The PCR was reported as endorsing the Three World Theory. The party also had delegations in China in May 1977 and July 1978.[121]
Partido del Trabajo Argentino
One other Argentine Maoist party existed in the late 1960s, although little information is available concerning its origins or subsequent history. This was the Partido del Trabajo Argentino (PTA; Party of Argentine Labor). The U.S. Maoist newspaper Desafio, organ of the Progressive Labor Party, then the recognized Maoist group in the United States, carried an extended analysis by the PTA of the recently held OLAS conference in Havana.
This document claimed “The neorevisionist CP’s, attacked by the incurable illness of reformism and suffering a general crisis in their political existence. … must be put aside as a functioning force in the revolutionary camp.” It went on to argue, “The Communist Party of China, ideologically, is the one which initiated the open, profound and total struggle, the first against neorevisionism. … In rejecting the neorevisionist humbug, the CPC rescues, revitalizes and develops the Marxist-Leninist thesis of the class struggle on a national and world scale, the role of revolutionary violence and the irreversible character of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the essential and special form of passing from the bourgeois dictatorship to the proletarian dictatorship, substituting revolutionary power for bourgeois powers.”[122]
Following the Chinese line of that period, this document of the PTA particularly attacked the call by OLAS, the Latin American revolutionary organization sponsored by the Cubans, for launching guerrillas on the model of Fidel Castro’s experience in Cuba. It said, “The Cuban leaders put aside revolutionary experiences, shamelessly accusing them of being ‘dogmatizing,’ of hidebound orthodoxy. … The similarity, more apparent than real, more superficial than profound, with the conception of revolutionary violence, does not absolve the Cubans of their opportunist sins, because they convert a form of struggle into an end in itself, in an embryo capable of taking the place of the objective and subjective conditions, the action of the Marxist-Leninist party, the incorporation and participation of the popular masses, the concept of the popular revolutionary war, into a chain of armed actions outside of the historical-social context, because it exalts the spontaneity of the masses and, finally, because it carries to fraudulent limits the real history of the stages and changes in the Cuban revolution.”[123]
We have no information concerning what became of the PTA after 1968. We have no indication whether that party received official recognition from the Chinese Communist Party, although it was clearly regarded as an Argentine counterpart of the U.S. Maoist organization of that period.
Conclusion
Maoism was represented in Argentina during the latter half of the 1960s and the 1970s by three groups: the Communist Vanguard—known subsequently as the Communist Party of Argentina (Marxist-Leninist), the Revolutionary Communist Party, and the Partido del Trabajo Argentino. The first two were recognized by the Chinese Communist Party as its counterparts in Argentina. Both of these parties had their principal strength in the student movement, although in the late 1960s the Communist Vanguard may have had some marginal influence in a dissident trade union confederation. Although all of these parties were formally committed to the concept of “popular war,” none of them seems actually to have engaged in guerrilla activities. We know that the PCA (M-L) and the PCR were severely repressed by the ferocious military dictatorship that came to power in May 1976, but we have no indication as to whether any of these parties was able to regroup after the end of that regime in 1983.
Bolivian Maoism
The Communist Party of Bolivia was not established until 1950. However, there had been two earlier efforts to set up such an organization. The first was undertaken in the late 1920s by Gustavo Navarro, better known as Tristán Maróf, a onetime Bolivian diplomat who resigned from the foreign service to return to Bolivia to establish the Partido Socialista, which declared its loyalty to the Comintern but was never formally a member of it. This group disappeared during the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay in the early 1930s, Marof went into exile in Argentina, where he became a Trotskyite.
After the Chaco War, a sociology professor at the University of La Paz, José Antonio Arze, took the leadership in establishing the Party of the Revolutionary Left (Partido de la Izquierda Revolucionaria; PIR), which although not avowedly Communist, was closely aligned with other Stalinist parties, particularly the Communist Party of the United States. The PIR gained significant influence in the labor movement. However, during the left-wing nationalist regime of President Gualberto Villarroel (1943-1946) the PIR, after having its bid to be a collaborator with that regime rejected, turned violently against it, and aligned itself with the right-wing groups that were also opposed to, and finally brought down, the Villarroel government. In the nearly six-year period (the “sexenio") between the overthrow of Villarroel in July 1946 and the triumph of the Bolivian National Revolution, led by the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario; MNR) in April 1952, the PIR collaborated with a succession of right-wing regimes, having cabinet posts in some of them.
It was this collaboration that led some of the younger leaders of the PIR to break away and establish the Communist Party of Bolivia (PCB) in 1950. The PCB had some strength among students, as well as marginal representation in organized labor, although most of the former PIR trade unionists had joined the MNR during the sexenio.[124]
Origin of Bolivian Maoists
During the early 1960s, pro-Chinese groups appeared in various sections of the Communist Party of Bolivia. Finally, in April 1965, the pro-Chinese elements organized what they called the Extraordinary First National Congress of the Communist Party, which proceeded to expel the pro-Soviet leaders of the party.[125]
At the inception of the Maoist party, which soon took the name Communist Party of Bolivia (Marxist-Leninist) (Partido Comunista de Bolivia (Marxista-Leninista) PCB (M-L), its principal leader was Federico Escobar Zapata, who headed the workers in the important Siglo XX tin mine.[126] According to James Malloy, the Maoists at that point had more influence in organized labor, principally due to the prestige of Escobar, than did the pro-Soviet party, although together they did not constitute a major factor in the labor movement.[127] A plenum of the pro-Moscow party in October 1968 recognized that “an appreciable contingent of cadres and militants had gone over to the pro-Chinese party.[128]
121
SED,
122
124
For further information on the origins of Bolivian Communism, see Robert J. Alexander,
125
Cecil Johnson,
127
Interview with James Malloy, Professor of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, and historian of the Bolivian National Revolution, in New Brunswick, NJ, October 15, 1966.
128