Appeal of the Latin American Bureau of the Fourth International
TO SPUR ON THE STRUGGLES OF THE LATIN AMERICAN
MASSES FOR THEIR LIBERATION AND SELF-
DETERMINATION: ANTI-IMPERIALIST UNITED FRONT
AND PROLETARIAN UNITED FRONT
Instability in Latin America is spreading and taking on a deeper character. The exploited populations of Latin America are rising up and uniting in their struggles against imperialism. The petty bourgeoisie, in all its middle and poor sectors, small tradesmen, peasants, workers, secondary and university students, is uniting or tending to unite in practical activity, in demonstrations and struggles against imperialism and its national agents and allies.
Nixon was chased away by the repudiation, the stones and spit of the masses of Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and Bolivia. The delegation of the 26th of July movement, the representatives of the Cuban revolution, in their tour through Latin America, were received and welcomed with all the warmth, solidarity, and fraternity of the Latin American peoples.
All sectors of the exploited population have something in common, in complaints, protests, opposition, and motives for struggle against imperialism, whether in the problem electricity, of petroleum, or of the land that arouses millions of peasants to struggle. population of Latin America expresses its powerful spirit struggle in a keen and permanent way.
Struggles for national liberation, the expulsion of imperialism, and agrarian reform are appearing in permaeverywhere in Latin America. The specific character of these movements is not precise and clear. The 26th of July movement began as a movement for the "moralization' of the regime and ended up by organizing ruerrillas and defeating Batista's armies, rmed by the army of Yankee imperialism. in which the movement of national liberation is presented or begins does not matter; basically it contains historical social elements of social liberation. The peoples have sensed that they are more powerful than the most powerful of the armies of Yankee imperialism or armed by it.
The process of the crisis of growth leads each time greater explosions and graver demonstrations of instability. Neither the bourgeoisies nor imperialism have means or forms for limiting or mastering this process. The eriments of Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Colombia are, in one form or another, ruling by permanent state of siege, by decree-laws, by special powers, by the permanent intervention of the army and repressive measures of intimidation, in the military mobilization of the masses. Neither parliament nor special laws and powers enough for them. THE NATIONAL BOURGEOISIES SEEK THE PROTECTION OF IMPERIALISM
The problems of the crisis of growth lead all the governments, all the bourgeoisies, to seek protection, alliance, imperialism (particularly and fundamentally Yankee imperialism), on the basis of yielding economic, military, and political concessions, which are translated into social, political, and trade-union repression against the exploited populations, The masses do not accept this; they reject, oppose, and actively fight against this situation.
bourgeoisie has no way other than to increase on Yankee imperialism so as to defend itself masses. Financially dependent on imperialism, bourgeoisie must depend on its impositions But it is also for their own interests and prospects that the national governments and bourgeoisies sciously on the side of imperialism against the They have no other means. Neither economically, financially, socially, nor politically do they have a prospect of any other way out.
The Bolivian and Cuban revolutions, the struggles
Colombia, Peru, zuela, and Paraguay — all the masses are caught up great struggles. A powerful process is developing involves all Latin America. Guerilla struggles à la Fidel Castro are spreading. In Paraguay and Guatemala guerrilla struggles are being prepared to overthrow dictatoras in Nicaragua, Santo Domingo, Haiti, sectors of the liberal bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie at the service of imperialism, aspire to head up the movements of liberation from the dictatorships that are being prepared.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
The 26th of July movement shows that it is preparing armed struggle to overthrow the dictatorship of and Trujillo. In all these movements, even though led by bourgeois parties and agents of imperialism, popular supshows the desire to overthrow dictatorships by demanding the turning over of the land, industrialization of the countries, social, economic, and political betterment and advancement, social liberation.
The 26th of July movement is organizing the overthrow of Somoza and shows that it is preparing that of Trujillo, partly as a direct means of defending itself against possible and real counter-revolutionary coups. In general all these movements, despite their bourgeois leadership and their proposing inter-bourgeois goals tor the struggle, demonstrate the existence of the anti-imperialist which these leaderships conceal, because all those dictators are agents financed, backed, and supported by Yankee imin particular.
There exist all the conditions for a powerful movement of an anti-imperialist united front, to develop at the present stage the intentions, desires, and needs of the great exploited worker, peasant, and betty-bourgeois masses.
This process is shaking the whole Latin American social structure. It is necessary to accentuate, strengthen, aid in supporting and developing this revolutionary process. It is the path of progress for Latin America. FROM SANTO DOMINGO AND NICARAGUA IMPERIALISM IS PREPARING INVASION
Yankee imperialism is preparing and organizing coups and counter-revolutions from Santo Domingo and Nicaragua. The answer is not to organize invasions or guerrille-
It is necessary to arouse on the masses of these countries to seize the land, beginning by distributing it, in Cuba, carrying out immediate social and economic transformations for the benefit of the masses, expropriating imperialism and installing workers' control, and completely carrying out the agrarian reform; to to carry out these social and economic measures; to call on them to organize guerrillas to attain these goals.
The masses, rising up in their struggles, will themselves decide if they wish or need military help, and what kind of military help. The aid of the Latin American workers movement can and must be to send workers' militias and put them under the leadership of the organisms with a class programme. The experience of the invasion of Fidel Castro shows that the real basis for his victory was calling on the peasants and promising to fight for a programme of agrarian reform and anti-imperialism.
This is the way to drive out, overthrow, and hang the remaining dictators in Latin America, and not only those who are declaredly and manifestly so, but the others as well. The tour of Latin America being made by the 26th of July guerrilleros declaring that they will carry the re iolution through to its end, accusing Yankee imperialism and will carry out the distribution of land, reflects the enormous pressure that the masses are bringing to bear on them. The workers have repeatedly occupied the imperialist enterprises and demanded their nationalization. is the process in which the intentions and desires of all the Latin American masses are involved.
Recently in Bolivia, as a reaction to an article in Time proposition to divide up Bolivia, the Revolucionario (Trotskyist) called on the masses to demonstrate and mobilize, and there took place a very big and combative demonstration and mobilization.
In Colombia, guerrillas continue, with occupation of the land. In Venezuela the workers demonstrate their desire to nationalize petroleum. The workers' trade unions and federations, the workers' and peasants' organizations, must call for the Anti-Imperialist programme of expropriations and the expulsion of im-
THE CLASS UNITED FRONT
The Latin American revolution, the process of national are steadily advancing. It is necessary to provide conscious impetus, to press for all the strength that is potential therein.
In Central America, attempts at invasion of San Salvador, armed and led from Nicaragua, with the complicity and backing of Trujillo, Haiti, Guatemala, and Somoza, have twice failed. It is Yankee imperialism which maintains, finances, and supports these movements, means of preventing, disturbing, and in case of need limdefeating (eg, Guatemala) anti-imperialist and anti-oligarchic movements and mobilizations against the dictatorships.
Behind these clashes and disputes in Central America, moreover, and the threat of invasions and coups d'état. there finds expression the crisis of growth, and the inability of imperialism to control and dominate this process of development and of revolutionary mobilizations.
This process of Latin American mobilizations and revolutions is part of the world process of colonial revolutions, but at the same time it obeys the dynamics of its own process, which in its turn contributes to the development of the colonial and world revolution.
Lacking class workers' leaderships tionary parties and programmes, the movements led by the petty bourgeoisie or the bourgeoisie tend to yield in juridical disputes with imperialism. But the basis of the Latin American revolution is much deeper than is expressed by these bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaderships. In this way the Latin American revolution of national liberation combined with social liberation is ripening. Under the leadership of a petty bourgeoisie that is still undergoing radicalization, the process is led in a way economic, social, and revolutionary-political possibilities.
It is the petty bourgeoisie that leads and orients it with this perspective, consequently shuts it in and leads it into limitations. The petty bourgeoisie cannot and does not want to give it all the power to develop, all the forces that are potentially contained in this revolutionary process of the Latin American masses.
The warnings and appeals to liberate Santo Domingo; Haiti, and Nicaragua are correct, but not their forms. is necessary to lead mobilizations toward real anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggles, expropiating perialism, nationalizing the principal sources of the economy, as with the monopoly of foreign trade, the nationalization of banking and insurance, and the workers' peasants' government.
Imperialism is not remaining passive toward the process of Latin American mobilizations and revolutions. Each new step of the revolution in Latin America, in Cuba, Bolivia, or Venezuela, is a blow to its authority, its control, and its perspectives, in Latin America. The call made by Yankee imperialism through Time magazine to divide up Bolivia is a demonstration of how far it is going an
At present it is preparing its agents, Santo Do Nicaragua, and Guatemala, to create difficulties, threaten and invade Cuba, and create military conflicts, up to and including war among the Central and South American states, in order to block the development of the
It is necessary to call on all the masses and peoples of Latin America to join their production, planning it and setting up a raw-materials pool for marketing it. Not to with imperialism. as the governments tina, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, etc, are doing, but among themselves, seeing how to exploit to the limit the contradictions of capitalism and imperialism; trading with the workers' states.
60 FOLLOW THE EXAMPLE OF THE CHINESE MASSES
In China the masses are giving an example of invincibility and of their capacity for sacrifice, initiative, and accomplishment when they feel that they are producing and struggling so as to raise their living standards in a real and direct way. China, starting out from a level of industrial development ten times more backward than that of Brazil and Argentina, has surpassed them,
Even under the leading bureaucracy of the Chinese Communist Party. The forms of workers' and peasants' government, and the planning of the economy and proluction are basis for overcoming the age-old backwardness of China. Whereas in Latin America the national bourgeoisies are impotent, they work out miserable plans for the development of heavy industry at the cost of the low standard of living and the social or economic backwardness of the masses, while the main profits and benefits remain in the hands of imperialism and of a small nucleus of national capitalists.
o raise the rhythm and level of the Latin American revolution, it is necessary to combine the struggle for national liberation with the struggle for social liberation. In Cuba the real progress and volution will be firmly established if this path is taken, that of the expropriation of imperialism, nationalizations, workers' control, monopoly of foreign trade, planung with the participation of the masses, with attention
Along this road, the Cuban, Bolivian, or Venezuelan revoiution will rapidly raise the level of the struggle; the form of reënforcing the struggle and consolidating national liberation is to struggle at the same time for social liberation. But the proletariat is not intervening as in the Latin American revolution. The lack of mass revolutionary parties of the working class prevents the unconscious and objective process of revolution from developing with all the forces and possibilities that it bears within it in each mobilization against dictatorships and imperialism.
In Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia there are needed inlependent class workers parties with a programme of national and social liberation. While the conditions are being prepared for the organization of these parties (based the trade unions, in the majority of cases), vention of the workers' trade-union movement itself in the struggle for national and social liberation is necessary. Except in Chile, the Communist and Socialist Parties are not leading in this process, and have no strength in it.
The conditions are ripe, and become every. so, for an Anti-Imperialist United Front. In all the contries of Latin America, the masses, more exploited than ever before, feel inpelled by their against imperialism, oligarchy, and dictatorship. ORGANIZE THE FIGHT FOR THE EXPULSION OF IMPERIALISM!
It is necessary that the trade-union organizations -the overall labor federations and the national craft unions, - call on the masses to mobilize in order to carry out demoustrations, strikes, public meetings, and concentrations in support of the Cuban and Bolivian revolutions. But at the same time it is necessary to agitate in the factories, in meetings in neighborhoods and headquarters, cultural
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL and political meetings, and by all other means, ganize concrete material aid for the Cuban people, solidarizing with them and volunteering to organize militias both for Cuba and Bolivia, to face up to the intervention of imperialism and the oligarchy.
It is necessary that the trade-union organizations, workers' and peasants' unions and federations, hold a Latin American meeting to organize the campaign and leadership of a United Front for the Expulsion of Imperialism from Latin America: for the defense of the self-deterof peoples; for support to popular revolutions and mobilizations against dictatorships; and for a programme of national and social liberation. It is necessary to set up a Latin American organism of the Anti-Imper-
United Front. The trade-union federations workers' parties must assume this responsibility and call on the masses to mobilize. There is needed a permanent Latin American campaign of agitation and propaganda, of permanent organization of support for Latin American popular and anti-imperialist revolutions, for the holding ts military and economic siruggle of the Latin American masses that want to free themselves nationally and socially
The Anti-Imperialist United Front is necessary in order to strike unitedly against imperialism; all the movements, ectors, und layers of the population are swept along, in• olved, and carried into the fight against it. To develop economically, to raise production, to overcome the crises of growth - the loans and financial investments of imperialism are not the means for obtaining these things. On the contrary, they are the most important barriers thereto.
A determined attitude on the part of the popular and workers' organizations of Latin America will spur on the Cuban masses, will bring pressure and drive them the historical social level of the Cuban needed an Anti-Imperialist United Front, based on a class programme that is revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist, in order to combine, accentuate, and spur on the process of the Latin American revolution of national liberation toward the path of social liberation of the masses from capitalism.
The Latin American Bureau of the Fourth International calls on progressive cultural and scientific organizations, on workers and peasants' trade unions, on political parties of the working class, and on the poor petty bourgeoisie, to set up the Anti-Imperialist United Front, to organize a Centre to coördinate and lead the struggles for the expulsion of imperialism from Latin America; to hold a Latin American Congress of all trade-union political organizations of the proletariat in order to form a Proletarian Front to struggle in a combined way in the Anti-Imperialist United Front for the programme and anti-capitalist goals of the exploited masses and for the establishment of Workers' and Peasants' Governments.
THE LATIN AMERICAN BUREAU OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL 13 March 1959
From the Archives of Marxism