Since last July, repression has hit the Bolivian vanguard. The Fourth International has engaged in a campaign against this repression and for the support of the POR and ELN.
The Workers' Press, published by a group calling itself Trotskyist, has attacked this campaign, dedicating a whole page of one issue to texts from a "POR" in Bolivia. 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 Unification in Quatrième Internationale, no. 24, June 1966). But Lora, who gave his agreement while he was outside Bolivia, refused, when he came back, to enter the unified organisation. He gathered a small clique round him and took the name of "POR" again. It is this (Lora's) microfraction which now launches—out of a lack of other activities—these attacks, which the Editorial Board of the Workers' Press seized, happy to be able to appear for once as internationalist, without much cost. Away from it all, it difficult for the reader to be able to judge the numerical importance of the different groups, whereas on the spot, the balance of forces from the same point of view is obvious. But the nature of the political divergences is clear enough. We attach less importance to the slanders of the Workers' Press than to the political line followed by our Bolivian comrades and to its exemplary international impact. Lora's group claims to be "in absolute disagreement with the guerrilla". Its declarations on the nationalisation of the Gulf Oil limits itself to generalities which lead to no programme for struggle against the military dictatorship—or even an appeal against the repression. Last July, after the arrests, Lora was already doing nothing more than condemn the guerrillas, which his group regards as "a typical adventure of petty bourgeois despair". Under such circumstances, one will understand that this group is somewhat isolated from the revolutionary vanguard in Bolivia, as well as in the whole of Latin America.
Besides, slanderous attacks against the arrested militants or those of the struggle underground are sufficient to demonstrate the political quality of this newsheet as of its correspondents. It declares that there exist today serious suspicions that "Mr. Gonzalez Moscoso would work for the Bolivian Government". If Lora and his clique had some proof, they would produce it and would not resort to publishing insinuations in England, because in Bolivia it would cost them the indignation—at best a verbal one—of the revolutionaries who until now used to find them ridiculous and who unanimously will judge them criminal. The Bolivian revolutionaries know who continues to fight beside the ELN, as an independent organisation, with its own press, still alive in spite of the repression, but in absolute agreement as far as the necessity of armed struggle is concerned; and who has renounced all struggle.
Slander has always been the weapon of opportunists: only politically bankrupt sects can recognise themselves in those rotten methods favoured by Stalinists.
The Workers Press shares full responsibility for such slanders with Lora.
The campaign in support of the Bolivian revolutionaries of the POR will not be hampered as the Workers' Press may hope.