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VOLCANOES & HURRICANES ee Revolution in Central America an = Caribbean
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This pamphlet has been written by Megan Martin, a Socialist Challenge supporter from East London, and an activist in the El Salvador and Nicaragua Solidarity Campaigns. 18th April 1982. If you would like to find out more about Socialist Challenge or the activities of Socialist Challenge or Revolution supporiers in East London write to PO Box 36, 136 Kingsland High St., London E8. [f you want to be put in touch with supporters in other parts of London, or in other parts of the country, write to P.O. Box 50, London N1.
Further information, including speakers, about events in Central America and the Caribbean can be obtained from: El Salvador Solidarity Campaign, 29 Islington Park St., London N1_ 01-359 2270 Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, c/o 20 Compton Terrace, London Nt New Jewel Movement Support Group, 1 Collingham Gardens, London SW5_ 01-373 7800
Typeset Published by Cardinal Enterprises for Socialist Challenge, P.O. Box 50, London NI. ., London N1. Printed by Spider Web Offset (T.U_), E4-16 by Lithoprint (T.U.), 329 Upper St Sussex Way, London N7.
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Revolution in Central America and the Caribbean
e A new revolutionary wind is blowing through Central America and the Caribbean. Suddenly, this part of the world, whose struggles previously passed unnoticed and unsung, has brought itself forcibly to international attention.
In March 1979 the New Jewel Movement of Grenada overthrew the American and British-backed dictator, Eric Gairy. Four months later, the people of Nicaragua, led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, destroyed the bloody dictatorship of the Somoza family — a regime which had been installed, armed and maintained by the United States for more than fifty years.
Today the people of El Salvador are fighting a life and death struggle against another US-backed dictatorship which has tortured, mutilated and murdered more than 32,000 people in the last three years. The people of Guatemala have also taken up arms.
These countries which imperialism once called ‘banana republics’, where no international news agency bothered to keep reporters, are now front-page news.
They are news because their struggles are not only taking place in the shadow of the most powerful imperialist nation in the world, but they directly challenge that imperialism. Already Washington has lost control of parts of Central America and the Caribbean, an area that it has for a long time regarded as its own ‘backyard’. It is desperately fighting to prevent further losses.
Reagan’s State Department is preparing for a regional war in Central America. Massive military aid is being channelled to the armies of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. At the same time the US, with the help of the CIA, is trying to destabilise the revolutions of Grenada and Nicaragua and strengthen the blockade of Cuba.
There are 110,000 people in Grenada, 24% million people in Nicaragua and not quite 5 million in El Salvador. They are determined that they will never again be in anyone’s backyard but they need our support.
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Grenada Grenada, the spice isle, famous for its cultivation of nutmegs, an island of 120 sq miles of lush green mountains surrounded by soft, golden sands and clear, blue Caribbean waters, But beyond the glossy pages of tourist brochures and outside the tourist enclaves the reality of Grenada, until 1979, was poverty: poor roads, inadequate housing, an unemployment rate of around 50 per cent, and about. 40 per cent illiteracy.
Politically it was best known outside the Caribbean as the country of Prime Minister Eric Gairy, the man who called for the Organisation of American States to set up a commission to investigate flying saucers.
Gairy believed that. he was ‘appointed by God to lead Grenada’. Besides being Prime Minister he was Minister for the departments of External Affairs; Home Affairs; National Security, Tourism, Land and Surveys; National Resources, Planning and Development; and Information. He dealt with political opposition through a personal secret police unit of 500 armed thugs called the Mongoose Gang, many of whom he recruited from prison. During the 23 years of his rule he drove the masses of workers, youths and farmers in Grenada into opposition to his dictatorial regime.
The leadership of this opposition was the New Jewel Movement, which arose in 1973 out of a fusion of two organisations — the joint Effort for Welfare, Education and Liberation (JEWEL) and the Movement for the Assembly of Peoples (MAP). JEWEL itself had been formed shortly after the 1972 general elections in Grenada and this context is significant.
There was a two-party system in Grenada, Gairy on the one hand and the Grenada National Party (GNP) on the other. Until 1974 Grenada was a British colony and it inherited a parliamentary paraphernalia from Britain. But this system was nothing more than a charade acted out ina fifteen-member chamber of horrors. The GNP was completely ineffectual. In the words of one New Jewel leader, it was ‘so bumbling, so lacking in any initiative, so cowardly that if Gairy breathed too hard they would all go hiding under a rockstone. With that kind of opposition, Gairy was going to be in there for the next thousand years once science was able to discover a way of keeping him alive!
The people had become thoroughly fed up with that type of politics and they had become fed up too with a type of politics which meant that. you came to the people two weeks before an election, having not at all come to them in the preceding five years, and then asked them once more to vote for you. So you had what. we call ‘five seconds democracy’’. You go into a polling booth and you vote, having been given enough rum and corned beef for the two weeks preceding — and maybe a little temporary work on the roads. Then you vote, and for the next five years you are ignored until two weeks before the next elections.’ * The NJM rejected this method of politics. They were young and had come out of the black power tradition in the late 1960s and early "70s in the Caribbean. They saw that the youth of Grenada, numerous and energetic, were completely unorganised and unaffected by the bourgeois politicians of the GNP. The NJM turned its efforts toward building support among the urban and rural workers and the youth. It set about winning the leadership of the major unions and began to organise and prepare for the revolutionary action that it knew would be necessary to bring down the Gairy regime.
In March 1979, NJM leaders discovered that Gairy was planning to arrest and
*Chris Searle, ‘‘Grenada’s revolution; an interview with Bernard Coard’’, Race & Class, Autumn 1979.
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execute them. On 12 March Gairy went to New York, feaving orders for the murder of the leaders, The NJM decided to act immediately On the morning of 13 March they organised a group of forty-six people, took over the True Blue army barracks, went to the radio station and put out a call to the masses of Grenada to come into the streets. And the masses responded. They marched on the police stations, and by the end of the day the corrupt and rotten Gairy regime had crumb] ed. The People’s Revolutionary Government. had come to power.
They were immediately faced with the task of trying to get the economy back on its feet. The Grenadians compare the situation they inherited with the damage
Grenada’s youngest Centre for Popular Education volunteer teacher — Lyndon Adams of Carriacou...
In Grenada today everybody is learning. In the past people voted without knowing what they were voting for; today people are able to read, listen, analyse and articulate their own judgements.
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caused by a constant hurricane-force wind for thirty years, ‘Hurricane Gairy’. They are now trying to get agricultural production going again, develop a fishing industry and revive tourism.
The revolution has already brought important gains to the working people of Grenada. Taxes have been abolished for the lowest-paid workers — about 30 per cent of the working population. At the same time social spending has been dramatically increased. Unemployment has been cut by a third. Education has been expanded massively and a literacy crusade launched. Women have been granted equal pay and paid maternity leave. The practice of hiring women only on the basis of sexual favours, which was one of the features of Gairyism, has been recognised as rape and is now liable to severe penalties.
There have been a number of other gains, too, but the most important achievement has been the development of democracy through the growth of the mass organisations. The National Women's Organisation and the National Youth Organisation are growing fast. The old, passive, conciliatory trade union leaderships are being forced to give way to new elected militants who aim to unionise all the work places and democratise the unions they lead with regular meetings, new
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internal committees and structures. There have been not only huge increases in the membership of long-established unions but also new unions growing into formidable organisations in just a few months.
Community assemblies, called Parish Councils have been established. These Councils have sprung up all across the island. One N.JM leader has described the atmosphere of these meetings as having ‘a little touch of theatre, something of a rally, and sometimes the suspense of a court, but the central ingredient is democratic seriousness, for here is the regular reality of democratic accountability at work, which the people must have over their leaders and administrators.’ * At these assemblies, members of the People’s Revoiutionary Government, plus civil servants of high responsibility, are made accountable, and must answer directly to the people, as well as report on the progress of their enterprises. In one such session the new, transformed revolutionary leadership of the police had to face the people. Imagine such a situation in Brixton, or Southall, or Liverpool or Dalston!
Directly out of the Parish Councils have come ideas from the workers themselves which are turning into realities: a Rent Restriction Law; a Workers’ Compensation Act; a new public transport system.
The pro-United States governments in the Caribbean, including Trinidad and a number of smaller islands of the Eastern Caribbean, reacted with considerable hostility to the new government in Grenada. The premier of St. Vincent asked Britain to send troops to overthrow it. Although the request was rejected at that time, neither Britain nor the United States have offered any significant aid to the Grenadians. In June 1980, following the murder of Guyana workers’ leader Walter Rodney, Maurice Bishop, Prime Minister of Grenada, charged the CIA with aiming to destroy the revolutionary process by violently removing the progressive leaderships of the Caribbean. A week after this statement Bishop and his entire Cabinet narrowly escaped death when a bomb exploded in the Grenadian capital.
Reagan (President of the most powerful imperialist nation in the world) has said that Grenada (110,000 people with no helicopter gunships let alone nuclear weapons) is a threat to peace in the region! For the United States events in Grenada are seen as the beginning of a hurricane which, if unchecked, will sweep through the Caribbean.
In the face of these threats the people of Grenada are mobilising through the People’s Revolutionary Militia to defend their revolution. Their slogan is ‘Forward ever, backward never’ and they know that it is the very democracy which they are building in Grenada which most frightens Washington. It is this genuine people’s democracy that is the greatest threat of all to the artificial and hypocritical parliamentary paraphernalia that imperialism uses as a cover for its crimes. In this case there is also a particular twist provided by the fact that this revolution is the first socialist revolution in an English-speaking country where the vast majority of the population are black. it provides an inspiring example for Blacks in the United States and for Blacksin Britain — black men and women running the government, the economy and the army and standing up against the racist US and British governments.
British involvement
Britain has abandoned direct political rule over its colonies in the Caribbean but it has been very concerned to show its ally, the United States, that it has no intention of allowing its former dependencies to fall into the clutches of Cuba. A series *“Our banner of direct democracy’'’, speech by Selwyn Strachan, reported in /ntercon tinental Press/ Inprecor, 14 December 1981.
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of meetings between Britain and the United States took place soon after Thatcher was elected in 1979. The subject of discussion at these meetings was policy towards the region and how to contain the radical movements there.
Britain put forward the idea of a joint regional defence force for the Eastern Caribbean, and plans were made for the establishment of an organisation of Eastern Caribbean States with a regional police force. These plans were pushed ahead in December 1979 when the government of Barbados helped that of St Vincent to suppress a rebellion of Rastafarian militants on Union Island. Tom Adams, Prime Minister of Barbados, welcomed the role of regional policeman and offered to send troops to any other island which requested them. Barbados emerged as the co-ordinator of what. was called a coastguard and fisheries service.
Britain provided 10 million dollars worth of assistance for the coastguard and additional funds for qualified Royal Navy officers and men to serve in the boats while training coastguard personnel. In 1980 Barbados and St Vincent both ordered patrol boats from Britain.
On the other hand, the Thatcher government has refused to sell arms to Grenada. Lord Carrington explained British policy on arms sales as follows: ‘Broadly speaking, we sell arms to our friends and to those whom we wish to encourage to defend themselves.’
To reinforce the military threat to Grenada, Nicaragua and Cuba, a Caribbean phase of ‘Ocean Venture 81’, the largest maritime exercise since World War II, was carried out in August. 1981. This exercise, involving NATO forces under US command, was widely recognised as a rehearsal for a direct military invasion by air and sea against Grenada.
Another NATO manoeuvre, ‘Operation Safepass’, was held in the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida Straits (between the United States and Cuba) in March 1982. This exercise involved ships and aircraft from the United States, Canada, Britain, West Germany, and the Netherlands.
These exercises are an important part of US imperialism’s preparations for a regional war in Central America and the Caribbean. And while they are making these military preparations the Reagan administration has embarked on a hysterical propaganda campaign against the revolutions in Nicaragua and Cuba. It accuses these countries of interfering in the internal affairs of El Salvador!
Fidel Castro answered these accusations on 19 July 1981, the second anniversary of the Nicaraguan revolution, when he paid homage to the reconstruction achieved by the Sandinistas after the devastation of the war, the advances in agriculture, health and welfare services, the organisation of the people, and the overwhelming success of the literacy campaign. He explained: ‘The people are like volcanoes; no one sets fire to them, they explode alone. And Central America is a volcanic region.’ eed
Central America: the ‘banana republics’ For the last eighty years daily life for most. people in the Central American republics has been dominated by coffee and bananas. As European and North American demand for coffee grew towards the end of the nineteenth century, the local landowning elites, called oligarchies, were encouraged to produce solely for the consumption of these markets. The needs of the working people of these countries were totally neglected.
A kind of division of labour between the exploiters was worked out: the local oligarchies amassed enormous fortunes from the coffee export trade while United States capital concentrated on banana production. These countries became
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known as ‘banana republics’ because the banana companies — notably the United Fruit Company, known as El Pulpo,the octopus — had an important influence on political and social developments in the region.
For example, in Guatemala and Costa Rica the banana companies played a direct role in the election of every president, and throughout the region they allied themselves with the local oligarchy and military against any threats from the workers and peasants.
The growing involvement of United States capital in the region received US government protection including, if necessary, the intervention of US marines. Thus the marines were sent into Cuba in 1917 and they stayed till 1923 putting down strikes and protecting US property. In the same period the marines also went into the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Nicaragua.
In fact, they went into Nicaragua twice; and on the second occasion in 1927, they faced a serious challenge. They went in to ‘protect American lives and proa)
perty’ during a civil war which had been provoked by the results of a USsupervised election. But they came up against Augusto Cesar Sandino, a nationalist, opposed to foreign intervention and the concentration of land in the hands of a tiny oligarchy. Sandino refused to accept. a US-imposed solution to the war, and for seven years — despite being outnumbered and outgunned —he led a guerilla war against the 4,000 occupying US marines.
This heavy involvement of US forces brought criticism back home and no outright victory in Nicaragua. The United States was forced to begin a process of withdrawal, but not before they had created a military force — the National Guard — trained, equipped and advised by the United States. When they finally withdrew in 1933 they chose as its commander Anastasio Somoza, one of whose first acts was to give the National Guard orders to murder Sandino. He subsequently secured the Presidency and maintained it by repeated electoral fraud.
Somoza began a systematic pillaging of the national wealth which made him the richest man in Central America in the space of twenty years. Nicaragua also
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became a model for the United States — the perfect way for the US to protect. its interests in the Central American republics without getting its hands too dirty. A US trained and ‘friendly’ dictator became the established and favoured means of maintaining order in the region and protecting North American interests. It was only a minor embarrassment if these dictators were brutal, corrupt megalomaniacs. It did not matter that their regimes reinforced the already grinding poverty in which the majority of the people lived.
Even when the United States was not directly responsible for the installation of dictatorial regimes, the desire to protect North American interests led it to support such regimes when they appeared all over Central America in the early 1930s, These were the years of the Great Depression. The world economic crisis hit the Central American economies particularly hard because of their dependence on external markets and United States investment, both of which contracted with the crisis.
Coffee and banana prices plummeted as demand slumped. Peasants, unable to pay their debts, were evicted from their land, while workers were thrown out of their jobs or had their wages slashed. The result was a wave of social unrest in city and countryside throughout the region. The military was called in to suppress the unrest.
In El Salvador, Augustin Farabundo Marti led a peasant rebellion against. the dictatorship of that country in 1932. The military crushed the revolt and proceded to murder 30,000 peasants. The United States had sent a cruiser and two destroyers to stand by during the rebellion and two Canadian destroyers were also sent on Britain’s request. As it turned out, these reinforcements were not needed, but the United States had shown themselves to be ‘good neighbours’.
Within Central America the years of dictatorship in the 1930s and ’40s succeeded in suppressing popular discontent but not in eliminating it. Then in 1959 Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista regime in Cuba. Once it had recovered from the shock the United States tried to overthrow the Cuban revolution. After the failure of the ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion in 1961 it had to reconcile itself to the existence of Castro’s Cuba but it never abandoned its objective of destroying the revolution.
The CIA has been very active for twenty years in its attempts to assassinate Castro and sabotage the Cuban economy. The revolution also made the United States determined to prevent ‘another Cuba’ in its backyard.
Cuba presented a threat to the United States which it had never before faced: it offered an alternative model of development. The North American mission to carry its ‘superior way of life’ throughout the hemisphere and beyond had previously rested on the claim that this would bring progress to ‘backward’ regions. Not. only had these regions not seen progress — unless you count the enrichment of a tiny minority of their populations — but now there was in Cuba a country which brought housing, education, medicine and nutrition to the majority of its population.
The Cuban revolution stands today as an example of what can happen whena government. acts in the interests of workers rather than private profits. —)
Cuba devotes the greatest part of ifs total national product to education and to health care, which are free to all. It isa country where a job is a basic human right and where the peasants have been given land.
Racial discrimination has been outlawed; high-quality child-care centres have been built for tens of thousands of children; abortion is legal and free; and the doors to all education are open to women.
The threat which the existence of Cuba presents to the US cannot be overemphasised since the Caribbean basin is of very great strategic importance to the United States. The US has important military bases in the region. United States
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military installations cover nearly 100 square miles of Puerto Rican territory. The Roosevelt Roads base in Puerto Rico is one of the most important testing and training areas for the US military in the world. Large quantities of weapons are stored on the island of Vieques for use by the Atlantic Fleet.in any conflict involving Africa, Central or South America.
The Panana Canal Zone is the headquarters of the United States Southern Command which coordinates all United States military and intelligence activities in Latin America. It includes the headquarters of the 8th United States Special Forces, the Green Berets. The Latin American contingent of this body travels throughout Latin America providing intensive training in counter-insurgency. The United States army School of the Americas in the Canal Zone trains military personnel from all over Latin America — it has been called the Escuela de Golpes, the school of coups.
The third major US base is Guantanamo Bay on Cuban territory! There are dozens of smaller air and naval bases in the region.
The United States drew some lessons from the Cuban revolution. One of these was to themselves promote moderate reforms in order to undercut. the influence of socialist ideas. The idea was that. this would extend the amount. of support for the pro-American regimes without going so far as to undermine the very basis for their existence.
This strategy was based on the assumption that the ruling elites in Central America would voluntarily agree to such reforms as a way of securing their interests in the long term. The problem for the United States was that. this assumption proved incorrect. In Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala the oligarchies refused to give up one iota of their power and privileges.
Not only did they refuse to introduce reforms; they also reduced the United States’ room to manoeuvre by murdering moderate politicians whom the North Americans might. have backed as an alternative to them.
The initiative for political change was left to those forces who argued for direct forms of political action, including armed struggle. In Nicaragua, FE] Salvador and Guatemala guerilla movements developed which were based on the active support of the people. Peasants, urban workers and sections of the middle class saw that they had no choice but to take up arms to fight for social justice.
Nicaragua
In Nicaragua the struggle against the Somoza dictatorship was led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), an organisation which had been formed in 1961 drawing on the tradition of Sandino as well as the inspiration of the Cuban revolution.
During the 1960s the FSLN’s strategy alternated between periods of guerilla action and political organisation in town and country. Despite military setbacks and the imprisonment, torture and murder of its leaders, the FSLN was able to create a solid foundation for the struggle against the dictatorship.
The final phase of this struggle began in January 1978 when the regime murdered Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, the editor of the major opposition newspaper. Thousands of people poured into the streets in protest and a twoweek general strike followed.
In February a rebellion broke out in Monimbo, an Indian community in the city of Masaya, when the National Guard attacked a mass meeting protesting the assassination of Chamorro. For two weeks the people of Monimbo fought the Guard with whatever weapons they could find or make. The community was bombed by Somoza and the rebellion drowned in blood but the people had shown
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that. they were prepared to rise up massively against the dictatorship. In other parts of the country strikes by students and workers, protest marches organised by the Women’s Association, and clashes with the National Guard went on constantly in the following months.
In August the Sandinistas staged a spectacular raid on the National Palace in Managua. They held dozens of Somocista politicians hostage for several days and secured the release of all Sandinista political prisoners, national publicity for their revolutionary programme, ten million dollars cash and safe passage out of the country.
Thousands turned out to line the streets and cheer as the victorious commando unit drove from the National Palace to the airport. The August raid was followed by uprisings in several major cities. Thousands of young people built barricades and fought alongside the Sandinistas against the National Guard. Only by brutally bombing the civilian population was Somoza's National Guard able to regain control.
He then sent his men into the streets to ‘clean up’ the resisters. For the Somocistas these rebels were the young. Every young person was a potential guerilla. The dead were found every day at sunrise.
But far from crushing the resistance, the events of September brought about a massive development in the consciousness of the people. All those who had in one way or another taken a hand at the barricades were now convinced of the need to organise armed resistance and prepared a fresh insurrection.
Under the leadership of the FSLN and the United People’s Movement (a coalition of trade unions, student groups, the women’s organisation and other organisations), defence committees and militia units were set up, arms were made and gathered, medicines and food supplies stashed away, and courses taught in street-fighting, barricade-building and the use of weapons. Hundreds of youth who had fled the repression after September were given military training and organised into fighting units of the FSLN.
The final offensive against the dictatorship began at the end of May 1979 when FSLN forces launched attacks on National Guard positions on the Costa Rican border. On 7 June a national strike called by the FSLN shut down nearly all industry, transportation and commerce in the country. Insurrections broke out in city after city.
Finally, on 17 July Somoza fled the country. The National Guard collapsed and on 19 July thousands of Managuans swarmed over Somoza’s deserted bunker as FSLN columns from other cities entered the capital.
The Nicaraguans say they inherited a ‘country in ashes’. Four of the seven largest towns had been blown (o bits. Out of a population of two and a half million, 50,000 people had been killed and twice that number wounded; 40,000 were orphaned and 200,000 families homeless.
The FSLN lead a Government of National Reconstruction that is trying not only to rebuild the cities destroyed by Somoza’s bombs but also to overcome his legacy of neglect and exploitation. In Somoza’s Nicaragua more than half the population was illiterate; malnutrition affected 70 per cent of the population; infant mortality was 12 per cent; 90 per cent of the rural population had no latrines let alone running water. Such misery meant illness and disease which all added up to the lowest life expectancy in Central America.
The economic problems which the Sandinistas face are cnormous. Somoza left a paralysed economy and a crushing national debt of 1.5 billion US dollars, The cost of economic disruption and direct war damage came to 2 billion US dollars and there was only 3.5 million dollars left in the bank!
The revolutionary government confiscated all the property of Somoza and nationalised all Nicaraguan banks. The National Guard, army and police were
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dissolved and replaced by new revolutionary bodies. Within two weeks of victory plans were begun for a massive literacy campaign. Agrarian reforms have been earried out and health and welfare programmes begun for the first. time in Nicaragua’s history.
At the heart. of these attempts to carry out fundamental social transformations lie the mass organisations, crucial to the development. of popular democracy and workers’ control. The role of these organisations is to ensure the active presence of every part of the population in production, political education, defence, welfare, local and national government.
These organisations include the Sandinista Defence Committees (CDS), the Sandinista Workers’ Federation, the Agricultural Workers’ Association , the Association of Nicaraguan Women, and the Sandinista Youth Organisation. The CDS are established on every street block with delegate meetings at district level and, along with the other mass organisation, they are represented on the Council of State, through which they directly participate in central government.
But real democracy needs a climate of security in which to find its feet. Years of repression and cultural deprivation have meant that people had little experience of collective organisation, In Nicaragua, as in Grenada, this room for the growth of confidence and experience is under constant threat, the threat of US intervention. From the very beginning of the revolution the problems faced by the Sandinistas in rebuilding their country have been made more difficult. by the hostility of the United States.
Destabilisation and counter-revolution
The very presence of the United States in the region is an unavoidable constraint on the revolutions in Cuba, Grenada and Nicaragua. One North American official compared this presence to ‘an elephant ina sitting room. Even if we don’t move, you can’t ignore us’.
Since the victory of the Nicaraguan revolution the guerilla movements in El Salvador and Guatemala have grown massively, and with the inauguration of the Reagan administration in Washington, the elephant has gone berserk.
Throughout 1979 and 1980 US attempts at destabilisation in Nicaragua had taken more subtle forms. Through financial aid to the remaining private sector and a political campaign against. the dangers of a ‘totalitarian’ state, the United States tried to ‘moderate’ the Sandinista revolution. The Reagan administration launched a campaign to show the world (by means of subsequently discredited evidence) that Nicaragua and Cuba were responsible for channelling arms to El Salvador. The 15 million dollar final instalment. of the Carter administration's 75 million dollar aid package to Nicaragua was suspended in January 1981. This was followed by the withdrawal of a 9.6 million doLar credit for the purchase of essential wheat supplies.
In October 1981 the US State Department admitted that it wasn’t winning the war in El Salvador. In its terms a ‘stalemate’ existed. So in November it decided the time was ripe to step up activity against the Nicaraguan revolution — maybe if could ‘draw the line’ in Nicaragua after all. Reagan authorised a 19 million dolar CIA plan to destabilise the Nicaraguan government and at the same time Secretary of State Haig refused to rule out the possibility of an overthrow of the Nicaraguan government through US military action.
The plan is already being implemented. There is fighting everyday on the border with Honduras near the Atlantic Coast. Bands of ex-Somocista National Guards are operating from camps inside Honduras. These attacks have been going on for some time and dozens of peasants and teachers involved in the literacy cam-
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paign as well as members of the Sandinista militia have been murdered. These bands are reinforced by Nicaraguan and Cuban exiles who are training in paramilitary camps in Florida. They are well-armed, operate with the collaboration of some sections of the Honduran army, and have definite targets such as the assassination of leaders and the sabotage of bridges and economic installations.
Ata time when Nicaragua is already facing enormous economic difficulties, worsened by imperialism’s attempts to strangle the economy, the government. is obliged to devote more and more resources to defence and to protection of the population, A campaign to reinforce the Sandinista Defence Committees is under way. Hundreds of meetings have been held at workplaces throughout the country to discuss the gravity of the situation and the immediate measures that have lo be taken.
The response to appeals for popular militia volunteers has been massive. Eighteen thousand members of the Sandinista Youth alone have enrolled. In Managua, thousands of people turn out three nights a week for training. The people of Nicaragua are prepared to defend their revolution with the same determination that they showed in overthrowing Somoza.
It is clear that any ‘Bay of Pigs’ style invasion of Nicaragua will fail, but the pressures brought by the United States on the future of the Nicaraguan revolution cannot be separated from the outcome of the struggle in El Salvador and the developing struggle in Guatemala.
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El Salvador
In El Salvador the ruling junta has murdered more than 32,000 people in the last two years. The corpses of civilians are found every day, headless and mutilated; the wombs of pregnant women are ripped open and the heads of their companions or lovers inserted. Regularly the international press carries reports of the
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massacres of peasants — like that at Mozote in Morazan province in December 1981, when the army systematically killed almost 1,000 peasants, mostly women, children and old people. They were butchered, machine-gunned and burned alive by the Atlacatl Brigade, a crack unit trained by the US Green Berets.
In the teeth of this repression the people of El Salvador have organised themselves. The five guerilla organisations have united to form the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). It is the FMLN which is leading the war against the Salvadorean junta. On a political level the people’s opposition in El Salvador is expressed by the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR), which unites peasants, trade unionists, priests, teachers, students, small businessmen, Christian Democrats, socialists, communists and Jesuits: the majority.
On the junta’s side is the Reagan administration; and Reagan is an enthusiastic supporter. He has poured in military assistance to the Salvadorean army at an unprecedented rate. From 1970-1975 the average annual US military aid to E! Salvador was 1.4 million dollars. By June 1981 the total military aid for that year alone was 35 million dollars, together with 56 counter-insurgency advisors, 800 military personnel, and 10 Huey gunship helicopters. The aid is still growing — 55 million dollars in January 1982 and 1,600 Salvadorean troops undergoing intensive training in the United States.
Despite this massive US aid the army is not. winning the war against the guerillas. The FMLN have around 30 per cent of the country under their control and they have managed to take the offensive against the junta’s forces on a number of occasions, disrupting communications and troop movements. On a diplomatic level they have also had some important successes. The most significant of these was the August 1981 declaration by the French and Mexican governments which recognised the FDR/FMLN as a representative political force in El Salvador.
This development in the military situation in El Salvador has had an important influence on the opposition in Guatemala, where the guerilla organisations have now united to form the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union. The Guatemalan government, like that. in E] Salvador, is a regime which rules only by using the most. brutal and sadistic techniques to suppress the growing opposition, A mass movement in opposition to US policy in Central America is developing in Britain, Europe and the United States. Forty thousands people marched in Washington on 27 March protesting at US maintenance of the war in El Salvador, and 15,000 marched in London the following day to protest US intervention and Thatcher’s collaboration with US policy in Central America. There have been many other demonstrations around Europe.
The people of El Salvador and the people of Guatemala are being drowned in blood and fire. The revolutions in Nicaragua, Grenada and Cuba are under threat. We must build a mighty international mobilisation that will force Reagan and his supporters to pull back.
No imperialist intervention in Central America and the Caribbean!
Victory to the FMLN in El Salvador!
Victory to the URNG in Guatemala!
Defend the Cuban, Nicaraguan and Grenadian revolutions!
[page 15]
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[page 16]
30p “The people are like volcanoes; no one sets fire to them, they explode alone. And Central America is a volcanic region.”
Fidel Castro, speaking at a rally in celebration of the second anniversary of the Nicaraguan revolution, July 19th 1980
“Il spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military forces — the Marine Corps. And during that period | spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short | was a racketeer for capitalism.
Thus | helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. | helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in... | helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. | brought light to the Dominican Republic for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 | helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested ... | was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, | feel | might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three city districts. We marines operated on three continents.
Major General Smedley D. Butler, Common Sense, 1935
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