Guevara in Myanmar: The Enduring Logic of Guerrilla Warfare
Abstract : This article examines the continued relevance of Che Guevara’s theory of guerrilla warfare through the lens of Myanmar’s ongoing civil war. Focusing on popular support, rural power bases, and ideology, it argues that despite criticisms of Guevara’s originality and mixed historical record, his core principles remain applicable to modern irregular conflicts. Myanmar’s People’s Defense Forces demonstrate how these elements can unify diverse groups and offset conventional military advantages in the 21st century.
On October 18, 1967, the American Embassy in La Paz, Bolivia, confirmed the death of the infamous Communist revolutionary, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, following a firefight with Green Beret-trained Bolivian soldiers in the Bolivian mountains. Following his death, Che Guevara’s fame lived on as a figurehead and representation of the Communist struggle against Western capitalism and the rights of the rural peasant. From posters in college dorm rooms to quotations in impassioned speeches, Guevara’s legacy has lived on in the decades following his death. However, Guevara’s legacy ultimately lies within his seminal work, Guerrilla Warfare, where he lays out the fine details and theories of conducting an insurgency.
Guevara’s theories are heavily influenced by the teachings and principles of Mao Tse-Tung and steeped in Communist ideology. This article explores Guevara’s relationship with Mao to better understand his intellectual foundations and explain his modern application. Using the present civil war in Myanmar as a case study, this article argues that Guevara’s core principles of guerrilla warfare maintain their relevance in modern insurgencies.
This article highlights three critical elements of Guevara’s theories: the importance of local and popular support, the importance of rural areas as a power base to consolidate and build strength, and the importance of ideology. A counterargument to Guevara’s applicability in the modern day follows, centered upon the heavy influences of Mao Tse-Tung and calling into question the originality of Guevara’s theories. The counterargument is rebutted by several facts on crucial differences between Mao and Guevara in their insurrectionary theories and detailing examples of Guevara’s theories in a modern insurgency, thus proving its maintained relevance.
Popular Support
“It is important to emphasize that guerilla warfare is a war of the masses, a war of the people… It draws its great force from the mass of the people themselves.” – Che Guevara
Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare borrows heavily from Mao Tse-Tung’s On Guerrilla Warfare. Both theories share the importance of popular support in funding, feeding, and filling the ranks of the guerrilla bands and the insurrection movement. Guevara’s quote at the section’s opening hints at the influence Mao’s theory of the people being the “water” that the “fish” (the guerrillas) swim through had on Guevara. Popular support and its importance cannot be understated and continues to be critical in modern irregular wars.
Burmese internal security has been unstable since its independence from British rule in 1948. Throughout the 2010s and into the early 2020s, unrest escalated into violence and ultimately erupted into civil war following a military coup in 2021. The amalgamates of the People’s Defense Forces (PDF) fomented growing ethnic nationalism across Myanmar. Opposition to the military junta in Naypyidaw evolved as a response to the coercive methods of counterinsurgency employed by the state armed forces (known as the Sit Tat) that have resulted in cases of extreme violence and human rights violations towards Burmese civilians. The ranks of the PDF have grown significantly over the past several years. With the coalescing of numerous militia groups, growing military success, and invigorated public support for the PDF militias, the PDF’s numbers swelled to roughly 65,000 troops in 2022.
Despite the lack of external support, the strong, local support to the PDF has allowed the resistance groups to form strong bases and consolidate forces to better prepare for direct offensive operations against the Sit Tat.
Popular support is critical in the PDF’s fight against the Sit Tat. The Chin National Army (CNA) – a PDF militia made up of ethnic Chin in Chin State which has seen recent combat success against the Sit Tat – has stated, “It [the CNA] must capitalize on the momentum before public support for the resistance could wane,” signaling an awareness of the importance of maintaining public support. The CNA’s statement reflects a key point of Guevara’s writing: capitalize on success and embolden public support.
Widespread support for the PDF provides a significant advantage over the Sit Tat. Public support has allowed PDF groups to recruit replacements for lost fighters and expand their numbers rapidly, all the while the Sit Tat experiences substantial recruitment troubles and public resentment. Despite the lack of external support, the strong, local support to the PDF has allowed the resistance groups to form strong bases and consolidate forces to better prepare for direct offensive operations against the Sit Tat. Although lethal aid remains elusive, the success of PDF operations and the support of the local population has resulted in non-lethal aid from the US supporting pro-democracy movements through the BURMA Act.
The Rural Area
One key difference between the Leninist and Maoist communist insurgency theories is Mao’s eventual prioritization of rural over urban areas. Following successive defeats in urban locales against the Kuomintang, the Chinese Communist Party retreated to the countryside, embedded in hard-to-reach locales, and embarked on an asymmetric campaign that ultimately proved successful. Guevara built upon Mao’s countryside lessons and applied them to his writings on guerrilla warfare from the Cuban Revolution. He notes that armed resistance for urban population centers would be very difficult in the early stages while directly under the government’s surveillance and security strongholds. The countryside, however, offers favorable fighting ground for guerilla warfare, being beyond the reach of government forces.
Control of the rural area has allowed the PDF militias to negate Sit Tat’s conventional advantages despite there being only “20 percent of PDF troops equipped with military-grade weapons and another 40 percent using homemade weapons.”
The insurgent forces in Myanmar’s various PDF militias equally prioritize the importance of a rural power base. Control of rural areas has been a tactical, operational, and strategic priority for the PDF militias, all for the same reasons laid out by Guevara: government control is weak in the countryside, the land is rugged and favors asymmetric tactics while weakening government forces tactical advantages, and access to a motivated population base to replenish recruits and supplies. The PDF has been so successful in securing its rural bases that there are now “several places it [the Sit Tat] cannot venture out into rural areas without suffering serious losses…” Control of the rural area has allowed the PDF militias to negate Sit Tat’s conventional advantages despite there being only “20 percent of PDF troops equipped with military-grade weapons and another 40 percent using homemade weapons.”
In alignment with Guevara’s theories of “Warfare on Favorable Ground,” the PDF has used the geography of the countryside effectively to level the playing field and inflict substantial losses against the government forces. The PDF has pushed the Sit Tat to the point where it is stretched so thin that it cannot sustain offensive operations. However, the Sit Tat knows that a retreat to the cities would be an admittance of its ineptitude against the PDF while also being a major psychological blow to a force that already suffer from low morale. Successfully establishing a power base in the countryside has allowed the PDF militias to strengthen and condense and conduct substantial offensive operations against the Sit Tat, similar to what Guevara details.
Ideology
Guerrilla Warfare is ripe with ideological language, championing the cause of the agrarian peasantry’s regaining autonomy and economic freedoms. Ideology, referred to by Guevara as “the cause,” is a fundamental driving motivation for the guerrilla and can sometimes be seen as the catalyst towards an individual’s will to employ violence to achieve a political goal. “The cause,” according to Guevara, can create a vanguard of dedicated revolutionaries, engrain righteousness within the insurgent, and, with an indoctrinated population, reinforce the base with a committed support apparatus.
In Myanmar, two key ideologies present themselves: democracy and ethnic self-determination. Following the military coup against the democratically elected government in Myanmar on February 1, 2021, pro-democracy groups both within Myanmar and globally have been motivated to re-establish democracy in the country. Democracy has been a cornerstone ideology across various PDF groups and their campaign against the Sit Tat. In an interview with Al Jazeera, one guerrilla within the Bamar People’s Liberation Army (BPLA) stated the “BPLA has offered her the chance to study political theory” and that she “became aware of why Myanmar people are asking for it [democracy] with their blood and sweat.”
Within Myanmar, there are 135 various ethnic groups and more than 200 PDF militias fighting under a shadow government known as the National Unity Government. Despite decades-long ethnic divisions between various groups seeking autonomy, the ideologically unified front for self-determination and federal democracy in Myanmar have been major reasons for the PDF’s success.
The BPLA fighter’s comments on political theory tie into another critical cornerstone of Guevara’s theory. Guevara mentions the importance of reading and self-education for revolutionaries and the peasantry to increase their intellectual understanding of the reasons and goals behind the fighting while also using literature to indoctrinate unaligned citizens. Additionally, the BPLA fighter’s comments share commonality with Guevara’s theory that the guerilla fighter is a social reformer and “has the intention of destroying an unjust order and therefore an intention, more or less hidden, to replace the old with something new.”
Within Myanmar, there are 135 various ethnic groups and more than 200 PDF militias fighting under a shadow government known as the National Unity Government. Despite decades-long ethnic divisions between various groups seeking autonomy, the ideologically unified front for self-determination and federal democracy in Myanmar have been major reasons for the PDF’s success. Sound ideology and a solid belief base are potent tools for an insurrection movement to motivate ordinary citizens to take up armed resistance, a hallmark tenant of Guevara’s guerrilla theories.
Counterargument to Guevara
Discussing Che Guevara without discussing Mao Tse-Tung’s work is not easy. Guevara respected Mao and drew heavily from his work. The core themes within Mao’s writings seen throughout Guevara beg the question of whether Guevara’s theories are unique or if he just repackaged Mao’s pre-existing theories and presented them through a lens more fitting to Latin American Communist movements, thus lacking original thought.
An essential criticism of Guevara and his theories is their limited applicability to achieving victory outside Cuba. Between a lack of ethnic diversity, a weak government, and deep public dissatisfaction with the brutality of Batista’s regime, Cuba was a relatively unique situation and prime for revolution. In every other theater in which Guevara attempted to replicate the success of the Cuban Revolution, he failed. The history of failure outside of Cuba also calls into question the relevance of Guevara’s theories in the post-9/11 and Cold War eras. Is a theory of guerrilla warfare that only saw success once in a potentially perfect situation even worth considering as a valid theory?
Adaptation Rather Than Replication
Guevara’s theories exhibit some distinct differences from Mao’s to the extent that they are considered entirely separate, albeit similar, theories. The most substantial of these differences is Guevara’s “foco” theory, the central tenant of Guevara’s tactical theories in guerrilla warfare. Whereas Mao advocated for a more methodical approach of gradually building forces in the countryside before engaging in conventional warfare by going through three distinct phases, Guevara believed that a small, highly motivated vanguard could create revolutionary conditions through sustained armed action, rather than waiting for objective political and social prerequisites to mature. In this sense, foco theory diverged sharply from both Leninist and Maoist thought by treating insurgent violence not as the culmination of mass mobilization, but as its catalyst.
The ultimate argument for rebuttal is this: no perfect theory exists. Theories depend heavily on the realities of the environment in which they are applied. It is a fact that Guevara’s foco theory failed outside Cuba. In general, foco is a non-starter; however, many elements of Guevara’s theory are adaptable. Arguably, his greatest legacy is his emphasis on the importance of ideology and the critical role ideology plays in motivating both the guerrilla and the citizen. In Myanmar’s civil war, both ideology and a common enemy unify a highly diverse assortment of ethnic groups with historical grievances and differing objectives.
Mao heavily inspired Guevara’s theory. Nevertheless, Mao also heavily inspired Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap in Vietnam during the Viet Cong/Minh regime. Giap’s theories were not direct copies of Mao’s; the struggle for independence against the French and the subsequent war against South Vietnam and the United States saw the Viet Cong/Minh take inspiration from Mao and tailor it to their operational realities. Guevara did the same thing in his theories within Cuba, which led to success in Cuba. A sound theory is rarely original and often draws inspiration from other theorists, conflicts, or struggles.
Guerrilla Warfare alone will not apply 100 percent in almost any conflict outside of the Cuban Revolution. However, Guevara’s core principles of the importance of popular support, the rural areas as a power base, and the crucial importance of ideology are seen throughout Myanmar’s insurgents’ fight against the Sit Tat, thus validating Guevara’s theory in the 21st Century. Time will tell if Myanmar’s PDF militias are ultimately successful in their struggle against the military junta. To date, however, PDF militias have successfully secured popular support, established a rural power base and security zone away from government forces, and seen the unifying effects of a common ideology and enemy.
Conclusion
Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s legacy as a revolutionary icon transcends mere historical interest. His seminal work, Guerrilla Warfare, continues to offer a framework for understanding and conducting insurgencies despite critiques regarding its originality and limited applicability. This article has explored the core tenets of Guevara’s theory—popular support, rural power bases, and ideology—and demonstrated their continued relevance through the lens of the ongoing civil war in Myanmar.
Guevara’s emphasis on popular support as the lifeblood of an insurgency resonates with the experiences of Myanmar’s PDF. The brutality of the military junta has driven widespread public opposition, allowing the PDF to not only replenish its ranks but also establish a strong social base in rural areas, mirroring Guevara’s assertion that guerrillas must operate within the people, drawing strength and legitimacy from their cause. The strategic importance of rural areas as a guerrilla base is another enduring principle. The harsh terrain and limited government reach in Myanmar’s countryside provide the PDF a sanctuary and a springboard for operations, thus aligning with Guevara’s focus on exploiting the weaknesses of conventional forces by establishing a foothold in remote locations. Finally, one cannot overstate the role of ideology in motivating both insurgents and citizens. In Myanmar, the fight revolves around restoring democracy and ethnic self-determination. This shared ideology, as emphasized by Guevara, unifies diverse groups and provides a compelling narrative for the fight against the military junta. While critiques regarding the limited success of Guevara’s theories outside Cuba and their similarities to Mao’s writings are valid, they do not negate the adaptable nature of his core principles. Just as Vo Nguyen Giap adapted Mao’s theories to the Vietnamese context, the PDF has effectively applied Guevara’s framework to its struggle in Myanmar.
In conclusion, despite its limitations, Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare offers valuable insights for understanding modern insurgencies. The importance of popular support, rural power bases, and a unifying ideology remain crucial elements for insurgent groups like Myanmar’s PDF. As the conflict in Myanmar unfolds, Guevara’s legacy as a theorist of guerrilla warfare is likely to endure.
Author’s Note: This article was originally prepared as a final paper for Strategies in Insurgent and Asymmetric Warfare under Dr. Stephen Grenier, May 5, 2024. It has been adapted for publication in Small Wars Journal.
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