People's Guerrilla Group

Last updated
People's Guerrilla Group
Grupo Popular Guerrillero
Dates of operation1963–1965
Active regions Chihuahua, Mexico
Ideology Marxism–Leninism
StatusDefunct

The People's Guerrilla Group (Spanish : Grupo Popular Guerrillero, the GPG) was a left-wing militant group in Mexico. It operated between 1963 and 1965, until a disastrous attack caused the death of most prominent members.

Contents

History

Founded in 1963 in the north-western Mexican state of Chihuahua, [1] the People's Guerrilla Group formed in the context of the period preceding the Dirty War. Left-wing and peasant unrest was near-constant in many parts of the country during this time, in opposition to the Institutional Revolutionary Party government.

The group's primary leader was Arturo Gámiz García, with Pablo Gómez Ramírez as a prominent theoretician and Salomón Gaytán as a military commander. The founding members were rural teachers, students and peasants, some of them members of the Popular Socialist Party. The primary ideology was Marxism–Leninism. Some researchers have additionally claimed a strong influence from the group's more well-known Latin American contemporary Che Guevara and his 1961 book La Guerra de Guerrillas , while others attribute the works of Mao Zedong as an at least secondary influence. [2] [3]

In the morning of 23 September 1965, the group launched an attack on some military barracks – the regional headquarters of the Mexican Army– in Ciudad Madera, the asalto al cuartel de Madera. The plan was to lead an assault consisting of three separate groups, with a total of about forty militants. However, only one of them went into action, as the second had chosen to withdraw as it was unable to find its way, and the third – carrying the heavier weapons – was delayed by impassable roads and swollen rivers caused by torrential rain the previous night.

The single group, consisting of only thirteen fighters, decided to commence the assault regardless of their low numbers. This was due to the mistaken belief that only two platoons guarded the barracks. In fact, there were a full 125 officers in the area. The attack took place at dawn, and was quickly repelled. It has been said that their quick defeat was due to a driver turning on his locomotive's lights by accident, lighting up the entrenched guerrillas and making them easy targets.

As a result of the brief combat, six military defenders were killed: Lieutenant Marcelino Rigoberto Aguilar, Sergeants Nicolás Estrada Gómez and Moisés Bustillo Orozco, Corporal Felipe Reyna López, and the soldiers Jorge Velázquez and Virgilio Yáñez Gómez. Among the guerrillas, eight of thirteen were killed: the teacher and GPG leader himself, Arturo Gámiz García, the physician and Escuela Normal Rural "Ricardo Flores Magón" de Saucillo Chih professor Pablo Gómez Ramírez, the student (and Arturo's brother) Emilio Gámiz García, the peasants Antonio Scobell and Salomón Gaytán, the student Oscar Sandoval Salinas, and the teachers Miguel Quiñones Pedroz and Rafael Martínez Valdivia. [4]

Legacy

While small and brief, People's Guerrilla Group and their actions had a significant impact on the rapid development of guerrilla warfare in rural and urban Mexico during the following years. Numerous militant groups took their names from the GPG and the assault on the Madera barracks, including the Grupo Guerrillero del Pueblo Arturo Gámiz, the Grupo 23 de Septiembre, the Movimiento 23 de Septiembre, and the prominent Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre .

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shining Path</span> Maoist communist party in Peru

The Shining Path, self-named the Communist Party of Peru, is a far-left political party and guerrilla group in Peru, following Marxism–Leninism–Maoism and Gonzalo Thought. Academics often refer to the group as the Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path to distinguish it from other communist parties in Peru.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">People's Revolutionary Army (Argentina)</span> Far-left militant organization

The People's Revolutionary Army was the military branch of the communist Workers' Revolutionary Party in Argentina.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Colombian Communist Party</span> Political party in Colombia

The Colombian Communist Party is a legal communist party in Colombia. It was founded in 1930 as the Communist Party of Colombia, at which point it was the Colombian section of the Comintern. The party is led by Jaime Caycedo and publishes a weekly newspaper named Voz.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucio Cabañas</span>

Lucio Cabañas Barrientos was a Mexican social leader, schoolteacher, union leader, and guerrilla leader who founded the social and political movement Party of the Poor in 1967. Under his leadership, the party later became a guerrilla organization that was active in the Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range of Guerrero.

<i>La Violencia</i> Civil war in Colombia from 1948 to 1958

La Violencia was a ten-year civil war in Colombia from 1948 to 1958, between the Colombian Conservative Party and the Colombian Liberal Party, fought mainly in the countryside.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">¡Alfaro Vive, Carajo!</span> Marxist-Leninist political-military organization from Ecuador.

¡Alfaro Vive, Carajo! (AVC), another name for the Fuerzas Armadas Populares Eloy Alfaro, was a clandestine left-wing group in Ecuador, founded in 1982 and named after popular government leader and general Eloy Alfaro. The group was labeled as a terrorist organization by the Ecuadorian state during the period of the former president León Febres Cordero. It existed between 1983 and 1991, when it carried out various armed actions and criminal acts in Ecuador, with Colombian (M-19) and Nicaraguan influence. The group was initially formed sometime in the 1970s, but was not active militarily for the first few years of the 80's.

<i>Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre</i> Marxist-Leninist urban guerrilla movement in Mexico

The Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre, or LC23S, was a Marxist-Leninist urban guerrilla movement that emerged in Mexico in the early 1970s. The result of the merging of various armed revolutionary organizations active in Mexico prior to 1974, with the objective of creating a united front to combat the Mexican government; the name was chosen to commemorate an unsuccessful guerrilla assault on the barracks of Ciudad Madera in the northern state of Chihuahua led by former schoolteacher Arturo Gámiz and the People's Guerrilla Group on September 23, 1965. The LC23S' militancy was made up mainly of young disenfranchised university students who saw any opportunity of a peaceful political transformation die in the aftermath of the 1968 student movement and then to be buried in the violent crackdown of 1971. Its long term objective was the “elimination of the capitalist system and bourgeois democracy, which would be replaced by a socialist republic and the dictatorship of the proletariat”.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spanish Maquis</span> Post-Spanish Civil War anti-Francoist guerrillas

The Maquis were Spanish guerrillas who waged an irregular warfare against the Francoist dictatorship within Spain following the Republican defeat in the Spanish Civil War until the early 1960s, carrying out sabotage, robberies and assassinations of alleged Francoists as well as contributing to the fight against Nazi Germany and the Vichy regime in France during World War II. They also took part in occupations of the Spanish embassy in France.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Genaro Vázquez Rojas</span> Mexican revolutionary (1931–1972)

Genaro Vázquez Rojas was a Mexican school teacher, organiser, militant, and guerrilla fighter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mexican Dirty War</span> Mexican theater of the Cold War, from 1964–1987

The Mexican Dirty War was the Mexican theater of the Cold War, an internal conflict from the 1960s to the 1980s between the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)-ruled government under the presidencies of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverría, and José López Portillo, which were backed by the U.S. government, and left-wing student and guerrilla groups. During the war, government forces carried out disappearances, systematic torture, and "probable extrajudicial executions".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">1976 Mexican general election</span>

General elections were held in Mexico on 4 July 1976. José López Portillo was the only candidate in the presidential election, and was elected unopposed. In the Chamber of Deputies election, the Institutional Revolutionary Party won 195 of the 237 seats, as well as winning all 64 seats in the Senate election. Voter turnout was 65% in the Senate election and 62% in the Chamber election.

Terrorism in Mexico is the phenomenon of organized violence against civilians. It appeared in the 1960s, committed by communist guerrillas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Armed resistance in Chile (1973–1990)</span> Armed conflict in Chile

Following the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, an armed leftist resistance movement against Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship developed until 1990 when democracy was restored. This conflict was part of the South American theater in the Cold War, with the United States backing the Chilean military and the Soviet Union backing the guerrillas. The main armed resistance groups of the period were the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) and Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez (FPMR), the armed wing of the Communist Party of Chile. These groups had a long-standing rivalry, including over Marxist orthodoxy and its implementation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Insurgency in Paraguay</span> 2005–present left-wing insurgency in Paraguay

The insurgency in Paraguay, also known as the Paraguayan People's Army insurgency and the EPP rebellion, is an ongoing low-level armed conflict in northeastern Paraguay. Between 2005 and the summer of 2014, the EPP campaign resulted in at least 50 deaths, the majority of them local ranchers, private security guards, and police officers, along with several insurgents. During that same period the group perpetrated 28 kidnappings for ransom and a total of 85 "violent acts".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Party of the Poor (Mexico)</span> Political Party in Mexico

The Party of the Poor was a left-wing political movement and militant group in Mexico operating between 1967 and 1974. Led by the rural schoolteacher Lucio Cabañas, the PdlP – through its armed wing, the Peasants' Justice Brigade – waged guerrilla warfare against the Mexican government in the mountains of Guerrero.

The Committee for Peasant Unity was an indigenous Guatemalan labor organization. It has been described as the most potent peasant organization since the 1944–1954 Guatemalan Revolution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jesús Monzón</span> Spanish lawyer and communist politician

Jesús Monzón Reparaz was a Spanish lawyer and communist politician. During World War II (1939–45) he helped organize Spanish members of the resistance to the Germans in France. In 1944 he organized a failed attempt to invade Francoist Spain. He was disavowed by the communist leadership in 1947 and spent many years in Spanish prisons.

The National Liberation Forces were an insurgent group in Mexico. It was founded in 1969 by a group of young regiomontanos led by César Yáñez Muñoz, integrating the members of an old dissolved organization called the Mexican Insurgent Army.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LXV Legislature of the Mexican Congress</span> Sitting of the Mexican Congress (2021 to 2024)

The LXV Legislature of the Congress of the Union was a meeting of the legislative branch of Mexico, composed of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic. It convened on 1 September 2021, and ended on 31 August 2024, during the final three years of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's presidency.

References

  1. Sierra Guzmán, Jorge Luis (2003). El enemigo interno: contrainsurgencia y fuerzas armadas en México (in Spanish). Mexico City: Plaza y Valdes. p. 37. ISBN   970-722-196-8.
  2. Castellanos, Laura; Jiménez, Alejandro; del Campo, Martín (2007). México armado 1943-1981 (in Spanish). Mexico City: Ediciones Era. p. 349. ISBN   968-411-695-0.
  3. Rothwell, Matthew (2010). "Transpacific Solidarities: A Mexican Case Study on the Diffusion of Maoism in Latin America". In Zheng, Yangwen; Liu, Hong; Szonyi, Michael (eds.). The Cold War in Asia: The Battle for Hearts and Minds. Leiden: Brill Publishers. p. 192. ISBN   900-417-537-7.
  4. Rangel Hernández, Lucio (2011). La Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre 1973 - 1981. Historia de la Organización y sus Militantes (Ph.D.). Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas.