At long last, we’re nearing the end. After Uruguay, Peru, and Nicaragua, El Salvador is the fourth and final scenario in Stephen Rangazas’s The Guerrilla Generation. We’ve seen urban resistance movements that neglected to reach the people they were bent on liberating, a cult-of-personality communist party who went to any lengths to maintain their doctrines, and far-right death squads whose activities were so vicious that they became invaders of their own country. Now, in El Salvador, we’re going to see a little bit of everything as the FMLN launches its first offensive against the government in January 1981.

But the story doesn’t begin there. It never does. History is a story, and stories need beginnings. But reality is not a story. There are any number of root causes to this particular insurrection. We might begin with Farabundo Martí, from whom the FMLN drew its name. He was executed by firing squad in 1938 after his uprising of peasants was massacred by the government. Or we could start with that regime’s formation in 1931 through coup d’état and its repressive rule for more than four decades.

This time, however, the most suitable starting point is a priest: Óscar Romero.

Óscar Romero was appointed the fourth archbishop of San Salvador in 1977. A native Salvadoran, Romero was a social conservative, and indeed this was one of the reasons his appointment had been considered. The priesthood of El Salvador had long been divided along social lines, with some priests supporting stability while others favored “liberation theology.” This was a relatively new strain of Catholic thought, born out of the Latin American revolutions and foreign interventions of the ’60s. As with any issue of dogma, there were contrasting definitions of liberation theology, but the gist was that the poor and downtrodden were being deliberately kept in place by both individuals and systems, and that good Christians were therefore called upon to reflect the living ministry of Jesus Christ by rectifying their suffering. Priests who supported liberation theology, then, tended to be sympathetic toward Marxist thought and communist guerrillas, while those critical of it fell into the opposite camp. Romero’s appointment was accepted with relief by the regime. Unsurprisingly, the liberationists were bitterly disappointed.

(Sidenote: North American and European readers might note a similarity between liberation theology and the concept of “woke” as it originated among African-Americans in the Jim Crow-era United States. These strands of thought arose from different sources, but as a quick and dirty analog one could do a lot worse. Short version: you are being kept poor on purpose, the jackboots have it in for you, and it behooves young people to get woke to reality so they can survive this hostile state of affairs.)

Only a month after Romero’s appointment to San Salvador, one of his personal friends, the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, was assassinated. This came as a shock to Romero. After all, Grande had been one of the good ones. Despite speaking out against the government on certain issues, he had also argued for a pastoral ministry that was disconnected from Marxism. After every effort to walk a middle path, he had still been gunned down by state security forces only a few miles from where he had been born. Romero requested an investigation. He was met with silence.

In his own words, Romero became devoted to following Grande’s path. He spoke to the people via weekly radio broadcasts, his diocese newspaper, and his sermons, repeatedly listing the government’s killings, tortures, and disappearances. When the joint military-civilian Revolutionary Government Junta proved as brutal as the military dictatorship it had replaced, he appealed to President Jimmy Carter to halt the flow of U.S. military aid and Pope John Paul II to condemn the regime. Again, silence. Even as his popularity among the people grew, it seemed everybody with access to real power was content to ignore his pleas.

Despite his inability to effect change, somebody was listening. Because that’s always how it goes with those who live by the gun. One must not only be victimized. One must be grateful for their place in life. One must submit.

In March 1980, Archbishop Romero called upon Salvadoran soldiers to reject the government’s crimes against humanity. The next day, he was shot through the heart by a gunman as he delivered a sermon at a small chapel attached to Hospital de la Divina Providencia. His funeral was attended by a massacre in the streets. The shooters fired from rooftops with rifles and threw smoke bombs into the crowds of mourners. At least thirty were killed. In response, José Napoleón Duarte, four years in advance of his presidency, blamed both sides of the political spectrum for the violence, and used it as pretext to decline an official inquiry into Romero’s murder. The meddlesome Archbishop, whom the regime had welcomed only three years earlier, had been silenced for good.

Nine months later, the FMLN launched its first offensive against the government.

This is where the fourth scenario of The Guerrilla Generation begins. The FMLN, fed up with the government’s constant human rights abuses, rolls from the highlands into the coastal and urban portions of the country. Potentially, large numbers of blue government cubes will be removed in an instant and the guerrillas will possess large swaths of territory. For a system that usually portrays insurgent forces as incapable of such a concerted assault, it’s a shocking opening gambit.

To accomplish this, Rangazas takes cues from a handful of earlier titles, most notably the “pivotal event” cards that made their first appearance in Mark Herman’s Fire in the Lake. At the time, these were a profound departure for the series. For those who don’t know the COIN System very well, events are normally seeded at random throughout the deck. Thanks to their chaotic appearance, they represent occurrences that fall beyond the factions’ ability to set into motion, but which one of them might leverage to their advantage. When Volko Ruhnke designed Andean Abyss, the first volume in the series, it represented a change in the way card-driven wargames presented player agency. Rather than putting every event into players’ hands — both literally and figuratively — factions were now presented as reactive. Something would happen: a massacre, the death of a politician, an influx of war materiel from an interested third-party nation. And then you, the player, would decide whether that event was worth acting upon.

Fire in the Lake presented another option. Some events, Herman’s system argued, represented moments of clear player agency. It wouldn’t make any sense for the Tet Offensive to blindside the Viet Cong, for example. So each player was given a single pivotal event. One card in their hand, which could be used at the player’s discretion to cancel an ordinary event and launch a special action.

The El Salvador scenario begins with one such event. Only in this case, the event has already been played. “FMLN Offensive Rocks Country” starts on the table. All at once, the FMLN, which the game presumes is largely in its historical situation as of January 1981, undertakes a country-spanning sweep. It won’t be enough to topple the regime, as FMLN leaders had hoped historically. But it sets the tone for what’s to come. This is a knock-down drag-out fight. The FMLN is significantly tougher than most of the series’ insurgencies; the Government, significantly weaker. But the Government has a prize trainer in its corner. The United States. Duh. And the U.S. is currently packing the Government’s gloves with enough silver eagles for a knockout punch.

From there, the scenario settles back into the system’s usual rhythm of events and faction activities. It isn’t long before both sides begin to have money trouble. The FMLN isn’t as willing to extort the local populace as some of its peers in other volumes. Managing its finances is a slow process, requiring careful spending and hard tradeoffs between building local support or using local resources to maintain their momentum.

The Government, meanwhile, is similarly pressed. There simply isn’t enough in the coffers to resist the FMLN’s offensive. This is where the United States rears its head. As in many previous volumes, the Government’s resources are bolstered by an Aid marker. Rather than releasing a trickle of resources at pre-appointed intervals, however, here Aid functions as a secondary cash reserve, with the niggling problem that the Government can only avail themselves of this pool for certain operations. Basically, while the U.S. is happy to send endless bundles of cash to resupply Government forces in urban centers, Congress balks when a massacre shows up on the evening news. It’s a testy relationship, one that encourages the appearance of stability even as the FMLN claims additional territory outside the cities.

It’s also the COIN System at its most ideological. In the past, I’ve critiqued the series as being frustratingly “blind” when it comes to ideology — and by extension, of defaulting to a conservative position that elides the nuances that underpin these conflicts. Basically, COIN’s emphasis on procedure excels at “what” and “how,” but usually flubs the “why.” We see the outcomes of ideology — the tanks and planes, the massacres and coverups, the boots on the ground — but not so much the reason those tanks were delivered to faraway places, the regime’s need to conceal those massacres, or the half-truths that were sold to the public to convince them to sacrifice their young men and women to fight a war that has nothing to do with them. It’s not especially far-fetched to see in titles like Land and Freedom, Versailles 1919, and Revolutions an ideological intervention into a system that was, itself, a procedural intervention on the card-driven wargames that came before it.

I don’t know if Stephen Rangazas is the strongest designer to handle the COIN System to date, but he makes a good case for being the most clear-eyed. Both of El Salvador’s factions are uniquely hemmed in by ideological concerns. In addition to their desire to govern the populace, the FMLN must uncover and promulgate the reason for their offensive. The why to the what. They do this by revealing cards from a personal deck to demonstrate the Government’s crimes against its citizens. Crimes that would continue over the twelve-year course of the Civil War, with the post-war commission stating that security forces were responsible for eighty-five percent of civilian casualties. By revealing these crimes, the FMLN doesn’t bolster their position immediately, and even risks the occasional backfire when the wrong card is revealed. They are, in effect, building a case during wartime for how the peace will be conducted.

For the Government’s part, they’re asked to walk a tightrope between taking a hard rightist stance toward the insurgency or introducing reforms to rein in their troops. (And secure greater U.S. Aid, but surely that isn’t the prime motivator. Right?) As these reforms are embraced, it becomes harder to conduct reprisals. And the Government is positively horny to conduct reprisals. It’s the easiest way to batter the population into… well, not supporting the Government, but at least they won’t be supporting the FMLN either.

It isn’t long before El Salvador becomes a zombie state, completely bankrupted and in thrall to foreign funding. It’s a stark ludic representation of a regime that has bought its continued right to abuse its citizenry by indebting itself to a hemispheric hegemony whose interests shift with the wind. Or, in game terms, with a whole bunch of event cards.

In some ways, the scenario pulls up short. There is no card for Óscar Romero. Perhaps his assassination came too early for the game to model. Robert D’Aubuisson, the death squad commander who ordered Romero’s death, he has a card. It isn’t flattering, reflecting his antagonistic nature and inability to avoid controversy. That’s as close to the Archbishop as the game gets. His absence is a reminder that no simulation reaches every corner, no matter how long the broom’s handle.

The one time I visited El Salvador, as a member of an ophthalmic surgical mission in early 2019, Óscar Romero was everywhere. We were hosted in Juayúa by a Catholic retreat, so the imagery of St. Romero was unsurprising, especially given his canonization only a few months earlier. But his visage appeared everywhere beyond the compound walls as well. On the streets of San Salvador, beside the walls of coffee plantations, inside coffee shops. A plaque marked where bullets had penetrated the wall during his funeral massacre.

Growing up, my Father was deeply conservative, but with a compassionate streak that suited his status as a medical doctor. When he began visiting Latin America to perform cataract surgeries — one eye per patient so the surgical team could double how many people they treated — he underwent a transformation. His nature grew more thoughtful; his veneration of Ronald Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt melted away. He began reading books about saints. Little by little, he started talking with more frustration and less condemnation about the state of the poor.

We also started getting along a bit better. But that’s neither here nor there.

I went with him in 2019 because he sensed this might be one of the last trips he had in him. The pandemic hadn’t been declared in our hemisphere yet, but the medical community could see the writing on the wall, and political changes were threatening to make El Salvador even harder to visit. So I accepted his invitation, renewed my expired passport in a panic, and off we went.

There’s no need to bore you with the details. The indigence was extreme, but all poverty has the same leanness. The defining moment came a few months after the trip, when I related how one of our fellow volunteers had called the people “lazy.” Dad, who all my life had complained about panhandlers and freeloaders and takers, suddenly roared, with such force that I think it surprised him as much as me, “They’re not lazy. They’re poor.”

I’ve always been proud of my Father. For his work ethic. For how much he reads. For putting up with a son who’s totally unlike him. But in that moment, I became proud of his ability to change.

When it comes to the COIN Series, El Salvador and The Guerrilla Generation more broadly also represent a change. As a system, COIN has sometimes been insightful and sometimes been blinkered. Often it has been both things in the same volume. With Rangazas’s work in this multipack and The British Way, it becomes something else. It tells a slightly different story, one less about counterinsurgent procedures and more about the systems that brought about these insurgencies in the first place.

Or, as Óscar Romero put it in his second pastoral letter, delivered at the Feast of the Transfiguration shortly after his appointment to San Salvador and the murder of his friend Rutilio Grande: “The Church has, quite rightly, denounced sin. Certainly she has denounced personal sins, and she has also denounced the sin that perverts relationships between persons, especially at the family level. But she has begun to recall now something that, at the Church’s beginning, was fundamental: social sin — the crystallization of individual sins into permanent structures that keep sin in being, and make its force to be felt by the majority of the people.”

Next time, we’ll examine those systems from afar via The Guerrilla Generation’s meta-campaign, which combines Nicaragua and El Salvador in Resisting Reagan.

 

A complimentary copy of The Guerrilla Generation was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

The first thing one notices about the third scenario in Stephen Rangazas’s The Guerrilla Generation is that the script has been flipped. Unlike both the Uruguay and Peru scenarios, which presented the COIN Series’s customary red insurgents facing off against government blues, here the entire color scheme has been inverted. Now the insurgent cylinders are the blue ones, while the government’s troops and police are red and pink. The effect is jarring. More than once, I found myself staring at the wrong side of the faction aid, trying in vain to make sense of the information before me. What do you mean the red side needs to deploy sweep-and-clear operations? Wait, the pinkos have air superiority? When has that ever been the case?

This is Nicaragua, baby. One short year after the socialist Sandinistas ended the Somoza family’s four-decade reign, inheriting an indebted and war-wracked country, the U.S.-backed Contras are pouring over the border from Honduras and Costa Rica. What follows is the most harrowing of the multipack’s scenarios thus far.

As always, the first few turns in a new COIN scenario are testy. Both sides take longer turns than usual, acquainting themselves with the operations that will be their guiding star over the next few hours. (Or, in the case of Rangazas’s scenarios, the next hour to ninety minutes.) Everything is new. The contours of the geography, with its many tropical hiding places and mountainous hard points. The location of any urban centers and their lifelines through the countryside. Any neighboring countries to act as hiding places for roving insurgent forces.

And, in this case, the sudden realization that the Sandinistas are going to have to find a way to afford all this stuff, while the Contras are perpetually flush.

This isn’t the first time in the COIN Series a faction has wielded unlimited spending potential. That distinction traces all the way back to the bottomless pockets of the Coalition in Brian Train’s A Distant Plain. Even this multipack has already showcased a scenario that dispensed with funding altogether.

But what makes Nicaragua so dizzying is that here it’s the insurgents who can act with impunity, not the government. In the background, the Sandinistas are hurrying to repair the damage from the last bad decade of Somozan rule, including the earthquake that leveled much of Managua only for relief funds to quietly route into el presidente’s personal bank account. Now they’re making good on their promises: literacy campaigns, schools, hospitals. Also no small measure of native repression, in case you’re thinking everything is rosy. So when it comes to the CIA shenanigans in Honduras, the Contras with their limitless materiel, the commandos laying nautical mines in the harbors, the U.S. embargo squeezing the entire economy, there simply isn’t enough cash to go around.

It wouldn’t matter so much if everything weren’t so damned expensive. When the scenario opens, the Sandinistas are desperately undermanned. This makes sense in context. All those bright-red troops and hot-pink police have been hastily retrained from the previous conflict’s insurgent cylinders. This leaves much of the country unprotected, especially around the fringes. The only solution, especially early on, is to spend, spend, spend. Spend to train more police. Spend to garrison them in the countryside. Spend to sweep into insurgent hotbeds. Spend to send in the soldiers with the big guns. Even with the multipack’s briefer campaigns, hovering around only eight cards per propaganda round, it isn’t uncommon for a government player to find themselves skint with a good few turns before the next infusion of income.

The only reprieve comes from the Contras themselves. Once again, Rangazas uses the limited tools of Volko Ruhnke’s COIN System to carve out some impressive evocations of insurgent warfare. Unlike the other insurgents we’ve seen thus far, the Contras are not locals. Or, well, they’re locals, former members of Somoza’s national guard or disillusioned revolutionaries, but they aren’t locals the way the Tupamaros were locals to Montevideo or the Shining Path were locals to Ayacucho. The Contras are roving death squads. Their targets aren’t only military, but also the schools and hospitals and agricultural collectives currently being set up by the Sandinistas. Their targets are economic. And therefore civilian.

Which means the Contras don’t have roots in local communities. They can establish bases in Nicaragua, but these are closer to waystations than actual recruitment centers. All their actual recruitment occurs in neighboring countries, in the safe harbors of Honduras and Costa Rica. They aren’t wholly untouchable across these borders; the Sandinistas can lob artillery strikes into foreign territory, risking erosions to their legitimacy, and depending on the whims of the event deck might mount small incursions. But their foreign-backed status informs everything about how the Contras behave. They deploy in foreign territory, then infiltrate into Nicaragua via mountain passages and jungle paths. Once there, they mount attacks and sabotage infrastructure — the customary insurgent tactics — only to melt back across the border at regular intervals.

This produces a starkly different type of gameplay from the usual COIN fare. The Contras work according to their own circadian rhythm, there and back again, in offensives and dispersions, rather than claiming territory long-term. When a campaign ends, they can maintain a certain number of toeholds in-country, but not so many that they won’t have to yield something hard-fought.

More importantly, this gives the Sandinistas some breathing room. Border security is a priority, and not an impossible one. Urban centers have always been tough nuts to crack, but Managua’s central position makes it uniquely secure among COIN capitals. It isn’t unthinkable, for example, that the Sandinista player might opt to empty it of protection altogether. A risky proposition, but one that might put its manpower to better use in more vulnerable sectors.

Meanwhile, the geography takes on real significance. Given its operational focus, the COIN Series has always taken a satellite perspective of territory, more about regional tendencies than individual strongpoints. Here, one immediately grasps the various inroads the Contras might take toward destabilizing the socialist regime. Harbors on the coast are vulnerable, but are more readily policed. The mountains are good hiding spots for entrenched death squads, but access can be blocked with some well-placed army divisions. Perhaps the tenderest pressure point is the harbor on the country’s Atlantic coast, far from Managua and surrounded by jungle. But the Contras also struggle to project that far. It’s a pickle all around.

Of all its pickles, however, none are more vinegary than the looming gaze of the continental hegemon. The United States is never absent from either side’s thoughts. While the Contras don’t have to worry about actual resources, they are subject to American pocketbooks. Depending on the current status of U.S. aid, their operations can target between two to four regions at a time. This encourages the Contras to spend at least a portion of their attention attending to their paymasters, whether through the event deck or by occasionally passing to beg for more attention.

The Sandinistas, for their part, must also keep an eye on the Yankees. There’s no avenue for directly tanking funding to the Contras; the inner workings of a corrupt American presidency are far above the Sandinistas’ ability to influence. But there are ample cards in the deck for applying international pressure. This makes the Sandinista player somewhat reliant on the sequencing of the event deck, but it also prevents their operations from becoming rote. More than most of Rangazas’s scenarios across both The Guerrilla Generation and The British Way, and indeed more than most of the main COIN volumes, Government players must consider every possible avenue for undermining their opponent. Where these titles usually present their government factions as clear frontrunners in terms of wealth and manpower, here they feel fragile and outmanned. They’re the region’s big dog, but their hookworms are funded by the most powerful empire in human history.

Which makes the Iran–Contra Affair such a big deal. Whenever the Contras require extra help, they can pass to bump up the aid track. The price is an extra evidence token in the Iran–Contra box. This isn’t guaranteed to trigger; in fact, it’s even less likely than the People’s Prison being uncovered in Uruguay or Abimael Guzmán being captured in Peru. But if Reagan does happen to get caught funding a violent insurgency that wantonly targets civilians, the ramifications are considerable. With no further ability to increase their funding, there’s a very real chance the Contras will wither on the vine.

Where the previous two scenarios existed in isolation, this draws greater attention to the specter of American involvement in Latin American politics. There’s the wider situation to consider. For The British Way, Rangazas connected all four scenarios via a meta-campaign that traced the larger anti-colonial movement against the British Empire. The Guerrilla Generation includes a similar option, one that’s both more focused and more ambitious. This campaign, called Resisting Reagan, allows players to tackle both this scenario and the next one side by side. It’s a massive undertaking, requiring familiarity with both scenarios and an additional set of campaign rules.

Which is why it will have to wait for its own chapter in this series. Hey, I can only do so much at a time. Look at the bright side: bonus fifth part! Yay!

(Right? Yay?)

All told, Nicaragua is not only the strongest of the three scenarios we’ve played in this multipack, and not only one of Rangazas’s best uses of this long-running system about counterinsurgencies, but one of the best expressions of the wider COIN Series, period. It draws clear delineations between its besieged (and increasingly problematic) revolutionary government and the foreign-backed commandos raising hell in the countryside, presents a novel gameplay scheme in the constant ebb and flow of its insurgents, and, perhaps most importantly, draws the player’s attention outward to the wider problems of American imperialism besetting the titular guerrilla generation on all sides. As my play partner put it, this might be the first COIN scenario that he would request we play again.

But another session in Nicaragua will have to wait for Resisting Reagan. First, we need to examine the multipack’s fourth and final scenario, and the one most personal to me: El Salvador.

 

A complimentary copy of The Guerrilla Generation was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)