Moscow and Peking press on the case of f Hugo Blanco.
The campaign to save the revolutionary peasant leader from execution at the hands of the Beladnde government, has spread to all parts of the world and hundreds of distinguished figures have added their voices to the demand that he be released. The great majority of them do not .share the views of Hugo Blanco, who is an avowed Trotskyist and an adherent of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. But they understand the need for elementary solidarity in behalf of a victim of the most reactionary forces in Latin America and their imperialist backers. If the silence of the Moscow press can be explained as due to the revisionism of Khrushchev's heirs what about Peking? Why should Mao follow the example of Kosygin-Brezhnev in this?
"The readers of the daily and weekly foreign-language editions published by the Chinese news services are well aware that they continually print long-winded statements by even the most insignificant persons, whose only virtue lies in the fact that they have made a trip to China -- free -- and then sung the praises of Mao's thought and the cultural revolution," observes Bandiera
Rossa. "But not a word about Hugo Blanco,
the hero of one of the most outstanding
political trials in the “history of Latin
America."
This silence is all the more
extraordinary, continues the Italian
Trotskyist paper, in view of the recent
repressions which have been directed
equally at "Trotskyists, members of the
ro-Chinese Communist party, of the PRIN
Partido Revolucionario de Izquierda Na-
cionalista] and the left wing of the MNR
[Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario]."
The Maoists reported only the re-
pressive measures taken against their own
partisans in Bolivia, thus “outrageously
purging the victims."
"Perhaps a still more scandalous
fact," continues Bandiera Rossa, "is
that the Chinese news agencies -- at
least in the bulletins received during
April -- have completely ignored the re-
cent declarations of the Cuban leaders,
from Fidel's March 13 speech to Che Gue-
vara's message.
"Contrariwise, they did not fail
in the past to publish documents of Latin-
American splinter groups that accused Fi-
del -~- now everyone can see with how little
foundation -- of having gone over to the
camp of revisionism; and they continue to
publish statements of vaguely identified
‘Cubans' who offer contributions from
time to time to the current deification
of the thought of Mao Tse-tung.
"Some of the grotesque aspects of this whole business might afford amusement. However there is an all too serious political meaning at the core of this grotesqueness ~- an utterly sectarian and profoundly bureaucratic method under
HAVE U.S.
In an editorial note May 23, the Paris daily Le Monde called attention to an ominous report in La Paz that Régis Debray, George Andrew Roth and Carlos Alberto Fructuoso, the three journalists seized by the Bolivian secret police in the southeast part of the country, have been turned over to special U.S. services and flown elsewhere for "interrogation."
The report was at once denied by both the American embassy in La Paz and the Bolivian authorities.
Nevertheless the Barrientos dictatorship has refused up to now to let either French embassy officials, Bolivian attorneys, or Debray's mother see any of the prisoners.
Meanwhile an international solidarity campaign has been started in behalf of Debray. Among the first to lend support to the effort was Bertrand Russell.
The military "gorillas" who. run Bolivia, and who have been conducting a savage witch-hunt against every oppositional tendency in the country, have sought to counteract this by vicious public attacks against Debray. Barrientos himself has taken the lead in this infamous work. .
"Régis Debray is only a common criminal, and he will be tried for the crimes he has committed," Barrientos told the press May 18. "He has broken Bolivian laws and is a Castroite agent."
It was announced the same day that the prisoner's mother, Mme Janine Alexandre~Debray had retained a defense attorney, Walter Flores, vice-dean of the faculty of law at La Paz University. His first step was to apply for a writ of habeas corpus.
On May 19 Barrientos announced that he would grant an audience to Mme Alexandre-Debray in order to help assuage her grief "as I would for any other mother in need of consolation."
The request for a hearing was filed May 5 but the general pushed it aside, alleging a commitment to go to Uruguay on government business. which everything that does not correspond to one's own views and tastes is implacably condemned. And it means little to these people that the elementary and pressing duty of displaying. solidarity is not carried out, as exemplified in the Hugo Blanco case."
"