[News] Venezuela - Embedded with the “Tupamaros”

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Embedded with the “Tupamaros”

April 23rd 2008, by George Cicariello-Maher
Parroquía 23 de Enero, 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.
Source URL: http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/
Printed: April 24th 2008
License: Published under a Creative Commons 
license (by-nc-nd). See creativecommons.org for more information.




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