MARIO ROBERTO
SANTUCHO
DECLARATION OF THE UNITED SECRETARIAT OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL The Fourth International denounces the murder of comrade Mario Roberto Sanfucho, a leader of the Revolutionary Workers party and the People's Revolutionary Army of Argentina, by the bruta military dictatorship, which has arrested thousands of worker militants and killed dozens of them since the coup of March 24, 1976. Comrade Santucho was a symbol of a whole generation of political fighters in Argentina who joined the revolutionary movement under the influence of the Cuban revolution and sacrificed their lives for what they considered to be the correct revolutionary orientation. He shared with them a limitless devotion to the cause of national and social liberation of the exploited and oppressed, the conviction that this liberation could only be achieved through a socialist revolution, the belief that prolonged armed struggle was the only way to bring about such a victorious revolution, and the single-minded personal involvement in all the political and organizational implications of such an orientation. As the leader of a revolutionary populist group in his native Argentine province (FRIP - IndoAmerican and Popular Revolutionary Front), in 1967 Santucho accepted fusion with the Palabra Obrera group, Argentine section of the Fourth International. This implied his acceptance of the adherence of the fused organization (PRT - Revolutionary Workers party) to the Fourth Internafional. He did this without conviction of the correctness of the revolutionary Marxist program, Chinese, and North Korean CPs, some Maoist parties, the Cuban CP, the main guerrilla forces in Latin America, and the Fourth International. Practice showed that the unification of such divergent political forces was impossible. Political differences erupted quickly inside the PRT and led to a split in the beginning of 1969. One wing of the PRT formed the PRT-La Verdad, which later fused with a section of the Socialist party to form the PST, which remains in the Fourth International. The other wing, under the leadership of Santucho, formed the PRT-Combatiente, which initially maintained its willingness to remain in the Fourth International and demanded recognition as the Argentine section at the Ninth World Congress. The Congress accepted this claim, given the statufory circumstances of the split, However, the political dynamics of the split proved to be decisive in the long run. The logic of the PRT's orientation of "prolonged people's war" brought the political and programmatic differences to the fore. Comrade Santucho publicly broke with the Fourth International in 1973. As leader of the PRT and the ERP (People's Revolutionary Army), Mario Roberto Santucho tried with iron resolution to inflict blows against the Argentine bourgeois army through actions of smalf armed groups in the hope that, following the Chinese and Vietnamese examples, masses of workers and peasants would rally around this first nucleus and a mass revolutionary party would be built in the course of the struggle. He hoped to constitute real "liberated zones" in the North of the country, devoting big resources and sacrificing many militants to assemble the necessary military infrastructure for this purpose. The Fourth International has irreconcilable differences with this strategy, which obscures the central role of the independent organization and class action of the proletariat in the process of permanent revolution and the need to build a party on that programmatic basis. But we mourn the death of this impressive revolutionary leader, who gave his life for the liberation of the masses of his country and his continent. The Argentine proletariat will avenge Mario Roberto Santucho, as it will avenge all the fighters for the socialist revolution killed by the bourgeoisie and its butchers in Argentina, by overthrowing the dictatorship and capitalist rule in that country.
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Editeur responsable: Rene Groslambert, 34 rue Nothomb, 1040 Bruxelles.