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Issue No. 81, February, 19811981

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Issue No. 81, February, 19811981 ~ Australasian ~ Number 81 February 1981 30 cents Military victory to left-wing insurgents! • • I war In or Jose Lavanderos No to popular frontismt For workers revolution in EI Salvador! 25 JANUARY - El Salvador, Central America is in the grip of civil war. Pro­ foundly socially polarised, wracked by almost indescribably bloody right-wing repression, the country is locked in a battle to the death. On one side is a dis­ credited US-backed regime defending the privileged rule of a tightly knit oligarchy. On the other are the impoverished worker and peasant masses who have suffered for.ha1f_a.century under Latin Am~rica's loftgest continuous military~titilf!""'" On 9 January, El Salvador's leftist guerrillas launched their long-expected "general offensive". Labour, the left, minorities and all opponents of junta terror must greet the insurrection against one of the most barbarous US puppet regimes in the Americas. What­ ever the odds, hesitation now will only invite a massacre far surpassing the bloodbath which followed the 1973 Pino­ chet coup in Chile. Victory depends on mobilising the energies and determi­ nation of the masses to sweep away the. uniformed butchers forever, through workers revolution, rather than simply replacing them with a new gang of "Reform" Junta's National Guard "takes prisoners" after storming of the occupied Christian Democrat headquarters "democratic" bourgeois rulers. Military In EI Salvador. victory to the left-wing insurgents! Break the dangerous popular front with •• demo­ hundreds of guerrillas marched into a show some muscle without risking im­ decides, the Reagan administration will cratic" bourgeois ~liticians and military number of provincial towns. mediate confrontation with the Soviet find that all the options have been well­ officers! For workers revolution in El Union. prepared by the Carter administration. Salvador! Washington targets Central Guerrilla leaders have warned that US America Just how Washington plans to draw the intervention would tum El Salvador into Taking over three radio stations in the line against the "red menace" in El "another Vietnam and the tomb of the capital city of San Salvador on 10 Jan­ The spectre of "another Cuba" in Salvador is not yet clear. Sending in the Yankee marines". This will be no easy uary, the Salvadoran guerrilla coalition, "America's backyard" has already led Marines Santo Domingo-style may be task, especially given the military dic­ the Farabundo Marti Front for National the Republicans to signal the Salvadoran very macho, but even for Reagan it is tatorship's sizeable military forces and Liberation (FMLN), announced: "This is military that they will have free rein, hardly the first option. The use of an superior firepower. The guerrillas also the moment. Free homeland or death! and whatever military aid is needed, to "inter-American" Organisation of speak of the "countryside surrounding People of El Salvador, we have now start­ drown the masses in blood. On the cam­ American States (OAS) "peace-keeping" the city" a la Mao Tse-tung, but in tiny, ed the national liberation". Simul­ paign trail, Reagan had rhetorically force including Venezuelan, Costa Rican taneously, 80 Salvadoran soldiers led by a asked: and other elements as a cover for imperi­ crowded EI Salvador conditions are not favourable for prolonged guerrilla lieutenant-colonel shot their commanding "Must we let Nicaragua, EI Salvador all alist intervention is possible. Then there struggle. Yet if the worldng masses rise officer and burned down army barracks in become additional 'Cubas', new outposts are the mercenary brigades in Honduras up in an all-round insurrection requiring Santa Ana, the country's second largest for Soviet combat brigades? Will the next push of the Moscow-Havana axis be and Guatemala formed from ex-Somoza the utmost in heroism and self-sacrifice, city. In Morazan department another northward to Guatemala and thence to troops, killers without a country who have they can defeat the white terror. ranking officer, also a follower of ousted Mexico, and south to Costa Rica and been staging terrorist incursions into The battle cannot be limited to little El junta "moderate" Colonel Adolfo Panama?" Nicaragua for months. Finally, there is Salvador, however, - the •'pulgarcito Majano, called on officers and soldiers to Now looking for an opportunity to flaunt the possibility of intervention by the (Tom Thumb) of the Americas". To stop follow the example of Santa Ana and join US military strength, Reagan's advisers Guatemalan and Honduran military the insurgent forces. And detachments of view El Salvador as the perfect place to regimes themselves. But whatever it Continued on page two Salvadoran workers and peasants do not Hernandez Martinez. Although the PCS . March-April 1980). Only this time the EI Salvador •• ~ face the tottering power of a hated leadership was rounded up (and later "solution" they are talking about is strongman who alienated the traditional executed), coffee estate workers in west­ 200,000 dead. Continued from page one bourgeoisie and transformed the National ern El Salvador rose and were brutally The roots of current political Guard into his personal bodyguard. In El repressed. In the following weeks Her­ the the torturing, murdering Salvadoran crisis can be traced most directly to the Salvador the ruling class is centred on nandez drove home this bloody "lesson" heavy-handed vote fraud which stole two gorilas and their Yankee godfathers, the a landed oligarchy, the so-called "14 to the working masses, by slaughtering whole Central American isthmus must be elections in 1972 and 1977, from Christian Families", which for at least half a 30,000 people, roughly 3 to 4 percent of Democratic (PDC) winners and continued set aflame with proletarian revolution. century has solidly supported naked the country's entire popUlation. This will force the petty-bourgeois bona­ the succession of repressive army govern­ military rule to prop up their economic This was La matanza, the Salvadoran ments under military hardliner General partist Sandinista regime in Managua to domination. bourgeoisie's response to the first confront head-on the dilemma it has Carlos Romero. With liberal reform The "golden age" ofthe coffee aristoc­ Communist-led uprising in the Americas. efforts consistently stymied, a radical left sought to escape: either breaking sharply racy came to a crashing end in 1929. As No one on either side of the class barri­ with the bourgeoisie and arming Salva­ opposition grew rapidly both in the cities the bottom fell out of the world market, cades has forgotten it, and today 1932 is and countryside. doran leftists, or capitulating to the Salvadoran farm labourers were hit with still the watchword of hardliners in the Three different guerrilla "armies" imperialist pressures and likely sealing mass unemployment. Meanwhile, ruling class. As a spokesman of the arose, each with its own mass-based co­ its own doom. It also means linking up, the oligarchy moved to oust an elected growers association recently remarked, just as the imperialists fear, with the "reform" government. In January 1932, "Coffee growers should not anguish over alition. The first, the FPL, was founded potentially powerful Mexican proletariat. the newly formed Salvadoran Communist the situation today; there was a similar by Salvador Cayetano, a former leader of The labour movement internationally, Party (PCS) planned an insurrection after one in 1932, and if it was solved then, it the Communist Party who split from the and especially in the imperialist US, must a putsch by General Maximiliano can be solved now" (NACLA Report, Continued on page eight demonstrate active solidarity with the Salvadoran workers and peasants by boycotting all military goods destined for El Salvador. Waterside workers on the US West Coast pointed in the right Spartacist demos in New York, London, Sydney direction when their union, the Inter­ national Longshoremen's and Ware­ housemen's Union (ILWU), black-banned Protest shooting of Bernadette Devlin I shipments of military goods from 30 West :~r :.. :;~ Coast, British Columbian and Hawaiian On 16 Januaty Bernadette Devlin and w !.~ U ports. The ILWU bureaucracy, however, her husband Michael McAliskey were which tails after the Democratic ex-chief ambushed at their home in Derry­ imperialist Carter, has already refused to laughlin, Northern Ireland and brutally defend union members against threat­ shot. The masked gunmen pumped seven ened company reprisals. bullets into Devlin's chest and legs, leav­ The labour movement worldwide must ing her and her husband in critical con­ demand: US-OAS-Latin American bour­ dition in a Belfast hospital. This at­ geoisies - all hands off El Salvador I Any tempted assassination of the well-known attempt at imperial~st intervention, Irish republican socialist comes shortly whether directly by US Marines, by after the cold-blooded murder last year of mercenaries or neighbouring dictator­ Irish Republican Socialist Party militants ships as US proxies, must be met with Ronnie Bunting and Miriam Daly. It is militant mass protest. part of a pattern of British imperialist/ Loyalist terror directed against leading No to the Popular Front! activists in the campaign against the no­ Today, as even the New York Times torious H-Block of Long Kesh prison. (12 January) realises, "the civil war in Within days of the shooting of Devlin­ El Salvador has divided the country along McAliskey, the international Spartacist class lines, with most guerrillas being tendency organised a series of inter­ drawn from among peasants and nationally coordinated protests. In New workers' '. Yet repeatedly the Salvadoran York City on 17 January some fifty left has tried to paper over the abyss people, including supporters of the US­ between the opposing class forces by pro­ based Northern Irish Aid, staged adem.. claiming a "national" and "patriotic" onstration outside the British Consulate. fight for "democracy", not socialism, Among the slogans raised by the pro­ and tying the workers to "progressive" testers were: "A united workers move­ bourgeois forces.
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