Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency

2: Some Wellsprings of Insurgency

24 RESISTING REBELLION 24 CHAPTER 2 SOME WELLSPRINGS OF INSURGENCY Many factors have produced insurgencies, almost as many as the ways in which rulers can commit folly or self-seeking men disguise their aims. While insurgencies always have multiple causes, in almost every instance one factor predominates, by providing either the provocation , the justification, and/or the opportunity for an outbreak. The present chapter examines five elements that have played such a role in insurgency: rigged or suppressed elections, a tradition of internal conflict, the aspirations of former or marginal or would-be elites, defeat in war, and a response from those targeted for genocide . (Religiously motivated insurgencies will be considered in separate chapters.) RIGGED ELECTIONS: CLOSING THE PEACEFUL ROAD TO CHANGE Popular elections have achieved a quasi-universal status as the symbol of legitimate authority, or at least as the road to peaceful change.1 “Perhaps the most important and obvious, but also the most neglected fact, about great revolutions is that they do not occur in democratic political systems.”2 Che Guevara insightfully observed that it is not possible to make a successful insurgency against a government that is democratic, or that pretends to be so.3 On the other hand, for at least the past two hundred years the absence, or especially the shutting down, of a peaceful means of redressing grievances has clearly contributed to the outbreak and continuation of insurgency. This section examines five cases of the connections between denied or rigged elections and the development of insurgency: France in the 1790s, Mexico in the 1920s, the Philippines in the 1950s, El Salvador in the 1970s, and Kashmir in the 1990s. Some Wellsprings of Insurgency 25 France The French revolutionary regime would eventually wage war not only against the whole of Europe, but against its own citizens as well, devastating and depopulating entire regions of France. Such conduct was possible because the revolutionary government had come to power through elections that were totally unrepresentative of popular desires. The French elections of August–September 1792 installed a new parliament , the so-called National Convention, a body that would proclaim the end of the monarchy; execute King Louis and his wife, Marie Antoinette; carry the country into war against Britain, Spain, and Austria ; impose the draft; confiscate the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars in private property; shut all the churches in Paris and elsewhere ; initiate the Terror; publicly guillotine thousands of citizens (most of them persons of quite humble condition); and wage genocidal war against French men and women in the Vendée and other provinces. Yet in those 1792 elections, less than one eligible voter in five participated , from an already narrowly restricted pool of electors. Most of those who did vote were compelled to do so orally and in the presence of government authorities.4 Thus the revolutionary regime, enforcing an unprecedentedly radical program while restricting the electorate to its own narrow base of supporters and beneficiaries, found itself confronted by widespread and serious insurgencies.5 Mexico The revolutionary regime that ruled Mexico after 1915 “had come to power through military force. It maintained itself by authoritarian means, without free elections. The new constitution had been imposed by a small minority of revolutionaries and had never been submitted to a vote for popular approval or rejection.”6 The subsequent electoral record speaks for itself. In the presidential election of 1920, the candidate of the revolutionary oligarchy, General Obregón, allegedly received 1.1 million votes, and all other candidates together less than 50,000; in some states the vote for Obregón was actually declared to be unanimous.7 In 1924, government candidate Plutarco Calles was credited with 1,340,000 votes; all his opponents, 250,000.8 In 1929, the official results gave Ortiz Rubio, the government candidate, 1,949,000 votes, while the distinguished educator José Vasconcelos allegedly received but 111,000. In 1934 the government candidate Lázaro Cárdenas supposedly obtained 2,225,000 votes; the official count for all his opponents, including the famous General Antonio 26 RESISTING REBELLION Villareal, was 41,000. Furthermore, shortly before the election of 1928 officially won by Obregón (who was soon thereafter killed), the government arrested both of the leading opposition candidates, Generals Arnulfo Gomez and Francisco Serrano, and executed them.9 Aside from their antireligious posture, the only shred of ideological cohesion among the revolutionary general-politicians was...