CANADIAN JOURNALIST INTERVIEWS YON SOSA
(The Toronto Daily Star ran a series of articles, beginning November 5, about the guerrilla movement in Guatemala. Written by Norman Gall, they are of unusual interest because of the evident concern of the journalist to present an accurate account of the social unrest in the Central American country. In addition, Gall was able to visit one of the camps of the MR-13 (Movimiento Revolucionario 13 de Noviembre) fighters and interview their leader, Yon Sosa. Little publicity has appeared about MR-143 in the last year, one of the reasons being the way a rival group, the FAR (Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes) has been favored by the Cuban leaders.
[Below we have reproduced extracts from the series, confining the material largely to the MR-13, although Gall also deals with the FAR. His reportage on the FAR is interesting and fair but contains little that is not available from other sources. We have indicated omissions by asterisks. ]
* * *
The journey was climaxed by an eight-day visit with the MR-13 guerrillas, commanded by Lt. Marco Antonio Yon Sosa, 37, a former army officer of Chinese descent who received U.S. anti-guerrilla training in Panama.
"Right now the government does not command in the Guatemalan Oriente," Yon Sosa told me during four days at his improvised camp in a small tropical rain forest between the lands of the United Fruit Co. and the Honduran frontier.
"The government can control a village only when it sends in large quantities of troops, enough to prevent an ambush by our peasant militias. We believe the North Americans eventually will intervene as they did in Santo Domingo, and we are preparing for this," Yon Sosa said.
"The war in Viet Nam may be a determining factor. If the U.S. loses there or withdraws, the victory of socialist revolutions in Latin America could come much sooner.
"Meanwhile, we are working with peasants, making fighters of them, teaching them political theory and organizing village committees of peasant self-government. We plan to gain control of Guatemala gradually, from the bottom up."
The confused, halting response of the inexperienced Mendez government to the stepped-up insurrection has worried many in Guatemala City.
Upon taking power, the new president offered amnesty to the rebels if they laid down their arms within 30 days.
When this offer was brusquely refused by both FAR and MR-13, Mendez' interior minister, Hector Mansilla Pinto, announced that "the government does not propose to adopt war-like attitudes. We want peace in the Guatemalan family."
What has concerned U.S. officials here even more has been the apparent inability -- and unwillingness -- of the Guatemalan army to find and fight the guerrillas, although roughly half of its officers have received special counter-insurgency training in the United States and Panama.
Nearly all the army's weapons were donated by the U.S. Instead of probing for the guerrillas in their Sierra de las Minas retreats, the army largely has limited itself to jailing, torturing and killing peasants and thus winning many new converts to the guerrilla cause.
x * *
There is something special about the hillbillies of the Guatemalan Oriente.
They are descendants of derailed white men, early Spanish settlers who fared badly and became primitive subsistence farmers, lightly mixing with Indians and Negroes, becoming violent as well as poor. Their houses are filled with talk of death.
* OF *
"They make excellent guerrilla fighters," Marco Antonio Yon Sosa told me as we talked in his guerrilla camp hidden in the rain forest near the Honduras border.
Yon Sosa, the surprisingly jovial, moon-faced son of a Chinese merchant, is commander of the November 14th Revolutionary Movement (MR-13).
"The rich in Guatemala frighten easily and run away," he said. "The peasant has nowhere to go and accepts death when it comes. His farming tool is a digging stick, but each campesino carries a 26-inch machete in a leather scabbard for 'self-defence.' He will buy a shotgun or a pistol before he will buy a pair of shoes.
"Our peasants are nomads," Yon Sosa went on. "They cut and burn the mountainsides to clear stony land that gives only one or two crops and then have to move on.
"Our university students who become guerrilleros are used to corn flakes and milk in the morning. They cannot keep up with our campesinos, who can live for days, walking all day in the heat without tiring, eating little food but tortillas and salt.
"Our campesinos like to fight and have relatives all over the Oriente, which is making it easier to extend the guerrillas to other zones.
"A few of our peasants have gotten drunk and molested some women in the villages, but these men have been thrown out of the movement. Now we send only those with great political clarity to talk with the peasants."
The MR-13 guerrillas have been operating, with many ups and downs, for roughly four years on either side of the lifeline Atlantic highway connecting the capital, Guatemala City, with the country's only major port area.
Guerrillas have often ambushed army patrols on the 170-mile highway and harassed traffic of the major trucking companies.
But their main work has been in the towns and villages fringing the highway, in the workers quarters on the United Fruit Co. plantations and, most of all, in the "other world" that begins just a few hundred feet from the asphalt highway.
There, one very rarely sees a road or a church or a school and Western civilization apparently has never arrived.
The tropical hillsides, denuded by the slashing and burning of subsistence farming, seem at a distance as if they were wounded by the shaving strokes of a wildly capricious barber.
In these hills it is possible to interview a group of 35 peasants, as I did, and find not one who can read.
"We are scarce of all means to live," they tell you. "We have no land, no medicine, no schools. The only way to get these is through the guerrillas, by fighting for a government of workers and peasants.
"We want to live like in the socialist countries, where there is food. We don't get anything from elections, only bourgeois governments defending the interests of the rich and the imperialists."
x * *
The November 13th Revolutionary Movement is named for a frustrated 1960 barracks revolt, mainly of younger army officers who professed to be disgusted at wild corruption within the military and in the government of Gen. Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes.
When rebellious army bases in the Oriente fell to government forces, a number of the rebels fled across the border.
"When I arrived in Honduras," Yon Sosa said, "my mother sent me $3,000 to buy a truck and begin working. Most of the 1960 rebels had accepted an amnesty, but we stayed. Instead of buying a truck we bought guns and boots with the $3,000.
"In March 1961, 24 of us entered Guatemala armed with six pistols and 18 machetes. Guerrilla warfare is a spontaneous revolutionary process. You don't need 200 machine guns at the beginning. History is full of examples that prove this.
"When we came to Guatemala the democratic political parties called us to the capital to get into another military plot against Ydigoras.
"We were still golpistas (coup-plotters), not revolutionaries. We hid in Guate-
~4AW
mala City for almost a year, talking with army officers who were interested at first, but then backed out, one by one, when they heard the revolution might be bloody.
"We gave. up and went to fight as guerrillas in the Oriente. We attacked a few small army posts and got more weapons, but we were still afraid of the peasants. We hid from them.in cornfields because we were-afraid they would betray us to the army.
"It was not until December 1964 that we began to feel more confident with then. We began then to appear regularly in the villages, making revolutionary. speeches and holding discussions at night of revolutionary doctrine. The. campesinos -began to freely give us food and information.
"Before then the army had attacked us a few times in our camps. Since then we have never been surprised by the army. Until then we knew nothing of revolution. Now we know a guerrillero must be a peasant from the zone."
On the night before I was taken to the MR-13 camp, a woman storekeeper in the town of Quirigua was taken from her house and shot by the guerrillas for allegedly acting as.an army informant. A year before her husband was killed: for the same reason.
On our way to the guerrilla camp we stopped and talked with peasants about the 'fiesta' the night before in Quirigua.
My guides were four youths. of a village "militia" who. were allowed to wear their olive green uniforms for the occasion. As we paraded through the hill country. in the 100-degree heat, we were stopped by a peasant who said a small army patrol entered the area after the Quirigua woman's death but that "they aren't bothering anyone."
This was comforting in view of the miserable weapons the militiamen carried —ancient: rifles and a shotgun and a tiny pistol which a 16-year-old boy pointed. at me from behind until I told him to put it in his pocket. -
The only good weapon was a shiny revolver taken in a MR-13 "revolutionary confiscation" holdup the previous week which cleaned out the Bison gun store in downtown Guatemala City.
As we marched through the midday heat a little peasant girl stopped us to wish us well and donate an armful of oranges. Then we. descended to bottomland across. an open valley and, under forest cover, slogged through a foot of mud and water for two hours.
-: Compared with hiking in the sun, the shaded jungle is pleasant and cool; ’ the only discomforts are insects and diarrhea. - hot
"We killed the woman only after we warned her to stop informing the army about our people," said Yon Sosa, himself a native of Quirigua. "But she went the next day -to the army base at Puerto Barrios and gave a long list of names. a
. “We generally don't like to carry out executions. But often there is a great deal of pressure from the campesinos for justice when someone. has injured them.
"This kind of justice is usually reserved for bad men -- military constables and policemen who have killed people and burned their houses, and planters who have unjustly thrown peasants off the land."
. The guerrilla camp, an improvised array of tumbled trees and hammocks ‘protected from the rain .by colorful plastic sheets, was in commotion with the recent arrival of a guerrilla patrol of 10 men and the comings and goings of peasant supporters.
It was impressive to see how many peasants entered and left without any apparent restriction. There were delegations from village committees and peasant women who made donations of fruits and vegetables.
There were always three or four boys in their early 'teens, running messages, standing guard duty, going to the nearest country store and, when there was nothing for them to do, hanging around the campfire and begging for guns. ; . "I know that in Guatemala City they say we don't exist anymore," said Yon Sosa.
-. "Some say I am dead. The official Communists of the PGT (the pro-Soviet Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo, with which the Maoist. MR-13 has been carrying on a bitter
ideological controversy)* say I have a low political development.
"But the PGT itself is deeply divided between those who favor peaceful coexistence’ and those who want tointensify the armed struggle. At least we are decided on this matter. Unfortunately, the PGT responds more to the wishes of Moscow than to the masses of Guatemala."
Yon Sosa insisted that ‘MR-13 has not been inactive, despite the lack of publicity about it in recent months. "We held up the Bison gun store last week because we needed shotguns for our peasant militias and small arms to carry under our clothing on missions when we have to use the railroad and buses. ~
"On March 18 we ambushed three army patrols in the same aay, two of them. on the railroad near the Aztec plantation of United Fruit, the third on Km. 216 of the Atlantic Highway at 5.10 p.m. against an army truck convoy. In the three ambushes we killed at least 10 soldiers and wounded several more without suffering a single loss ourselves.
He stressed that "we ‘have’ superseded -the period of propaganda strikes for their own sake. For many months now we have been engaged in organizing: our. .peasant bases. We carry out no military action that.has no definite political objective.
"The peasant committees are growing stronger and we have opened a new guerrilla front in the Department of Chiquimula. We are much better organized than’we. were a year ago, and can bring together hundreds of men now for a major action. Our people have much greater political clarity now, and that's what is most’ important."
During my eight days with the MR-143 guerrillas, there was ample. opportunity to talk with scores of peasants -- nearly all illiterate -- who spoke with great convic-— tion in the jargon of Latin American Marxism.
* * *
"We have: 500 families organized into peasant: committees to ‘fight for a government of workers and peasants," said one militiaman in a group that surrounded me.
"When a child dies there is not even the’ seven dollars needed to buy a wood box to bury him. We have to use a burlap bag or wrap the body in palm leaves. We once built a_ school ourselves, _but- the government never sent a teacher and the > building finally fell down. ‘
Said a dark-skinned peasant in a faded blue workshirt and rubber shoes propped up on the log where we sat: "Our village militia’ has two sub-machine guns, three grenades, eight shotguns and pistols. We don't need authorization from above to- ambush an army patrol.
"We never sell the army food when they come to our village because the soldiers abuse our women and steal our radios.
"Two months ago a 15-man army patrol came toward our village, so we laid an ambush. We killed three of them and wounded. two,-but we couldn't: get their weapons because they retreated too quickly.
"The army returned in three days with a thousand men," he continued, “but all the men had fled from our village and hid in the mountains. "So they took: all the women. and children prisoner and kept them 28 days at the army base in Puerto Barrios.
"They tortured three of our women by beating them with a rubber hose and putting a plastic bag filled with DDT over their heads. After we returned to the village we organized a night watch so the army could not.catch us by surprise."
* eK
The velocity of change within the Guatemalan guerrilla movement is indicated by
* Up to now the MR-13 has not been generally labeled "Maoist," but "Castroist" or even "Trotskyist," the latter being applied because of the MR-13 program, which is strongly in favor of socialist revolution and because for a time some of its leading figures, particularly those in charge of publications, were followers of J.Posadas, an ultraleftist’ who falsely claims to represent the Fourth International. Norman Gall's references to “frotskyists? further on are really to the followers of Posadas. -- World Outlook. Poet . : mo, :
what has happened to the five leaders who signed the "Declaration of the Sierra de las Minas," issued Dec. 20, 1964, as the principal theoretical document of the MR-13.
Calling for establishment through guerrilla warfare of a "workers and peasants government," the document urged "extension of the guerrillas; multiplying of peasant militias; organization of hacienda workers' committees and of farm workers' unions, first clandestinely but later openly, in the great estates of the south and west and on the properties of the United Fruit Co., then the unification of these unions with the guerrilla struggle."
The five signers of the Declaration were: .
MARCO ANTONIO YON SOSA: 37-year-old former army officer of Chinese descent (trained at the U.S. army jungle warfare school in Panama), survivor of the abortive barracks revolt of young officers of Nov. 13, 1960, leader of MR-13 since 1961, was in Cuba at the time of the 1962 missile crisis, where he met with Ernesto Che Guevara several times. At last January's Tri-Continental Conference, Yon Sosa was denounced by Fidel Castro for letting his movement come under Trotskyite domination because he "was ignorant .of the profound problems of politics and of the history of revolutionary thought." oe ; - - .
Lf. LUIS AUGUST TURCIOS LIMA: Precocious 24-year-old former army officer, trained by U.S. Rangers at Ft. Benning, Ga., Guatemala's delegate to the Tri-Continental Conference, praised there by Castro for having "divorced himself from MR-13" and for having "snatched the revolutionary banners of Guatemala from the dirty hands of these mercenaries (the Trotskyites) at the service of Yankee imperialism." Turcios, who organized the guerrilla front in Zacapa Department in February, 1964, and under PGT influence, broke with Yon Sosa, was the major public figure of the FAR until he was reported killed in an auto crash Oct. 2.
J. EVARISTO ALDANA: Leader of a small group of Mexican Trotskyites who infiltrated the MR-1% guerrilla movement in 1964 and became its ideological guide. The Trotskyites were expelled from the guerrillas last April for allegedly having quarreled repeatedly with peasants in the movement and for "subtracting" about $40,000 from kidnapping ransoms to finance Trotskyite activities elsewhere. The bitter polemics between MR~14 and FAR ended shortly after the Trotskyites' expulsion.*
LT, COL. AUGUSTO VICENTE LOARCA: Leader of the barracks uprising of young officers at the Cacapa army base in November, 1960, chief of the MR-1% underground in Guatemala City until killed by police July, 1965.
FRANCISCO AMADO GRANADOS: A young Guatemalan Trotskyite who was among the topranking leftist leaders killed by police after some 28 persons disappeared in February and March.
Other leading figures among the missing are Victor Manuel Gutierrez, former PGT Secretary-General; Leonardo Castillo Flores, chief of the Guatemalan Peasants Confederation in the Arbenz regime; Mexican Trotskyite leader David Aguilar Mora and Fernando Arce Behrens, who abandoned his law studies at the University of Mexico to succeed Loarca as head of the MR-13 urban underground.
The death of Turcios and the inner turmoil of the guerrilla movement over the past 15 months has left only one of the original guerrilla leaders -- Yon Sosa -- alive and fighting. However, as a result of the denunciation by Fidel Castro and the ideological quarrel with the. pro-Soviet PGT, the Maoist MR-13 guerrillas of Yon Sosa have fallen from the international spotlight and have become more of a regional peasant movement. ; .
The FAR has a classic Communist cell system in both.its urban and rural organizations, while MR-13 is based largely in peasant committees and village militias. The PGT-oriented FAR is based principally in Guatemala City, according to Communist sources. The FAR, moreover, commands the services of many disciplined Communists who have received advanced revolutionary training in Soviet-—bloc countries since the pro-Communist Arbenz regime was toppled in 1954. MR-13 still depends largely on untrained peasants and students.
Interviewed in his guerrilla camp in the Department of Izabal, Yon Sosa recalled
* For an-English translation of the key documents issued by the various groups concerned with this dispute -- which involved followers of Posadas and not members of the. Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky -- see World Outlook, July 15 and 29.
the 1962 trip to Cuba.
"TI remember five of us went to Havana in September 1962: Turcios, Francisco Amado, an officer from the 1960 revolt named Oscar Trejos, myself and a student I cannot name," Yon Sosa. said. "It was arranged through a lawyer in Guatemala City who summoned us and said Che Guevara wanted to see us. We met with Che four or five times and with Fidel in one long Session that lasted from 4 p.m. to e a.m. the next morning.
"What I remember most was our visits with Col. Arbenz (the pro-Comminist ‘Presi-— dent ousted in 1954),* who was teaching in the Cuban war college. Once he wept as he — told us he wanted to’ return to Guatemala. He said: 'When you think it convenient for me to join your movement as just another soldier, I will do so gladly because I want to live again in Guatemala. ' ;
"They put us ina ‘small house “and we ent on-the usual tour of schools. arid hos—~ pitals and state farms and military bases all over the island," Yon Sosa ‘continued. "Then one day Che Guevara walked into’ our ‘house’ unannounced. : ‘We didn't know who -he was.’ He came in without arfy fanfare or pretensions and just started chatting. Wien | one of --his aides finally introduced us, we started asking him about how to organize cur movément and what would be the best part of Guatemala to start guerrilla operations. He refused to answer these questions, saying Guatemalans should ‘know: “these answers best.
"At the°end of one of our’ talks we asked Che ~ ‘for money “to finance our operations. He said many people would have’ to join“in deciding on such a request but ‘that it “would be considered. We stayed in Cuba through the October 1962 missile crisis, , and left shortly thereafter. When we left, the- Cubans gave us a lump sum of money. It was the only material help we ever got from _them."" ‘Yon Sosa refused to ‘reveal’ “the ‘ “amount * “of “ money given.
. "Shortly after that the Cubans stopped giving out money so freely. ‘There were many fake revolutionaries living high in Havana and throughout Latin America on the money of thé workers and peasants of Cuba. We knew ‘some Hondurans Like | ‘that in Havana ~ when we were there." ; : o
Fidel Castro's sudden, damaging denunciati6n-™ of the Yon Sosa movement ‘last January may have paved the way for a reconciliation between the two feuding guerrilla organizations. - Communist sources said “FAR did not feel strong enough at any time to send rival guerrilla units into the MR-13 territory. The FAR-MR-13 polemics subsided ~ sharply after the expulsion of. the frotskyites last April, for which Yon Sosa's tote ~ ment was publicly congratalated by the old-line Communists. aL.
* The legally elected Arbenz 7 government was overthrown by” a comberrevolut onaxy coup * d'état largely plotted by the CIA, as has been boasted often enotgh in Washington. - Arbenz granted timid concessions to the land-hungry peasants. ‘This infuriated “the « Guatemalan oligarchy, the United Fruit Co., and the Eisenhower administration. -- W.0.
. __