious guerrilla movement inside South Africa was the very high financial cost of a serious operation. They unmistakably had the popular support. But they did not have the resources for a military campaign. So what the ANC did is conduct a worldwide political campaign which ultimately was successful, but it is different from coming to power by military means, as did the Chinese Communists.
The question is where can guerrillas get the money they need to wage warfare? There have been two traditional sources. They have raised money ("taxed") individual supporters, both within the country and in the rest of the world. This seems to have been the major source of financing of the Irish Republican Army. Of course, it helps if one has a diaspora that is reasonably wealthy. They have also raised money from sympathetic governments. During the Cold War, both the U.S. government and the government of the Soviet Union gave money directly to many guerrilla movements. They did so presumably because the guerrilla movements they supported were expected to pursue foreign policies more sympathetic to the objectives of one side or the other than the existing government. Both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. said that it supported particular guerrilla movements for ideological reasons, but a skeptical observer might be forgiven for believing that the ideological explanations were oftentimes mere cover for more mundane, geopolitical motives.
The rise in cost of warfare occurred just at the time the Cold War began. Guerrilla movements began to rely on US/Soviet money. Guerrilla movements that sought to keep distance from both superpowers found themselves in great financial difficulty. But now the Cold War is at an end. Russia no longer has the money to disperse, even if it wanted to. Other lesser money distributors, such as South Africa or Cuba, are now out of the game. There still seem to be a few sources in the Islamic world, but their distribution is quite focused. For most guerrilla movements, the only real source of outside funds is the Central Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. government has very clear geopolitical priorities (and even financial constraints).
So what is a poor guerrilla movement to do? In this neoliberal Utopia in which we are living, they can go into business. What it requires are two things: already controlling some territory and having some valuable resources to sell on the world market, especially the black market. Let us look at some recent examples.
Angola is a case in point. From 1961 to 1975, Angolan nationalists were in a war of national liberation against the Portuguese colonial regime. There were however three nationalist movements, all claiming to being involved in guerrilla warfare. And they obtained such outside funds as they could get, which was not much, from different sources: one from the U.S., one from the U.S.S.R., and one from China. When the Portuguese regime collapsed, the MPLA seemed to be the dominant guerrilla force and assumed power in the capital city. The U.S. decided that the MPLA was too "leftist" for its taste (despite a history of complicated conflicts with the Soviet Union), and hastily switched support from the FNLA (which seemed to be dying) to UNITA (which had previously had Chinese support). The South African apartheid government was even more forthright and enthusiastic in its support of UNITA.
As a result, since 1975, Angola has been living through a horrible and devastating civil war. UNITA's style of action and local government has grown more execrable as the decades passed. Finally, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the U.N. brokered two successive major peace agreements. Elections were held, and UNITA lost both of them. The whole world seemed to rally around the MPLA government, now fully legitimated. Did this stop UNITA? Not at all. Deprived of outside funding (or at least of most of it), they had important resources in their region - diamonds. And diamonds can be sold on the world market with ease, even when it is illegal.
Today, UNITA is flush with money, and has used it to buy very expensive weapons, again illegally on the world market. They are doing very well against the legitimate government. They may yet win the civil war. What does UNITA stand for? It has a historic ethnic base. But it is today primarily a group of thugs with a lot of money. The U.S. officially deplores them. Of course, it had sustained them in the difficult days of the Cold War, which enabled UNITA to get where it is today. But the U.S. State Department prefers not to mention this.
The State Department prefers to talk about "narco-guerrillas." What are they? This is a term the U.S. is now applying to the FARC in Colombia. The FARC is the last surviving major guerrilla movement in Latin America, having engaged in warfare against the government for some thirty years. It is an ideologically-based movement seeking to establish some form of socialist government. For this reason, the U.S. has long opposed it, and supported a succession of very corrupt regimes in Colombia. The FARC may at one time have been getting some money from the Cuban government, but for many reasons those days are long past. FARC has survived largely because of popular support among the peasantry.
Where do they get the money? The U.S. now says it is from selling cocaine. Perhaps. But the U.S. is very selective about which cocaine-sellers they attack. When the Contras in Nicaragua or the KLA in Kosovo were accused of similar practices, the U.S. turned a blind eye, or perhaps even helped the Contras do it. The New York Times says the U.S. may be preparing active military intervention in Colombia. If so, the issue isn't cocaine.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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