ABSTRACT
Though there have always been assassinations and kidnaps throughout history, the first calculated
political terrorist campaign was that by Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL) in Palestine in the 1940s. The term
‘urban guerrilla’ was not coined until 1967, after the failure of Che Guevara and his rural guerrilla
Foco Theory in Bolivia, whereafter Latin American revolutionaries decided that, in place of the
unresponsive peasants, they must redirect their efforts at the intellectuals and urban proletariat in the
cities. This philosophy was expounded in Brazil in 1969 by Carlos Marighela in a series of tracts
which became known as ‘The Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla’.
