Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla: The Revolutionary Writings of Abraham Guillén

Abraham Guillén's name might not have the same resonance as that of the man I call Cliché Guevara, but the fact is that this former CNT guerrilla fighter in the Spanish Revolution, turned economist in exile in Argentina, turned guerrilla warfare theorist, is to urban guerrilla strategy and tactics what Guevara is to its rural counterpart. As such, he was hugely influential in the urbanised Southern Cone of Latin America - Argentina, Chile and Uruguay in particular - in its darkest hour, the Operation Condor holocaust that "disappeared" tens of thousands of regular folk, let alone leftist militants.

Among the disappeared was Alberto "Pocho" Mechoso, a trade unionist whose organisation, the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU) had built a 400,000-strong union centre, the CNT, and a mass worker-student front, both of which confronted the Bordaberry Dictatorship of 1973-1985. Mechoso was tortured and killed, his bones, dumped in a barrel of cement, only identified and buried properly in 2012 - but Bordaberry and his henchmen have now been brought to trial for their crimes.

Guillén was an inspiration for the Uruguayan Tupamaros guerrillas, but ultimately was critical of their proto-state terrorism, while being lauditory of the FAU's armed wing, the OPR-33, whose battles were far more integrated into community and factory struggles and which maintained a strongly libertarian (and thus anti-terrorist) operational ethic in its kidnappings, bank expropriations, bombings and other armed actions.