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_—From the Bolivian Underground. Meaning of New Guerrilla Front
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From the Bolivian Underground
THE MEANING OF THE NEW GUERRILLA FRONT
(The following material has been passed on to World Outlook from the Bolivian underground. It consists principally of a declaration written by Hugo Gonz4lez Moscoso, one of the main leaders, along with Guillermo Lora, of the Bolivian Trotskyist movement who have both been exiled in remote jungle camps by the Barrientos regime.
(The declaration, now being circulated in Bolivia, appears to have been written before Gonzalez was seized by the secret political police and was evidently drawn up as the text of an official party statement. It was approved, it should be noted, by the Political Bureau of the POR. The statement is preceded by an introduction signed by the La Paz Regional Conmittee of the POR.
{The importance of the declaration and the fact that it is being circulated clandestinely will, of course, be apparent to everyone familiar with the political situation in Bolivia.] * * &* INTRODUCTION
Comrade Workers:
The bourgeois-—democratic method of struggling to win power and obtain the great fruits of socialism cannot achieve the triumph of the proletariat. This method serves only to justify the existence of an oppressive regime with the title, "legally constituted." The emergence of the Nancahuazt guerrillas has totally changed the country's current political situation.
How could the proletariat and the people of Bolivia liberate themselves if they continued today to confine their methods of struggle to the channels which the bourgeoisie established to safeguard its own social order? To put it precisely, in order to achieve the victory of the Bolivian proletariat and popular masses, to destroy the regime which serves the interests of the monopolies and finance
capital, and ‘to create a new social order
more in harmony with the needs of the day,
it is necessary to adopt a more advanced
method of struggle, a method by which the
proletariat and people of Bolivia can win
political power. And the best method to
this end is armed struggle in the form of
guerrilla warfare.
The Partido Obrero Revolucionario
[POR -- Revolutionary Workers party, the
Bolivian section of the Fourth Interna-
tional] was the first to indicate this
method of struggle to the masses.
Today, the revolutionary struggle
of the Bolivian working masses is ex-
pressed in the guerrilla activity of the
brave fighters of Nancahuazi. Today, the
guerrillas are emerging as the leadership
of a nation oppressed by imperialism, as
those who most authentically represent
the masses and their needs.
The guerrilla struggle has begun!
And with it has begun the final battle
which will smash the pro-imperialist re-
gime in Bolivia. The task of the revolu-
tionaries is to sharpen this struggle, to
defend it, and extend it valiantly with-
out vacillation or fear.
The guerrillas are our most reso-
lute class brothers; they are fighting
for us, for the entire people. However,
there are many who do not understand
their cause or their objectives. The dic-
tatorial military government is mounting
a full-scale campaign of slander against
the revolutionary patriots of Nancahuazi.
Imperialism, for its part, wants to pre-
sent a distorted view of the guerrilla
struggle to international public opinion.
To set the record straight, the La
Paz Regional Committee of the POR puts in
your hands, comrade worker, peasant, high-
school student, university student, em-
ployee, intellectual, this work on the
guerrillas and their objectives by the
party's general secretary, Comrade Hugo
Gonz4lez Moscoso.
La Paz, May 1967
ALL THE PEOPLE TO THE SIDE OF THE GUERRILLAS
We wholeheartedly salute the guerrillas of Nancahuazti! In the midst of the demoralization of the vacillators and the opportunism of the parasites, and when the military repression, after filling the concentration camps in the eastern jungles, has outlawed the POR and the
PCB {Partido Communista de Bolivia], the
appearance of the guerrillas in the south-
east of the country is the proper response
to the crimes of the "gorilla" dictators.
The guerrillas are a trumpet call to bat-
tle and a light on the path the Bolivian
masses must follow to shake off the yoke
of their oppressors and exploiters.
The guerrilla movement is not a mad adventure and still less a mechanical and artificial transposition of the Cuban guerrilla experience. While there is no doubt that the victorious armed struggle of the Sierra Maestra, which buried the revisionism of the partisans of a "modus vivendi" with imperialism and "peaceful roads to socialism," was one of the most valuable lessons of the Cuban revolution, the guerrilla movement has emerged in Bolivia as the natural culmination of the country's internal political process.
The armed struggle is not alien to the Bolivian people; to the contrary, it represents the conclusion which the peo-. ple have drawn from the present objective reality. ;
Bolivian history records those climactic moments in which these masses have risen in arms to break their oppressive chains. The guerrilla movement of the War of Independence, of the Padillas, Juana Azurduy, the Lanzas, the Mendez Mutiny, the Thesis of Pulacayo with its Armed Committees, the Ninth of April [the revolutionary nationalist uprising of 1952 which put Paz Estenssoro in power] with its armed trade-union militia make up the historical legacy belonging to the guerrillas of Nancahuazt.
Symbolically, the geographic scene of their activity is the same as that in which Juana Azurduy and Manuel Asencio Padilla waged a victorious guerrilla war against the Spanish royal armies in the second decade of the past century.
The experiences of the last fifteen years have forced the Bolivian people to return to this historical tradition. The flancahuazi guerrillas thus express the people's general inclinations and are their most authentic spokesmen.
The resolve to turn to armed struggle ripened by a slow process in the consciousness of the workers and the people. These last fifteen years are witness to how the workers, the peasants, the intellectuals, the workers and peoples parties, in sum, the entire Bolivian people, have fought to improve their living conditions, to deliver the country from dependency and backwardness.
Numerous working-class, peasant, and student congresses have petitioned and formulated plans and programs. Moreover, the mobilized masses have lent their support and their force to one bourgeois leadership after the other in the hope that they would use their power to realize their desires and aspirations for progress. But the masses were always cheated. The social, economic, and political conquests gained at the cost of sacrifices, at the moment of truth, turned into nothing more than pompous, lyrical declarations.
The agrarian reform did not improve the lives of the peasant masses who remain poverty-stricken with the lowest per capita annual income in Latin America. The nationalization of the mines, by way of a peculiar desire to create a "strong bourgeoisie" in Bolivia, served to enrich a caste.
Instead of national independence, finance capital returned to take over the oil and the gold. Imperialist agents infiltrated every institution, from the cabinet on down -- the army, education, and all administrative and economic activities in the country. Hundreds of spies from the so-called Peace Corps, and military, banking, agricultural, mining, and cultural commissions hold sway throughout the length and breadth of the land.
When the masses, realizing how they had been defrauded, became restless and demanded thoroughgoing solutions and a complete change in their way of life, their flatterers became their hangmen; and the workers' every petition and mobilization was answered with open repression. But the jailing of the workers' leaders, the imprisoning of the Trotskyist and Communist leaders, did not end the economic crisis; it did not make unemployment disappear; it did not feed the people.
This aggravated crisis brought the military to power. A military government came to the fore to crush the people. And its inability to solve the problems of the workers and of the nation led it to massacre the miners in the Siglo Veinte Mine, to bomb and machine-gun Milluni and the heights of La Paz, to confiscate trade-union property and to decertify the unions.
Instead of giving the people more bread, the military government cut wages and salaries. But -- in return for reducing the people's food ration -- the military raised their own salaries by more than three hundred percent.
With the military dictatorship, imperialist oppression became more acute. As a consequence, the last vestiges of freedom and democracy disappeared for the masses and their partisans. But, far from containing the economic crisis, the capitulation to imperialism, the destruction of the unions, unemployment, and finally the "outlawing" of the POR and the PCB only accentuated it. The military government with its terroristic methods cannot resolve even the least of these problems; and chaos and bankruptcy continue to mount.
The Guerrilla Movement Is the Way to Save Bolivia
The guerrillas have come to the fore to put an end to this situation and to open up a new road, the true road, to progress for the country.
The normal, legal methods of struggle have become ineffective in the face of military terror. Present conditions have made armed struggle in the form of guerrilla warfare a necessity. The military dictatorship has barred all democratic roads and forced the emergence of guerrilla warfare. This is the incontrovertible truth of the matter.
When trade unions are being broken and unionized workers massacred, when union leaders and revolutionary militants are being jailed and persecuted, and when the workers' every petition or action is met with armed force or jail, that means that there is no room for legal and democratic methods of struggle.
It is the military dictatorship which has put itself outside the law and forced the people to take up arms. The military government alone, the lackey of imperialism, is responsible for the guerrilla war!
The masses have learned from their daily experience that armed rebellion is now necessary to oust the military dictatorship, to break the yoke of imperialism, and then to create a state of the workers and the people. The people have seen clearly the inability of the bourgeoisie and imperialism to promote development. The meetings of ministers [of the American states], the OAS [Organization of American States], the ECLA [Economic Conmission for Latin America], the summit meetings of the [Western Hemisphere ] presidents, the Alliance for Progress, all the different kinds of economic plans, have failed disastrously and become nothing more than smokescreens to hide the dramatic and agonizing reality in Latin America and in Bolivia.
All these bodies have been studying the Bolivian crisis for twenty years. There is no lack of plans, programs, inquiries, etc. Bolivia has been studied from every angle, but the imperialists and their lackeys have never found a renedy for its backwardness.
The reason for this is quite simple -- the only cure for the ills of Bolivia, its backwardness, dependence, and poverty is socialism; and this medicine is poison to the Yankee exploiters and their national bourgeois counterparts.
It is natural, then, for the people to have lost confidence in the plans of the imperialists and the semicolonial bourgeoisies and in their organizations and bodies. After long experience, no one can hope any longer that the exploiters will change and become sensitive to the needs of those they exploit; the most the exploiters can do is cover themselves: with empty, demagogic verbiage.
Barrientos speaks of developing a dialogue with the people; but for him development is capitulation to imperialism and his dialogue is directed to the oligarchies and the agents of imperialisn. He speaks of concord and peace among Bolivians but at the same time he persecutes, jails, and slaughters the people. We saw the dialogue Barrientos is offering when the army moved into the Siglo Veinte, and the peace he offers is the peace of the grave, as it was for the construction worker Adrian Arce and the POR miner. leader César Lora, who was murdered by a pistol shot in the head.
We have seen it also in the peace of the prisons, of San Pedro, Puerto Rico, Huaragoys, Pekin, Madidi, Ixiamas, Ulla Ulla, where the revolutionary opponents of his antinational and antiproletarian regime are confined; and in the outlawing of the POR and the PCB. The entire Bolivian people condemn and reject such dialogues and such a peace!
The Guerrillas Are Sons of the People
It is through this conviction that the people, the great majority making up the nation, have come to the belief that armed struggle -- guerrilla war -- is the true way and that it is the solution to this situation here and now. The guerrilla movement thus has issued from the needs of the people itself and from out of the depths of the people.
The most resolute and valiant sons of the Bolivian people are fighting in the mountains of Nancahuazi -- the miners who were driven from the mines and condemned to starve; the factory and construction workers who saw their wages cut and their rights abolished; the peasants who in their humble huts waited in vain for progress and saw the agrarian reform become a cruel farce; the young unemployed professionals who chose to sacrifice thenselves for the fatherland rather than emigrate; the students whose hopes have been frustrated by the crisis and by unemployment.
These sons of Bolivia, the sons of miners, factory workers, peasants, and professionals, are called "foreign mercenaries" by the military dictatorship. We reject this insult to the patriotic sons of the people! It is the Yankee spies, fauned on in every government office from the palace down, who are the mercenaries.
Barrientos' gorillas have whipped up a full-scale sensation around three journalists,* but they keep their mouths shut about the arrival of Yankee military officers and FBI agents. The foreign mer-— cenaries are the Argentine, U.S. and Brazilian military officers who, in complete violation of national sovereignty, have, in fact, replaced the inept Military High Command and the government itself! The mercenaries are those who trail behind their imperialist master and have converted Bolivia into a jail for Bolivians.
What Are the Guerrillas Fighting For?
The objectives which the guerrillas seek are clear and require no special explanation. Issuing from out of the people itself, they seek to put an end to the regime characterized by social injustice, absence of democratic freedoms and guarantees, and imperialist oppression of the nation.
The guerrilla struggle takes its inspiration from the aspirations of the people and the workers, from all of the demands of the miners, students, and teachers which up to now have met only with a violent and negative response from the military dictatorship.
Conduct of the Military Dictatorship
The response of the gorillas to the presence of guerrillas in Nancahuazi has been the same as their previous response to the petitions of the workers: terrorism, deception, and lies. Far from giving any thought to the social and economic causes of the guerrilla activity, the military clique lashed out violently against the people.
In the cities and in the mines, dozens of trade-union leaders and revclutionaries have been arrested. The concentration camps in the eastern jungles are full of POR, PCB, and PRIN (Partido Revolucionario de Izquierda Nacionalista, the left split-off from the former ruling Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario] members and leaders, of miner and student leaders.
In the countryside, the bureaucratic henchmen of the dictatorship have unleashed a reign of terror and already many peasants have fallen victim to it.
in the guerrilla zone, the Yankee, Argentinian, and Brazilian officers are displaying criminal ferocity against a handful of Bolivian patriots; 3,000 infantrymen, heavy artillery, fighter
* Régis Debray, George Andrew Roth and Carlos Alberto Fructuoso. -- W.O. planes and bombers, parashoot troops, the DIC [Direccién Investigacién Criminal, the secret political police] and the National Guard with trained dogs have been thrown against the guerrillas.
Daily, the woods, plains and settlements are being furiously and indiscriminately bombed and machine-gunned. Napalm, provided by American aid, is being dumped on farmers, small ranchers, and humble peasants. The villages of Camiri, Lagunillas, Muyupampa, and Monteagudo are living in anguish as a result of the attitude taken by the military bullies.
Day after day, presumed guerrilla supporters are taken prisoner, many of whom "commit suicide" after horrible torture.
This sort of behavior on the part of the Yankee, Argentinian, and Brazilian mercenaries, as well as the Bolivian traitors, stands in contrast to the humane conduct of the guerrillas, who call for surrender first and fire only in selfdefense, and who treat their prisoners well and set them free after giving them medical treatment.
Thus, the casualties which occur in the guerrilla zone are the sole responsibility of the military dictatorship and its gorilla mercenaries.
It Is Our Duty
to Support the Guerrillas
The guerrillas' cause is the cause of every Bolivian. The guerrillas are nothing more than the fighting arm of the people, their weapon to curb those who starve the masses, to check the murderers of Arce and Lora, the butchers of Siglo Veinte, Milluni, the heights of La Paz, the mass murderers of 1965, those responsible for Bolivia's backwardness and want, as well as for the wage cuts -- and those who are selling their country and delivering it over to the voracious appetite of imperialisn.
The guerrillas represent every Bolivian, every sector of the population, because their struggle is all Bolivia's struggle.
But the people's support must be organized and coordinated. The greatest nelp we can give to the guerrillas is to advance the struggles of the urban masses, the masses of the miners, the masses of the workers in general, as well as the masses of students and peasants, for their own demands.
Onward with the struggle to regain possession of the mines! Onward with the struggle for a general increase in wages! Onward with the struggle of the teachers,
university and high-school students, and the peasants! Onward with the struggle for democratic rights and for the release of the prisoners! The guerrillas are supporting the people's struggle arms in hand! Mobilize against the military dictatorship and the gorilla mercenaries!
All revolutionaries must unite to strengthen the powerful Left Front. The underground committees and armed militia must reappear in the unions; and the most audacious union leaders must be brought to the fore.
In this mighty process, the trade unions must be reorganized, from the rank-and-file level to the leadership of the COB [Central Obrera Boliviana, the Bolivian trade-union federation], bringing forward elements whose stature is equal to the level of the armed struggle begun by the guerrillas. The masses must start from the level to which their gains and their experiences of the most recent years have brought then. ,
The Guerrillas Will Triumph
The people are invincible and the guerrillas, who constitute the armed ex- -662-
pression of the people, will triumph. The weaknesses of imperialism and the puppet government are apparent; already signs of crisis and demoralization are appearing in the Military High Command, the officers and the ranks. The hybrid cabinet of -Barrientos, the Bolivian Cao Ky, is tottering. Nothing but the pressure of the American embassy has prevented the army and the government from cracking before now. A section of the army has called for Barrientos' resignation and demands an exclusively military cabinet.
This crisis, suppressed today, will soon ripen and explode. The guerrilla war and mass struggle will shatter every barrier and apparatus of repression, and at last Bolivia will be free and find the path of development which will lead it to the creation of a new workers society without exploiters.
Political Bureau of the POR
Bolivian Section of the
Fourth International
May 1967
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