Free Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits by John Arquilla Page B

treating the populace humanely may have grown from lessons learned the preceding decade when an anti-Republican guerrilla uprising in the Vendée, a coastal area of France just south of Brittany, was tamped down only when respect for basic rights accompanied skillful military action.
    Perhaps the most accomplished French practitioner of this subtler aspect of the art of occupation was Louis-Gabriel Suchet, whose operations in Aragon and Catalonia provided a textbook model of this aspect of counterinsurgency. Under his command a large swath of Spain remained, for the most part, peaceful and secure. The historian Lynn Montross has described the situation:
Suchet not only put an end to French looting . . . but actually refunded money extorted by his predecessors. Treating the conquered with scrupulous fairness, he created hospitals, orphanages and schools. By admitting Spaniards into a share in the government, he won their respect to such an extent that soldiers of the army of Aragon were able to go unarmed among the peasantry. 3
    Suchet was also a great field commander, defeating several British generals who sought to bring the successful methods Wellington employed on the Portuguese front to other parts of the peninsula. He encouraged the recruitment of Spaniards who were willing to join the cause against the guerrillas—as many of the latter, in the name of freedom, had simply seized upon the opportunity to engage in banditry. While Suchet’s methods did not catch on completely throughout all of occupied Spain, his fellow commanders did strive at least in part to emulate his approach.
    In short, the guerrillas were up against tough, smart occupying forces and sometimes had to fight other Spaniards. The conventional forces they tried to operate with were either far off or, when operating closer, beaten by the likes of Suchet. How then did the guerrillas come to prosper in the field and have such a powerful impact on the outcome of the war?
    To be sure, the French occupation was resented, especially because both old King Carlos and his son Ferdinand were being held in France as hostages, with Napoleon placing his brother Joseph on the throne—the ultimate act of nepotism. But hard feelings about “overthrow and occupation” were not enough to make for a successful insurgency. That demanded the kind of charismatic leadership that could bring the people together, not only to rise up but also to fight effectively. The regency government in still-free Cádiz in southwestern Spain, wracked with its own byzantine infighting and performing poorly in the field, could not provide this sort of inspiration or even model military leadership. Instead it was left almost entirely to private individuals both to galvanize and guide the resistance.
    Many of these insurgent captains arose from the peasantry in various parts of Spain. Some were struck down, others were beaten in battle. Still others either switched sides or seized the opportunity to resort to outright banditry. Some achieved small degrees of success simply by staying on their feet and fighting the French until liberation—like Juan-Martín Diez in Guadalajara, EL EMPECINADO (the Indomitable). 4 But in the scale and strategic impact of his operations, one stood out from all the rest: a man who took the name “Mina.” He was almost surely illiterate, a Basque-speaking farmer who was to become the most successful insurgent leader of the resistance. He would suffer stinging defeats and several wounds during the war years but would always rebound. Along the way he would improve his practices, exhaust and befuddle his more numerous French adversaries, and in the end, play a crucial role in their defeat.
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    The Peninsular Campaign and Insurgency
    In the beginning, he wasn’t even Mina. Francisco Espoz was a common soldier among the Navarrese insurgents who had joined up to serve in a “land pirate” ( CORSO TERRESTRE ) band of insurgent raiders led by his distant younger