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Urban guerrillas are blamed for a long list of other incidents. Since January, 74 Brazilian banks have been robbed, and the government suspects that at least half of the holdups were carried out to refill guerrilla war chests. Almost daily, bombs explode in São Paulo, the nation's commercial and industrial center. Last year U.S. Army Captain Charles Rodney Chandler was shot and killed in the city by terrorists who claimed that he was a Viet Nam "war criminal." Dissidents have taken over local radio stations on at least two occasions to broadcast antigovernment propaganda. They also burned three São Paulo television stations in one week last month.
The Last Lieutenant. Argentina, also run by a military-dominated government, has been under a state of siege for nearly three months. Terrorists there began attacking military installations in April. Just before Governor Nelson Rockefeller's visit to Buenos Aires on a fact-finding mission for President Nixon last June, they fire-bombed 13 Minimax supermarkets—a chain controlled by Rockefeller family interests. A few days later, four gunmen shot and killed Augusto Vandor, Argentina's leading labor unionist. Uruguay's Tupamaros (TIME, May 16) regularly embarrass the democratic government of President Jorge Pacheco Areco. In June, the Tupamaros set fire to a General Motors building in Montevideo, causing $500,000 in damage. Last week they kidnaped a leading Montevideo banker and announced they would not release him until the government capitulated to the wage demands of 8,000 striking bank workers.
Colombian urban terrorists affiliated with the Army of National Liberation pocketed at least $600,000 in ransom money from kidnapings in August alone. In Bolivia, where 22 dynamite explosions have rocked La Paz and other cities since May, the government last week scored a rare triumph over the guerrillas. Police surprised Guido "Inti" Peredo, the only one of Guevara's lieutenants to survive Che's doomed campaign, in a house in La Paz. Inti died in the clash. In Guatemala City, where terrorists last year assassinated U.S. Ambassador John Gordon Mein and two U.S. military attachés, guerrillas recently blew up a television station. Even relatively untroubled Chile saw its first political robbery this month. Chile's Communist Party denounced the terrorists as "gangsters"; they, in turn, accused the Communists of "passivity and betrayal."
Government security forces have found the terrorists elusive and difficult to stop. Brazil's answer to the new phenomenon has been to tighten the screws: last week the government decreed the death penalty for "revolutionary and subversive warfare." The trouble is that the guerrillas often welcome such responses, since their effect may be to create martyrs and focus attention on causes that might otherwise go unnoticed.