END THE
IMPERIALIST AGGRESSION IN SANTO DOMINGO!
[The United Secretariat of the Fourth International, the world-wide revolutionary-socialist party founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938, issued the following statement May 2.]
The United Secretariat of the Fourth International denounces the landing of U.S. Marines in the Dominican Republic as a cynical attempt by American imperialism to maintain a military dictatorship against a popular movement that sought to restore to constitutional office a regularly elected president; one, moreover, who is merely a liberal bourgeois,
This intervention opens a new stage in the hardening of American imperialism with regard to all the colonial and semicolonial countries that do not servilely obey its-orders. After the military coup d'état in Brazil, the intervention in the Congo, the crisis over Cambodia and the aggression against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Yankee imperialism is again displaying its ~ decision to utilize direct military force against any new forward step of the world revolution -- even if it is.a step taken under a liberal bourgeois regime. Washington is aware that such a regime can constitute only an interlude with an outcome towards thé extreme right or towards permanent revolution, .
In this way Kennedy's liberal camouflage ("Alliance for Progress"), which sought especially through massive economic aid to contain the colonial revolution at a bourgeois "democratic" stage, is progressively being replaced by a policy which is openly and directly counterrevolutionary, which returns to the "gunboat diplomacy" of the rising and triumphant stage of imperialism.
But the world has changed in a decisive way since that era. The political cynicism of Johnson and the Pentagon is arousing mass indignation on a wider and wider scale, compelling even pro-imperial-~ ist governments like those of Chile and Peru, which are desirous of maintaining a certain amount of popular support, to oppose the American policy, thus creating the danger for Washington of deeper and deeper isolation in Latin America.
The United Secretariat of the Fourth International appeals to the masses of Latin America to exert the utmost vigilance, because the aggression against the Dominican Republic can be the prelude to a direct attack against socialist Cuba.
The United Secretariat of the Fourth International appeals to the masses everywhere to mobilize and express their indignation over this new imperialist crime, to redouble their blows everywhere against
the reactionary and pro-imperialist governments and regimes, and against the foundations of imperialism.
The best way to weaken the imperialist policy of. direct mili-~ tary intervention is to increase the number of revolutionary centers, to compel the Pentagon to extend its forces more and more, and to confront them with new fronts each time they think they have "restored" the situation in a country.
Get the American Marines out of Santo Domingo!
Get Yankee imperialism out of Latin America!
Go forward in speeding the Latin-American revolution in accordance with the teachings of the Second Declaration of Havana!
THE