The Guerrilla Generation: Cold War Insurgencies in Latin America (COIN)

For many Central Americans who came of age between the 1960s and 1980s, the solution to mass poverty, discrimination, and social exclusion lay in taking up arms against the entrenched structures of authoritarian militarism and oligarchic elites.
- Dirk Kruijt, Guerrillas

Some rebel groups abuse noncombatant populations, while others exhibit restraint, discipline, and control. Insurgent leaders in some countries transform local structures of governance, engaging civilians in the process of affecting political change; others build administrative machineries that do nothing more than extract resources. In some context, rebel groups kill their victims selectively; while in others violence appears indiscriminate, even random. Movements sometimes loot and destroy the property of civilian populations, while at other times they protect it from government attacks.
- Jeremy Weinstein, Inside Rebellion

The Guerrilla Generation: Cold War Insurgencies in Latin America is the second COIN multipack, containing four separate games exploring a series of thematically related insurgencies. Building on the The British Way, this new multipack allows players to explore variations in insurgent groups’ organizational structures, strategies, and relationship with civilians, across four insurgencies in Central and South America between 1968 and 1992. During this part of the Cold War era, Latin America experienced an incredible number of different insurgent groups, many inspired by the Cuban Revolution featured in Cuba Libre, ranging from popular backed rural insurgencies, flexible urban guerrillas, externally sponsored raiders, and brutal ideologically rigid groups. This multipack features a game exemplifying each of these types of insurgencies, to offer players the chance to compare different approaches to rebellion highlighted in the quote by scholar Jeremy Weinstein above. The Guerrilla Generation also offers four longer and more complex individual games than those found in The British Way, as well as an entirely different approach to the linked campaign scenario, which combines two games into a simultaneous side-by-side experience.

Highlights:

Four full games in one box: Explore four different conflicts set during the height of Cold War Latin America between 1968 and 1992. Each game uses a unique ruleset building on the same general mechanical structure, ensuring that they are easy to pick up while still offering a distinctive experience.
An extension of the COIN multipack approach with a higher level of complexity than the games in The British Way, introducing new changes to the core system.
Unique mechanisms reflecting the different attributes of each insurgency: exposing atrocities with Radio Venceremos in El Salvador, managing US Aid in Nicaragua, the hunt for Guzmán in Peru, and kidnapping officials to the People’s Prison in Uruguay.
Small board footprint with quick-but-deep gameplay: Each game plays in under 2 hours and takes place on a single 17” x 22” board.
A “Resisting Reagan” Campaign: A linked campaign scenario allowing up to 4 players to play El Salvador and Nicaragua side-by-side, with new mechanisms to represent the Central American peace and solidarity movement’s efforts to resist the Reagan Administration’s aid to both the Salvadoran government and the Contra insurgency, by influencing Congress and American public opinion.

El Salvador

The Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992) was an intense struggle between an American backed government and an insurgent group that many label the strongest in modern Latin American history, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Despite being a coalition of five different insurgent groups, the FMLN managed to launch two major offensives taking the fight to the capital San Salvador, develop a widespread support base in the countryside, and utilize sophisticated means to garner international sympathy while condemning atrocities by the government. The Guerrilla Generation: El Salvador borrows existing COIN series mechanics such as Pivotal Events while introducing new mechanics to capture the FMLN’s innovative tactics and the struggle within the Salvadoran government between reformist and rightist factions. Although more complex than The British Way: Malaya, the El Salvador game will also offer new players an introduction to the COIN series, giving them some familiarity with Government and Insurgent factions in other modern COIN volumes.



Nicaragua

The Contra war in Nicaragua (1979-1990) offers a completely different style of insurgency than the FMLN in El Salvador. The Contra insurgents heavily depended on external support from the United States to wage their war of attrition against the newly formed Sandinista regime. Operating largely from sanctuaries in the bordering countries of Honduras and Costa Rica, the Contra player, with the help of the Reagan Administration, aims to inflict increasing amounts of economic cost to the Sandinistas, conducting Sabotage to generate Unrest rather than build Opposition and battling the Sandinista’s forces directly. Much of the Contra’s attacks focused on civilian targets and risked driving the effected civilians to assist the Sandinista counterinsurgency efforts. The Sandinista’s counterinsurgency effort relies on mobility and firepower to eliminate Contras in Nicaragua and possibly even risk launching limited incursions against Contra bases located in neighboring countries. The Contra player must also manage efforts to maintain US aid for their war effort and may need the Reagan Administration to risk engaging in workarounds of Congressional limits that could lead to a scandal similar to the historical Iran-Contra affair. Nicaragua may also be paired with El Salvador in the “Resisting Reagan” campaign scenario that offers additional mechanics to model the debate over aid in the United States.



Uruguay

In addition to the two insurgencies in Central America, The Guerrilla Generation also offers two games on insurgencies in South America to include additional types of insurgencies and illustrate the tensions of waging counterinsurgency in democracies. The Tupamaros insurgency in Uruguay (1968-1972) presents players with one of the most famous urban insurgencies in history. Operating largely out of the capital city of Montevideo, The Guerrilla Generation: Uruguay adapts the COIN series to an almost entirely urban setting with all of the accompanying features such as safe houses, intelligence gathering, specific locations in the city, and additional headline events on every card to capture the chaotic nature of the capital in the late 1960s. The Tupamaros player must choose the organizational structure of their clandestine group, either a tightly controlled smaller group or an expanded group with command-and-control issues, each with its accompanying tradeoffs. Uruguay had been a successful democracy before the severe economic troubles and insurgency of the 1960s, and the Government player must balance the choice of undermining the democracy by expanding the role of the military in the conflict, which might allow them to crush the insurgency but risks a coup that topples the democratic government.

Peru

The tensions of counterinsurgency in democracy continue in The Guerrilla Generation: Peru, which covers the main period of the Shining Path insurgency (1980-1992). Peru transitioned to a democracy from military rule in 1980, making the new civilian government reluctant to entirely hand the war over to the military. Instead, the civilian government progressively placed more of the country under “emergency zones” that granted the military special powers to combat the growing insurgency, even at the risk of human rights abuses. The Shining Path insurgency that forced the spread of emergency zones is one of the most brutal in Latin American history, commonly compared to the Khmer Rouge. The Shining Path was a highly centralized insurgency under the leadership of Abimael Guzmán, who advocated a rigid ideology that extolled the use of violence to achieve social change. The centralized nature of the insurgency allows the Shining Path player to use terrorism more easily and utilize Guzmán Directives granting additional actions at critical moments. However, both present serious liabilities to the Shining Path’s ultimate success. The Government may devote their energies to hunting for Guzmán, and if he is captured, it may reverse the course of the struggle. In addition, Terror by the Shining Path in Highland spaces will generate local peasant resistance, adding ‘Rondas’ pieces that may activate and undermine Shining Path Opposition and Control.



The Guerrilla Generation is first and foremost designed to provide an educational experience on the specific conflicts in the pack and to push players to think more broadly about variation in how insurgent groups operate. The design of the games required extensive research utilizing works by historians, political scientists, area specialists, human rights reports, and local accounts to best capture the strategies of the armed actors in each conflict and their effects on the local population. Armed actors, represented by roles taken on by players, often adopted strategies of intentionally targeting civilians to coerce them to their side or weaken the opposing armed group. The Salvadoran military used scorched earth tactics and systematic bombing of guerrilla zones, as described in the quote above. The military in Uruguay utilized extensive torture to crush the Tupamaros before going on to crush the democracy itself. Insurgents such as the Contras and Shining Path deliberately terrorized civilians to advance their goals. Engaging in an interactive exploration of these strategies can be deeply uncomfortable; however, I would argue that interacting with these strategies is central to understanding the conduct of both these specific historical conflicts and unfortunately many contemporary ones. More importantly, I hope the games are useful for illustrating why many of these unethical strategies struggle to “work” as the armed actors intended, often even backfiring. I would encourage players to engage seriously with the games and the conflicts that they depict and to think carefully about the historical analogs of their actions while they play.



Components:

• Two double-sided 17” x 22” mounted game boards
• Four Game Event Decks
• One Campaign Event Deck
• 131 wooden pieces
• 16 pawns
• One and a half full-color countersheets
• 12 double-sided player aids
• Four double-sided player mats
• Three 6-sided dice
• Four combined Rule/Background Booklets
• One combined Playbook/Campaign Guide

Game Designer: Stephen Rangazas
Game Developer: Joe Dewhurst
Series Designer: Volko Ruhnke
Series Developer: Jason Carr