The urban guerrilla must always identify himself as one with the cause of the masses, thereby winning popular support. Where government actions are characterized by ineptness or corruption, the urban guerrilla should stand at the forefront of opposition and so win over the sympathy of the masses. The present government, for example, imposes repressively high taxes and places heavy financial burdens on the people. The urban guerrilla takes advantage of this situation by attacking the dictatorship's tax collection system and its financial structure. He throws the entire weight of violent revolutionary activity against these points.
In addition to attacks on the tax collection system, the urban guerrilla should strike at those government agencies that set and enforce price controls, or raise prices. He attacks the wealthy native and foreign profiteers and owners of large property. In short, the urban guerrilla is the foe of all who accumulate huge fortunes from the high cost of living, the wages of hunger, and from excessive prices and rents.
Foreign cartels, such as those that produce refrigerators, and other North American factories that monopolize our markets -- including those manufacturing processed foods -- should be systematically attacked by the urban guerrilla.
The urban guerrilla's revolution and his regular intervention in affairs of public or mass concern, is the best method of ensuring popular support. We must repeat and insist on repeating this maxim. It is the best way of ensuring popular support. Once a significant number of the masses takes us seriously, our success is guaranteed.
The government has no alternative but to intensify repression. Police nets, house-to-house searches, the arrest of innocent civilians and suspects, blocking streets-all make city life unbearable for the masses. The military dictatorship has embarked upon a massive political persecution. Political assassinations and police terror become routine.
In spite of all this, the police systematically fail in their objectives. So the armed forces, the navy, and the air force must mobilize to assist in routine police work. Even so they fail to halt the guerrilla campaign, or to wipe out our organization, since our mobile, decentralized teams operate persistently and contagiously throughout the nation.
The masses refuse to collaborate with the authorities because they feel the government is unjust and incapable of solving their problems. So the government responds by resorting purely and simply to physical liquidation of all opponents.
The national political situation has become a military situation, in which the "gorillas" appear more and more to be the ones responsible for the mistakes and the violence. Meanwhile the lives of the masses become more and more difficult and truly catastrophic.
Pacifiers can always be found within the ranks of the ruling class. Seeing the military dictatorship on the brink of the abyss, and fearing the consequences of a revolutionary war which has already reached a fairly advanced and irreversible stage, they join in with right-wing opportunists, and partisans of non-violent struggle, seeking to spread rumors and begging the hangmen of the dictatorship for free elections. They call for "redemocratization," constitutional reform, and other nonsense designed to fool the masses so that the revolutionary struggle in the cities and countryside will come to a halt.
But those of the masses who see the revolutionaries know that it is a farce to vote in elections which have as their sole objective the guaranteed continuation of the military dictatorship and the covering up of its crimes.
The urban guerrilla must wholeheartedly attack this election farce and so-called "political solution" that appeals so greatly to the opportunists. He must become even more aggressive and violent, resorting without letup to sabotage, terrorism, expropriation, assault, kidnapping, and executions.
This is the urban guerrilla's reply to these attempts made to fool the masses by convening Congress and reorganizing various political parties. Those government political parties and even those of the opposition function thanks to the license of the military dictatorship in a true spectacle of marionettes and leashed dogs.
The urban guerrilla continues fighting to gain the support of the masses, keeping in mind the basic interests of the masses as well as the heightening disastrous situation requiring the government to take action. These circumstances, disastrous for the dictatorship, afford an opportunity for the revolutionaries to begin open rural guerrilla warfare based on the uncontrollable expansion of urban revolution.
The urban guerrilla seeks to aid the masses through revolutionary warfare. He seeks at the same time to encourage these same masses to join with him in the struggle against the military dictatorship and the liberation of our nation from the yoke of the United States. Based on the support of the urban guerrilla and the masses, the rural guerrilla develops rapidly, expanding his organization in dimensions parallel to the rebellion in the cities.