GUATEMALAN GUERRILLAS BREAK WITH COMMUNIST PARTY
(With its December issue, the wellknown Mexico City magazine Politica suspended publication. (See World Outlook, January 26, p. 58.) However, the subscribers have just received a supplement to that issue containing two items: the text of the speech made by the president of Cuba, Dr. Osvaldo Dorticés Torrado, at the opening session of the Cultural Congress of Havana, and the text of a document sent to Politica by the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (Rebel Armed Forces) of Guatemala.
[The editor of Politica, Manuel Marcue Pardifias, in a brief footnote to the FAR document, explained why he was putting out a supplement: "This document reached the editorial office of Politica after the final issue had been mailed. Because of its extraordinary importance, Politica is making an effort to bring it to the attention of national and interna-~ tional public opinion."
(Politica carried the following titles on the document: "Declaration by the FAR of Guatemala. The PGT has Capitulated. The FAR Breaks with an Opportunist Political Current. A Genuine Vanguard As~ sumes Leadership of the Revolution."
[The FAR is the wing of the Guatemalan guerrilla movement headed by César Montes. Until the public break came, as announced in this document, the FAR was considered to be closely linked with the PGT (Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo -- Guatemalan Labor Party; i.e., the Communist party). The PGT, in turn, because of its connection with the FAR, enjoyed the reputation of being committed to a revolutionary program and of favoring the road of armed struggle.
{The break between the FAR and the PGT is a significant milestone in the development of the revolutionary struggle in Guatemala. It portends a much closer relationship between the FAR and the other wing of the guerrilla movement, the MR-13 headed by Yon Sosa. Internationally, its importance must be judged in the general context of the differences between the Cuban revolutionists and the Kremlin over the orientation of the struggle for freedom and socialism in Latin America.
[The translation below is by World Qutlook. The subheadings appear in Politica. It is not clear whether these are contained in the original document. ]
*x* * *
"And the peoples will follow the fighters and rally around the combatants, the revolutionaries, the men of action. The masses will be stirred by the men of revolutionary action, by the guerrillas. In Guatemala, in Colombia, in Venezuela, and in Bolivia this problem is being posed on the field of action." -- Comandante Juan Almeida.
At the very moment when the struggle between the reactionary bandits and the poor people grows fiercer and more implacable, when the enemy is bringing massive destructive and annihilating power to bear, employing all of American technology's most horrible instruments of war and most inhuman methods of pressure, those who usurped the place of a popular vanguard have finally dropped their mask and their lying rhetoric. They show thenmselves now as what they have always been -- petty-bourgeois opportunists. To keep from burning their own fingers, they pushed us into testing whether a revolutionary war could be victorious. Then, as they did in 1954 and as they are doing now when they think they see a threat to the survival of their so-called Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo [Guatemalan Labor Party], they abandoned us to our fate under the fire of the enemy, under the imperialist scourge of extermination and massacre.
For a year we have faced the counterrevolution's most furious and cunning assault, suffering the hardest blows the enemy has yet dealt us. We have paid the price for the failure of the false and adventurist orientations of the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo which tried to lead the guerrilla struggle from its city hideouts, and with this the price of a military defeat -- the death of hundreds of compafieros and almost 3,000 men of the people. But far from renouncing the fundamental path of revolutionary war in this temporary and limited defeat, by standing up against the most brutal enemy operations and keeping up the fight even under the most adverse conditions, we learmed to stop letting ourselves be deceived by dirty opportunist politicians. We learned to gauge the enemy's strategy and tactics for ourselves and to conduct ourselves in accordance with our own experience. We are now testing our strength to resume the advance and preparing ourselves to continue the fight by carrying out anbushes, harassment, capturing weapons, incessantly attacking the enemy and by reaffirming our unshakeable determination to struggle and triumph.
Far from retreating, from becoming discouraged or faltering, we are overconing all blows and reverses and today we are better prepared to face any eventuality and any circumstance. There has been no lack of hard blows suffered or of failures in the history of the victorious revolutionary struggle of the peoples. Blows
and failures are the beginning of our apprenticeship in victory.
@ The war of extermination and
the seductive demagogic gifts
of the puppet government of
Méndez Montenegro
Having the help of a civilian force in the government of Guatemala enabled imperialism to employ the methods of special warfare more effectively, through the development of more precisely directed combat operations against the revolutionary forces and through the inplementation of a series of novel tactics, such as the highly touted civic action of the pilot economic development and social plans. The electoral victory of Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro enabled the counterrevolutionary warfare specialists to plan more effective operations through simultaneous use of the Partido Revolucionario [Revolutionary party -- the party now in power] and the national army. During the military dictatorship of Peralta Azurdia, the imperialist agents were unable to carry out a coherent and effective policy to combat the armed struggle in our country. Only the victory of the PR made it possible for the enemy to win the support of the population while the army and the repressive forces sought to annihilate the revolutionary forces. Through the U.S. State Department the American ambassador in Guatemala, Gordon Mein; its agent Mr. Hinton of the AID {Agency for International Development] mission; Colonel Hacker of the U.S. military mission in Guatemala; Major Frederick Boaerner, the civic action expert of the U.S. military group; and, naturally, the CIA unit in our country, imperialism succeeded in putting at the service of counterrevolutionary war the legal political parties and their civic organizations as well as the majority of commercial, industrial, financial, and agricultural associations and enterprises. It gave specific responsibility for antiguerrilla operations to the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of the Interior and the offices and institutions of public service, social welfare, culture, and civil-military action.
The objectives of the government of Julio César Méndez Montenegro have been limited to crushing the armed movement, reestablishing order, and restoring public confidence and the stability of the regime for the benefit of the bourgeoisie, the landowners, and imperialisn. The government's entire policy is oriented toward restoring tranquility for the ruling classes and maintaining the regime of imperialist domination by diverting into channels beneficial to it all the political militancy and activity of those masses susceptible to reformism, economism, and corruption. At the same time, it kidnaps, murders and carries out re-
pressions against those whom it cannot
corrupt. To achieve these objectives,
the puppet government has presented
itself as the banner bearer of the revo-
lution and the people's causes. It is
developing a reformist policy for seduc-
tive purposes, while it brutalizes and
murders those whom it cannot deceive. It
allows the unions to organize and the
traditional organizations to continue to
function so long as they support its war
of "pacification." Thus it divides and
politically disarms the trade-union move-
ment. It permits the student organiza-
tions to operate as long as the students
stay shut up in their class rooms and are
very careful not to raise any questions
of national import. It kidnaps and mur-
ders those whom it cannot silence, who
do not lend themselves to the maneuvers
of the CIA agents, those whom it cannot
use for its counterrevolutionary ends.
The reformist policy of the Méndez
Montenegro regime is determined by the
objectives of counterrevolutionary war-
fare. This regime does not seek to solve
the problems of hunger, poverty, igno-
rance. It only pursues this policy to
"win the hearts and minds of the people,"
to maintain the regime of imperialist ex-
ploitation and domination. The effective-~
ness of the government's reformist mea-
sures is not gauged by the extent to which
they provide a real solution to the prob-
lems of the peasants and the workers but
by how successful they are in drowning out
the revolution's promises -- by their suc-
cess, through granting a few small crumbs,
in "fostering sentiments, attitudes and
behavior favorable to the government and
the army in their pursuit of the national
aims, including the destruction of the
guerrillas." What the puppet government
seeks is to win the war against the revo-
lutionary movement and it cannot do this
unless it can count on the support of the
civilian population. The creators of the
political-military science of counterrevo-
lution are so stupid and so cynical that
they seem not to have realized that a
fight against the revolutionary movement
is a fight against the people and that
the people can never support these tortu-
ous schemes. But the enemy is trying to
make the people fight against the people;
when its demagogy fails to persuade them
it employs force and terrorism to obtain
their support. And when it does not suc-
ceed in intimidating them, it turns to
merciless extermination.
The puppet government's demagogic
policy succeeded for a few months in de-
ceiving some sectors of the people and
won a certain measure of support for the
fight against the revolutionary movement.
But the government's presents began to
become too costly in the lives and blood
of their kinsmen, brothers, and sons, and
the regime's policy only fanned the peo-
ple's hatred of their oppressors. Since
it is impossible to fight the revolutionary movement without fighting the people, the government had to take off its mask and show itself as it is -- a regime of violence, defending the interests of the ruling classes and imperialism and directed against the people. Since the people failed to see benefactors where there were none, the government tried to force them to and thereby it succeeded only in arousing a powerful desire in the people to fight against it arms in hand. Everything is turning out wrong for the puppet government, because it is a reactionary government, because it is the guardian of the prevailing system of oppression which the people have risen up against. The government of Méndez Montenegro needed to represent itself as revolutionary but its reactionary aims and its objective of defending the interests of its bourgeois masters, the big plantation owners and the imperialists, betrayed it; no other road was left to it but to continue on with its aggressive policy of extermination.
e@ The difficulties of the revolu-
tionary _war forced the petty-
bourgeois opportunists to drop
their masks, to falter and re-
nounce the armed struggle
The enemy policy of extermination is what frightened the opportunists and the weakest and least revolutionary elements. This does not surprise us because they never prepared themselves morally, politically, or militarily to confront these difficult situations; they do not even know what exhaustion is, how bare feet hurt on a march, what it is to have to face hunger while under enemy harassment and bombing. This group came into existence in conditions of legality, it was not forged in combat or even in street battles. Those who have played with the lives of the revolutionary fighters, with the lives of the people, are frightened because the enemy has moved in everywhere, deploying his forces broadly and murdering with impunity.
The aggressiveness of the enemy forces and the difficulties of the war have frightened the defeatist opportunist petty bourgeois of the PGT. In deceptive ways they have broken with the revolutionary forces and entrenched themselves in a conspiratorial rear guard. They speak shamelessly of a "Strategic retreat" "to organize and prepare the armed struggle and employ all forms of mass political struggle" while they dismiss the present struggle of the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes. We revolutionaries cannot retreat and make a truce to prepare and organize; combat is our school of preparation and organization. We are fighting in order to organize and we are organizing in order to fight. We are fighting and the people support us. We are organizing them. The people are
organized and are fighting. Retreats and
truces only give the eneny time to recon-
dition his troops, to implement new re-
pressive techniques, to recover lost
ground, and to broaden his military and
political control.
To speak of retreat at this stage
in our war is more than defeatism, it is
capitulation and complete abandonment of
the struggle, leaving the worker and
peasant masses defenseless so that the
enemy can continue exterminating people
with absolute impunity. Attitudes of this
type do not surprise us in the least be-
cause they have a historical explanation.
The reason is that in our country the role
of revolutionary vanguard has not been as-
sumed by the workers or the peasants but
by the oscillating middle layers of the
petty bourgeoisie. These layers have
swayed at times to the side of the revo-
lution and at times to the side of reac-
tion, giving rise to the proliferation of
camarilla opportunism, diverting the popu-
lar movements into support at best of a
reformist camarilla and at worst of a re-
actionary and pro-imperialist camarilla.
@ The PGT arose and developed as
an opportunist petty-bourgeois
camarilla and usurped the lead-
ership of the revolution
The Partido Guatemalteco del Traba-
jo arose in a period of legality as an
extension of the bourgeois-democratic rev-
olution of the forties -- on the basis of
bourgeois liberties and within the consti-
tutional framework of the bourgeois gov-
ernment of Juan José Arévalo. The PGT did
not develop out of the popular struggle
that threw out the feudal dictatorship of
Ubico but rather as an extension of tne
bourgeois conquests which this struggle
made possible. It did not develop as the
antithesis of the new bourgeois regime
or the forces represented in this regime
but as a component of these forces, as
their radical component. It did not de-~
velop out of the struggles of the peas-
antry and the working class but took
form as the vanguard of a bourgeois po-
litical party, as the vanguard of the
Partido Accion Revolucionaria (PAR)
(Revolutionary Action party]. Therefore,
the PGT was never able to give the bour-
geois-democratic revolution an impetus
toward socialism; it limited itself to
mere chatter about the evolutionary road
to revolution, without turning working-
class hegemony to account, without pre-
paring the conditions for the advancement
of the revolution, without creating the
necessary mechanisms to consolidate the
revolution and retain power for the ex-
ploited.
The ouster of the government of
Jacobo Arbenz was the work of American
imperialism but responsibility for the
failure to defend it rests with the lead-
ers of the PGT. They were incapable of foreseeing the consequences of that re-~ gime's nationalist reforms and of facing up to the aggressive plans woven by the Central Intelligence Agency. Accustomed as they were to the horse-trading of machine politics, the PGT leaders never neglected to express their confidence in the national army's "democratic" and "revolutionary" spirit. And when the shadow of Foster Dulles, the U.S. secretary of state and a shareholder in and lawyer for the United Fruit Company -the principal imperialist enterprise in Guatemala at that time -- fell over the country, instead of standing up to this aggression shoulder to shoulder with the people and defying it no matter what the consequences, these tinhorn politicians cravenly fled the country. Jacobo Arbenz' nationalist policy of seeking an independent capitalist development had clashed with the imperialist interests and thus touched off American aggression and military intervention.
@ The defeat of the traditional forms of camarilla opportunism inl was not final; they reappeared in the guise of underground activity _and support for the armed struggle
The 1954 failure buried forever the traditional forms of struggle. But when the PGT leaders -- who in the safety of exile did not experience the conse-— quences of this defeat -- returned to Guatemala, they revived all the dirty political customs of the past in the guise of underground activity; they imposed the same conservative organizational forms on the popular masses. And when in 1962 the masses discovered on their own new forms of struggle and took the armed-struggle road to revolution, the PGT did not even attempt to take the lead of the new struggle. It wanted for its part to establish its own guerrilla movement in the mountainous regions of Baja Verapaz and precipitously pushed into this a handful of valiant compafieros who were massacred by the army before they had made their way deeply into the mountains.
Despite the PGT's indecision and scepticism about the potential of armed struggle, since there was no other popular organization, the train of events ended with its enlistment in the guerrilla struggle. Its leaders began setting orientations from the city up to promoting themselves into “strategists," organizers, and tacticians of revolutionary war without participating in it. In fact the guerrilla struggle was no more to them than a bargaining item, a power piece, “a tactical category" to be used while what they called a "shift in the forces in the counterrevolutionary camp" was taking place. The PGT's policy_has always been to decide which is the main enemy, not in order to concentrate its struggle against this main enemy but with the aim of making deals with the "lesser enemies"; this was the policy which they pompously termed “united-front work." The PGT entered into negotiations not only with the Unién Revolucionaria Democratica (URD) [Revolutionary Democratic Union] but also with the Democracia Cristiana {Christian Democracy] and the Partido Revolucionario. It carried on negotiations with the PR before the 1966 presidential elections, after those elections, and is now doing so when that party is submissively serving the imperialist objectives of special warfare.
@ Peoples war is forging the
legitimate leaders of the
revolution and burying the
petty-bourgeois opportunist
usurpers
But while the PGT survived on the basis of cheap political wheeling and dealing and usurped the leadership of the revolutionary war, the real and only leaderships of the revolutionary movement were being forged on the guerrilla front, in the guerrilla war where a worker-peasant alliance has taken form, in the mountains where the revolutionary intellectuals are being proletarianized. The PGT now not only repudiates its former ideological position of support for the armed struggle, concocting theories to suit its capitulationist attitude and explanations for its — oe eee eee eee i oe destroy the fundamental political content and the strategic perspective of the guerrilla war. It has unleashed an intense divisive campaign within the ranks of the Rebel Armed Forces, promoted rivalries among the fighters, tried to obstruct and undermine the authority _of Comandante César Montes, and has mounted a campaign of slanders against the patriotic, unifying and resolute activity_of the compafieros of the Captain Alejandro de Leon Guerrillia Front and its Comandante Marco Antonio Yon Sosa.
The PGT has ceased to be a revolutionary instrument and is dying as a working-class party in the Marxist sense. It is becoming a mere bureaucratic apparatus living off international solidarity. Our defeats in the northeastern part of the country, signify more than the culmination of the PGT's erratic and incorrect line; they signify the end of a political party called "Marxist Leninist" and definitively mark the end of a period in our history. This is so not because the enemy has defeated these conceptions in the field but because our defeats forced us to move forward, overcoming and outgrowing the traditional conceptions of revolutionary war, as well as overcoming and outgrowing the old conceptions of a party and revolutionary vanguard. Therefore the PGT's break with the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes went
beyond the mere break of a camarilla with the revolutionary fighters; it was a break of the revolutionary fighters with a_ political tendency; it was a break with the history of the so-called Guatemalan Communist party. And this break marks the culmination of the process of establishing a real worker-peasant vanguard brought forth in battles of the guerrilla front from the ranks of the people. In these battles the worker-peasant vanguard
consolidated in the heat of these battles, and from them a real party_of the working class is being created.
@® Camarilla opportunism has
founded a school and the
PGT's capitulationist at-
titude has led to the
proliferation of petty-
bourgeois positions of
both the left and right
The revolutionary fighters, however, realize that this erroneous tendency will not disappear overnight. It has already put down deep roots and founded a school which only the advance of revolutionary war will definitively eradicate. At this moment, we see how unprincipled opportunists have found their element in this perverse current. Using no political or ideological arguments, they are trying to distort and present a falsified view of the political and military activity of the guerrillas, alleging that there can be no revolution without a party. Opportunists who at one time engaged in a few battles have switched from bombast and heated talk to flight and refuge in the foxholes of a gang of dirty politicians. But let us also note how the “antiparty" opportunists are trying to exploit our break with the PGT to carry out their maneuvers and dirty political schemes. They proclaim the transfer of political leadership from the city to the mountains but totally reject the authority of the guerrilla leaders, to whom they deny all political capacity. These new opportunists see the PGT as political men and the guerrillas as military men. Oscillating between the city and the country, they call themselves "politicalmilitary men"; they claim to be complete revolutionaries but in reality they are neither political nor military men. For us a revolutionary's worth depends not on his attitude toward the party _but_on his attitude toward the war, his attitude in the fighting. We are living in a time when it is not enough to be a party man to be a revolutionary nor antiparty_to be a revolutionist. Both positions are equally opportunist and adventurist. War leaves room for neither opportunism nor adventurisn.
@ The guerrilla leaders are
assuming the leadership of
the war under the banner of
unity _with all the revolu-
tionary, democratic, and
popular forces
The people now must know that, as
an urgent necessity_and independent of
any dogmatic, defeatist, bureaucratic, or
opportunist tutelage, the guerrilla lead-
ers of the FAR have taken the leadership
of the revolution into their hands and
that we share this historic responsibil-
ity_with the compafieros of the Captain
Alejandro de Leén Guerrilla Front. The
Guatemalan revolutionary movement could
not continue under the incompetent and
adventurist leadership of a sect of op-
portunist provocateurs. The Fuerzas
Armadas Rebeldes represent the broadest
popular and revolutionary interests; they
are the organized and fighting vanguard
of the peasant and worker masses and of
the country's revolutionary youth. Our
brother peoples need not worry about the
vacillating and defeatist attitude of the
Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo, because
of the struggle of the people and its
organized vanguard. Even our enemies
realize that our break with the usurpers
does not constitute a split in the revo-
lutionary forces but rather a step for-
ward in the indomitable struggle against
them all. Despite the fact that the PGT
is helping the exploiting classes solve
their economic crisis by acting as the
intermediary for the sale of coffee to
certain socialist countries whose govern-
ments advocate the evolutionary coexis-
tence road to revolution, the enemy has
not ceased his preparations for war or
his desperate attempts to crush the peo-
ple's vanguard, the guerrillas of the
Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes. Only revision-
ists can be alarmed by the development of
people's war independent of petty-
bourgeois, opportunist, and conciliation-
ist so-called "Communist" parties.
We fighters of the Fuerzas Armadas
Rebeldes are for the unity of all the
revolutionary, democratic, and popular
forces in order to make the revolution in
our country. We understand that the rev-
olution must be the work of all patriotic
Guatemalans. The revolution is not the
objective of the FAR and the guerrillas
alone; it is not only the endeavor of a
class and an organization; it is the
achievement of struggle and sacrifice of
all the revolutionary and progressive
classes; it is the accomplishment of the
mobilization, organization and militant
action of all the people. It is not a
desperate or adventurist action on our
part to plan the immediate overthrow of
Mendez Montenegro or any other puppet or
reactionary ruler. We are promoting the
guerrilla movement in order to develop a
guerrilla army which will overthrow the
reactionary regime and create the condi-
tions for the political and military de-
feat of the exploiting classes and the
imperialist aggressor. The revolutionary struggle has very deep roots in the needs of the peasants and workers and it has a guerrilla tradition. It is not an improvised, adventurist, or unprepared struggle. The FAR will continue to gather strength and force in the mountains of the country, in the working-class and student centers and in the agglomerations of agricultural workers as well as among all those who sympathize and collaborate with these sectors. Because the FAR's line of struggle for land, bread, and dignity is tied to the future of the entire people and the entire country.
The defeatists and the timorous, those who think that the defeat inflicted on the guerrillas has put an end to the political instability, who fear the hardships of revolutionary war, can call us adventurists, "half-baked leftists," "Militarists," who are trying to skip stages. But we are responding to broader interests, to the national, immemorial aspirations of the peasants and workers, whose energies must be directed and organized militarily in order for us to be able to oppose the enemy's professional armies. The dogmatic sectarians will call us "liquidators." But we will uphold the principle of armed struggle with forcefulness, firmness, and flexibility. We will promote violent political actions in coordination with the guerrilla struggle. We will develop an organizational network around us comprising and permeating all the best elements of all social sectors. And, in order to guarantee a correct leadership, we will realize an alliance of the workers and peasants. The defeatists, the divisionists, the discouraged and the opportunists, with their so-called "strategic retreat," have made a move toward an accord, political negotiation, and conciliation. And, although the revolutionary situation in our country has receded, still the progress of the struggle for freedom is calculated, is measured, is assessed in blood ~- rights are not given; they are seized in the fight.
@ The revolutionary fighters will fight to the victory or die arms in hand; the people will defeat the aggressors
Revolutionary war is the people's strength as the land will be. Let Arrega Bosque, Arana Osorio and all their advisers of the American special forces keep hunting for us. Let them keep sending their troops. Let their armies range throughout the entire country; they will only fall into our ambushes, our traps. Let them come to the mountains; the mountains will come alive. Let them search for us; we will scatter and fade like the mist. Let them find us; we will give them a taste of the same lead that we have captured from them. Let the puppet Julio César Méndez Montenegro desperately rave on that the guerrillas have been decimated; we will answer with our gunfire where he least expects it. Let the idiot Héctor Mansilla Pinto keep on announcing that all the kidnappings, tortures, and murders are selfinflicted; public opinion wili throw his shameless and stupid lies back into his face. Let the CIA keep inciting clandestine enemy groups to commit their craven murders; they will only more quickly dig their own graves.
We have learned how to fight. We know the enemy. We do not underestimate him tactically or strategically. The special warfare which American imperialism is developing has had some success in our country. And let no one say that these soldiers do not know how to fight; that is the only thing they know how to do and they do not do it badly. But besides fighting, they burn houses, destroy seed, rob, rape and sadistically murder the civilian population. We have learned how to fight and we are teaching the people how to fight, to implacably annihilate our enemies. Our struggle wins more and more support; it is like a flame that sweeps along, that catches everywhere, that daily swells in power. The puppet army and the whole repressive apparatus will find itself compelled to spread out their forces in the attempt to extinguish this struggle. The enemy may win a momentary respite but will fail in the end because our strength is rooted in the fact that the humble people of the countryside are beginning to struggle for the land of their glorious forebearers. Our strength is rooted in the support of those who have nothing to lose but the chains that bind them. The students and revolutionary intellectuals who cannot live in the stifling atmosphere of ignorance and inquisition support us. The new generation which is fighting for its land, for its traditions, and for its freedom, supports us. Imperialism and the landlords have police, new weapons, light and heavy planes, helicopters and bombs. But no matter what they have and do, they have not the people's will and morale. All the enemy's machines of war, all their napalm bombs, their poisonous- and noxious~gas bombs, all their fragmentation bombs and saturation bombings will only prolong their death agony in a war in which at last we will inevitably be victorious.
Following the fighting example of Comandante Luis Turcios Lima and the heroic Comandante Ernesto Guevara, we reaffirm our unshakeable determination to WIN OR DIE.
Sierra de las Minas,
January 1, 1968.
Year of the Guerrillas. Signed by the FAR Command:
Comandante Camilo Sanchez,
Captain Pablo Monsanto,
Captain Socorro Sical,
Lieutenant Androcles Hernandez, and
[Lieutenant] Ramiro Diaz.