Bolivia
CRISIS AS A REGIME: THE SILES GOVERNMENT LURCHES ON
The well-nigh unique situation in Bolivia has persisted for another quarter: in a nation staggering along in such political, economic, and social crisis that its continuance seems impossible, a beleaguered and internally quarreling government shows itself incapable of governing, while the toiling masses have not yet found the way to throw it off their backs. In a way suggestive of the French dictum that
"only the provisional lasts," the crisis of the regime has become practically crisis as a regime.
In its present form, the Siles government has visibly out-
Siles himself is reliably reported to have spent the New Year period negotiating with the heads of the for some sort of deal with the
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL October 21st are being speeded up, and are expected to end in their going scot-free. Meanwhile a previous conspirator, Inofuentes, has been promoted, and another, Guzmán Gamboa, confirmed in his post as head of the carabineros, the national militarized police. To reassure the rosca, the "Control Político" has been "dissolved," but its anti-worker functions will obviously be continued under some other name. Among the various governmental "solutions," there is much talk of a junta of "strong men" such as Guevara Arze, Peñaloza, and Andrade, and the renewed possibility of Paz Estenssoro as president to neutralize some sectors of the trade-union and MR bureaucracies. But the essence of the governmental situation lies in the fact that not even the proponents of the divers rival measures have much hope that they will provide a lasting solution.
In the agricultural sector, the Third Peasants' Congrses at La Paz has just shown its lack of confidence in the government and its Ministry of Peasant Affairs and Council of Agrarian Reform. The congress, carefully prepared by these government organizations to rubber-stamp their activity, blew up in their faces. The peasants, geographically atomized and not yet well organized nationally, have for a longer time than the miners and industrial workers continued to feel confidence in "their" MNR government, although, as formidable explosions in the Yungas, Northern Potosí, and Ucureña have demonstrated, they are instinctively disposed, once convinced that they are being fooled, to the most violent direct action; and by now the feeling has become well-nigh universal among them that the agrarian reform has become paralyzed, and that the functionaries of the government's organizations for installing it are, on the contrary, in alliance with the latifundists, the gamoneros, if not themselves becoming big landowners by various frauds and seizures. Sparked by the La Paz Federation, the congress called back Nuflo de Chávez, and invited Lechín to come and address it; showed total lack of confidence in the government; and elected new rank-and-file delegates to the new leadership. These steps alone, however, though plainly progressive, are visibly insufficient: only by overcoming their atomization by organizing themselves on a national scale in such a way that they can move as one man, only by allying themselves closely with the unions of the miners, railwaymen, and factory-workers, and only by adopting a full anti-capitalist programme, can the peasants really ensure the land to those who work it.
In the mining and industrial sectors, the government, still pig-headedly trying to drive through the "stabilization" plan of Yankee imperialism, has kept up its unceasing campaign either to fire workers, especially the most militant elements, or to persuade them voluntarily to throw up their jobs. Checked by the workers' resistance at Pulacayo, it tries again at San José; stopped at San José, it makes an attempt at La Unificada ; blocked at La Unificada, it turn to the national glass factory. And, now that the railwaymen have thrown off their backs the notorious bureaucrat Sanjinés, the government discovers that hundreds of railroad workers are redundant. As a further method of driving the "surplus" workers back to the land, the government has threatened to unblock the controlled prices at the mines' "company stores," the pulperías. So far, the working class has successfully beaten back the government's attacks on almost every front.
In La Paz itself, the government's weakness was nakedly revealed in its inability to smash the long and bitter strike of the bank employees. Here, naturally, predominate middle- class elements, who for long were the enthusiastic central nucleus of the MNR membership, and it is an accurate measure of the degree of revolutionary development in
Bolivia that they fought "their" government so militantly, and stood up, in their majority, against all threats.
And threats were not lacking. First, the government held a night rally of local comandos (its private MN R army of thugs and killers), with shooting in the air and a speech by Guevara Arze full of menaces to the bank employees.
69 But support for the strike only increased : the Emergency Committee of the national trade-union federation, the CO B, came out for it. The bank employees' leaders declared a hunger strike, and the COB leaders threatened to follow suit.
The government decided on really large-scale intimidation, calling for an afternoon "mass concentration" in the Plaza Murillo in front of the government palace. On the one hand, they brought to La Paz the notorious Huanuni, comandos, who preceded the rally by marching through La Paz firing off their guns at the top floors of houses. On the other hand, they closed all factories and offices, with threats to fire any workers or clerks who did not attend the rally. They even dared close the municipal markets, to the loudly expressed rage of the redoubtable market-women. Not all these efforts succeeded: the crowd was the smallest that Siles had ever assembled. At previous rallies, to give an impression of union support, the government had collected a few men carrying worker or peasant union banners, even though not tollowed by any delegation; this time, the organizers did not succeed in utilizing even this device. Only a few government functionaries, terrified of losing their jobs, were marched in.
The speeches from the balcony of the Palacio Quemado had divergent lines. MN R Executive Secretary F Álvarez Plata savagely attacked the left, both the Trotskyist POR and the left wing of his own party. The speeches of Guevara Arze and Aguilar, on the other hand, attacked the right, the fascist Falange Socialista Boliviana. They spoke of the bank employees as good MNRistas who had been momentarily led astray, but said that all MR members would now work together. President Siles Zuazo himself, taking a line between the two, attacked M NR members who were "stabbing the government in the back." He startled the audience by one emotional outburst : "I am not going to resign. I am going to end up like Villaroel or Busch!" Seeing that President Villaroel had been hanged on a lamp-post in that very plaza by an angry mob, and that the mysterious death of President Busch has never been satisfactorily clarified, this statement was to say the least extraordinary, and both reflects some severe inner crisis in the MNR leadership and reveals Siles's well-founded fear of the masses.
The spreading influence of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario, Bolivian Section of the Fourth International, and the growing hatred felt for it by the capitalists and the pro-capitalist elements in the labor movement, has been revealed in this last quarter by an increasingly extensive and despicable campaign against it, in which falsifications, amalgams, and arrests have been combined
It opened with an anti- POR series by one Armando Morales (a former M NR member who has gone over to the Falange) on the San José radio, of which he and his brother Alberto have captured control. It was centred largely against Comrade Fernando Bravo, letters of whom were falsified in such a way that he seemed to be advising the miners voluntarily to give up their jobs. In this tactic is readily seen the hand of Lechín, Guevara, and Aguilar.
The Lechín-Torres tendency utilized preparation of a miners' union conference to brand oppositionals within their own tendency as "agents of the POR." Looking for a scapegoat to divert the miners' anger for the firing of hundreds of workers at Pulacayo, the mine administration hit on one Cabrera, who had compromised himself by supporting the firings. It accused him of being a PORista and the POR of supporting the firings, an accusation repeated by the union bureaucracy.
In the strike of the bank employees, dissident Trotskyist Guillermo Lora, serving on the employees' side in a commission of arbitration, voted for the employees. The government thereupon accused the POR of being the sole promoter of the strike, arrested Lora, and issued warrant for numerous POR leaders It caught Comrade Víctor on work, the others, warned in time, took cover and went
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In the union field, in view of the unmilitant and untrustworthy functioning of the present bureaucratic
COB, some 30-odd national unions and regional inter-union organizations met at the mining centre of Catavi to sign a highly militant and revolutionary Union pact for mutual defense implementation of an advanced programme. This is a progressive step, but, as
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FOURTH INTERNATIONAL the POR tirelessly points out, only the holding of an Extraordinary Workers Conterence, which will reorganize the COB, coördinate the all-too dispersed workers'. and peasants' struggles on a national plane and drive for the and constitution of a workers' and peasants' government, can really put an end to the present state of semi-permanent crisis in Bolivia.
Congo