page_title: National Union of Freedom Fighters
section_title: Guerrilla campaign
hierarchical_section_title: National Union of Freedom Fighters / Guerrilla campaign
caption_attribution_description: English: Waterfall in Grande Riviere
context_page_description: The National Union of Freedom Fighters was an armed Marxist revolutionary group in Trinidad and Tobago. Active in the aftermath of the 1970 Black Power Revolution, the group fought a guerrilla campaign to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Eric Williams after the failed Black Power uprising.
  In 1972 and 1973 NUFF attacked police posts to acquire weapons, robbed banks, and carried out an insurgent campaign against the government. With improved intelligence capabilities, the government was able to track the group and eventually killed or captured most of its leadership. Eighteen NUFF members and three policemen were killed over the course of the insurgency.
  NUFF was anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist in its ideology, and opposed both the foreign investors who controlled much of the economy and the local economic elites. They were notable for the extent to which women played an active role in the organisation, and included women among its guerrilla fighters.
context_section_description: On 31 May 1972 Kernahan's group, newly named the National Union of Freedom Fighters, attacked an Estate Police Station belonging to the American oil company Texaco, and seized six guns and over a thousand rounds of ammunition. The following day, armed NUFF members in north Trinidad robbed the Barclays Bank branch at the St. Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies. The rough, forested terrain of the Northern Range provided safety for NUFF's roughly three dozen guerrilla fighters. Fidel Castro compared the landscape to that of Cuba's Sierra Maestra, from which Castro had launched the Cuban Revolution.
  On 1 July, a group of guerrillas returning from the Northern Range were intercepted at a police roadblock and a gunfight occurred. One NUFF member, Hillary Valentine, was killed and three policemen were shot. Valentine's funeral attracted four thousand mourners. On 23 February 1973 Barclay's Bank on Tragarete Road in Port of Spain was robbed. Acting on a tip, the police ambushed a group of NUFF members at a safe house in Laventille later than day. Three NUFF members were killed including John Beddoe. Jamaican sociologist Brian Meeks considered Beddoe's death to be "a major  blow to  the movement as he  is one  of the people with genuine organizational capability and the leading advocate of the line for greater propaganda, education and consolidation".
  On 1 June NUFF guerrillas used gelignite to destroy a transformer at the Textel Earth Station, the satellite link connecting Trinidad and Tobago with the outside world and left a message for Assistant Superintendent of Police Randolph Burroughs "that if he wanted [them] to come in the bush for [them]". The guerrillas ambushed policemen responding to the incident and injured four of them. On 6 August, the Trinidad-Tesoro Oil Company's police station in south Trinidad was attacked, and three days later the Matelot Police Station was attacked. The insurgents left Matelot with twice as many guns as there were people to carry those guns. These attacks prompted a joint operation by the army and police against the rebels, and the government offered large rewards for Jeffers, Harewood and Andrea Jacob, a third member of the group's leadership.
  The possibility of rewards, coupled with the use of harder interrogation techniques, allowed the police to ambush the northern group at their camp in Valencia on 28 August. Although the guerrillas all escaped with only minor injuries, the attack showed the benefits of the shift in tactics by the police. On 13 September, two hundred police and soldiers surprised the guerrillas in Caura, where they had retreated after the attack in Valencia. A sentry at the camp was killed and Jennifer Jones was captured. As they fled the attack on the camp, two insurgents Beverly Jones (sister of Jennifer Jones and British Black Panther leader Altheia Jones-LeCointe) and Kenneth Tenia, were killed by the police. After this, NUFF was left on the defensive: "police were on our heels, people were selling us out and we just running from  ambush to ambush" recounted NUFF member Terrance Thornhill, in a 1996 interview with Meeks.
  After Guy Harewood was killed by the police in Curepe on 17 October 1973 NUFF was "effectively broken". Their last major activist, Clem Haynes, was captured by the police in Laventille in November 1974, marking the end of the movement. Overall, 18 NUFF members and three policeman were killed over the course of the insurgency.
caption: The rough, forested terrain of the Northern Range provided safety for NUFF's guerrilla fighters.
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