CONTINUES IN BOLIVIA
A Message from the Underground Fighters
La Paz
The Latin-American national bourgeois and imperialist news agencies have hastily prophesied the liquidation of the guerrillas in Bolivia and the failure of armed struggle -- advocated by Comandante Ernesto Guevara, Fidel Castro, and the Cuban revolution -- as a method of struggling for power. But they are mistaken.
It is true that the assassination of "Che" Guevara is a heavy blow to the Bolivian guerrilla struggle. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that guerrilla war, in Bolivia as in any other country in which it arises, has deep national and world economic causes.
With regard to Bolivia, guerrilla
war is nothing more than the continuation
of the class struggle on the level of
arms. To facilitate grasping this, a sum-
mary of the current situation faced by
the Bolivian people can prove useful.
Since November 4, 1964, power has
been in the grip of a military caste,
shaped and educated in the courses pro-
vided by the Pentagon in the Panama Canal
Zone, in Guatemala, etc. The regime is at
present under the strict control of Yan-
kee military commissions.
The 1964 military coup d'état was
called the "restoring revolution." In
actuality, the military caste intensified
and carried to its logical conclusion the
antilabor, antinational policies which
the MNR [Movimiento Nacionalista Revolu-
cionario] had already initiated in the final stages of its exercise of power. It should be recalled that it was during the administration of Siles Suazo that the destruction of the unions was begun by means of armed attacks, that it was during the regime of Paz Estenssoro that the army occupied the mines, precipitating the first battles like the one at Sora Sora.
In power, the "gorillas" restored the laws favoring imperialism and "la rosca" [tin barons] which the insurgent masses had overturned in 1952.
Within a few months after taking power (May, 1965), the military junta went over to the offensive. Decrees were issued lowering the wages and salaries of all sectors of the working class. In the nationalized mines this amounted to fifty percent. Next, also by decree, the trade unions were dissolved and military administrators and receivers were placed in charge of the unions' resources. These measures were climaxed by a Union Regulation by means of which the Ministry of Labor appointed leaders in the unions. Shortly after this, to block the workers and people from taking action, a decree was issued called the Law of State Defense and Security [Ley de Defensa y Seguridad del Estado], providing a prison sentence of two to six years for any trade~union or political activities in opposition to the line of the military junta. In September, 1966, repressive action was begun against revolutionary parties and the unions.
Through bloody massacres, four of them since November 1964, with thousands killed, the army occupied the mines, took over or destroyed the union radio stations and engaged in ruthless terrorisn.
After this preparatory work, they called elections to give the dictatorship a semblance of illegality. Despite the fraud, despite the oppressive machinations, Barrientos was supported by barely thirty percent of the voters. At the same time a controlled, docile parliament was set up in which all that is permitted is the hired opposition of the FSB [Falange Socialista Boliviana] and the PDC [Partido Demécrato Cristiano].
The legalized military dictatorship brought some civilians into the cabinet from parties that had been repudiated and forgotten by the masses but which the military caste restored to political life. The dictatorship resurrected these mummies in order to incorporate them into its ministries. It then utilized its power to create parties with numerous labels. This holds for the PIR (Partido de la Izquierda Revolucionaria], the PRA [Partido Revolucionario Auténtico], the MPC [Movimiento Popular Cristiano], the PRN [Partido de la Revolucién Nacional], the PSP [Partido Socialista Popular], and the PALIC [Partido Agrario de la Izquierda Cristiana]* which are only bureaucratic committees or mere letterheads. The lot of them do not have a hundred active cadres. This is the extent of the civilian support for the dictatorship.
The people struck at the military caste the very day of the coup d'état, November 4, 1964. It was clear to the masses that the military government would intensify the rightist course of the MNR regime, and with clear intuition they opposed it from the first moment. No sector of the workers or the populace was taken in.
As has been traditional, the miners led the struggle against the dictatorship. The military were unable to find the slightest fissure in the courageous, granite opposition of the miners. The factory workers similarly took their places in the opposition, although less militantly. The urban middle class, which at first remained hopeful, soon grasped the incompetent and counterrevolutionary nature of the military government, the turn to the left among the university students being spectacular. The teachers, too, lined up with the miners.
The dictatorship was unable to find a social base. It had no force with which to govern outside of the army. Consequently it employed violence against the masses.
The mines were converted into huge prisons with forced labor, in which work is carried on at bayonet point. With wages reduced by fifty percent, with personnel reduced by thirty percent, more must be produced than in November, 1964. All active unionists have been fired from the mines -- the members of the POR [Partido Obrero Revolutionario], the PRIN [Partido Revolucionario de Izquierda Nacionalista], the PCB [Partido Comunista Boliviano]. Any attempt to inspire union activities ends up with those involved being
*The PIR was founded by the Stalinists in 1940, dissolved in 1952, and recreated by the military junta. The PRA began as a right-wing splitoff from the MNR in 1963. The MPC was founded by the military junta after 1965. The MPC originated in the same way under the direct sponsorship of Gen. René Barrientos. The PRN, founded similarly in Santa Cruz, is headed by Gen. Ovando Candia, a member of the junta. The PSP, another creation of the same kind, is headed by Oscar Barrientos, a cousin of the dictator. Gen. Barrientos himself is chairman of the PALIC which was set up under similar circumstances.
sent to prison or to a concentration camp. Up to the present, 8,000 workers have been fired from the mines for political or union activities and the purge is still going on. The same holds true for the factories, plants, offices, etc. Barrientos, nicknamed "General Massacre" and the "Cao Ky of Bolivia," has admitted that there are at present 500,000 unenployed out of a total population of 4,000,000.
The Barrientos government has continually alleged that it has the support of the Bolivian peasants. This is untrue, as could already be seen from the results of the 1966 elections in which a big proportion of the peasants abstained.
The peasants in the communities and former haciendas, clearly conscious of their interests, displayed lack of confidence in the military government from the beginning. The army has traditionally been the enemy of the peasant masses. But in addition to this, the peasants felt that with the seizure of power the former landlords and their agents began acting as if they had a new lease on life, and the old racial prejudice in the cities once again became noticeable with its invidious language about the "dirty Indian," and the disdainful and arrogant attitude to be seen among public officials and in the conduct of the authorities on a provincial and county level. Thus there are no economic, social or political reasons why the peasant masses should feel attracted or obliged to support the Barrientos military regime. Just the contrary.
The truth is that the military dictatorship has bribed the bureaucracy based on the peasant artisans which was set up and corrupted by the MNR. This bureaucracy and the military dictatorship became amalgamated because their interests coincided. Without government support the bureaucrats would not have lasted a month, the military men in turn needed to control the countryside and block the peasants from mobilizing. Because of this, the peasant bureaucracy came to serve Barrientos and, with the help of the army, now controls, by means of armed violence, the most densely populated and restless centers of the countryside. The Peasant Confederation and the departmental federations are the only organizations in existence, the rank-andfile peasant unions, their councils and subcouncils having been suppressed. These paid bureaucratic leaderships, many of them deputies and functionaries holding various posts, make up the government ministry. With the help of the army, they punish rebellious peasants with arson, murder, the confiscation of stock and crops and finally expulsion from their holdings.
The broad peasant masses are against the military dictatorship, they are decidedly in favor of the guerrillas, but as yet they are unable to mobilize. They will do this, we are certain, at a more advanced stage of the struggle.
It has proved impossible to convert the Bolivian peasants into a conservative social force, a support for bourgeois governments. The reasons are clear. The agrarian reform, owing to its limitations, did not bring about an agricultural transformation. It did not change the system of cultivation, it did not increase production. Consequently the annual income of the peasants continues to be one of the lowest in the world. Misery, backwardness, disease persist. The former colonized peasants, who received a bit of land in the case of haciendas affected by the Agrarian Reform of 1954, see this land today split up among their sons, now young men establishing families. In addition, the unemployment in the cities and mines, aside from the stagnation it induces in the countryside, aggravates the misery still more, since, directly or indirectly, the burden falls on the peasant family. It must not be forgotten that the urban and mine proletariat is half peasant; now unemployed, they and their hungry children turn to their relatives dwelling in misery in the countryside.
Because of all this, the peasant masses in Bolivia, despite the Agrarian Reform, continue to remain a fighting force which, when the time comes, will break the chains of the bureaucracy and the army and join the mighty armed struggle of the Bolivian people.
Only the officers, who lack any popular support, and a bourgeois opposition composed of the FSB and the PDC are permitted to engage in political activities. They share important functions in the state apparatus. The Christian Democrats took over the Ministry of Labor and compromised themselves by implementing the antiunion decrees which were rejected by the masses and which met with stubborn resistance. They likewise approved the firings and the impounding of trade-union headquarters. These parties, with their demagogic propaganda, tried to win popularity among the masses in order to become their spokesmen, but failed in this.
The opposition parties of the left, the POR, the PCB, the PRIN, had to go underground. The same holds for the MNR, although to a lesser degree. The POR and the PCB have been banned by decree, prohibited from publishing anything, from maintaining a headquarters, from holding meetings, etc.; and a savage repression has been waged against their members and leaders, who crowd the jails and concentration camps.
The MNR is at present orienting toward forming a national front together with the FSB and the PDC, in order to put together a civilian alternative team that could take over and run the government in accordance with its own line, the army assisting. The POR, on the other hand, advocates a Left Front of revolutionary parties, the masses and guerrilla forces.
The guerrillas, organized by the Castroist sector of the youth, induced a qualitative change in Bolivia, a sharper definition of the revolutionary forces, and served to separate the opportunists from the revolutionists.
With regard to the guerrillas, the parties hold the following positions: The government parties are, of course, oppos-— ed. These include the FSB, the PDC and the MNR, which have issued special statements disavowing any ties or support, while demagogically insisting that Communism cannot be fought by means of arms alone but requires economic and social measures. The pro-Peking Communist party supports the guerrillas verbally, but does nothing practically. The PRIN holds a contradictory position. While Lechin, in exile in Santiago, Chile, openly declares his sympathy for the guerrillas, the leaders of his party in La Paz are negotiating a front with the MNR and the PDC with a conciliatory line toward the army. The position of the POR, the Bolivian section of the Fourth International, is clear and definitive. It is militantly on the side of the guerrillas and is appealing to the people to support then. LSee "The Meaning of the New Guerrilla Front," in World Outlook, July 14, p. 658.]
The position of the pro-Moscow Bolivian Communist party displays the twists and turns characteristic of all the Stalinist Communists. In the beginning the party participated in the preparations for the guerrilla struggle, including demanding that the political and military leadership be placed in the hands of one of its secretaries. Then little by little it took its distance in association with the break between the right wing of the Venezuelan Communist party and Fidel Castro and the guerrilla fronts commanded by Douglas Bravo. After the OLAS conference, the attitude of these Bolivian Communists changed into aggressive opposition to the guerrillas, compelling the Communist youth linked with the guerrillas to go underground in their own party in order to avoid reprisals. Political circles in La Paz, particularly those close to the PCB, are convinced that the pro~Moscow leadership in the persons of Jorge Colle, Mario Monje and Aldo Flores have gone very far in making things difficult for the Communist youth associated with the guerrillas as, for instance, in the case of the group headed by Loyola Guzm4n.
It is certain that the Bolivian Communist party supports the rightist line of the Venezuelan Communist party, that it is working in alliance with the PIR, the first Stalinist party in Bolivia, founded in 1940 and dissolved in 1952 after a decade of betrayals and coalitions with "la rosca" when it was murdering miners. This party was reconstituted by the military junta and now has four ministries, enabling it to serve as a vehicle through which the PCB could work. In addition, Government Minister Antonio Arguedas was a member of the PCB, in charge of the cell at the air base. Relations between the regime and the Communist leaders are friendly. The pro-—Moscow Communist secretaries have not been arrested, while the repression fell fully on the Trotskyists, the pro-Peking Conmmunists, leaders of the PRIN and tradeunion leaders.
The closing of the democratic road is not a rhetorical phrase in Bolivia but a tragic reality. Parties have been outlawed, trade-union activities banned, political and trade-union leaders imprisoned. The only law is the law wielded by the army. The courts of justice have been converted into agencies furthering the repression. No one in the revolutionary opposition has any assurance of being free tomorrow or of being alive next week. The army and the National Guard control the cities, the mines and the countryside; and exercise of even the most minimum political and trade-union rights is denied.
And in the midst of this brutal repression, an economic crisis is strangling the people. Economic development is a crude joke. Imperialism is taking over all the economic levers and continues to choke off the nationalized property. Bolivia has been converted into a virtual Yankee colony.
Under these economic and political conditions, the masses, having been shot down in strikes, having seen the mines occupied by troops, their union headquarters taken over, their leaders imprisoned, turned in a natural way toward armed struggle. Responding to the feelings of the masses, the POR was the first party to propose guerrilla warfare.
The "various forms of struggle," the theme which the Communists utilize to mask their cowardice and betrayal, is not a subject of debate in Bolivia. It is no longer a matter of an abstract discussion, but of determining the concrete methods of struggle in the concrete moment of Bolivian history. Consequently when the guerrillas appeared on March 23, the pleasure of the masses could be felt from the cities to the countryside, including the mines. But as the guerrillas went into
action, the pro-Moscow partisans of a "democratic peace" began operating in the shadows, without going into open opposition, setting up obstacles to isolate the guerrillas from the working-class political forces that wished to join them and to fight, and then they abandoned the guerrillas when they became encircled by the army.
Thus heavy blows were dealt to the guerrillas. The Communists of a "democratic peace" sought to liquidate the guerrillas, this they held in common with the "gorillas," in order to pontificate later on the failure of this method of struggle and to refurbish their revisionist position on coexistence and the peaceful roads to socialism.
But the guerrilla struggle in Bolivia, despite the death of Comandante Guevara, despite the blows, continues to be the way out of the country's economic and political crisis. It is the duty of revolutionists in Bolivia and Latin America, as the Bolivian POR sees it, to back the present guerrilla struggle, strengthen it, break it out of isolation, link it up with the mass movement in the cities and the mines, bring in the peasantry as a fighting force.
This means opening new fronts, within the concept of a mobile column, organizing an armed struggle in the mines and the cities, and, still more, promoting the fighting solidarity of the masses throughout Latin America.
20,000 IN WEST BERLIN