Setting the record straight. Statement by the International Marxist Group, British Section of the Fourth International.
Beginning in mid-July 1969, the Bolivian revolutionary movement was subjected to a series of savage attacks at the hands of the Bolivian military dictatorship. The military clique focussed its blows on the ELN (the National Liberation Army, which was led by Che Guevara until his assassination in 1967) and the POR (Revolutionary Workers Party, the Bolivian section of the Fourth International), During 1969. the two revolutionary groups had been collaborating.
During this period, the military regime succeeded in arresting. jailing and torturing members of both organisations. On September 9th, 1969 "inti" Peredo, the leader of the ELN, was reputed killed in a battle with police in La Paz. Hugo Gonzalez [Moscoso was] actively sought [by] police but evaded them. The prisoners were held incommunicado and some, according to their families, were subjected to torture by suffocation, electric shock, and blows to the testicles.
At the time of the repressions, which took place throughout the major cities of Bolivia, reaction to the repression was widespread. The Bolivian Student Confederation (CUB) issued a statement on July 28th denouncing "before national public opinion the fact that a new repressive campaign is being unleashed, against the staffs and students of Bolivian universities. The revelations made by the Ministry of the Interior, regarding alleged subversive activities of the ELN do not justify this ministry's violating the constitutional rights and exceeding its authority to make arbitrary arrests on the pretext that persons arrested are implicated in guerrilla activities.
The student federation of San Simon accused the military dictatorship of using the guerrilla activities as a "pretext for blocking the reorganisation and reunification of the trade union movement by persecuting worker, peasant and student leaders" as well as attempting to create a witch-hunt atmosphere favourable to a coup d'etat that would "abolish the most elementary democratic freedoms" and "completely endorse" turning the country's resources over to foreign capital.
An even sharper denunciation of the repression came from fifty Bolivian and foreign priests who said in part: "We denounce the capitalist system in force in Bolivia which is the cause of the underdevelopment, of the poverty of the Bolivian people and of the poverty of the miners in particular. We repeat our denunciations of the violations of trade union rights in the mines. These violations systematically prevent the mine workers from achieving their just social demands. We denounce the [illegible] big mines...which [illegible]. All are responsible for injustice who do not work for [illegible] by all [illegible].
In October 1969, General Alfredo Ovando Candia, the man most responsible for the murder of Che Guevara and the carrying out of the current repression seized power. The repression of the Bolivian revolutionists continued while Ovando attempted to provide himself with an anti-imperialist image to ease social tensions.
On October 17th, the La Paz Regional Committee of the POR released a statement to the Bolivian people welcoming the nationalisation of Gulf Oil by the Ovando regime as a victory for the Bolivian people, whilst thoroughly exposing the manoeuvres of the new regime. The statement reminded the Bolivian people that this "anti-imperialist triumph" was linked to the struggle of the Che Guevara guerrillas, and the struggle of the revolutionaries in Ovando's prisons. The statement demanded the unconditional release of all the political prisoners in Bolivia including Regis Debray. It ended:
"Together with the revolutionary people, we Trotskyists demand cessation of the furious persecution and the attacks on the liberty of the General Secretary of the POR, Hugo Gonzalez Moscoso and all our national leaders. The release of the revolutionary fighters will also be a victory over imperialism,"
In Britain, the October 1969 issue of International, the journal of the International Marxist Group, British section of the Fourth International, Moscoso's British comrades, reported on these developments along with an appeal for financial aid to the Bolivian revolutionaries in Ovando's jails or fleeing his police. The report gave a partial list of the names of the mine leaders, peasant leaders and youth and student leaders of the ELN and POR who had been killed, arrested and tortured. The appeal concluded:
"We appeal therefore to all supporters of Trotskyism, to all supporters of armed struggle, to all opponents of the reactionary oligarchies of Latin America to contribute to this fund."
Two months after the appeal by International, on December 5th, 1969, the Workers Press, daily organ of the Socialist Labour League which claims to be Trotskyist, dealt with the Bolivian [repression]. But there was no appeal for solidarity and aid. On the contrary! There appeared a statement under the name of Alberto Saenz, for a group calling itself the POR, led by Guillermo Lora, The statement, far from being a statement of solidarity, could only be construed as an attempt to knife the campaign for aid to the victims of the Bolivian military's repression.
The January 1970 issue of International, in an article on the "Workers Press Treachery on Bolivia", explained the origins of the Lora group:
"The Trotskyist movement in Bolivia had been divided into two tendencies for many years. Both of them had the same name, One of them was led by Hugo Gonzalez Moscoso and was affiliated to the Fourth International. The other was led by Guillermo Lora. These two organisations joined together on 17th February 1966 (cf. the agreement on the unification in Quatrieme International No. 28, June 1966), But Lora, who gave his agreement while he was [illegible] Bolivia, [illegible] when he came back to enter the unified organisation. He gathered a small clique [illegible] took the name of 'POR' [illegible]."
What did the Workers Press statement say? The statement denounced the defence campaign for the jailed revolutionists as:
"an operation with all the signs of a fraud."
"Today it is the political intervention and the writings of Castroism that this group of profiteers (the POR) is trying to exploit in order to carry on their shady dealings with the help of the revolutionists' money."
The letter made an even greater charge if that is possible:
"There exists today serious suspicions that Mr. Gonzales Moscoso himself (the leader of the POR) would work for the Bolivian government."
In the summer and fall of 1969, savage repression is unleashed against Bolivian revolutionists by the military dictatorship. "Inti" Peredo, the leader of the Guevara guerrilla organisation is murdered, and members of both the ELN and the POR are also killed, arrested, jailed and tortured. The leader of the POR, Moscoso, is forced to flee and is now hunted by Ovando's police. To all this the recent appeal by Moscoso's British comrades for aid is met by the Workers Press not with a statement of solidarity, not with a demand for liberation of the Trotskyists jailed in Bolivia, but with a statement calling the defence campaign a fraud, and charges that [he] might be in the pay of the Ovando regime. it would be reasonable to think that at this point the editors of the Workers Press might have taken a step back and considered the enormity of their crime against the Bolivian revolution by their violation of an elementary [principle] of the class struggle—solidarity with the working-class victims of capitalist repression.
But no!!! [They published] the muck by publishing another letter, this time signed by Lora himself attempting to reply to the exposure of his treachery in Rouge, the paper of Moscoso's French comrades. In this letter, Lora calls the POR "a party of self-seeking adventurers" and states:
"I am in complete agreement with the communique issued by my party (published in Workers Press, December 5th) to unmask those adventurers (the jailed revolutionists) who have made participation in the revolutionary movement a means to further their own ends."
The editors of the Workers Press obviously believe that a slander to be effective must be published not once—but twice.
In response to these attacks on the victims of the Bolivian repression, the Political Committee of the International Marxist Group sent a letter dated January 5th 1970 to the leadership of the Socialist Labour League demanding that the SLL and the Workers Press retract the slanders of the Bolivian Trotskyists.
On January 10th 1970, the International Marxist Group issued a leaflet to a conference of Young Socialists—the youth organisation of the Socialist Labour League—appealing to the Young Socialists to support the Bolivian Trotskyists. The appeal described the repression, the slanders in the Workers Press and pointed out that the two statements in the Workers Press made no call for the release of the prisoners. The leaflet outlined the issues: "1) the refusal to support a campaign for the release of the victims of repression. 2) the direct accusation that a revolutionary who is being hunted by the police is a government agent." The leaflet appealed to the Young Socialists to repudiate the slanders against the Bolivian Trotskyists, oppose the use of Stalinist smear methods, and to support the Bolivian Trotskyists against police repression.
Within six days of this public exposure of the Workers Press reprinting major themes of the Bolivian slanders, the January 17, 1970 edition glibly informed its British readers that there hadn't been any slanders after all and that the whole thing was due to an error in the translation of the original statement by Lora's group. The article, a reply by the SLL to the IMG letter, points out that in translating the Lora group's slanderous statement from the French, Intercontinental Press, an international weekly news service of the Fourth International, translated Lora's charge to read that Moscoso is working for the Bolivian government when an accurate translation should read would work for the Bolivian government.* And we are further startled to read that not only has there been an unfortunate misunderstanding due to errors in translation, but that the SLL and the Workers Press editors: "are completely opposed to the political repression of Ovando's regime and for this reason support the right of Moscoso and his group to full political and civil liberty as well as the amnesty of Regis Debray. As you can see (!), we have no slanders to retract, To this what can be said except—who's kidding who?!
Having published statements calling the defence campaign for Moscoso and his comrades a "fraud"; having accused the jailed and persecuted leader and victims of being under suspicion that he "might be in the pay of", "might be in the pay of", or "would work" for the Bolivian military, which has the blood of Che Guevara, "Inti" Peredo and his own comrades on its hands, all boils down to the same monstrous and unproved slander against this anti-imperialist fighter!
The complete bankruptcy of Banda's "reply" is further demonstrated by the fact that he had to drag innumerable red herrings across the trail about Ceylon, Algeria, etc., repeating [on other] occasions.** Anything to draw attention away from the Workers Press's disgraceful lies about the POR.
The editors of the Workers Press and the leaders of the Socialist Labour League can wish they had no slanders to retract if they choose. They can ponder over their responsibility for the publishing of the Lora group's slanders on December 5th and December 20th and their switch on January 17th, without publishing a line in support of the political and civil liberties of Moscoso and his comrades,
With a shameful cowardice, Banda tries to retreat from the Stalinist slander he spread against comrade Moscoso by pretending it is after all only a question of translation: but it is clear that the Socialist Labour League and the Workers Press now have the responsibility to publicly demand the unconditional release of all Bolivian political prisoners. They must call for the dropping of all charges against the victims and an immediate end to the harassment and victimisation of Hugo Gonzalez Moscoso. They must immediately declare their willingness to join in the world-wide campaign to defend the victims of the Bolivian repression! Finally, they must repudiate completely the smears and slanders of the Lora clique and make a full self-criticism on their participation in these slanders.
*For information [illegible], the French original: "Il existe aujourd'hui de serieux soupcons sur le fait que le sieur GONZALEZ MOSCOSO [illegible] travaillerait pour le compte du [illegible]."
**See, in particular, Ernest Germain's Marxism versus Ultra-leftism, available from Pioneer Book Service, 8 Toynbee Street, London E.1.