ABSTRACT
Whether their ideology is Marxist, nationalist, religious, or a mixture of these, most rural guerrilla movements, past and present, follow the Maoist revolutionary strategy. First, the guerrillas deploy cadres to organize popular support in remote areas, to make them a ‘friendly sea in which the fish can swim’. Thereafter they terrorize any who do not co-operate, establish liberated or no-go areas, and extend their influence into the more prosperous areas to isolate the cities in whose shanty towns they can develop the organization for an uprising when the time is ripe. In some cases, as in Peru and Colombia (see Chapter 12) the violence in the cities runs in parallel with the rural campaign, in close co-operation with big criminal gangs, usually those financed by drug trafficking.
