Guerrilla Warfare – Che Guevara (1961)

“Guerrilla Warfare (Spanish: La Guerra de Guerrillas) is a military handbook written by Marxist–Leninist revolutionary Che Guevara. Published in 1961 following the Cuban Revolution, it became a reference for thousands of guerrilla fighters in various countries around the world. The book draws upon Guevara’s personal experience as a guerrilla soldier during the Cuban Revolution, generalizing for readers who would undertake guerrilla warfare in their own countries. The book identifies reasons for, prerequisites, and lessons of guerrilla warfare. The principal reason to conduct guerrilla warfare within a country is because all peaceful and legal means of recourse have been exhausted. The most important prerequisite for conducting guerrilla warfare in a country is the popular support of its people for the guerrilla army. Guevara asserted that the success of the Cuban Revolution provided three lessons: popular forces can win a war against a regular army, guerrillas can create their own favorable conditions (not needing to wait for ideal conditions to take shape), and in the underdeveloped parts of the Americas, the basic place of operation for a guerrilla army is the countryside. Guerrilla Warfare is a manual for left-wing insurgency which draws upon Guevara’s experience in the Cuban Revolution. It elaborates the foco theory (foquismo) of revolution in which the guerrilla operates as a vanguard, taking initiative to make revolution without waiting for ideal conditions to present themselves. Although the text has been compared to Mao Zedong’s On Guerrilla Warfare, Guevara claimed not to have read Mao’s book. Guerrilla Warfare was influenced by two books from the Spanish Civil War: Nuevas Guerras and Medicina contra invasión. South African revolutionaries read the work in the early 1960s; former Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils noted that the apartheid regime’s police questioned his late wife about an order of ‘Che Guevara’s book on guerrilla warfare.’ … While the book was intended for other revolutionary movements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, it was also studied by counter-revolutionary military schools. With the success of Che’s military campaign in Cuba and the spread of communism in Latin America, U.S. military activity increased throughout the region. The U.S. military adopted some of Che’s own tactics in order to better combat guerrilla fighters in the jungle. This entailed U.S. military training throughout Latin America in order to counteract the spreading of guerrilla movements throughout the region (for historical context on United States foreign policy in Latin America, see the Good Neighbor policy). Che faced the results of this training in his disastrous Bolivian Campaign, in which most of the ELN rebels led by him were killed and Che himself was executed. …”
Wikipedia
Che Guevara – Guerrilla warfare: A method

Guevara in the Congo (Zaire)