was prepared, May Day some British workers and students at best, demonstrate somewhere in Central don. In Argentina, as this interview shows, celebrate differently: by accupying towns, ing banks and blowing up factories. About of the Argentinian population is urban, the ntine workers have 50 vears of trade union rience, and they have, in Peronism, a mass lar movement inside which Marxist ideas but was caught before going to the hills. Then came May. In May the police, after two months of stress, were in al demoralised state; they saw conspiracy every- where. There was a small demonstration in the town of Goya by students against price rises in the students canteen. The police went to. repress that, and instead of doing what they hat follows is based on a tape-recorded ersation with a leading Argentinian ade from the revolutionary Peronist ency which developed inside the mass nist movement. This tendency is now in a d front with the PRT (Partido lucionario de los Trabajadores, the ntinian section of the Fourth national), with a section of the Communist eveloping. Argentina, although there is a very small pro- Chinese party galled the Vanguardia Communista. It's just like the Maoists in any -Can you tell us more about the PRT? /See Peronists went to China. introduction.
The revolutionary groups executed him. There always a myth about Vandor: his onularity ete A few daus Vandor's death, one of our Emilio Mariano Jauregui, in the streets by the police.
usually do, kicking somebody, and putting three or four people in jail, they just shot at them-and they killed one student. Two davs after that, in Rosario, which is a bigger town with more students and workers, there was a had been • demonstration against the killing of the student, strength, before and two/more students were killed. Two days afterwards, there was Cordoba. Cordoba is a big comrades was killed industrial and university city. In Cordoba the students don't live with their families or in the , and with the Camilistas (revolutionary lies who call themselves after the nbian guerrilla priest Camilo Torres). you tell us, first, somethine about ismo, and about the development of the utionary tendency within Peronismo? was in power from 1945 to 1955. The ist regime can be said to have been the The PRT, after kicking Moreno out, with his propagandist and syndicalist positions, had cane workers, where they are the strongest there. They also have a lot of strength in Rosario and among the students. The PRT is not very big numerically but its cadres are in some student leaderships, and they have a 6,000 or 7.000 people went to his funeral. about half of them workers, in a very militant way; the police had to abandon the streets, because there were too many armed people around. Then Vandor died. The union. of metallurgical industries gave half-a-day's holiday to the workers so that they could go to Vandor's funeral. About 3,000 people went. That's half the number of people who went to the funeral of a not very well-known militant of About university, they live in houses in the city with ten or fifteen other students and mostly they have very little money, they work, and vou find that student leaders are sometimes also trade union leaders; so you have a really mass student movement, closely linked with the working class. They made a very big demonstration against the killings of Rosario and Gova and there was also a general strike, called-by the of the democratic national revolution in tina. It was a Bonapartist regime, with a alliance between the bourgeoisie and the unions. It was nationalist. and it was ted from the Communist Party and the n the 1950s the class alliance broke up: ismo was left with the working class and without an organised party, without s and without an ideology-just very ideas about nationalism, about the
-What did they do with what they produced? They just had to store it; there were no markets. It was very interesting and educative, because it showed the masses the limits of reformism, the limits of the trade union struggle. You can occupy a factory, yes; you can put a factory into production, yes; you can run the factory but you can't sell what you produce; and if 30 Poliat. So you need ana riy. you nee noting build an army, you need to organise the workers militarily so that they can defend the - Do you think there is a chance of a united party developing out of the united front? No, we think a united army may come out of the united front. The party will be built in the process, as the army will be built in the process. not going to lead the revolution. That's our idea: we don't have professional military leaders in our organisations, we keep telling our cadres who are in military work that they must always be political cadres, because politics always comes first. We say that war will never be won by destroying, by killing the enemy militarily, but by destroying it politically. Batista wan't thrown out because he was militarily destroyed; in fact after the battle of Santa Clara, 80% of Batista's army wasn't touched, and it just collapsed. So we think politics always comes first-even for some people like me who have been doing military activities for 14 years. factories. -You have said that the left Peronist groups have developed Marxist ideas. Would you say that all the groups in the united front had a clear Marxist orientation? Yeş. For example when the movement split in January 1969 in the congress of all oul Dur tea c adosd noonnard " aar are for a united front and for unified military actions. They are not sectarians in any way; they understand very. well that probably none of the parties and groups and leaders who start the war will end it. They don't think that they possess God's truth, which is a very positive attitude-and that's the attitude of the whole united front. We all know that we are Peronistas, the others are Trotskyists; we are not anti-Trotskyists, some of us are Trotskyist, The real Marxistleninist wole ingelas pah y. We are not discussing who's going to lead the revolution, we are making the revolution-that's our way of acting. -Can you tell us more about your general political and strategic ideas? We believe that in Argentina there is going to be a long protracted people's war, based both in the city and in the countryside. About 70% of After that, in July, there was some more of the same sort of thing. Then in September there was the second uprising. That was Rosario. There was a general strike, they occupied the only three civilians killed-accidentally, not in demonstrations; and there were several soldiers, officers and policemen killed. 80% of the public burnt. The city was held for 14 hours, with sharp-shooters. Afterwards people retired, and let the army come in; there was no resistance to the army. So the second partial uprising was really an organised uprising, with the political vanguards working side by side with the mass of the students and the trade unions. The process is continuing; it hasn't stopped. Cordoba, Rosario, and Rockefeller's visit were the three points of high escalation. But without interruption, since March 1969, to today, there have been constant vanguard actions, and they workers took over the city. Cordoba is a city of about 1 million inhabitants, and there were a about 40,000 people in the streets. 5,000 policemen were not enough to control them; the police had to retreat. The students and the workers took over most of the city, and they started to burn. They didn't burn every thing; it was a very selective burning. Not like the black uprisings in the United States where you hear that whole districts of the cities are burnt. In Cordoba only one private house was burnt; it was the house of a senior police officer. But a lot of shops were burnt, and cars were burnt; for example, about a hundred Citroen cars were taken out of a showroom and burnt in the street. Barricades were put up, and for about a day they held the city. Then,the army was sent, and the government imposed martial law. They received the army with sharp-shooters and barricades; they blew up the electricity and left the city without lights; and they resisted about DIR ARTHE MOOI ONTT "AAIIT t forms; it was at first very spontaneous, mb explosions and so on, occupations barracks; in 1956 about 300 Peronists ecuted. r 1959 the Peronist movement was more ced by the left, especially by some ist groups and by the CP. There was the e of the Cuban revolution, although at ideology was not important to us. In e Peronists made the first guerrilla ; militarily it was a complete failure, ad mass popular support. There were ut 3,000 bomb explosions in the cities, ut 1,000 Peronists were jailed. In jail ere discussions and polemics between s and Marxists. We began to learn that part of the class struggle and, very we began to read Marx, the little we o Tse-Tung, Che Guevara's writings; Marxist book I read in my life was The by Wright Mills. -That sounds like Debray to me. revolutionary organisations, it was on that issue. The centre groups said that they were fighting When you say The Party, with big black letters. for a Peronist state, we said that we were no. We are developing the parties, with an 's' on fighting for a socialist state. We still call the end and small letters. Because we have got ourselves Peronistas because we have the full our own party organisation, the PRT has its right to call ourselves Peronistas; we say that party organisation, and some other groups are Peronismo is the historical mark of our building theirs. We are building our own arm:, revolution; its way is the armed struggle, its end with small letters, and the PRT is building its is socialism, and its ideology is Marxist-Leninist. own army, with small letters. And we expect. all of us, to build the big Party and the big -Do you think that workers councils or soviets Army. That isn't Debray. will play a part, or have they already played a (Interviewed by Robin Blackburn and Teresa part, in the struggles of Argentina? Hayter). If you ask me if there have been workers' councils exactly similar to those that they had in Russia, I can say no. But a kind of double power does develop in the struggle, and Bonapartism: the classic definition of especially when you have strikes which are not Bonapartism, an expression derived from the only against the bosses, but are also strikes rule of Napoleon Ili, is a form of government against the trade unions. We don't have a in which the classes, the working class and the strongly disciplined single political organisation, bourgeoisie, are fairly evenly balanced and or a single mass organisation. Of course we say therefore the state assumes a certain the population of Argentina is urban. Buenos Aires has about 8 million inhabitants, about the same as Cuba for example. That is about 700 miles from the nearest suitable place for developing guerrilla war; 700 miles of plain without forests, populated by quite rich small farmers, many of whom have cars, tractors, etc., so there is little or no popular support there. So it won't be possible for our liberation army to build itself in the hills and then go up to Buenos Aires; it can't be done. So-this is not only a cold military view, it's a political view-you must make war where the masses are, and you must sacrifice good terrain for people's support. So we believe that armed struggle will be both in the cities and in the countryside. We are against the foco conception, Debray's conception; we respect his theory, but we think it doesn't work, it's a petit-bourgeois conception. We think that the struggle is with the masses, the war is first politics, and have been progressively bigger. Cordoba, which was not very organised, now has two or three very big organisations. Seven or eight small towns have been captured: in the middle of the night small groups, six or sèven commandos, enter a town of 2,000-3,000 inhabitants; they capture the police barracks, and take the arms; thim out tof his house, o pr the bal, ge , take money out, and go away. In November, on the "Day of Sovereignty", there were a lot of attacks against American and British firms, about 20 or 30, with the usual procedure of Cun pletely raz weth s plaats he factor ombs, completely destroyed. There have also been attacks on regiments; there was a very successful attack in the middle of December, in the city of La Plata; a regiment was attacked and about half of the weapons were captured. -What was the attitude of the Communist 18 hours. About 30 people were killed. But for the first time for quite a long time, of the 30 people killed, about 12 were army and police- men. So we don't call that a real massacre; there was trouble, but people were killed on both sides-and that's very important, because for everyone it was a victory. Sharpshooters had to be removed from the buildings with bazookas and mortars, and people found out It wan't exactly a spontaneous thing, because the workers were organised, to some extent. The strike was a new kind of strike; it was called a 36-hour general strike. Usually in strikes the workers simply say, "Tomorrow we won't work," and they go home to their houses. In the new kind of strike, the workers deeide that from midday they will stop working; so the workers, at midday, are in the factories, and when they go out, they go out in an organised way, into the streets. So instead of being a their own strength. 62 Peron made an alliance with the oups; it was opportunistic at the top, le base it was taken seriously. A group atonary Peronists began to emerge, gly in conflict with the official 64 there was a second guerrilla attempt, lubans; it failed. The PRT split and one an to make preparations for immediate ruggle; both it and a vanguard Peronista ere liquidated before they could act. 66 the military dictatorship came to nd suppressed such civil liberties as re. The left was shattered; the Peronista p began to make contacts with the 57 there was the Bolivian guerrilla. A rinistically, people expected Che to Argentina. Great preparations were d there were polemics on the left Debray's works. independence, in the sense that it is not directly accountable to any particular group of the bourgeoisie while maintaining bourgeois rule in general; this usually involves a collapse of the representative organs of the bourgeoisie such as Parliament and their replacement by executive or dictatorial power. syndicalist: concentrated exclusively on trade union work. Theory that the revolution can be made by industrial work without building an independent political organisation. propagandist: engaged in propaganda and comment as opposed to direct revolutionary action, for example the armed struggle. foco, focismo: theory laborated in Debray's book Revolution in the Revolution. The theory the Cuban ev bie boni, a on chi mx phat tn the that's a kind of negative situation, but in anther way it's very positive, because there's an ample democracy in the bases. There's no bureaucracy in the struggle at the moment. In our organisation our discipline is not very strong, because in some ways we exaggerate democratic tendencies inside us; we are very afraid of militarism and bureaucracy. For us internal democracy in the organisations is very —Do you have a formal Leninist party No, we don't, we haven't been able to build that yet, because we have a kind of federated organisation; we have an intellectuals' front. we have a rural workers' front, we have the students, we have the workers, and we have the military organisation. It's very loose, not very strong. We also have a kind of central committee, very small, very practical, about afterwards shooting. Shooting is a way of making politics, but we believe in mass organisations; a small group, which is isolated. can't make a people's war; we don't want guerrillas to be parachuted somewhere. For example in our peasant struggles, we don't send cadres to the countryside: we have a peasant organisation which is built there. If at some time that devélops into a guerrilla struggle, we will probably send some military and important. technical cadres. But we think that guerrilla must grow, and nof.be artificially planted. We think that the foco isolates itself from the masses. So we believe in a very broad people's war, protracted, and in which the struggle will be in the cities and in the countryside. After the experience of the Tupamaros in Uruguay it has been shown that Debray's thesis that you can't do guerrillas in the cities is wrong. The Tupamaros have been doing that for about five years. Some comrades have died, Party during the events of last year? It called for a new government of broad coalition that would call for elections to renew the constitution. That was when you had the general strike, the masses in the street, and cities occupied. Even the Union Civica Radical, which is perhaps a little to the right of the Labour Party here, said the struggle for national liberation had begun, we must join it, and so on. -Is the CP small? What is its membership? Not so small; about 60,000 or 70,000 members. It's very rich, very well organised, with a very big bureaucracy: there are about 9,000 paid members inside the party. -Where does it get its money from? From factories, cinemas, banks; they managed very well; it's a big firm really, a commercial firm. It's very rich-a bad example of how you can build a party. It has no future. We say it's strike at home, at least the first part of the strike is a strike in the streets. The political vanguard groups were not very strong in Cordoba at that time; the PRT was very small in Cordoba; the left-wing Peronistas were not so small, but they were not so well organised. So they acted as individuals inside those organising groups. They didn't have control of them; the uprising was directed by the mass movements, by the trade union leaders, by the student leaders. The military organisation was not verv effective• the resistance to the army, for example by sharp- shooters, was very individualistic. That was May, in Cordoba. After May the revolutionary vanguards studied the situation, to develop their ideas about it. to understand it. Rockefeller's visit provided an opportunity to show they had succeeded. There were the usual demonstrations against him, but a new factor appeared: there was very systematic and well- organised military activity. For example, in the 1967 trade union congress, two tendencies emerged. Ongaro became esman of the Peronist revolutionary ough he is limited by his situation, and ade union leader and must work in a 1 way (unlike me; I have been ne for seven years), we have complete ce in him. Ongaro controls mainly the ons of the interior, and the trade at are in crisis, for example the sugar the car workers. The big trade unions trolled by Vandor and his people; if t trade union by trade union, the endency is stronger. Vandor was the first resistance, but he began from 59 to make deals with the bosses, and y became a reformist and tionist. A mass movement developed ngaro; it is not very definite in its , but it is anti-dictatorship, anti- st, and says nothing can come out of ore-revolutionary situation which exists in Latin America, the revolution can be made by a small group of guerrillas operating in rural areas. who will gradually build up their strength through successful actions against the army and recruitment, mainly among peasants, until they are able to defeat the army and take power. This theory denies the necessity for a political party and for political work among the rural and especially the urban masses. Tupamaros: revolutionary group of urban guerrillas in Uruguay which began operating early in the '60s independently of any political party and independently of Cuba: has a revolutionary socialist position. dual power: situation in which the working class has set up organisations of its own which have power independently of the institutions of bourgeois rule. seven or nine comrades, who deal with a whole lot of things. The Peronista tradition is a bit anarchic: we have never had avery strong organisation; but the trend is to build it. The PRT is a Leninist party, very well organised. -I can see that you can have a guerrilla struggle which is linked to a political struggle; Debray was wrong in saying that it was not possible: but has it yet been shown that it can really be linked to the masses? Surely only an organisation like the Soviets would make it possible. The armed groups vou describe are the armed groups of parties: whereas the armed Bolhevik passi, wer not linked to the How many years of trade union experience did they have in Russia before the 1917 revolution? In Argentina we've had 50 vears. We've had 10 years of experience of power for the trade unions, in the experience of Peronism. Every about 100 are in jail, but they're still fighting, and they're going to take power some time. We sometimes say, in fact we're quite sure, that Uruguay will be the second socialist country in Latin America, after Cuba: and we sometimes say that it might be the first communist country in Latin America-that's a kind of joke with the -You have said that the Tupamaros are in a very strong position, perhaps even in a position I think it would he very adventurous to say the Tupamaros could take power now. Last year in October, on Che Guevara's day, they showed how they could occupy a city, with 30,000 or 40.000 inhabitants, in five minutes: they occupied the city, the police headquarters, army barracks, fire stations, banks, electricity works. They took about 2 million dollars from the banks, they made meetings in the streets, Cuban comrades. to take power now? not a party; it's a society for friendship with the city of Buenos Aires 14 of the 20 big super- was a year of discussion and splits and Soviet Union. markets of the Minimax company, which is a ng in the Peronist movement and the -What about the future of the struggle in well-known Rockefeller family concern, were al left. In 1969 part of the Peronist left blown up, and then burnt and completely ing for some nationalist general, like destroyed. There was about 15 or 16 million ians for example: the rest of us, who The crisis goes on. One very positive thing is dollars' damage, which is quite a lot, even for that most of the left vanguard and the Peronist a minority, said that conditions were the Rockefeller family. And there were many vanguard are now in a united front; it is rmed struggle. bomb attacks. The CGT called a general strike, clear there was going to be an politically and legally a united front: and it is to repudiate Rockefeller's visit. Vandor was and political crisis: we decided that also semi-clandestine against that, and he issued a communique I start political and military actions, -Which are the other groups in the united saying that he was not participating in the heir impact might make things start front? general strike, although some of the reformist and mobilise the masses. trade unions did. At that precise moment There is the PCR (Revolutionary Communist s in fact what happened, in May to Vandor was executed, that is about six hours Party), which is a split from the Communist ast year? after he issued his communique saving he was Party. And there arc the Camilistas, that's the not against Rockefeller's visit, and about two d of February we began organising left Catholics who call themselves after Camilo hours before he was due to be reccived by tary actions, attacks on army barracks, Torres. -ups, attacks on the police: gun-shops Rockefeller -Is the PCR formally pro-Chinese? ed and guns taken; a guerrilla group Who was he executed by? No. There is no strong pro-Chinese party in
Kidnapping and the Bourgeois Press ow that the comrades in Latin America have tarted capturing diplomats, we have some headlines about them in the bourgeois ess. In fact the executing of the German bassador has given us a whole page of quite esting material on Guatemalan history and itics from the Sunday Times Insight team, h was actually sent to Guatemala. But apping, usually for financial ransom, has i a tactic used for some time in Latin rica. The Guatemalans are the most rienced, and have been practising the art e 1966. In Cali, a provincial town in Columbia, it is said that $600,000 were raised through ransom money in a period of three onths last year, resulting, among other things, n a noticeable decline in night-club life. One of he earliest Latin American kidnappings was hagnificently international although unfortunately it was unsuccessful: the Venezuelan FALN (Fuerzas armadas de liberacion nacional) kidnapped the US military attache in order to save the life of Nguyen Van Troi, the South Vietnamese guerrilla leader. They were forced by extreme police measures to release him; the day after they did so, Van Troi was killed. The Uruguayan Tupamaros have captured a prominent local banker and newspaper owner and sentenced him to one year's imprisonment. The Argentinian FAL (Frente armado de liberacion) released the Paraguayan consul without their demands being met; and the Guatemalan FAR (Fuerzas armadas rebeldes) have, as everybody knows, executed the German ambassador.
Useful Tactic In spite of some failures, the tactic is definitely useful. First, valuable comrades are released. Some 60 or 70 political prisoners have been let out in exchange for diplomats and others; they can be, and are, got out by other methods, for example by direct attacks on prisons or while they are being transferred for medical treatment, but these methods may be even more dangerous than kidnapping diplomats. The importance of individual leaders and comrades is very great; they may have military training, guerrilla experience, or long experience of clandestine work; often the number of revolutionaries with such experience is quite small; and, as the Argentinian interview in this issue shows, mass movements can sometimes be sparked off by armed actions by a few: barracks, gun shops, banks, even towns, are attacked and sometimes occupied by "seven or eight commandos". Each individual loss is a disaster.
Humiliation of Puppets Second, the kidnappings expose and humiliate the Latin American regimes. They are shown to be powerless to ensure security in the cities or to catch the kidnappers. Their subservience to US imperialism is re-emphasised; they must, on the demand of the State Department, release say 19 political prisoners in exchange for one US military official. Hordes of US security officers are now said to be descending on Latin America, importing hatred and tension. And the world is made aware of the existence of large numbers of political prisoners in Latin America, and even, sometimes, of the fact that they are being tortured.
Victory for Revolutionists Third, it is a victory for the revolutionaries: a sign that they can attack safely in the heart of the cities, carry off their hostages, and get their comrades released. That it may lead to further repression by the regimes shows that these regimes are demoralised, and weakened; repression is bound to increase until the final victory or tne revolution, ana revorutionaries cannot be deterred from successful action by the fear of reprisals. Commenting on the Brazilian dictatorship's redoubled repression after the release of the 15 prisoners, a declaration by the Partido Operario Communista of Brazil stated: "This is the way it is after every individual action of the vanguard. But it is these actions, apparently checkmated by the reaction, which awaken, teach, and mobilise ever broader masses, who resume the struggle on ever ascending levels. Their Morals and Ours The bourgeois press of course makes lavish use of words like "immoral", "reprehensible". It thus demonstrates, yet again, its amazingly distorted set of values. Count von Spreti's family life is minutely and harrowingly described, and he gets an obituary in the London Times. But nothing is said of the heroism and sacrifice of the revolutionaries, and usually little is said of the nature of the regimes from which they are struggling to liberate their people. Nothing, or very little, is said of the death and torture of these revolutionaries and those who support them. Is it immoral to detain the Japanese Consul-General in Sao Paolo in order to obtain the release of five prisoners, including a Mother Superior whose torturers had been excommunicated by the Brazilian religious authorities? "The jailing of the 15 political prisoners," says the statement of the Partido Operario Communista, "as well as several thousand others held in the dungeons of a regime that has no program but repression and exploitation, is not (according to the Brazilian press) immoral.
"The jailing of 20 metal workers in Rio de Janeiro who put up an opposition list in their trade union elections is not immoral.
"The imprisoning of hundreds of students for maintaining their own organisations is not immoral.
"The jailing of two workers who organised last year's strikes in Minas Gerais and Sao Paolo is not immoral.
"Torturing Sergeant Lucas to the point of death is not immoral, nor the murder of Father Henrique..
And what of the callousness of the regimes which decide that diplomats-not yet diplomats of the United States, nor local figures such as the the Guatemalan Foreign Minister-are expendable? Mr. Quintin Hogg, MP, tubthumping moralist Hogg, pronounced in the Sunday Express that there were lessons we needed to learn: The first thing is that blackmail is something to which it is morally wrong to submit, even if one thereby saves one's own skin... One can only thank one's stars that the Guatemalan authorities appear to have seen the light over the kidnapped German diplomat. If the US authorities had only stiffened the backs of other South American countries when American diplomats were held to ransom one might be quite sure that the unfortunate German diplomat would not now be in peril. " Well, Hogg got his way; the Guatemalan authorities, appealing to their "constitution", ignored the German government's offer to pay the ransom and pleas that the prisoners should be released; and the guerrillas kept their promise to execute von Spreti if their demands were not met. This happened after the Argentinian dictatorship had got away with not releasing the prisoners demanded in exchange for the Paraguayan consul, which, according to Hogg, should have meant no more kidnapping.
More blatant still was the callousness of the Argentinian and Paraguayan dictatorships. Generals Ongania and Stroessner (the latter was visiting Argentina at the time) apparently discussed the matter of the kidnapping of the Paraguayan consul, who had travelled to Buenos Aires to greet his President, and decided that he was expendable, after which Stroessner went fishing. Eventually the FAL decided to release their prisoner; they issued a statement saying their decision had been based on humanitarian considerations, since the authorities had made it plain that they were not interested in the survival of their wretched employee. The Argentinian Foreign Minister sent a telegram to the Paraguayan government, thanking it for its "understanding"
A Minor Official's Exchange Value-Nil The Argentinian comrades had a difficult decision to make. Obviously their operation had failed; the Paraguayan consul, representative though he was of a "bloody dictatorship serving US imperialism", was a minor official and not a big enough catch. Moreover, of the two prisoners demanded in exchange for him, one had been tortured to the point where he signed a declaration saying he didn't want to be rol pacer and the other had nronany near politics, where individual violence is less of an everyday affair than in Central America and where there was a danger of popular outrage if the execution took place, the decision not to execute the prisoner was probably correct. At any rate, the Argentinian comrades were able to expose very clearly the callousness of the authorities, and to make what seems to have been some effective propaganda inside Argentina. But from an international point of view the decision could have been disastrous, in the sense that the kidnapping tactic could have lost its credibility.
Use-Values The situation was made worse by the fumbling, lack of political clarity and partial capitulation of the Japanese Red Army hi-jackers. It was retrieved by the Guatemalan guerrillas. True, as the Sunday Times put it, the guerrilla leaders overestimated "the going price of ambassadors"; Colonel Arana, President-elect of Guatemala, the Sunday Times said, "thought the guerrillas' price was too high". "'We would have considered, say, six guerrillas a fair exchange, said one of (Arana's) officers fair-mindedly. "But twenty-five! It was robbery!*" One might establish a sort of international price list; US ambassadors = 15 political prisoners; US military attaches= 19; Japanese consuls-general = 5; Paraguayan consuls= 0; German ambassadors = ?6. But the Guatemalan guerrillas, having made their mistake, retrieved it by an operation apparently smoothly carried out: the German ambassador was found in the place where the guerrillas had said he would be, with one bulletwound in his head and his belongings around him. In the escalating terror and counter-terror of Guatemala, which has taken firm root since the US organised the overthrowing of Arbenz for attempting to take over, with compensation, Guatemala's land from the United Fruit Company, the execution of the German ambassador was not very startling, although internationally, of course, it hit the headlines; certainly nothing compared to the razing of villages undertaken by the President-elect, or to the brutality of some of the operations of the right-wing terrorist group MANO, manned apparently by police and army. The Guatemalan authorities are threatening to kill one political prisoner for every half-hour any future captive is detained; if they do so, it can be expected that the guerrillas will respond in kind-just as the Algerian liberation-fighters eventually retaliated against mass killings of villagers by planting bombs in places frequented by French settlers and their families. Such is the situation to which Guatemala, and other Central ONE MBASSADOR (BAD CONDITION)
IN EXCHANGE American Republics, have been brought by years of tyranny and oppression.
Lenin Lenin, in his article on guerrilla warfare and terrorism which we reproduced in the Lenin centenary issue of The Red Mole, spoke of the alleged danger of "demoralisation" for the revolutionary forces in such forms of action, and said: "It is not guerrilla warfare which demoralises, but unorganised, irregular, non-party guerrilla acts." The Guatemalans are an organised, political group, with revolutionary and socialist objectives; we should, of course, fully support their actions in Guatemala. The lessons of Latin American experience seem to be that the tactic of kidnapping in order to obtain the release of valuable political prisoners is a very useful one, so long as the diplomats or others taken are important enough to the authorities for them to need to pay the amount demanded for their release, which probably means concentrating on US diplomats; they must also be persons whom, in the political context of the country concerned, one is prepared to execute. This obviously limits the usefulness of the tactic. And in Western Europe the relative efficiency of the security forces and inexperience of the revolutionary groups would make the operation difficult; one essential measure would be, for example, that communication with the authorities should take place through an agent in some safe place like Algeria, since most kidnappers have been traced and caught through such communication. But it is not inconceivable that the tactic might be practised with success in European countriesfor instance, as the Guardian suggested, the next kidnapping "could easily be the American ambassador in London, seized...in order to extract concessions from the British governmen over Belfast." Or the Greek ambassador (an army General), who could be kidnapped to demand the release of some of the hundreds of prisoners who are being tortured in the concentration camps of the junta? Attila P.S. Humanite, organ of the French CP, apparently thought it necessary to denounce the Guatemalan revolutionaries for using imperialist pillage as a pretext for "preaching the armed struggle to the exclusion of all other considerations , for "the assassination of a diplomat does not appear to us to be a method worthy of a legitimate struggle." (Humanite, 7.4.70). Such is the new morality of the Stalinists-whose own hands are not exactly OUTe.
,and firjacking et off of thatcloud -theres a revolution down here! hat do wedo? concepr of bask ReciTiona lialechic...
Maube we could
go outside andplay Get nod or at of swords and dynamite. Imprison 106 passengers and the entire crew. Make the suspense last for more than 60 hours...
All this in order to leave a country where leftists are gaoled and to get to a country where fingers are pointed at "Trotskyists" ... Such is the exploit of the Japanese students of the "Red Army" in their attempt to get to North Korea. What were they going to do there? What were they fleeing from? What would they struggle for in North Korea?
The anti-aircraft guns of Pyong-Yang and the trickery of the South Korean authorities obliged the students to make a major change in their plans, and to transform their aeroplane into a sort of rearguard camp stuffed with hostages This put them, very much in spite of themselves, into the headlines. The distorting mirrors of the press and TV then gave them very much the same image as the four bandits who, at Villefranche-sur-Mer, kept three hostages in a noter Dearoom The anxious metaphysical question posed by the journalists, "Will they or will they not blow the whole thing up?", is without importance. Revolutionary violence, since there was revolutionary violence at stake, cannot be notched up like a base-ball score. It must be BE politically judged on its results: does it make the revolutionary movement advance? does it raise the consciousness of the exploited masses? As far as the Boeing exploit of Seoul is concerned, the answer to both questions is "No". This kind of action, which after all could be carried out by any isolated group, though they might have the best intentions in the world, succeeds only in giving credibility in public opinion to the thesis that leftists are merely wreckers.
We are neither against violence, nor against destruction. And we think that it is, to say the least, grotesque to accuse the Japanese students of having wanted to kill "innocent people", when the thousands of "innocent people" who die every day in Vietnam, in Africa or in Latin America leave the press unmoved.
But we think that revolutionaries, Japanese and others, have other things to do besides taking refuge in North Korea and organising prolonged picnics in aeroplanes. The example of Guatemala, the same week, was there to show that the class struggle is something other than a sort of carnival with ministers, heart attacks, samurai swords and sandwiches. (Translated from Rouge, 13.4.70, newspaper of the Ligue Communiste, French section of the Fourth International).
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15 POLITICAL PRISONERS