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TIL there was a guerrilla struggle based in Guadeloupe in the 1980s!!! Alliance révolutionnaire caraïbe (Caribbean Revolutionary Alliance)
pic is former leader of ARC who's still an independence activist today, Luc Reinette
pic is former leader of ARC who's still an independence activist today, Luc Reinette
If any of y'all read french here are two PDF copies of a history of armed struggle in the Antilles:
https://www.bboykonsian.com/attachment/142255/ (for web)
https://web.archive.org/web/20090320010649/http://basseintensite.internetdown.org/IMG/pdf/caraib.pdf (print layout)
somebody gotta translate these…
https://www.bboykonsian.com/attachment/142255/ (for web)
https://web.archive.org/web/20090320010649/http://basseintensite.internetdown.org/IMG/pdf/caraib.pdf (print layout)
somebody gotta translate these…
some background in english from the book Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment
excerpt from section: THE PATH OF ARMED STRUGGLE
excerpt from section: THE PATH OF ARMED STRUGGLE
“By the late 1970s, Guadeloupe’s nationalist unions had developed a strong following, achieving important economic gains for agricultural workers, while also engaging in larger social struggles.
But there was an emerging frustration among some nationalists that the ‘new syndicalism’ was not paving a clear path toward political independence. Opinions were split on whether to engage in electoral politics.
Most activists agreed on boycotting national elections (presidential and legislative), but some supported participating in municipal and cantonal elections, with the goal of electing a pro-independence politician as the head of the General Council.
To this end a new political party, the People’s Union for the Liberation of Guadeloupe (Union populaire pour la libération de la Guadeloupe, UPLG), was founded in 1978.
Some disagreed with this electoral tack, advocating armed struggle as the best means of obtaining political independence. In the 1980s these radicalized activists came together to form a new series of clandestine pro-independence guerrilla groups such as…
the Armed Liberation Group (Groupe de liberation armée, GLA), which in turn spawned the Caribbean Revolutionary Alliance (Alliance révolutionnaire caribéenne, ARC) & the People’s Movement for an Independent Guadeloupe (Mouvement populaire pour la Guadeloupe indépendante, MPGI).
These groups claimed responsibility for over sixty bombings throughout the Antilles and mainland France during the early 1980s. Their targets included hotels, department stores, airline companies, automobile clubs, banks, prisons, restaurants, police stations, and tax offices.
These activists did not emerge out of the political tradition of the AGEG [General Association of Guadeloupean Students, formed in france] or the GONG [Guadeloupean National Organization Group, a successor organization with a stronger base in the Antilles].
They were slightly younger than the BUMIDOM [Bureau for the Development of Migration from Overseas Departments, french state assimilation/exploitation project] generation and had not participated in the political movements of the 1950s and ’60s.
The movement’s main figure was Luc Reinette (born in 1950), who became a popular hero in the 1980s after he escaped imprisonment in Basse-Terre, where he was serving a sentence for his presumed involvement in the ARC bombings.
After escaping, Reinette eluded the authorities for three years, living en marronage in Guadeloupe. He was eventually arrested in St. Vincent in 1987, when he left Guadeloupe to seek political asylum.
He was then extradited to France and sentenced to thirty years in prison but was pardoned in 1989 by François Mitterrand.
This new generation of militants claimed to be engaging in armed struggle, but their use of violence was mostly symbolic.
This new generation of militants claimed to be engaging in armed struggle, but their use of violence was mostly symbolic.
In its 1987 manifesto, the ARC cited the 1960 UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples as both the legal justification and the guiding principle for its tactics.
They outlined three criteria for obtaining UN recognition as a non-self-governing territory: geographic distance from the governing power, cultural and ethnic difference from the governing nation, and evidence of a national liberation movement.
Arguing that the first two conditions were clearly met in the French Antilles, the ARC stated that its goal was to provide evidence of a separatist movement.
These activists were more focused on creating international pressure for decolonization…
These activists were more focused on creating international pressure for decolonization…
than on building nationalist consciousness, yet they managed to gain respect, if not mass support, from local residents who viewed them as devoted to the noble (if not necessarily viable) cause of national independence.
As the Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé once quipped, Reinette’s ability to hide on an island as small as Guadeloupe for three years is in and of itself testament to the support he received.
By the time Reinette was released from jail in 1989, however, the political landscape was shifting…”
excerpt from section: THE POSTCOLONIAL MAROON
“during the 1970s Antillean Creole and gwoka music were increasingly affirmed not just as the language and music of slaves but as the communicative tools of slave resistance, with gwoka in particular often referred to as the téléfonn a nèg mawon.
The nationalist teachers’ union SOGED produced numerous pedagogical manuals during this time that sought to decenter the abolitionist history of freedom by recasting rebel slaves as the protagonists of their own emancipation.
Texts such as A pa Schoelcher ki libéré nèg, for example, sought to explicitly displace the figure of the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher by placing rebel slaves at the center of the history of Freedom.
Although the turn to the maroon was generalized, it was not the new syndicalists who became most associated with marronage. Instead, it was the armed struggle groups that emerged in the 1980s—ARC, GLA, and MPIG— that explicitly took on the label of ‘the modern maroons.’
As discussed in chapter 1, these activists arrived on the political scene in the late 1970s and quickly became frustrated with the labor movement—which in their view was not charting a clear and direct path toward national independence.
They advocated armed struggle and carried out a number of strategic attacks, placing bombs in public buildings throughout the Antilles and mainland France.
Their movement did not focus on producing historical narratives per se, but they launched a radical newspaper titled Neg Mawon and referred to themselves in their manifestos as ‘the modern maroons.’
The association with the maroons was further cemented when their leader, Luc Reinette, escaped from the Basse-Terre prison, eluding authorities for three years by going into ‘marronage.’
The association of marronage with the nationalist movement was not exclusive to the French Antilles. Throughout the Caribbean, intellectuals during this period began to turn to the figure of the maroon as a protonationalist hero.
As Richard Price writes in the preface to the seminal collection Maroon Societies, ‘Rare was the Caribbean intellectual or artist of the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s who failed to compare himself to a maroon.’
In Cuba the figure of the maroon was associated with the ‘new man’ of the revolution following the publication of Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave in 1966.
As Barnet would later write, in the aftermath of the revolution, ‘it was necessary to record history from a new perspective.’
Although Esteban Montejo, the 103-year-old man at the center of the Barnet’s oral history, had lived through various important periods in Cuban history, it was his experiences as a cimarrón that carried the most pressing lessons for 1960s Cuba, according to Barnet…”
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