ANTI-IMPERIALIST DEMONSTRATION; FASCIST UPRISING;
BETRAYED STRIKE; EXILE OF REVOLUTIONARIES
74 Bolivia
Situations for too long ripe tend to decay, and in Bolivia, where for nearly a year there has existed an objectively revolutionary situation that the instinctively combative but politically uneducated masses have been unable to seize and turn to their advantage, there begin to appear some ominous foresigns of an unfavorable turn.
In recent months, Yankee imperialism has grown inreasingly impatient with the inability of the Siles governto its knees. The famed "Stabilization Plan" working class ment to establish order" by bringing the could not be applied, and was not even renewed when it ran out last December. The Wall Street Journal disgustedly editorialized that aid to the Bolivian government was "like throwing money in the gutter." The American Metal Market opposed barter of excess agricultural products for Bolivian tin, saying that "Bolivia does not deserve our help." But it was the smart-aleck Time magazine that made the cup run over. On March 2nd and 3rd, anti-imperialist mass indignation reached a new peak when it was learned that Time old idea that has been knocking around Bolivia for years, that the country, since its maritime provinces, is an economically unviable national unit whose people would be better off if it territorially divided up among the limitrophe Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. News of this gratuitous insult aroused tremendous spontaneous anti-imperialist demonsirations, particularly in the administrative capital, Lo Pad Tem and divert, bem lo to present them, jumped. to lead them and divert them down ". less channels. But the masses would not be diverted. They moved against the US embassy chancellery and other
Lan first apteralis offits. has then opened mire, ail pne
lice first attacked with tear gas,
Needless to say, the Partido Obrero Revolucionario, Bolivian Section of the Fourth International, had participated in the demonstrations, in the front ranks.' government, hysterical with rage, and anxious to distract attention from its own role as the watch-dog of imperialism, accused the POR of precisely the murders for which it was itself responsible. In a series of communiqués and it denounced the PORistas, especially Comrade Victor Villegas, and called on everyone to turn them in to the police. La Nación, chief La Paz daily, in a main editorial, tried to whip up a real lynch spirit against Yankee imperialism showed its teeth. Styles Bridges and other US senators demanded armed intervention. the scenes there certainly threats that if the Siles gang could not handle the situation, were other gangs in Bolivia that perhaps could. Until the revolution secret diplomatic archives, proof will be possible, but it is not without significance that the next major event in Bolivia was the uprising of the Falange Socialista Boliviana. This fascist group, the Siles nent's "iriendly enemy, " has long been notorious for upsuppressed without much and rarely punished with any rigor. But this time the FSB was in deadly earnest and pu everything it had into the attempt.
In La Paz, it seized the armory of the Ballivián regiment, the arms stocks in the city hall, and the state Radio Illimani, and ialled on the populace to come get the arms and extend fre revolt. Though its own nucleus is small.
gets tens of thousand of votes in the elections, obviously expected that masses of discontented petty bourgeois would join it. But the middle class did not move.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL Isolated, the FSB whiteshirts were mowed down by MNR comandos and the Control Político, plus a few army elements. Kallemberg and Walter Alpire, the leader of the FS B's "coup d'état" were either killed in the fighting or executed at the end of it. The top FSB dead, reportedly although, as it was remarked with sardonic
"the idea may have been rather violently suggested to him." Figures of deaths ranged from 72 up to several workers mediat th mouli détal, the factory and railway detachments arrived from Milluni. At the edge of the workers' districts barricades were immediately built and protective patrols set up, priot to moving against the uprising. But it proved unnecessary for the workers' militias to undertake offenSive operations against the fascists: the MNR forces had sufficient. Elsewhere in Bolivia, workers' and peasants' militias mobilized but their action proved unnecessary.
Once sure the Falange was defeated, Siles next day attacked it on the radio. But, as on March 3rd, he turned against the POR "contact with which the working class must shake off." Other speakers belabored the same theme.
In this the M NR chiefs show a sure political instinct. Though the POR is numerically still relatively weak and heavily handicapped in its race against time a mass party, Siles correctly recognizes steady organizational growth and even more the now rapid its political influence among the masses, particularly the miners, as they learn by experience the principled nature of its programme and the practical soundness of its proposals, make it the main and implacable enemy of imperialism and its native agents of every degree and tendency. Momentarily freed of fear of attack from the right by the crushing of the Falange, and sure of the support of the Lechinists of the "left" at all critical moments, Siles is concentrating on an effort by all means, "legal" or otherwise, to decapitate and smash the growing revolutionary party. This has been shown once again the third big struggle in Bolivia in the last quarter: that over the unfreezing of prices in the "pulperías,' " the mine commissaries, whose commencement was already mentioned in our last issue.
In Bolivia's uncontrollable inflation, it is only controlled prices that make life possible at all for the ill-paid miners. But the International Monetary Fund decreed that, if they were not unfrozen, further aid to Siles government would be refused. The government's attempt to comply, however, direct action. In the 13-mine centre of Quechisla in the South the miners seized the pulpería and turned it over to the union to manage. In Catavi, San José, and Huanuni the women put a stop to the unfreezing by stoning the
The government countered by ordering withdrawal of administrative and technical personnel from mines that rejected unfreezing, and refusing to send further food stocks to them. The San José miners answered by locking the administrators up. Ăll mines continued work without the technical personnel. But, as always, Lechers Torres, & Co, the bureaucratic leadership of the union, came to the government's aid. While the ment on the one hand threatened hunger and the sending of troops, Torres on the other promised pie in the sky. But the rank-and-file resistance was so great that a "compromise." "guaranteed" by Lechín and Torres, was effected, whereby the measure was to be postponed for 120
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL days. Naturally, once the miners accepted, the government welshed on its promise, and removed 50% of pulpería items from price control as of April Ist.
Meanwhile, the anti-Trotskyist campaign was stepped up on all sides "fingered" the POR members and de- San José mine, the Canadian Oblate Fathers manded that they be fired. Elsewhere MNR elements did the same. When a rank-and-file union delegation from Catavi went to La Paz to complain that food was not sent and wages not paid, the union bureaucrats told them to throw out the PORistas and food and mone) «They are forthcoming. The miners indignantly refused: workers like all the rest of us. " The press, especially El Diario and the Catholic Church daily, Presencia, raged against the Trotskyists. The government called for expulsion of all POR members from the mines as "necessary" if a "stable agreement" were to be Torres, No 2 bureaucrat of the miners' union, backed the ineffable Morales at San José against the Trotskyists, and has been multiplying declarations against "extremists."
The goveinment's all-out drive produce results. Beside Víctor Villegas, party's organ, Lucha Obrera, arrested earlier, Hugo Gonsález Moscosc. the general Fernando James, Andrés. Lucio Arenas, and others were seized and jailed. The party is being hounded into illegality. The International Secretariat twice, on March 20th and April 25th, issued declarations appealing to workers' organizations, particularly in Latin the repression striking at the proletarian vanguard of the Bolivian revolution.
The Lechinist union bureaucracy, its authority a little more worn away each time that it puts an end to the miners' repeated and tireless struggles by compromise, recently realized that, if it continued to try tr straddle between a revolutionary policy as represented by the POR, and the counter-revolutionary policy of the MNR government, it was in danger of being outflanked on the left, and eventually even replaced, wholly or in part, by the PORistas. It has choice, to line up fully with the government. On the one hand, it threatened, in a melodramatic gesture, to walk out of the union leadership, leaving the humanly combative but organizationally unskilled rank and file leaderless: and Lechín has even made the threat more vivid by personally dropping everything at the most juncture and setting off on a trip of several months to the US A and Israel. And on the other, it has opened an organized and coördinated offensive to isolate the Trotskyists and drive them from the mines before the miners, cured by repeated sell-outs of their long faith in the Lechín-Torres leadership, draw the practical conclusions and start replacing that leadership by a revolutionary
A first step in this direction, which no doubt stood out as a vivid danger signal to the Lechinists, was the creation by the miners of the Oruro area of an emergency strike committee in which the majority of the elected leaders were members of the POR and of the dissident-
Trotskyist Masas group of Guillermo Lora, whose brother Cesar was elected president. The government, single negotiation, refused all discussion with the committee, and the bureaucratic union ceeded in isolating it. Police repression quickly followed, with César Lora and other leaders arrested.
This case of a replacement of the discredited bureaucratic leadership was a step in the right direction and significant of the beginning of a trend mining rank and file. But the process of their full understanding that nothing but defeats can be expected from the Lechinists and that their leadership must be replaced by a revolutionary one, is a long one, racing. The first result of the Lechinists' success in dispersing and disorganizing the miners' fight against the unfreezing of pulpería prices has been rather to discourage the rank and file, which is now sullenly watching the hated measure applied in one mine after another.
The victory obtained over the miners with the betrayal of the Lechín-Torres bureaucracy, crushing of the uprising of the fascist Falange, questionably strengthened the Siles government's momentarily, and it will redouble its efforts to roll back the revolutionary tide that has been for a year breaking in wave after wave against it. It will above all do everything possible to decapitate and smash the POR as the Bolivian revolution's vanguard.
But, though the long vacillating scales seem noment to be turning a littie in the government's favor the Bolivian bourgeoisie and imperialism have to date only gained a few skirmishes, not won the war. Even the Siles government's victory over the FSB is two-edged, for now, as in Venezuela and Cuba, the reaction has no
Farm in reserve. And the masses' slow dısillusion with the misleadership of the COB, though for the moment its effects are only at the first stage of confusion and discouragement, will logically lead them more active second stage of sweeping class-col. laborationist leaders into the dustbin and replacing them by a revolutionary leadership determined to settle once for all with the outlived MNR and its Siles government and to set up a workers' and peasants' government in Bolivia. It is, in a sense, a race with time in a worsening small but militant POR, conscious thereof, is redoubling its efforts.
### BULLETIN
As we are already on press, news comes from bourgeois yet confirmed through our own channels — that the Siles government has exiled from Bolivia all the arrested Trotskyists. To what country they have been exiled was not stated. Unless, as has sometimes been done in the past, there is collusion with the government of the country of exile to confine our comrades to some semi-prison island, we may be sure that they will soon be back in Bolivia and at their revolutionary tasks again. The whole International salutes these courageous comrades and sends them warmest expressions of fighting solidarity.
Chile