Foco
Encyclopedia
The foco theory of revolution
Revolution
A revolution is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time.Aristotle described two types of political revolution:...

 by way of guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians use military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and...

, also known as focalism , was inspired by Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, based upon his experiences surrounding the rebel army's victory in the 1959 Cuban Revolution
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...

, and formalized as such by Régis Debray
Régis Debray
Jules Régis Debray is a French intellectual, journalist, government official and professor. He is known for his theorization of mediology, a critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning in human society; and for having fought in 1967 with Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in...

.

Its central principle is that vanguardism
Vanguardism
In the context of revolutionary struggle, vanguardism is a strategy whereby an organization attempts to place itself at the center of the movement, and steer it in a direction consistent with its ideology....

 by cadres of small, fast-moving paramilitary
Paramilitary
A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....

 groups can provide a focus (in Spanish, foco) for popular discontent against a sitting regime, and thereby lead a general insurrection. Although the original approach was to mobilize and launch attacks from rural areas, many foco ideas were adapted into urban guerrilla warfare
Urban guerrilla warfare
Urban guerrilla redirects here. For the Hawkwind song, see Urban Guerrilla.Urban guerrilla refers to someone who fights a government using unconventional warfare in an urban environment...

 movements by the late 1960s.

Background

Like other leader
Leadership
Leadership has been described as the “process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task". Other in-depth definitions of leadership have also emerged.-Theories:...

s of his time, such as Mao Tse-Tung, Ho Chi Minh
Ho Chi Minh
Hồ Chí Minh , born Nguyễn Sinh Cung and also known as Nguyễn Ái Quốc, was a Vietnamese Marxist-Leninist revolutionary leader who was prime minister and president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam...

 and Amilcar Cabral
Amílcar Cabral
Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral was a Guinea-Bissauan and Cape Verdean agricultural engineer, writer, and a nationalist thinker and politician. Also known by his nom de guerre Abel Djassi, Cabral led the nationalist movement of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Islands and the ensuing war of independence...

, Che Guevara
Che Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...

 believed that people living in countries still ruled by colonial powers, or living in countries chained by what he saw as a new form of economic exploitation, could best defeat what he perceived as colonial powers by taking up arms. Like other theoreticians, Guevara also believed that armed resistance needed to be built not by concentrating one's forces in urban centers, but rather through accumulation of strength in mountainous and rural regions where the enemy's presence was weakest.

Cuban Revolution

Foquismo, which was theorized by Régis Debray, draws on Ernesto Guevara's experience of the Cuban Revolution, where a small group of 82 members landed in Cuba on board of the Granma
Granma (yacht)
Granma is the yacht that was used to transport 82 fighters of the Cuban Revolution from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 for the purpose of overthrowing the regime of Fulgencio Batista. The 60-foot diesel-powered cabin cruiser was built in 1943 and designed to accommodate 12 people...

, in December 1956, and initiated a guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra
Sierra Maestra
Sierra Maestra is a mountain range that runs westward across the south of the old Oriente Province from what is now Guantánamo Province to Niquero in southeast Cuba, rising abruptly from the coast. Some view it as a series of connecting ranges , which joins with others extending to the west...

. During two years, the poorly armed escopeteros
Escopeteros
Escopeteros in its original usage means those armed with a smoothbore long barrel firearm, sometimes a trabuco or blunderbuss, and has been used in this general context in histories of Spain and Latin America . It has been used to describe a pitcher in baseball e.g. , or a sniping journalist...

, at times less than 200 men, managed to win victories against Batista
Fulgencio Batista
Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar was the United States-aligned Cuban President, dictator and military leader who served as the leader of Cuba from 1933 to 1944 and from 1952 to 1959, before being overthrown as a result of the Cuban Revolution....

's army and police force, which numbered between 30,000 and 40,000 in strength. The small group finally managed to take Havana
Havana
Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...

 after the December 1958 Battle of Santa Clara
Battle of Santa Clara
The Battle of Santa Clara was a series of events in late December 1958 that led to the capture of the Cuban city of Santa Clara by revolutionaries under the command of Che Guevara...

.

This surprising success led to the foquismo theory which, inspired by Mao's doctrine of people's war, counted on the support of the people to win the war. But the foquismo theory stated that this popular support would be created during the armed struggle itself: thus, against predominant Marxist theory, there was no need to wait for the "objective conditions" of a popular uprising to engage the last stage of the revolutionary struggle (i.e. armed struggle). In other words, a small group of revolutionaries was considered to be enough to jumpstart a revolution since this group could begin the revolutionary struggle while at the same time developing the conditions necessary for popular support for the revolution. This theory focused heavily on the notion of vanguardism
Vanguardism
In the context of revolutionary struggle, vanguardism is a strategy whereby an organization attempts to place itself at the center of the movement, and steer it in a direction consistent with its ideology....

 and on the moral value of the example.

Theory

While focalism drew from previous Marxist-Leninist ideas, including a unique, adaptive blend of the Stalinist tactics of the popular front
Popular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...

 with other opposition groups against the Batista regime combined with the Maoist strategy of "protracted people's war", it also broke with many of the mid-Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

 era's established communist parties. Despite Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...

's eager support for "wars of national liberation
Wars of national liberation
In Marxist terminology, wars of national liberation or national liberation revolutions are conflicts fought by oppressed nationalities against imperial powers to establish separate sovereign states for the subjugated nationality. From a Western point of view, these same wars are called insurgencies...

" and the focalists' own enthusiasm for Soviet patronage, Cuba's own Partido Socialista Popular had retreated from active confrontation with the Fulgencio Batista
Fulgencio Batista
Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar was the United States-aligned Cuban President, dictator and military leader who served as the leader of Cuba from 1933 to 1944 and from 1952 to 1959, before being overthrown as a result of the Cuban Revolution....

 regime, so Castroism/Guevarism
Guevarism
Guevarism is a theory of communist revolution and a military strategy of guerrilla warfare associated with Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, one of the leading figures of the Cuban Revolution...

 substituted the foquista militia
Militia
The term militia is commonly used today to refer to a military force composed of ordinary citizens to provide defense, emergency law enforcement, or paramilitary service, in times of emergency without being paid a regular salary or committed to a fixed term of service. It is a polyseme with...

 for the more traditional vanguard party
Vanguard party
A vanguard party is a political party at the forefront of a mass action, movement, or revolution. The idea of a vanguard party has its origins in the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...

.

In La Guerra de guerrillas
Guerrilla Warfare (book)
Guerrilla Warfare is a book by Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara that was written right after the Cuban Revolution and published in 1961. It soon became the guidebook for thousands of insurgents in various countries around the world....

(Guerrilla Warfare), Guevara did not count on a Leninist insurrection led by the proletariat
Proletariat
The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...

 as had happened during the 1917 October Revolution
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...

, but on popular uprisings which would gain strength in rural areas and would overthrow the regime: the vanguard guerrilla was supposed to bolster the population's morale, not to take control of the state apparatus
State (polity)
A state is an organized political community, living under a government. States may be sovereign and may enjoy a monopoly on the legal initiation of force and are not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union...

 itself and this overthrow would occur without any external or foreign help. According to him, guerrillas were to be supported by conventional armed forces
Conventional warfare
Conventional warfare is a form of warfare conducted byusing conventional military weapons and battlefield tactics between two or more states in open confrontation. The forces on each side are well-defined, and fight using weapons that primarily target the opposing army...

:

"It is well established that guerrilla warfare constitutes one of the phases of war; this phase can not, on its own, lead to victory."


Guevara added that this theory was formulated for developing countries, and that the guerrilleros had to look for support among both the workers and the peasant
Peasant
A peasant is an agricultural worker who generally tend to be poor and homeless-Etymology:The word is derived from 15th century French païsant meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district.- Position in society :Peasants typically...

s.

In power, Castro sided with the USSR
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 in the 1961 Sino-Soviet split
Sino-Soviet split
In political science, the term Sino–Soviet split denotes the worsening of political and ideologic relations between the People's Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the Cold War...

, while Guevara sympathized with the People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...

. Perhaps accelerated by this divide, the latter man shifted his energies away from Cuba to adventurism, promoting guerrilla focos overseas. Though this method had triumphed in Cuba, Guevara saw it subsequently fail in Africa and Latin America. Laurent-Désiré Kabila
Laurent-Désiré Kabila
Laurent-Désiré Kabila was President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from May 17, 1997, when he overthrew Mobutu Sese Seko, until his assassination by his bodyguards on January 18, 2001...

 put it in practice in Congo. Despite the backing of the Castro regime, an attempt to forge an insurgency in Bolivia
History of Bolivia
This is the history of Bolivia. See also the history of Latin America and the history of the Americas.Bolivia is a landlocked country in South America...

 led to Guevara's capture and execution in 1967.

Foco after Guevara

The failure dampened Cuba's overt support of focoist uprisings internationally for several years, and many revolutionary movements split into different factions, particularly New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...

, Maoist and/or urban guerrilla breakaways from previous Moscow-line parties and/or foco groups. By the mid-1970s, however, Cuba revived and further escalated its previous zeal, directly deploying its military in Africa before the collapse of détente
Détente
Détente is the easing of strained relations, especially in a political situation. The term is often used in reference to the general easing of relations between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1970s, a thawing at a period roughly in the middle of the Cold War...

—e.g., propping up the MPLA guerrillas in Angola
Angolan Civil War
The Angolan Civil War was a major civil conflict in the Southern African state of Angola, beginning in 1975 and continuing, with some interludes, until 2002. The war began immediately after Angola became independent from Portugal in November 1975. Prior to this, a decolonisation conflict had taken...

—while reinvigorating its insurgent proxy war
Proxy war
A proxy war or proxy warfare is a war that results when opposing powers use third parties as substitutes for fighting each other directly. While powers have sometimes used governments as proxies, violent non-state actors, mercenaries, or other third parties are more often employed...

 policy in the Caribbean region by the end of the decade.

ERP

In Argentina
History of Argentina
The history of Argentina is divided by historians into four main parts: the pre-Columbian time, or early history , the colonial period , the independence wars and the early post-colonial period of the nation and the history of modern Argentina .The beginning of prehistory in the present territory of...

, the People's Revolutionary Army
People's Revolutionary Army (Argentina)
The Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo was the military branch of the communist Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores in Argentina...

 (ERP), led by Roberto Santucho, attempted to create a foco in the Tucumán Province
Tucumán Province
Tucumán is the most densely populated, and the smallest by land area, of the provinces of Argentina. Located in the northwest of the country, the capital is San Miguel de Tucumán, often shortened to Tucumán. Neighboring provinces are, clockwise from the north: Salta, Santiago del Estero and...

. The attempt failed after the government of Isabel Perón signed in February 1975 the secret presidential decree 261, which ordered the army to neutralize and/or annihilate the ERP insurgency (which was not supported by a foreign power, and also lacked popular support). Operativo Independencia
Operativo Independencia
Operativo Independencia was the code-name of the Argentine military operation in the Tucumán Province, started in 1975, to crush the ERP , a Guevarist guerrilla group which attempted to secede part of Tucuman as an independent nation, in the north-west of Argentina...

gave power to the Argentine Armed Forces to "execute all military operations necessary for the effects of neutralizing or annihilating the action of subversive elements acting in the Province of Tucumán."

General Acdel Vilas immediately deployed over 3,000 soldiers, including conscripts from the Fifth Infantry Brigade and two companies of elite commandos. While fighting the guerrillas in the jungle, Vilas concentrated on uprooting the ERP support network in the towns, using state terror tactics, inspired by the 1961 Battle of Algiers
Battle of Algiers
Battle of Algiers or Algiers expedition may refer to:* The Siege of Algiers by Spain leading to the establishment of the Peñón of Algiers* The Capture of Algiers by Aruj Barbarossa* The Capture of Algiers by Hayreddin Barbarossa...

, later adopted nation-wide, as well as a civic action campaign. The ERP was quickly defeated, but this military campaign marked the beginning of the "Dirty War
Dirty War
The Dirty War was a period of state-sponsored violence in Argentina from 1976 until 1983. Victims of the violence included several thousand left-wing activists, including trade unionists, students, journalists, Marxists, Peronist guerrillas and alleged sympathizers, either proved or suspected...

" in Argentina.

Central America

After victories for a once-divided, recently-reunited Sandinista movement in Nicaragua
History of Nicaragua
Nicaragua is the least densely populated nation in Central America, with a demographic similar in size to its smaller neighbors. It is located about midway between Mexico and Colombia, bordered by Honduras to the north and Costa Rica to the south. Nicaragua ranges from the Caribbean Sea on the...

 and the United Front
United front
The united front is a form of struggle that may be pursued by revolutionaries. The basic theory of the united front tactic was first developed by the Comintern, an international communist organisation created by revolutionaries in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.According to the theses of...

-style New Jewel Movement
New Jewel Movement
The New Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education, and Liberation, or New JEWEL Movement, was a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party in the Caribbean island nation of Grenada...

 in Grenada
History of Grenada
-Early history:About 2 million years ago Grenada was formed as an underwater volcano.Before the arrival of Europeans, Grenada, was inhabited by Carib Indians who had driven the more peaceful Arawaks from the island. Columbus sighted Grenada in 1498 during his third voyage to the new world...

 in 1979, Castro effectively supported the creation of the FMLN of El Salvador
History of El Salvador
The history of El Salvador has been a history of struggle against conquistadors, empires, dictatorships and world powers to be free. El Salvador was one of the regions that resisted the Spanish invasion led by Pedro de Alvarado who had to fight Atlantica and retreat several times back to Guatemala...

 by pushing for the merge of five other communist factions between December, 1979 and October, 1980. Similarly, Cuba supported four rival guerrilla groups' decision to form the URNG coalition of Guatemala
History of Guatemala
The history of Guatemala begins with the arrival of the first human settlers as early as 12,000 BC or even 18,000 BC. Civilization developed and flourished during the Pre-Columbian era with little to no contact with cultures from outside of Mesoamerica...

in 1982.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK