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guerri ll as in significant numbers and who are repulsed by violent
action as well as by an awareness of the futility in confronting modern
soldiers armed to the teeth. Such ideas have contributed to the prolifer–
ation of castrating dictatorships.
Among those who seized upon these ideas, endorsed by a Cuban
revolution presenting itself somewhat inaccurately as an example of
their truth, were the young students from the middle or upper classes,
impatient to put an end
to
social injustices in their country and eager
for excitement. During the 1960s, the progressive intellectuals of
Europe, as well as Debray, were won over by this new romanticism and
through him they discovered (or better,
invented)
Latin America. When
reality did not conform to this romanticism, they felt deceived, and
many displaced their interest to another segment of the Third World–
the Palestinians, for example-more in line with their incurable
nostalgia for direct action. For the Latin Americans who tried to act
out these myths and who, after a few week's training in Cuba, China,
or North Korea, established guerrilla strongholds in the mountains of
their countries or later formed urban commandos, the disillusionment
was even more tragic because it meant death, imprisonment, torture.
From among these young men arose the Venezuelan Illich Ramirez
Sanchez, who would make himself famous under the pseudonym of
"Carlos."
If
Colin Smith had reconstructed Ramirez Sanchez within the
milieu that bred him-those South American settlements in Paris,
London, and Moscow-the character would probably be more believ–
able than the one who appears in Mr. Smith 's book,
Carlos: Portrait
of a Terrorist.
Instead, we have the impre>sion of detective stories and
spy movies (perhaps most specifically the James Bond movies) as the
backdrop and the unconscious context for this biography. Although it
is clear to the reader that the feats referred to in his biography are real–
killing, kidnapping, throwing bombs-the Carlos of this book has a
stubborn air of unreality about him.
Undoubtedly, a contributing factor to this lack of reality is the
difference between Carlos and the terrorists in fiction or the revolution–
aries in political essays-the abyss that separates the man of flesh and
bone from the characters
to
which books have accustomed us. Neither
intellectual coherence nor ethical purity enhanced this chubby, petu–
lant, fornicating youth, whose banality puts him closer to Musil's man
without qua lities than to Conrad's or Malraux's more modest brutes.
Even when he shot the president of the Marks and Spencer store in
London or when he directed the kidnapping of the OPEC ministers in
