Abraham Guillén Collection

Author, economist, educator. One of the most prolific revolutionary writers in Latin America during the 1960s and intellectual mentor of the Uruguay's revolutionary Movement of National Liberation (Tupamaros). He is most widely known as the author of Strategy of the Urban Guerrilla, which played an important role in the activities of urban guerrillas in Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil.

Guillén was born in Guadalajara on March 13, 1913. During the Spanish Civil War he fought against the Franco's forces, operating within the National Confederation of Work (CNT), the Federation of Spanish Anarchists (FAI), and the General Union of Workers (UGT). At the end of the war, he was arrested by Franco's forces, condemned to death, and ultimately was sentenced to ten years in prison. He escaped from prison in 1945, fled Spain, and spent three years in France.

In 1948, he immigrated to Argentina. During the Peron era, he worked as an editor for Economía y Finanzas ("Economy and Finance"), and his contributions were published under the pseudonym, Jaime de las Heras. Under another pseudonym, that of Fernando Molina, he contributed to the Buenos Aires newspaper El Laborista. His 1957 publication, The Agony of Imperialism, resulted in the loss of his job and his barring from employment as a journalist in Argentina. In 1960, he was employed briefly as an economic consultant to the Argentine government.

In 1961, he was imprisoned for a few months on the charge that he was a member of the Uturuncos, guerrillas active in northwest Argentina during 1960 and 1961. Following his imprisonment he sought political asylum in Montevideo in 1962 and soon made contact with revolutionary elements in that country. The first edition of Strategy of the Urban Guerrilla was published in 1966. It served as a counter to the rural insurrectionist methods espoused by Che Guevara, although Guillén did agree with Guevara on several key issues and even authored the introduction to the Uruguayan edition of Guevara's Guerrilla Warfare.

Guillén continued to publish frequently during this time period. He took a position as a journalist for the Montevideo newspaper Accion, often using the pseudonym of Arapey. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was a constant subject of investigations both by Latin America police and by the CIA. In addition to Argentina and Uruguay, he also lived and worked in Peru and eventually returned to Madrid, Spain, where he taught theories of self-management and communal action. He died on August 1, 1993.