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THE TESTIMONY OF DO VAN NGOC
[One of the most moving moments at the Stockholm hearings of the International War Crimes Tribunal came when a 9-year-old Vietnamese boy, badly burned over the lower abdomen by napalm, offered his testimony as to war crimes conmmitted by the U.S. invaders of his country. An observer said that the contrast between the brave little boy and the barbarous use of American technology brought tears to the eyes of those present. The following is the full text of the statement made by this witness. ]
My name is Do Van Ngoc, 9 years old, from the village of Vinh, Tuy, hamlet of Vinh Minh, district of Quang Minh, province of Quang Minh, the son of Mr. Do Oj and Mrs. Ha Thi Giee; both my parents are rice growers.
On the afternoon of June 16, 1966, I was looking after the oxen with my two friends, named Ha Khec and Do Van Giau, when three American planes appeared from over the sea and dropped bombs on the place where we were.
The bombs exploded and the flames [Please turn to page 539]
Vol. 5, No. 21
May 26, 1967
Guerrilla Front in Bolivia
Pictured as "Impregnable"
October Antiwar Protest
Set for Washington, D.C.
Hugo Blanco Goes
on Hunger Strike
i]
What Three Parades Show
on Rating of Vietnam War
@
Analysis of Forces Behind
Coup d'Etat in Greece
&
General Strike in France —
New Test for deGaulle
®
Text of Sartre's Address
at War Crimes Tribunal
New York, N.Y. 10010
New York, N. Y. 10010.
GUERRILLA FRONT IN BOLIVIA PICTURED AS "IMPREGNABLE"
[The reports concerning the opening of a guerrilla front in southeastern Bolivia have been so contradictory that until the report below was published, World Outlook considered it best to adopt a reserved attitude.
[The main source of information was the Barrientos regime, one of the most unreliable in all of Latin America -- and that is saying a good deal. What it reported one day canceled out what it had said the previous day.
{The Johnson administration appeared to be dubious as to the accuracy of the accounts, although this did not prevent it from sending additional military supplies and a number of "advisers" and experts in counterguerrilla war.
{It should be added that the sudden reports about guerrilla activities came on the eve of the Punta del Este Conference sponsored by the Johnson administration and were utilized to help whip up the "hate Cuba" propaganda. Moreover, the focusing of attention on the southeast part of Bolivia was not without a certain value in helping to draw a screen over the savage witch-hunt of political opponents which the Barrientos regime has been conducting since last January.
{Various journalists appear to have been trying to ascertain the truth about the reports of a new guerrilla front. Three journalists who went there were promptly seized by the Barrientos regime and one of them, Régis Debray, was accused of being the "political commissar" of the alleged guerrilla group. (See World Qutlook, May 19, p. 507.)
[The Paris daily Le Monde sent one of its best correspondents, Marcel Niedergang, to Bolivia. An unusually reliable journalist, his dispatches have been awaited with interest. His reports concerning Régis Debray soon pointed up a number of lies on the part of the Barrientos regime.
(Arriving in the guerrilla zone, he seems to have succeeded in interviewing some of the representatives of political tendencies that have been driven underground. Coupling this information with facts gleaned from other sources, he offered his first conclusions concerning the guerrilla front in the May 18 issue of Le Monde. We offer below some extracts from this article.]
* * x
(Niedergang begins by reporting the March 23 incident in which a govern-
ment patrol stumbled into an ambush on
the Nancahuazti River north of Lagunillas,
an oil town in the province of Santa Cruz.
A sublieutenant named Amezaga, six sol-
diers and a civilian employee of the Bo-
livian state oil company, one "Vargas,"
were killed. ]
* * *
The news was not released offi-
cially in La Paz until Monday March 27;
the authorities preferring to remain si-
lent at first...
According to a communiqué of the
army high command, Sublieutenant Ameza-
ga's lost patrol was charged with "study-
ing indications of a forest trail" and
the "quick reaction of the forces of law
and order enabled them to capture some
prisoners, a jeep, radio equipment, some
suitcases containing uniforms and Castro-
Communist propaganda of Cuban origin."
A quite different version is of-
fered at Marietta's in Camiri. "For sev-
eral months people in Camiri had noticed
the incessant coming and going of 'Coco'
Perero and his brother Marco, both of
whom are from Beni. Congenial, friendly,
with an easy smile and ‘abrazo' [equiva-
lent to a slap on the back], they said
they had bought a farm near Nancahuazi to
raise stock. People around here ended up
just the same thinking that the two
brothers were buying an abnormal amount
of supplies for their employees. Around
Lagunillas and Monteagudo, they made no
objection to paying double the price for
chickens and meat. At first it was
thought that a new clandestine plant for
making cocaine was involved, these being
numerous in the region. Then things said
in confidence by an employee of the con-
pany about men coming down from the moun-
tains to the Perero farm led the govern-
ment authorities to send a patrol accom-
panied by the guide 'Vargas' to see what
was involved."
* * *
[About ten kilometers from the Pe-
rero farm this army unit ran into a genu-
ine military training camp. ]
x * *
From all appearances, the unex-
pected invasion by the Amezaga patrol
caught the guerrillas by surprise. They
had not expected to be involved in action
so quickly. Actually, three months earli-
er, a young Bolivian technician had by
chance met the Perero brothers in the
Monteagudo market. He knew them well in
Europe when he was a student there. Marco
and "Coco" Perero belonged to an extreme
left formation, but at the end of 1965 they decided, it seems, to join a pro- Chinese group, the leader of which is Oscar Zamora, former general secretary of the International Student Union in Prague.
Zamora, a former member of the "orthodox" Communist party, is at present detained in a military camp for political prisoners in Peking, a place in the Amazon forest close to the Brazilian border said to be unhealthy. [See World Outlook, April 21, p. 420, for a description of the conditions in these camps.] When his family complained about the particularly harsh conditions of the camp, the authorities replied: "What are you complaining about? He is exactly where he wanted to go.” In this particularly isolated part of Bolivia are to be found other places with such unexpected names as Paris, Versailles, New Berlin and London...
"We decided, with the comrades, to begin armed insurrection," the Perero brothers confided. "For the time being we are in the stage of preparation and organization, but you will soon hear them talking about us. The only way out is through armed struggle." x ok O*
[In La Paz and Santa Cruz, Niedergang continues, one hears many Bolivians affirm after the event that they knew about the guerrilla preparations all along. In the area, however, two months later the general feeling is still one of surprise and doubt.
(Three days after the skirmish at Nancahuazu, General Barrientos, president of the republic, arrived by plane to personally inspect the "red zone."
[For a month and a half repeated announcements were made about an imminent clash, but the reported incidents indicated that the guerrillas continued to hold the initiative. ]
* kx
On April 10 a particularly murderous ambush, sprung by the guerrillas at Iripiti, still on the banks of the Nancahuazi, cost the lives of two lieutenants, a subofficer and eight soldiers.
Still graver -- the section commanded by Captain Sanchez, which reached there a little later, was disarmed and taken prisoner. Captain Sanchez and his men remained two days with the guerrillas, astonished at not being exe¢uted. They observed with interest the very modern arms of the rebels, their organization and perfect discipline. A doctor, Japanese according to them, took care of the wounded. Deprived of their clothes and their arms, the men in the Sanchez patrol, no doubt having refused to join the guerrillas, were released. They carried their dead and wounded on stretchers; one of the guerrilla chiefs turned over to Captain Sanchez the wedding ring belonging to Sublieutenant Amezaga, killed March 23.
On April 20, in the village of Muyupampa, that is, considerably south of this sector, Mr. Régis Debray was apprehended in the company of two journalists, one of them Argentine, the other British. This was not done by the military but by the DIC (Department of Criminal Investigation). The three men were unarmed, in civilian clothes, manifestly unprepared to stay, for even a short time, in the Nancahuazi jungle.
Other skirmishes took place April 25 and during May near Gutierrez, not far from the Rio Grande. A total of twenty-five deaths in the ranks of the regular forces in less than forty-five days. This is a high figure; proportionately much higher than the losses admitted officially over a longer period in Colombia or Venezuela, the two countries most affected up to now by armed insurrectionary movements.
Thus morale does not seem to be very high among the Bolivian soldiers of the Fourth Division, taken aback by combat tactics and-a terrain to which they are quite unaccustomed. Despite the repeated announcements about a "general offensive," orders have been issued by the high command to reduce the number of "suicide patrols."
In the sinister gorges of the Nancahuazi, thirty years ago, the heads of the Bolivian army, under different conditions of course, had to overcome the distaste of the men of the Altiplano or the high Andean valleys for the tropical heat and humidity. The Aymara Indian and the Cochabamba cholo dread the jungle and its snares -- snakes, mosquitoes and giant, venomous spiders. It seems clear that the rebels, controlling a territory of around 200 square kilometers, do not intend to "break out of the encirclement" and pass over to the offensive. They are satisfied with lightning commando operations to demoralize the regular troops.
"It seems," Colonel Zenteno, commander of the Eighth Division and former minister of foreign affairs, told us, "that the guerrillas have a base in this sector that is for the moment almost impregnable."
Conscious of these difficulties, the top command is now seeking to replace the troops composed in the majority of men from the highlands by conscripts enlisted in the tropical zones, particularly Beni. But a significant incident occurred last week at Trinidad, the capital of.
Beni, the province north of Santa Cruz. A crowd of men and women assembled on the airstrip at the airport to block the military plane from taking off with the conscripts. The government's comment: "It involved a group of Communists."
The project launched by General Barrientos at the end of March to create a "peasant militia," seems to have likewise been abandoned. It is not that the Bolivian army, having a strength of about 30,000 men, lacks elite units, but they are not numerous. A battalion of Rangers, around 1,000 men, is stationed near Santa Cruz but has not yet engaged in operations. Another battalion has great firepower and is well trained. A second battalion of Rangers is being formed with the collaboration of U.S. "advisers" from the anti-guerrilla school at Panama. An estimated 250 young Bolivian officers have already taken courses in this school.
There is nothing confidential about this American military assistance. A regular military flight schedule is maintained between Howard air field in the Panama Canal Zone and Bolivia. The newspapers in La Paz have published pictures of Hercules air-cargo planes landing war matériel in Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, as well as pictures of American "advisers." The same Bolivian dailies report "military aid from Argentina."
"U.S. and Argentine technicians and instructors are arriving frequently in Bolivia," General Belmonte Ardiles, commander in chief of the Bolivian air force has admitted. And he added: "This aid consists of cooperating with our aviators in the struggle against the guerrillas in the department of Santa Cruz."
"We were surprised," a U.S. adviser, a specialist in radio communications, told us in Santa Cruz. "The rebels possess a remarkable camouflage technique and a dispersion capacity resembling what we are running into at present in Vietnam. They have good radio equipment. We detected six points transmitting in Morse code. But when the troops tried to move toward one of these points, all six shifted at the same time, wiping out the trail ... Really they are very well trained."
The excellent preparation of the Bolivian guerrilla focal center, admitted by the U.S. and Argentine advisers, thus makes all the more interesting the affirmations of those who, even in Santa Cruz itself, appear to be in good position to know the intentions of the guerrillas.
"This zone was not chosen by accident," they say, "not only because of the terrain but especially with disengagement in mind. From Nancahuazi it is easy to link up with Bolivia's three levels -the eastern plains by way of Camiri, the valleys of Cochabamba and the Altiplano by way of the passes. For the immediate future, it is only a matter of harassing the regular forces. In the long range, if the focal center is maintained, it will perhaps be possible to form columns marching simultaneously toward the capital. This obviously involves linking up with the tin miners in the Altiplano. Some of them have already joined the underground. They talk about foreigners among the guerrillas. What difference does that make? Aren't there foreigners on the side of the Bolivian army?"
Does it make sense, this "dream" held by the leaders of the Bolivian left -- of repeating, ten years later, in this area, the exploits of the "Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos columns"? Many factors must be considered, beginning with the almost total absence of political consciousness among the peasant masses in this country. Can the fish live in such inhospitable water? The more or less underground spokesmen of the parties (all of them, however, divided into several tendencies), ranging from the Communists to the MNR (National Revolutionary Movement) of ex-President Paz Estenssoro, are not stopped by these considerations. "To defeat the guerrillas," they say, "the government will be led progressively to an operation of the Santo Domingo type."
In any case there is one point on which all the leaders and representatives of the opposition are in agreement -- the shots fired last March 23 in the wild gorges of the Nancahuazu marked the beginning of something that threatens to last for a rather long time and to compel all "shadings" of opinion to take a stand on in relation to the "Bolivian focal center," the most important perhaps of all those that have surged up in the past ten years with varying fortunes south of the Rio Grande.
CUBANS SCORE A RECORD HARVEST
Cuba has announced a smashing success in this year's sugar harvest. On May 8 as the cutting neared completion, total production stood at 5,590,792 metric tons. This is a million tons higher than last year's harvest at the same time.
Las Villas Province produced 25 percent of the nation's total sugar crop. With a harvest of 1,396,175 tons, the province set a 14-year record.
JUAN LECHIN HAILS BOLIVIAN GUERRILLA FRONT
Juan Lechin Oquendo, former vicepresident of Bolivia and a popular figure in the labor movement there, has hailed the appearance of a guerrilla front in his country although he denies having any connection with it.
_Lechin was arbitrarily arrested by Dictator René Barrientos in May 1965, put on a plane and sent to Asuncién. No trial was held. Interior Minister Oscar Quiroga simply announced that LIechin had been exiled because of "present social tension." He told the press that Lechin was connected with "a vast subversive plot of international character planned and financed for several months by internationally known Communist leaders."
No evidence whatsoever was offered to substantiate the charge. Quiroga merely asserted that Lechin was maintaining "a permanent link with Italian Conmunist leader Signor Iuigi Longo" in a scheme to turn Bolivia into "a new focal point for violence and extermination in the Southern Hemisphere." [See World Outlook, May 21, 1965.]
With the outbreak of guerrilla activities in the southeast part of Bolivia last March, it was wondered if Lechin had any connection with the development although in Bolivia he had disting-
HUGO BLANCO GOES
The Uruguayan Committee for the Defense of Human Rights reported May 11 that it had learned from its sources in Lima that Hugo Blanco, at present in the prison hospital, is convalescing from "physical torture inflicted on him" and that as his "only means of self-defense" he has gone on a hunger strike.
As previously reported by World Qutlook [May 5, p. aso), Hugo Blanco was brutally beaten by prison guards early in April. The authorities at the notorious "El Front6n" fortress-prison told the press that the famous revolutionary peasant leader had been taken to the hospital suffering from a "grave lung ailment. :
The Uruguayan Committee for the Defense of Human Rights reports that Hugo Blanco's friends in Lima are appealing for strong public protests in behalf of the victim. They fear that the Peruvian authorities have decided to do away with Hugo Blanco and that public protest is the only way he can be saved from the "slow death" which they appear to have decided to inflict on the prisuished himself for his incapacity to organize any effective resistance to the Barrientos dictatorship.
On May 7 lechin was arrested at Arica while en route from Argentina to Santiago de Chile. He was traveling on a false passport.
He at once asked for the right of political asylum. This was denied by the Frei government but Lechin was nevertheless granted the right to stay 45 days in Santiago.
In a press interview reported by Agence France-Presse May 16, lIechin said, "When I entered Chilean territory, my intention was to reach Bolivia, where I still want to return as soon as possible and by any means available."
In response to questions, Lechin denied rumors that he had met with "heads" of "international Communism" in Europe. He also denied having anything to do with the guerrilla front in Bolivia.
But on the latter topic, he added: "Personally, I admire these men who have taken the only road that now remains open to the Bolivian people to escape oppression.
ON HUNGER STRIKE
oner.
Hugo Blanco was sentenced last September to 25 years in El Frontén because of his Trotskyist political views and the leadership he provided to the peasant masses seeking land and other improvements in their status.
; The sentence was handed down by a military tribunal in an illegal trial held in the remote town of Tacna.
When Hugo Blanco appealed the savage sentence, the prosecution demanded that the Supreme Council of Military Justice apply the death sentence. Under new legislation passed by parliament under witch-hunt conditions, this body has the power to make such a decision without right of appeal and the sentence can be carried out at once.
A worldwide campaign to save Hugo Blanco's life followed. It has received the support of such prominent figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell. Hundreds of outstanding intellectuals in many countries have joined in. Labor or-