Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Francis Wheen
delivery trucks to finish unloading, he paid little attention to a large red van until it edged out from the kerb and bored into his car’s left wing. Even this was not unusual amid the jostling chaos of Montevideo’s streets. With a weary shrug, the Embassy chauffeur opened his door to inspect the damage. A young man suddenly appeared from nowhere and smashed him over the head. There was a simultaneous rattle from a sub-machine gun, hidden in a basket of fruit carried by a bystander. Moments later, four Tupamaros were driving the ambassador away.
Jackson never discovered why he had been taken: no ransom was demanded, no execution threatened. Two months later the Tupamaros issued a photo of their prisoner in his ‘people’s jail’, heavily bearded, reading Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. In an accompanying letter to his wife, he urged her to ‘have faith and confidence’, and to remember that their car insurance needed renewing.
His release, in September, was as sudden and unexplained as his capture. During his eight months locked in a tiny cage in a Montevideo basement he studied his jailers closely, trying to fathom their aspirations. For all the Marxist slogans, he concluded that their motivating force was as much psychological as political. ‘Could it be,’ he wondered, ‘that the violence, the ferocity of clandestinity have no intellectual let alone ethical component, but instead are just another symptom of a deranged body-chemistry, just another mechanistic function of mankind’s alienation from a world and a society with which he is ever more incompatible?’ He noticed that they preferred music and books which ‘tended to the sad, the negative, the empty, the melancholic, the frustrated’. A burly guard known as ‘El Elefante’ often listened to John Lennon singing ‘Across the Universe’, though he understood none of the words. One day he asked his English prisoner to translate an insistent phrase from the chorus. In Spanish, Jackson replied: ‘Nothing’s going to change my world.’ After a short pause for reflection, the guard barked with laughter. ‘That’s what he thinks!’
For the Elephant and his comrades were now the vanguard of the revolution, and not only in Latin America. ‘The Tupamaro solution’ was the phrase used by members of the far-Left Weatherman group in the United States when, at the end of 1969, they elected to go underground and take up arms, having decided that confronting the police at street protests was wimpishly ineffective. ‘We understood that to say we dug the Viet Cong or the Tupamaros or the Black Panthers and yet not be willing to take similar risks would make us bullshitters,’ a Weatherman explained. A former soldier in the Symbionese Liberation Army, another gang of American guerrillas, recalls that they also took their inspiration from Latin America: ‘One of the groups that I really liked – and I guess it’s back to the old Robin Hood and Zorro thing – was the Tupamaros down in Uruguay.’ In West Germany, the anarcho-terrorists who formed the 2 June Movement – bombing police stations and US army bases, murdering public officials – originally called themselves the West Berlin Tupamaros.
In January 1971, the month of Geoffrey Jackson’s capture, the Tupamaros were the subject of a reverential twenty-page article in International, the journal of Britain’s International Marxist Group. A year after Jackson’s release Penguin Books published an English translation of Alain Labrousse’s The Tupamaros, which included the full text of their proclamations and revolutionary songs, with an introduction by the British journalist Richard Gott. ‘The Tupamaros are unquestionably a very special kind of revolutionary,’ Gott raved. ‘In spite of a fierce counter-attack, their staying power seems inexhaustible.’ One reason for their huge impact, out of all proportion to their numerical strength, was that they had ‘tried to adapt the “foco” theory of Guevara and Debray to urban conditions’.
As Gott’s awestruck tone suggests, this theoretical breakthrough was exciting news for impatient insurrectionists. Traditional revolutionaries believed that the necessary prerequisite was a mass movement of urban workers, painstakingly nurtured through organisation and education. The French Marxist Régis Debray, animated by the example of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in Cuba, had proposed a short-cut in his book Revolution in the Revolution: in Latin America, the revolution could be made by small groups of guerrillas in rural areas, recruiting peasants to their cause and fighting bush warfare against the army, without the tiresome preliminary chore of building a political party and raising the consciousness of the urban proletariat. Alas for Debray and Guevara, their attempt to put this into practice during the 1967 Bolivian guerrilla uprising ended in the death of Che (it was Richard Gott who identified the body) and the detention of Debray in a Bolivian military jail. By the time he was freed, three years later, he’d had ample time to reconsider. From his new base in Chile, where he had taken a job as press officer to Salvador Allende, he announced in January 1970 that there could be ‘various ways for Marxist movements to take power in Latin American countries, depending on varying national circumstances’. Through standing for election, for instance, like his friend Allende; or through ‘direct action’ in cities, as practised by the Tupamaros and advocated by the Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella in his influential Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (1969), which gave useful tips on cell structure, the selection of military and corporate targets, and even the need for regular exercise. ‘Other important qualities in the urban guerrilla are the following,’ it advised. ‘To be a good walker, to be able to stand up against fatigue, hunger, rain or heat. To know how to hide, and how to be vigilant. To conquer the art of dissembling. Never to fear danger. To behave the same by day as by night. Not to act impetuously. To have unlimited patience. To remain calm and cool in the worst of conditions and situations. Never to leave a track or trail. Never to get discouraged.’ Very like Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys, but with a rather different purpose. ‘The urban guerrilla’s reason for existence, the basic condition in which he acts and survives,’ Marighella wrote, ‘is to shoot.’* Metropolitan malcontents loved the book. Why should peasants bear all the burden, or have all the fun?
Come to that, why only Latin Americans? By the end of the 1960s there were plenty of itchy young urban radicals in North America and Western Europe who yearned for deeds rather than words – and deeds rather more incendiary than simply joining a protest march or hurling insults and cobblestones at ‘police pigs’ – but they jibbed at the idea of abandoning their basement flats and trying to radicalise yokels. Hadn’t Marx himself sneered at the idiocy of rural life? The Tupamaros and similar armies elsewhere in South America had shown what could be done without either peasant soldiers or a political party, so long as one had no qualms about planting bombs, assassinating politicians and kidnapping diplomats.* What mattered was making a noise, seizing attention, scaring the wits out of the ruling class; and where better to do it than in a big city? As the Yippie leader Jerry Rubin wrote in Do It!, his handbook for modern revolutionaries: ‘The street is the stage.’ America’s Weathermen, Italy’s Red Brigades and West Germany’s Red Army Faction (aka the RAF, aka the Baader-Meinhof Group) all read Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla in preparation for taking to the stage. (Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Marighella’s Italian publisher, was so enthused that he promptly went underground into a ‘Partisan Action Group’; in March 1972 the poor ninny blew himself to smithereens while planting a bomb under an electric pylon.) Small is Beautiful, the title of Erich Schumacher’s best-selling book, was their credo too: even the tiniest band of desperadoes could paralyse a nation. In a public plea for clemency on behalf of Ulrike Meinhof in 1972, the German novelist Heinrich Böll described the struggle of her group as that of ‘six [people] against sixty million’, and he wasn’t far wrong: the entire Baader-Meinhof membership at the time numbered no more than thirty, and fourteen of them were in jail.
Although these Western guerrillas differed in style and intensity – the Red Brigades killed scores of Italians, the Angry Brigade killed nobody – the common feature is that they took up arms at the same time, between the spring of 1969 and the autumn of 1970. All, in short, were gestated after the defeats of 1968, when for a few weeks the New Left convinced itself that the revolution had begun. ‘London, Paris, Rome, Berlin,’ soixante-huitards chanted. ‘We will fight and we will win.’ They didn’t, though Paris was a close-run thing, and when the tide receded the revolutionary street actors and situationists were left high and dry. Where next? Some