MICHELSEN'S
MANDATE
In the abortive coup, as in all other crises in the military, the good intentions and sensibilities of some young officers were interlaced with the plans and calculations of the bourgeoisie and imperialism, which are trying to preserve their power in face of the decomposition of the existing military dictatorship. Confronted with the rise of the masses and the failure of Banzer, the uneasiness and hesitation of the young officers had to be canalized toward a simple change in personnel without any other important changes. That was the objective of the ruling classes. It is important to note that the tendencies that appeared simultaneously with the abortive coup are contesting for the support of the masses and are orienting toward the COB and the university students. We can thus expect the launching of an operation designed to "save the armed forces and the regime that they represent." This will be, to put it another way, a preventive operation to replace Banzer but save the regime. Already the hand of imperialism has appeared in such a way as to leave no room for doubt about the origin of certain counsels and advisers. It is not by accident that the two documents produced by military tendencies were written by officers living in the United States. There are also indications that the ex-president of COMBOL (the nationalized mines company -- INPRECOR) during the Barrientos regime is intervening in the crisis. The putschists also did not conceal their ties with the old reactionary politician Paz Estenssoro. There was a heterogeneous conglomerate of groups ranged around the attempted coup, groups that were both united and COLOMBIA by CARLOS RODRÍGUEZ Five candidates ran in the 1974 presidential elections in Columbia: * Alfonso López Michelsen, supported by the Liberal party. * Alvaro Gomez Hurtado, supported by the Conservative * Maria Eugenia Rojas de Moreno, presented by the ANAPO (National Popular Alliance). * Hernando Echeverry Mejia, presented by the National Union of the Opposition. * Hermes Duarte, supported by the Christian Democracy. Political context of the electoral struggle After the fall of the military dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, the bourgeoisie decided to form the so-called National Front, which united the two traditional bourgeois parties, the Liberal party and the Conservative party. This agreement entailed an alternation of the party holding the presidifferentiated in their ambitions. The coup attempt on June 5,
1974, seems to have been prematurely precipitated by the impatience of some of the military officers before all the possible participants could be grouped together. The rehabilitation of Paz Estenssoro that was demanded by the putschists provoked conflicts with the groupings that are lined up in different "fronts. " Among these groupings are the MNI of
Siles (Movimiento Nacionalista de Izquierda - - Left Nationalist Movement, an old faction of the MNR), the Christian
Democratic party, the PRA, and even the Bolivian Communist party, in addition to Paz Estenssoro's MNR.
The working class, the peasantry, and the revolutionary university students differentiated themselves from the putschists with a sure instinct. No sector of the masses mobilized in response to the putschists' appeals. The trade-union organízations and their vanguard continued to work for their revolutionary class objectives. Banzer used the coup attempt as a pretext to orchestrate a new campaign against "extremism"
and to denounce preparations for guerrilla warfare. His visits to the military garrisons were aimed at reconstituting his decomposed front by resorting to the fear of "extremism" and guerrillaism. But he failed before and he will fail again.
Furthermore, the maneuvers to save the capitalist neocolonial regime through appeals for a "Second Republic" symbolized by the hated former dictator Barrientos will not replace the socialist perspective among the masses, the perspective around which they are united and for which they are preparing themselves. ** LÓPEZ dency. Every four years the presidency would automatically change hands between the Conservatives and the Liberals. It also entailed parity in parliamentary seats and public officials. The agreement was to remain in effect for sixteen years. The two traditional bourgeois parties thus maintained a monopoly of power during the successive governments of Lleras Camargo, Guillermo Léon Valencia, Carlos Lleras Restrepo, and finally, Misael Pastrana Borrero. Access to parliament was barred to all other political formations or parties. No person not belonging to one of these two parties was allowed to fulfill any bureaucratic function within the state apparatus. For more than a decade, during the "violencia, " these two parties appeared as deadly enemies. During this whole period, the Conservatives held monopoly control of the state apparatus and unleashed a violent repression against "seditious elements, " into which category they added the Liberals. But at the end of the battle, the two parties concluded an alliance that eliminated the divergences that had conjuncturally ex-
11
COLOMBIA isted between them. This alliance was presented as a veritable fortress that would protect the state apparatus and ward off all workers and popular demands. In the political realm, the National Front was the clearest expression of the monolithic character not only of the Conservative party but also of the Liberal party, in the sense that the most brutal repression was unleashed against any other form of political organization and against any demand of the masses. The Liberal presidents competed with the Conservative ones in repressing the left and trade-union organizations, as well as any other form of mobilization against the government's reactionary policy. The myth of liberalism as a representative of a supposedly "nationalist" sector of the bourgeoisie that "progressive" or even revolutionary forces could ally with proved to be a Stalinist fantasy lacking the slightest foundation in reality. There was one decisive conclusion for the revolutionary process in Colombia: The Colombian revolution will be socialist or there will be no revolution. During the first years of the National Front the Stalinist Communist party was considerably weakened. Its search for a "nationalist" sector of the bourgeoisie led it to dream of a confrontation between two lines within the bourgeoisie: the "progressive" line of López Michelsen and the "recalcitrant" line of the official leadership of the Liberal party and the entire Conservative party. According to this schema, López Michelsen represented an alternative solution to the official line of the Liberal party, because he defended certain theses that had earned him a reputation as the "enfant terrible" of the bourgeoisie -- an example being the fact that he continved to support the Cuban revolution and called for a "revolution" in Colombia. In reality, for a certain time the position of López Michelsen could have been considered as expressing a sentiment of opposition to the premises of the National Front (parity, monolithic character of the two parties, etc.) and as articulating certain theses on the state that some "Marxists" might have considered "revolutionary" during the 1960s. But history was to confirm that this opposition to the National Front was not necessarily anti-bourgeois or anticapitalist. On the contrary, it was aimed at finding the most auspicious ground from which to orient the bourgeoisie after the National Front came to an end. It was a matter of preserving bourgeois rule, of confirming its juridical and political superstructure in such a way that a possible democratization of parliamentary representa-
Colombian bank workers strike for higher wages.
AVAN LA JUDASE DRA
PETICIONES DE LOSYA LAS JUS ADOS VIVA LAS
TRABADORES• DEL PETICIONES LAS JUS TAS SOLO BANKO POPULAR RAPOPULAR PETICIONES, FARA
•SINI RAPOPULAR Y PAt AFAT DEL GARATE STRADE SA TEXICIMOS METO! BARRANQUILLA I TARES SALARIOS VIVA NUESTRO SINTRAPACNIAR
12 tion could provide all necessary guarantees against the revolution and the mass movement so that the working class and its allies, the peasant and student movements, would continue to have their hands tied. The National Front was responsible for the most restrictive legislation against the working class and the right to strike. This legislation was strengthened by each successive National Front government, to the point that it is now virtually impossible for the workers to launch a strike without it immediately being declared illegal by the Ministry of Labor. The National Front is responsible for the murder of about a hundred students and high-schoolers, for the massacre of striking workers in Santa Barbara, Barrancabermeja, and the Cauca Valley. López Michelsen never supported any protest movement against this policy of the Colombian bourgeoisie, despite the support extended to him by the Stalinists for several years. His political program was defined by his conception of the role of the state, which he thought would have to be strengthened beyond the political parties and the professional groupings. It is no accident that at the time that López's Revolutionary Liberal Movement was functioning, both the Stalinists of the Communist party and the official leaders of the Liberal party adopted attitudes toward López Michelsen that were contradictory but nevertheless flowed from the same basic premise: the assumption that a strengthening of the state would lead to a weakening of the bourgeoisie in terms of its professional organizations and its political representation through the parties. Hence the myth of the "progressive" character of Lopez Michelsen -- he was being supported by the CP and vehemently attacked by the official leaders of the government party. But it took only a few years for both sides to become convinced that the famous formula of strengthening the state would mean exactly the opposite of what they had thought. In face of this evidence, each side switched its position 180 degrees. The bourgeoisie threw its support to López Michelsen; the Stalinist CP began to oppose him. But the CP's opposition was not a frontal opposition. The Colombian far-left, which arose out of opposition to the • class-conciliationist line the CP was following in the 1960s, had manifested its distrust of any sort of alliance with sectors of the national bourgeoisie from the beginning. It set itself the task of waging its struggle against North American imperialism in combination with the struggle against the whole
López Michelsen.
"national" bourgeoisie, whatever "progressive" character any of its sectors might have appeared to have at any given moment. Anticapitalist and antibourgeois opposition were presented as the coordinates of the political practice of the far left, which was concretized by the guerrilla struggle as the expression of revolutionary radicalism and by a permanent antiparliamentary propaganda during this period. The peasant movement and the student movement attained their maturity around the time of the elections exactly on the basis of antiparliamentary and anticapitalist propaganda. The pro-Moscow CP, which was continuing its efforts to get into parliament, ran in the elections as a sector of the Liberal party, which was the only possible way to run legally. The candidates and their electoral currents Before the 1974 elections there was a battle within the Liberal party between former president Carlos Lleras Restrepo and Alfonso López Michelsen. Lleras represented the typical tradition of the policy of the National Front, of which he was one of the most representative spokesmen. He presented himself as the advocate of an alliance with the Conservative party; that is, he wanted to be the unitea candidate of the two parties, despite the fact that the sixteen-year period of single candidacies for the presidency had expired. López's position was to assert the necessity for the Liberal party to run its own candidate (himself, of course) and to rally a wide gamut of sectors of the bourgeoisie into a campaign of alliance, drawing in many popular layers to support a political figure who had presented himself for years as a "revolutionary. " López won this struggle hands down and got the support of the most important sectors of the bourgeoisie, in industry and agriculture as well as among the banks and commercial sectors.
Given the crisis of the political parties, the thesis on the strengthening of the state won support from all sections of terests of the large landed proprietors grouped around Julio
Cesar Turbay Ayala, the chief of the Liberal party.
López summed up his program in the formula for a "clear mandate" and a supposed "wages and incomes policy, " eclectic formulas that could mean opting for a neocolonial economic development combined with some participationist demagogy.
The Conservative party, led by the current president, Miscal
Pastrana Borrero, launched the candidacy of Alvaro Gomez
Hurtado under the slogan "a policy in favor of economic development." This was aimed at attracting the industrial sector of the bourgeoisie and the landed proprietors. The "policy in favor of economic development" was nothing but a demagogic formula raised by some sections of the bourgeoisie in order to lull popular layers with the dream of prosperity.
Moreover, the Conservatives were not able to take advantage of the "clear mandate" insofar as their campaign, as opposed to López's, was too vague to regroup the various factions of the bourgeoisie around their program.
the bourgeoisie as its most intransigent watchdog, borrowing the propaganda slogans of the rightist organizations, like
Tradition, Family, and Propriety (the equivalent of the Chilean Fatherland and Freedom). This wound up isoleting it even further from the popular masses and opened a breach for the Lopez campaign, which appeared as an alternative "leftist" solution. The National Popular Alliance, a political formation that arose out of the Conservative party and drew along some elements of the Liberal party, developed as a pole of attraction for some sectors of the "lumpen" bourgeoisie (large-scale smugglers, drug peddlers, emerald dealers, etc.) and the state apparatus. It had some support among marginal sector; of the population. Ideologically, it can be charauterized as a petty-bourgeois party in that its ideology balances between capitalism and socialism, between Catholic professions of faith and defense of freedom of religion, between parliamentarism and threats of civil war. It got its highest score in the 1970 elections, when its candidate got almost as many votes as Pastrana, the official candidate. But later its vacillations resulted in its being cast into a minority position as against the two traditional parties to the point that today it is no more than "the third party. " Its presidential candidate, Maria Eugenia Rojas de Moreno, daughter of the old dictator Rojas Pinilla, got only 350, 000 votes. The National Union of Opposition ran Hernando Echeverry Mejia as its candidate. The National Union of Opposition is a coalition of various factions that left ANAPO and of some independent groups around the pro-Moscow CP and the MOIR. The MOIR represents the Colombian expression of the Maoist movement after the right turn of the Chinese leadership. Hernando Echeverry himself was part of the group that split from ANAPO. He looked for a rapprochement with the Conservative candidate during the electoral campaign. The program of the National Union of Opposition was strictly luke warm so as not to annoy any sector of the bourgesisie or petty-bourgeoisie. Although its strategic project was close to that of the Chilean Unidad Popular, the program was diluted to the lowest possible level, with a few pearls being borrowed from the treasure chest of the government reactionaries, like the demand for the opening of diplomatic relations with all the countries of the world.
The National Union of Opposition did not succeed in attracting massive support from working-class voters, although the union bureaucrats grouped around the CSTC (Confederación
Sindical Trabajadores Colombianos -- Colombian Trade-Union
Federation) which is controlled by the CP, linked up with it.
Despite the huge propaganda machine it utilized, the National Union of Opposition got less than 150, 000 votes. It is significant that the enormous mass of propaganda distributed by all the parties and political groups aimed at leading the voters to the polls did not prevent a large number of abstentions. (This has been a constant feature of Colombian elections in past years.) Only about 50% of those eligible cast ballots.
Crisis of parliamentarism
Many and varied hypotheses have been put forward about the election of López Michelsen. None have stressed the reformist character that his government could take on, which would be in contradiction to the considerations we described above.
It will rather be a government that will continue some of the practices of the National Front with a political program that will not be fundamentally different from the one advanced by previous presidents.
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The Colombian economy is in critical straits, as are all neocolonial economies. But the Colombian bourgeoisie has been able to take advantage of a circumstance that is unusual in the Latin American context: the lack of combativity among the working class during the past decade. On the basis of this laxity, the judicial machine established by the National Front has put the proletariat in an unfavorable situation. It cannot even legally wage a struggle for its most elementary demands, a situation that has led not only to the so-called free trade-unions (the UTC and the CTC, which are affiliated to the ORIT), but also to the CSTC controlled by the Stalinists. To be sure, the struggles that have continued to be led by the guerrillas, the student movement, and especially a radical sector of the agricultural proletariat organized in independent unions all demonstrate the great potential of struggle inherent in the current situation of the working class and the radicalized sectors. The bourgeoisie is afraid that its prospects for broadening its markets will fail. It knows that the crisis that threatens the economy could increase unemployment in a massive way and could simultaneously provoke a dizzying price increase with AUTO auto industry: