It is necessary for every urban guerrilla to keep in mind always that he can only maintain his existence if he is disposed to kill the police and those dedicated to repression, and if he is determined to expropriate the wealth of the big capitalists, the latifundists and the imperialists.
—Carlos Marighella Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla
INFLUENCED by Fidel Castro's successful revolution, Che Guevara went to Bolivia and tried to launch a similar movement from the sparsely populated hinterlands. Too late, Che discovered that the country's peasants were more likely to betray than to befriend guerrilla fighters. Unable to count on aid from the people he was hoping to convert, Che was trapped and later executed by Bolivian soldiers in 1967.
The lesson was not lost on a strapping, green-eyed Brazilian mulatto named Carlos Marighella. A longtime Communist and former member of Brazil's congress, Marighella had no quarrel with Guevara's goal of overthrowing the established order—just with his tactics. Marighella believed that the proper approach was to terrorize Latin America's crowded and vulnerable urban areas. It is easier, he reasoned, to fade into a teeming city than to elude an army patrol in a rural district where the peasants distrust all strangers. Marighella put his ideas into a 55-page work of revolution, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla.
Though Marighella, like Guevara, was eventually hunted down and killed, his book has been widely circulated among city-dwelling terrorists in many parts of the world. Justly worried about its pernicious influence, authorities have banned it in much of Latin America. In France, it was published in July and quickly outlawed. In the U.S., the Minimanual has been making the rounds of radical groups in mimeographed form and in extensive excerpts in underground newspapers.
In the Minimanual, Marighella enjoins urban terrorists to carry out executions "with the greatest cold-bloodedness, calmness and decision." He particularly recommends "the killing of a North American spy, of an agent of the dictatorship, of a police torturer, of a fascist personality, or a stool pigeon, police agent or provocateur." To finance revolutionary endeavors, he suggests robbing banks; trying not to overlook anything, he goes so far as to advise "locking people in the bank bathroom, making them sit on the floor." For the urban guerrilla's arsenal, Marighella recommends "Molotov cocktails, gasoline, homemade contrivances such as catapults and mortars for firing explosives, grenades made of tubes and cans, smoke bombs, mines, conventional explosives, plastic explosives, gelatine capsules."