Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency

15: Two False Starts: Venezuela and Thailand

Two False Starts: Venezuela and Thailand 209 209 CHAPTER 15 TWO FALSE STARTS: VENEZUELA AND THAILAND During the 1960s, for reasons that may be difficult to comprehend today, the Communist Parties in Venezuela and Thailand decided to launch guerrilla insurgencies against their respective governments. The outcomes of these decisions were quite unexpected, especially to those who had made them. VENEZUELA Venezuela is three times the size of Poland, larger than Texas and Oklahoma combined. In the early 1960s, the population was about 7.5 million. Much of the national territory, especially in the south and east, was sparsely populated.1 In 1958, after helping to oust a military dictatorship, the reformer Rómulo Betancourt won the Venezuelan presidency in a free election. According to many analysts (notably Ernesto Guevara),2 it is not possible to stage a successful popular revolution against a democratic government ; nevertheless, the Venezuelan Communist Party, with between 30,000 and 40,000 members (hardly a mass movement), determined that that the time was propitious for a Communist revolution in that country. Venezuela was a society of ominous social disparities aggravated by high unemployment. The country had a long tradition of successful revolts, but no sustained experience with representative democracy. In return for cooperating with the recently ousted dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez, the Communists had been allowed to take control of many labor unions.3 They could also count on money, arms, and training from Castro’s Cuba. President Betancourt himself was unpopular in Caracas, the nerve center of the nation, as well as in certain conservative army circles. At the same time, Betancourt’s insistence on obser- 210 RESISTING REBELLION vance of civil rights guaranteed Communists freedom of travel and communication, as well as the right to organize within the precincts of the Central University of Caracas, into which the police were forbidden to go. Neither could the police fingerprint anybody under the age of eighteen. And they lacked cars with radios until late 1963. Between late 1960 and early 1963, the Communists carried out their “Rapid Victory” campaign, intended to seize control of Caracas and other cities through terror, rioting, robberies, and sniper attacks. Most of the perpetrators of these acts were university and high school students. (Two small, uncoordinated mutinies at military bases were easily put down.) Young Communists went to the countryside to convert the peasants. Instead, the peasants turned them over to the authorities. The Communists then decided to disrupt the December 1963 presidential elections. Their guerrilla arm, the FALN (Armed Forces of National Liberation), warned that anyone found out of doors on election day, even women, would be shot down.4 Nevertheless, 91 percent of the registered electorate went to the polls, only two points down from the 1958 turnout.5 After this humiliating rebuff, the party turned to rural insurgency, which it undertook in late 1963. The Venezuelan army did not move in sufficient strength against the guerrillas to eradicate them, giving them time to become familiar with terrain and population. However, Betancourt’s Democratic Action Party had been organizing the peasantry in most of the countryside for decades; thus the insurgents found little space for recruitment. Moreover, the army had established good relations with the rural population, and on the whole treated prisoners humanely. The Communists’ attempts to get a foothold within the rural population were further handicapped by their identification with unpopular foreign states. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the government gave the coup de grâce to any possibility of a serious guerrilla war by carrying out an extensive land reform.6 In 1966, Fidel Castro deposited some of his own guerrillas on the Venezuelan coast in an attempt to support the Communists’ insurgency. Nothing much came of this move, however, except a further deflation of the myth of the exportable Fidelista revolution. Ultimately, the Venezuelan insurgency faded away, so that by 1969 the country was free of any notable guerrilla activity. At the same time, an even more impressive failure of Communist insurgency was taking shape literally on the opposite side of the globe, in Southeast Asia. Two False Starts: Venezuela and Thailand 211 THAILAND Thailand has an area of two hundred thousand square miles, the size of Spain, or of Colorado and Wyoming combined. During the 1960s, Thailand looked to some like a good venue for a successful, or at least very troublesome, Communist insurgency, in light of its unique geography and population...