Guerrilla Movements in Latin America [illegible]
For many who have been overawed by the fact that Latin America is an extremely large geographical entity, thousands of miles away and therefore a trifle difficult to study in detail, Richard Gott's book will provide a useful [illegible] Colombia, Peru, and of course Bolivia. This somewhat limits the scope of the book; for instance Nicaragua and Uruguay, where the [illegible] are both active and, within their own terms of reference, partially successful, are mentioned only briefly, and that too only in the concluding chapter as though an afterthought. Neither is there any reference to the guerrilla experience in Brazil and Argentina, which is rather unfortunate, as developments and changes in these two countries to a certain extent determine the future of the rest of Latin America, and without an analysis and balance sheet of their respective revolutionary movements it is impossible to grasp the totality of the struggle.
However, despite these failings the book provides certain useful documentary information relating to the role which the Stalinist parties and formations have played in Latin America. The betrayal of the Guatemalan C.P. which found itself quite at home when it came to supporting the candidacy of liberal members of the bourgeoisie for various positions, but which adopted ambivalent positions towards the guerrilla struggle, and which withdrew party cadres when total manipulation of the struggle could not be ensured, is well documented. A similar, but in the final analysis a more treacherous, role was played by the Venezuelan C.P. The situation in Venezuela was so obviously pre-revolutionary that the C.P. was forced despite itself to set up a guerrilla front. While this front included a certain number of non-Stalinist radicals, its political and military policies were decided by the Venezuelan C.P. Despite this, the C.P. leadership in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, could not totally control the actions of the FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional) in the countryside. The latter engaged in what the Party was later to term "ultraleftism" and "adventurism". With a "reactionary" President replaced after an "election" by a "less reactionary" one (the degree of his reaction depending, of course, on his attitude towards the C.P.), a convenient excuse came into existence. The new President announced publicly in his inauguration address that if the C.P. was prepared to renounce "violence" [illegible] the Committee of Venezuelan Stalinism announced: "We the Communists again say to the country: if an all-embracing amnesty is declared, if public liberties are restored, if the right to legal action for the banned parties is restored, if officers jailed or exiled because of their nationalist positions are readmitted into the armed forces with full rights, then political struggles in the country can be directed along peaceful paths."
From now on the Venezuelan C.P. were to move rapidly rightwards. A slanderous campaign was begun against the guerrilla leader Douglas Bravo who was not allowed any rights inside the C.P. Several months later he broke with the party as did numerous other militants. This led Fidel Castro to publicly denounce the C.P. as having betrayed the guerrillas. The Cuban state began to help the guerrillas directly. The Venezuelan experience demonstrated even to the blind that the Latin American C.P.s were no different from their European counterparts. With a few exceptions the "peaceful road to socialism" became the norm, and while similar positions in Europe at least enabled revolutionary militants to attack the reformism of the C.P. and engage in fierce polemics, in a continent like Latin America many C.P.s are quite happily prepared to betray the "ultralefts" to the oligarchy and its repressive forces. Polemic is thus avoided. The total degeneration of the Communist Parties in Latin America is ably and painstakingly demonstrated by Richard Gott.
Where Gott does make mistakes is in his remarks regarding the "Trotskyist" movement. He fails to acknowledge the fact that the "Trotskyists" who, by their lunatic (literally) sectarianism and bad faith, completely alienated themselves from Yon Sosa's guerrilla detachment and as a result were expelled, in fact belonged to a faction led by Juan Posadas. The latter did not in any way represent the mainstream of the world Trotskyist movement, a fact which Castro also preferred to ignore when he made his celebrated, but completely indiscriminate attack on "Trotskyism" at the Tricontinental Congress in Havana in 1966. ('The Cuban Posadistas were attacking the Cuban government for building workers' flats, when they felt that the state should have been concentrating on building underground nuclear shelters to prepare for the coming holocaust!). This lapse by Gott is somewhat unfortunate and inexplicable as he is undoubtedly aware of the "Trotskyist" tendencies outside the Fourth International and has written about them elsewhere. A similar mistake is made regarding Peru: in this case Gott categorically states that Hugo Blanco ended his connection with the "international Trotskyist movement" when in fact what Blanco did was to cease contact with the Argentinian [illegible] "...ist" group [illegible] the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International, which waged a worldwide campaign to secure his release and in doing so probably saved him from almost certain death at the hands of the oligarchy.
What Gott does demonstrate conclusively is that the reason why Blanco could not maintain his peasant base was because of the lack of a fighting unit and he speculates that if the guerrilla bands which sprung up later had existed at the same time as Hugo Blanco was heading the peasant struggle, the picture in Peru could well have been different.
While the entire book contains a great deal of valuable information, the chapters on Bolivia are without doubt the most perceptive, and here Gott writes from an intimate knowledge of the territory (he was the first journalist to identify Guevara's dead body) and a deep sense of commitment to the struggle itself. He explains how the political/economic situation in Bolivia combined with its vigorous revolutionary tradition made it the most obvious country in Latin America where a revolutionary overthrow of capital seemed possible. Those militants who think that Bolivia was simply a name on a small piece of paper which Che pulled out of a hat should carefully study the background of the country.
However, what Gott is quite unable to explain is why Che Guevara, who understood better than any other Cuban leader the real nature of the C.P.s, made the fatal mistake of imagining that an alliance with the Bolivian Stalinists led by Monje was a practical possibility. It was precisely this fact which ensured that Che's plan was doomed from the beginning, and to appreciate this fact one has to understand the global role of Stalinism. The links of the Cuban state, or rather its dependence on the Soviet Union, meant that Monje had to be consulted, but surely a revolutionary of Che's experience should not have depended on Monje and the C.P. to provide the urban network so essential for any real success. Gott also is probably not aware of the fact that the POR (Revolutionary Workers Party, Bolivian section of the Fourth International) offered Che their support from the first day of the struggle. Che cabled Havana for approval, but by the time the Cubans replied in the affirmative, the game was already played out and Che's group was encircled by the gorillas. It is possible that if the comrades of POR had been involved in the [illegible], Che would still have been alive today. Their knowledge of the territory and their numerical size could well have been decisive.
The defeat of the Bolivian guerrilla, symbolised dramatically by the death of Che, should be [illegible] of the Latin [illegible]. Defeats are not uncommon in struggle, no matter where or how it takes place. The important fact is that we must learn from these defeats and ensure that they are not repeated. Gott correctly quotes Marx as saying "With the exception of only a few chapters, every more important part of the annals of the revolution ... carries the heading: Defeat of the Revolution!"
What succumbed in these defeats was not the revolution. It was the pre-revolutionary [illegible] appendages, results of social relationships which had not yet come to the point of sharp class antagonism ... "In a word: the revolution made progress, forged ahead, not by its immediate ... achievements, but, on the contrary, by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution, by the creation of an opponent in combat with whom only, the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party."
But Gott continues to maintain that the foco could still work, when in fact the whole experience of the guerrillas over the last ten years suggests the very opposite. What is needed is a strong, disciplined, Leninist organisation, based in both the cities and the countryside and capable of sustaining the armed struggle by its roots in the masses. The guerrillas have not been wrong in recognising that throughout Latin America there exists a pre-revolutionary situation. The imperialists have recognised this as well, which is why they are prepared to permit experiments in "military reformism" in Peru and Bolivia and of "parliamentary socialism" in Chile. They see them as medium-term solutions to contain mass struggles and from that point of view they are correct. But this situation cannot last long. The military reformists will soon begin to feel the pressure; Allende will either make decisive moves to pull Chile out of the capitalist world market (in which case we will see a civil war with likely U.S. intervention) or what is more likely, he will simply become a Chilean Harold Wilson.
As Marxists we abhor impressionism and therefore, while we must take into account the manoeuvrings of American imperialism and its puppet regimes, we cannot afford to lose sight of our own objectives. We have to understand that a pre-revolutionary situation exists in Latin America despite the twists and turns of the bourgeoisie. The weakness of the guerrillas has not been that they have misjudged the objective situation. It has been exactly the reverse: they have not made the adequate preparations to ensure that the subjective factors were capable of meeting the needs of the objective situation. Richard Gott is a bit confused about this himself or else he would not write off not only the peasantry, but also the urban proletariat in Latin America. To make a revolution neither a party nor the best-prepared of focos can substitute its own consciousness for that of the class. They can take steps to develop and arouse working-class consciousness, but that is a completely different story. Impatience is no substitute for theory and only an extremely short-lived substitute for practice.
Rural guerrilla warfare without an organisational base in the urban working-class is a recipe for disaster and if there isn't even an adequate base in the countryside, then the disaster is multiplied. To think that certain aspects of the Cuban experience can be repeated mechanistically is to abandon the dialectical method. It would be absurd to think that U.S. imperialism has not learnt the lessons of the Cuban Revolution.
The whole question of organisation, therefore, becomes paramount. Unless revolutionaries have the perspective of building a combat Leninist organisation from the very start they can succumb to political confusion under pressure from "organisational centrists." Of course it goes without saying that revolutionary marxists have to participate in the struggle. They have to help in its preparations and coordinations. They have to be ready to intensify the struggle. In Latin America or rather in many other parts of the semi-colonial world as well, this is the best way to build revolutionary organisations. To simply proclaim the superiority of a programme from the side lines is to fetichise the programme and consign oneself to being a propaganda group indefinitely. It is in fact to caricature revolutionary marxism. Even in Argentina, where the urban proletariat is extremely powerful and where there have been more General Strikes than anywhere else since the Second World War, the failure of these strikes to develop insurrectional forms demonstrates not only the necessity of armed struggle for the seizure of power, but also the need to prepare for it.
Only if Latin American revolutionaries understand and grasp the importance and the necessity of organisation will we be able to say that they have understood and learnt the real lessons of Latin America's 1905. Only then will they be able to lay a firm and solid basis for the extension of the Cuban revolution to the rest of the continent, thus freeing not only their own oppressed masses from the yoke of American imperialism, but also freeing the Cuban Revolution from the oppressive weight of the Soviet bureaucracy.
G. Camillo