spain: an appeal for SOLIDARITY We are publishing below a letter appealing to Trotskyist mi litants and sympathizers throughout the world for international solidarity. If was written by twenty militants of the Liga Comunista Revoluc ionario/Euzkodi ta Askatasuna-VI (LCR/ETA-VI - Revolutionary Communist League/Basque Nation and freedom-VI), a sympathizing organization of the Fourth International in Spain. The twenty comrodes are prisoners in Segovia. The sentences that have been handed down against them total 383 years in prison and two death penalties. Most of these comrades were militants of the ETA when they were arrested and were won to the LER while in prison, when the LCR fused with the revolutionary Marxist wing of the ETA to form the LCR/ETA-VI. The process that opened last year in Portugal and Greece with the overthrow of the dictatorships in these two countries has left Francoism as the only remaining representative in Europe of the open dictatorial forms of rule that the bourgeoisie adopts to perpetuate its class rule. But the Francoist dictatorship will not escape this process. The nearly forty-year-long bloody period through which the working class and the popular masses in the Spanish state has suffered is coming to an end. The crisis that began with the Burgos trials and has emerged ever more clearly in the past few years has now attained such depth that an important effort from revolutionaries in Spain and throughout the world is necessary to overthrow Francoism and to make the process opened by that overthrow culminate in the socialist revolution in the Spanish state. In the course of its long years of rule as the faithful guardian of the interests of the bourgeoisie, the Francoist dictatorship has systematically used the weapon of repression to paralyze the mobilizations of the masses and above all to terrorize the workers movement. The struggle against repression that has been going on during the past several years has in il turn proved to be the best weapon in the hands of the working class and the popular layers in the fight to overturn the repressive plans of the dictatorship and to extend consciousness of the necessity for it overthrow.
Editeur responsable: René Groslambent,
The main example of this was the Burgos trials, during which the dictatorship was forced to refreat and renounce its criminal plans in the face of the moss mobilizations in the Spanish state and internationally. But the dictatorship has not given up its criminal plans — as was shown by the murder of Salvador Puig Antich in March 1974 — and it will not give them up, for repression is the pillar of every dictatorship; and the Francoist dictatorship today is much more bloody and vicious than ever, for it is approaching its end. The Spanish bourgeoisie today, acting through the intermediary of it faithful guardian, is preparing new trials of the Burgos type with the clear intention of duplicating the execution of Salvador Puig Antich and of doing what it was unable to do in 1970: execute at least three militants who were imprisoned last summer, accused of responsibility for the execution of Carrero Blanco, the president of the government. The dictatorship has found inelf obliged to find scapegoats, and thanks to its sinister policy, it has been easy to do so. Eva Forest, an internationalist militant active against the war in Vietnam; Antonio Durán, well-known militant and leader of the workers movement in Madrid; Salvador Garmendía, Basque nationalist militant; and pther comrades have been "elected" for this trial, during which several death penalties will probably be requested. The lives of Eva Forest and her comrades are hanging by a thread. Francoism wants to use this trial to "teach a lesson" to all those who are consciously struggling against it and to the workers and people's movement, which for years has been asserting iself ever more vigorously. As good Leninish, revolutionory Marxists cannot let the slightest acts of repression that the bourgeoisie tries to carry out go by without denouneing and combating them. The frame-up trials against Eva Forest and her comrades are the bloodiest and most criminal that the bourgeoisie has tried to conduct in the Spanish state since the Burgos trials. For Spanish Trotskyists, the struggle that we are waging today against the dictatorship means the struggle for the defense of these comrades, who continued on pg. 31. 3A rue Nothomb, 1040 - Bruxelles/ Imprimerie speciale de l'oditeur.