[R-G] Embedded with the Tupamaros

[Anthony Fenton]

April 25, 2008
"We Are Not Terrorists"
Embedded with the Tupamaros
By GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER
http://counterpunch.com/maher04252008.html

Caracas.

It is a Friday night in Caracas, Venezuela. We are standing in the  
back of a pickup truck surrounded by dozens of motorcycles, tearing  
through the streets of Catia, the massive slum area that makes up  
nearly half the population of the city. On the motorcycles,  
revolutionaries young and old, women and men, some masked and waving  
flags, weave back and forth, sometimes ahead of the truck, sometimes  
behind. Two large speakers are blaring songs by revolutionary folk  
musician Alí Primera while a voice calls on the community to halt the  
repression of its most radical elements.

Fliers are distributed by throwing entire handfuls toward the crowded  
sidewalks. The motorcycles surge ahead, down narrow barrio streets, to  
coordinate the progress of the truck and the many cars following it in  
the caravan, as they make their way through the sometimes clogged  
streets. Occasionally there is confusion: we cannot pass this way, and  
the truck is slowly turned around as onlookers, some awestruck some  
annoyed, watch from the crowded sidewalks. The caravan pauses  
occasionally, occupying an entire intersection for several minutes,  
chanting revolutionary slogans:

Now more than ever, we are united,
radical groups and popular militias

And, in reference to the historically-revolutionary neighborhood that  
most of these groups call home:

23 de Enero, people’s army

Each time we stop, a motorcyclist dismounts to set up an apparatus,  
makeshift but sturdy, for launching giant bottle rockets into the sky.  
The deafening explosions only heighten the drama of the caravan. At  
one point, a young teenager darts past with what looks like a bundle  
of burlap. A perimeter is cleared, and he lights what turns out to be  
a massive firework, but one which detonates on the street rather than  
in the air. The explosion is deafening. It looks like an earth-bound  
supernova.

For more than two hours we wind through these streets, fumes from the  
motorcycles and the generator burning my throat and eyes. But I am  
seeing areas that would be impossible for me to visit without the  
security offered by these revolutionary militias, these “Tupamaros.”

The Myth of the “Tupamaros”

The late 1970s saw a waning of the Venezuelan guerrilla struggle,  
weakened by defeats on both the military and political fronts.  
Strategic errors and state repression had left what few armed units  
remained almost entirely isolated from any kind of mass political  
base. A period of reflection and self-criticism ensued, with some  
former revolutionaries seeking to reconnect with the masses through  
new electoral movements like Teodoro Petkoff’s Movement Toward  
Socialism (MAS) or Alfredo Maneiro’s more grassroots Radical Cause  
(LCR).

This emergence from the shadows of clandestinity, however, did little  
to temper state violence: rather, as longtime revolutionary Roland  
Denis puts it, the 1980s saw a “socialization of violence.” As the  
state’s capacity to provide necessary services declined alongside oil  
prices, popular protest was met with hot lead, most prominently in the  
1989 Caracazo riots, which saw as many as 3,000 slaughtered in the  
poorest barrios.

It was in this context of repression that the Venezuelan popular  
militia movement was born. Neither entirely clandestine nor fully  
open, small groups began to spring up to defend local barrios from  
both the state and the burgeoning parallel violence of  
narcotrafficking. Small groups, masked and armed, began to make semi- 
public appearances, giving an ultimatum to local drug-dealers: either  
you stop selling drugs or you’ll be killed. The police, too, found  
themselves all the more frequently victims of armed ambushes and  
shootouts with masked militias. In order to explain this phenomenon,  
the police, government officials, and even more appreciative local  
residents adopted a single moniker, derived from the Uruguayan urban  
guerrilla struggle: in mythical fashion, these militias were deemed  
“Tupamaros.”

This became a new code word for both sides: the police used the term  
to denigrate, local residents to express an amalgam of respect, awe,  
and uneasiness, and the militants themselves to symbolically unify  
their struggle into one. This symbolic unification would become formal  
in 1993, with the establishment of the Simón Bolívar Coordinator. Its  
function lay in the name: this was a broad organization whose goal was  
to coordinate and unify the activities of the various armed militia  
collectives that had emerged spontaneously in response to the rising  
tide of state and para-state violence.

In response to Hugo Chávez’s decision to run for the presidency in  
1998, the Coordinator began once more to give way to a variety of  
perspectives and tactics. Some collectives sought to maintain absolute  
autonomy from the electoral arena, others like the remaining  
Coordinator and more recently the Alexis Vive Collective have accepted  
positions of non-electoral support in exchange for state funding, and  
finally some entered more directly into the electoral arena.

Somewhat ironically, it was the latter group, under the leadership of  
José Pinto, that chose to maintain the Tupamaro name. This electoral  
strategy was not without its gains: after supporting Chavista  
candidate Alexis Toledo, Pinto himself would be named police chief of  
Vargas State. But the use of the Tupamaro name for electoral politics  
would not go down well among some revolutionary sectors of 23 de  
Enero, and after 1998 Pinto found himself increasingly less welcome.  
One such critical revolutionary explains the resulting irony as  
follows: “Today, everyone is a Tupamaro, and yet the Tupamaros as an  
organized formation don’t exist in 23 de Enero.”

Radio Combativo 23

Our day began in a much less exciting way. We had managed to arrange a  
meeting with members of the Radio 23 Collective, the first community  
radio station to operate in the revolutionary parroquía of 23 de Enero  
upon its founding exactly four years ago. Unlike state-sponsored  
stations, Radio 23 operates on a shoestring budget. Each member  
contributes around $2 a week, and most are behind several weeks’  
payments for lack of work. Despite such financial difficulties,  
however, the station broadcasts 24 hours a day, an incredible feat  
that collective members attribute to the “magic” of their technician,  
who has managed to construct a homemade transmitter that has never  
crashed.

“We are itinerant,” they tell me, “of the 9 sectors of 23 de Enero, we  
have operated in 8.” Most recently, the collective set up shop in the  
zone of Cristo Rey. As we walk up the gentle hill that crosses from  
Monte Piedad to Cristo Rey, we pass a massive mural painted by another  
local revolutionary collective, La Piedrita. It is Jesus holding an  
AK-47, above an inscription that reads, “Christ supports armed  
struggle.” One of the oldest in the zone, the La Piedrita Collective  
has been operating for 22 years, and its members patrol the sector in  
a bright red, military style personnel carrier.

While the zone surrounding La Piedrita was pacified by the armed  
militia long ago, Cristo Rey is another story altogether. Tucked  
beneath the climbing barrios of Sierra Maestra, El Mirador, and El  
Observatorio, Cristo Rey was until six months ago a deadly warzone.  
“If you had a problem with someone,” collective members explain, “they  
would shoot you right here and dump your body in the ditch around the  
corner.” While much of the prevailing violence was drug-related,  
members of the Radio 23 collective are quick to point out that drug  
violence and state repression are really one and the same: “It was the  
Metropolitan Police and the National Guard who were bringing the drugs  
in in the first place and overseeing their distribution. To fight the  
narcos was to fight the police at the same time.”



When the collective set up shop, the first thing they did was to  
install the large power cables necessary for running a radio station.  
This was done at 11pm, and by 6am, the cable had been stolen. “That  
was the last thing that was stolen from us.” Members of the collective  
confronted local malandros (delinquents) and indigentes (homeless).  
“It was a dialogue, but one with consequences,” with the threat of  
force always implied. Almost immediately, the zone was secured, and  
there has only been one death in the entire area since. “The community  
is very appreciative,” we are told, and they even approach the  
Collective to sort out their basic demands, for example when the  
subsidized Mercal supermarket isn’t selling the amount of chicken they  
are supposed to.

But Radio Combativo 23 is more than merely a radio station: its  
members were among the more than 30 revolutionary collectives that  
recently called an armed blockade of the entire parroquía of 23 de  
Enero.

“Todos Somos Juancho”

Until recently, the relationship between the revolutionary collectives  
of 23 de Enero and the Chávez government had been a friendly one.  
Certainly, there were moments of tension, as when the Alexis Vive  
Collective and Simón Bolívar Coordinator turned up outside opposition  
television station Globovisión last year, protesting the station’s  
content and spray painting radical slogans on the walls.

But in general, the revolutionary collectives have enjoyed a much more  
open and supportive atmosphere, cultivating a tight relationship with  
the Bolivarian government. This relationship was at its clearest in  
April 2002, when Chávez was overthrown and briefly replaced by a non- 
democratic junta before being returned to power by popular  
mobilizations less than 48 hours later. Not only were revolutionary  
collectives in 23 de Enero key to Chávez’s return to power, but they  
had even provided a safe haven for Chavista government ministers and  
elected officials during a wave of opposition retribution.

In recent months, however, this relationship has been strained  
considerably. In February, a militant named Héctor Serrano, alias  
“Caimán” (“Alligator”), died while placing a small pipe-bomb outside  
of Fedecámaras, the nation’s chamber of commerce, heavily implicated  
in the 2002 coup. In the aftermath of the botched bombing, Venezuelan  
security and intelligence (DISIP) services entered revolutionary  
neighborhoods for the first time in several years. The revolutionary  
community responded with armed blockades protesting DISIP incursions,  
hailing their dead comrade, and demanding a halt to the persecution of  
another, Juan Montoya a.k.a. “Juancho,” for suspected participation in  
the bombing.

Chávez himself came out swinging on several occasions: “these people  
don’t look like revolutionaries to me, they look like terrorists,” he  
claimed on Aló Presidente immediately after the blockade, before  
arguing in a speech marking his return from the short-lived 2002 coup  
that the revolutionary collectives of 23 de Enero “have the hands of  
the CIA behind them.”

Unsurprisingly, this message was not well received among the  
revolutionary collectives that participated in the action. Despite the  
fact that the collectives issue their communiqués to “our commander-in- 
chief Hugo Chávez Frías,” the tone among some is bitter when the  
President’s name arises. “Chávez is calling us terrorists!” But they  
are quick to add the crucial caveat that things are far different than  
they had been under forty years of elite bipartisan rule: “At least he  
isn’t coming after us… yet.” Another member chimes in: “We’re not  
Chavistas, we’re not Marxists, we’re not socialists, we’re not  
anarchists or anything. We’re just Venezuelans who want to open up a  
little space so that the people have a little access to power.”

After our discussion with the Radio 23 Collective, we receive the  
unexpected invitation to join the caravan. We pile into a car and head  
to the meet-up point. As we climb out, we are told that “these people  
are the hardest of the hard,” and indeed it’s true. We meet members of  
the many collectives involved in the recent actions: La Piedrita,  
Militia Zero, the José Leonardo Chirino Collective (named for the  
leader of a famous slave rebellion), the Fabricio Ojeda Collective  
(named for a towering figure of the Venezuelan guerrilla struggle),  
the Zapatista Collective, the Revolutionary Movement of Bolivarian  
Defense, and Lina Ron’s Venezuelan Popular Unity, among many others.  
These revolutionaries greet one another with a single word: “Fuerza!”

The occasion is the defense of their comrade “Juancho,” who is  
currently in hiding after being named by the DISIP as a suspect in the  
Fedecámaras bombing. “Today, we are all Juancho, because during the  
coup, if they were just dealing with Chávez, it would have been over  
much quicker and the opposition would have won. But at that time, we  
were all Chávez, and we were victorious.” But this is more than mere  
comparison, and his words are thick with irony: “Do you know who was  
directing the armed resistance that day?” asks one revolutionary,  
referring to the street battles waged by radical Chavistas against the  
opposition-controlled Metropolitan Police who were participating in  
the coup. “It was Juancho!”

And yet this same revolutionary leader who was so essential to  
Chávez’s return to power now finds himself a wanted man. After a few  
minutes, participants crowd together to chant revolutionary slogans  
and plan the caravan route, and we are off.

“Yes, We Are Infiltrated”

A spokesperson for the Fabricio Ojeda collective is on the microphone.  
Twice I was told he was a “leader” of the collectives, and twice he  
replied “no, I am just a soldier.” During the two-hour caravan, he  
repeatedly reads a statement denouncing government repression and  
calling for participation in the next day’s planned cultural and  
sporting event in defense of “Juancho.” To Chávez’s accusations that  
these revolutionary collectives are infiltrated by the CIA, the reply  
is blunt: “Yes, we are infiltrated, we are infiltrated by the workers,  
we are infiltrated by campesinos, we are infiltrated by students and  
women, we are infiltrated by the oppressed, in short, we are  
completely infiltrated by the Venezuelan people.”

While insisting that “Juancho” had nothing to do with the bombing at  
Fedecámaras, the speaker nevertheless insists that their comrade  
“Caimán” “fell at the gates of Fedecámaras during a revolutionary  
action.” For these groups, there is no possible ethical grounds to  
oppose attacks on Fedecámaras, since “this is the same Fedecámaras  
that participated in the anti-democratic overthrow of the Venezuelan  
government, this is the same Fedecámaras that hoards food and gambles  
with the people’s survival, this is the same Fedecámaras whose  
paramilitary squads have murdered more than 300 campesino leaders in  
the past three years!”

While opposition leaders associated with the violent 2002 coup, such  
as Mayor of Chacao Leopoldo López and Ex-Governor of Miranda Enrique  
Mendoza, walk the streets and are even beginning to campaign for the  
November elections, the voice belting out of the loudspeaker insists,  
the revolutionary collectives of 23 de Enero find themselves pursued  
and persecuted “with the intention to annihilate us.”

According to the flyer distributed at the caravan, whose text is  
superimposed over the face of Che Guevara:

We are making clear that we will continue to defend our demands, that  
neither jail nor persecution will silence our voice, to the contrary,  
just as our ancestors resisted, today we will do the same against the  
attacks of an Oligarchy and a DISIP that are disgusted by the Smell of  
the People and the Smell of Revolution.

“We Are Not Terrorists”

While the primary function of the caravan was to denounce DISIP and  
police intervention and demonstrate the resolve of the collectives, it  
was also meant as a public invitation to attend and participate in the  
following day’s events, events which many might not expect from armed  
militia movements. We gather along with thousands of others in the  
neighboring parrioquía of Sucre for what is billed as a “cultural- 
sporting encounter” sponsored by the same organizations who  
participated in the armed shutdown two weeks prior.

This shutdown was much more peaceful, with hundreds of children in the  
street playing basketball, soccer, and volleyball, participating in  
Tae Kwon Do demonstrations and boxing matches. Members of the  
revolutionary militias participated as referees and by providing water  
and box lunches to the children. “You can see,” comments one  
revolutionary, a clipboard in hand and a whistle around his neck, “we  
aren’t terrorists, we’re just people from the communities who want to  
do everything we can to support the development of these communities  
and this revolution.”

George Ciccariello-Maher is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at  
U.C. Berkeley. He is currently in Venezuela writing a people’s history  
of the Bolivarian Revolution, and can be reached at  
gjcm(at)berkeley.edu.