Escobar disappeared from the scene soon after the establishment of the PCB (M-L). He was reported to have gone abroad, visiting Cuba and China, then returned home. He died late in 1966, and was succeeded as First Secretary of the party by Oscar Zamora Medinacelli.[129]
The Maoist party suffered persecution at the hands of the regime of President René Barrientos, which had come to power after the overthrow of the MNR revolutionary government in late 1964. In January 1967, Oscar Zamora and a number of other principal leaders of the party were arrested, and were held in jail for several months. These included Jorge Echazú Alvarado, correspondent of the New China News Agency, whose arrest brought an official protest from Peking.[130]
For some time after the establishment of the Partido Comunista de Bolivia (Marxista-Leninista), the Chinese did not give it their official blessing. Cecil Johnson suggested that this was because the new party did not take a sufficiently strong stand on the side of the Chinese in their conflict with the Soviet party.
Johnson said “The anti-party group, as it was called by the supporters of the Soviet Union, sought to pursue a neutralist policy regarding the differences in the international Communist movement. For example, they insisted that Chinese documents as well as Soviet documents be allowed to circulate among party members. … In short, they, like the Castroites, were refusing to take a position. If the pro-Soviet forces were dissatisfied with their posture on the Great Schism, one can well imagine how the Chinese must have reacted to their neutralism.”[131]
However, “In late 1966, the pro-Chinese group launched a major ideological assault on revisionism, led by the CPSU. … By taking a stand that was clearly pro-Chinese, the Bolivians must have ingratiated themselves with their “sponsors.’”[132]
That this was the case was indicated by a statement of the New China News Agency in April 1967, protesting the arrest of many of the Maoist party’s leaders by the Barrientos government. It noted that the “Bolivian Communist Party is a genuine revolutionary party holding high the revolutionary banner of national liberation and firmly opposing the traitorous policies of the dictatorial regime, and opposing U.S. imperialist domination and enslavement.”[133]
When he was released from jail, Oscar Zamora sent a message to Mao, thanking him for his support while Zamora had been in prison. Later that year, Zamora sent a message to Mao and Chou En-lai on the anniversary of the Chinese Revolution that Cecil Johnson said was “the epitome of the spirit of total submission to Peking so characteristic of the Latin American Communists of Chinese persuasion after the advent of the Cultural Revolution.”[134]
The Maoists and Ché Guevara
From November 1966 until October 1967, Ernesto Ché Guevara, the Argentine medical doctor and guerrilla commander in Fidel Castro’s revolutionary forces in Cuba, who in the first years of the Castro regime became the principal theoretician of a distinctive “Fidelista” theory of the Communist road to power, led an attempt to organize a guerrilla war in Bolivia. In spite of the Bolivian Maoists’ claim in April 1967 that “the only way to liberate the people is to make revolution by armed struggle,” they played little or no role in Guevara’s attempted “armed truggle.”
There appear to be several reasons for this. One seems to have been that Ché Guevara had certain doubts about Oscar Zamora. According to Inti Peredo, a member of the pro-Soviet party who ultimately joined Ché’s guerrilla force, and sought to continue guerrilla activity after Ché’s death, Guevara had told him about the reason for these doubts.
Zamora had been in Cuba while Ché Guevara was still Castro’s Minister of Industries, and the two men had discussed the possibility of launching a guerrilla campaign in Bolivia. According to Peredo, “Zamora received an offer of valuable aid to develop armed struggle.” This aid included the assignment of a man in whom Ché had confidence, identified only as Ricardo, to help prepare the guerilla foco.
Zamora informed Ché that he was going to return to Bolivia with the intention of splitting the Communist Party, because the party was “incapable of making the revolution.” According to Peredo, “In spite of having people of experience at his side, Zamora preoccupied himself more with dividing the PCB. … rather than dedicating himself honestly to opening a foco. He let pass this historic opportunity, postponing the opening of the foco, and sterilizing the action.”[135]
However, when the guerrilla campaign was being prepared, Regés Debray, the young Frenchman who had worked with Castro and Guevara in Cuba and was apparently one of the advance men in the organization of the Bolivian guerrilla operation, established contact with the Bolivian Maoists. Harry Villegas Tamayo, a Cuban army captain who was in charge of gathering supplies for the guerrilla effort in the months before Ché’s arrival in Bolivia, wrote in his diary that he knew nothing of Debray’s contacts with the Maoists, and said of the Maoists, “1. They have not shown confidence in guerrilla war. 2. They have made no effort to organize, but rather, they see all this and resolve nothing.” Villegas Tamayo went on, “They argued that they were concentrating their efforts on a general uprising and considered the guerrilla war as secondary. We asked them what they had done so far and they said ‘nothing.’ We answered that we would not wait 20 years for them to prepare.”[136]
Another factor explaining the failure of the pro-Chinese Communists to collaborate with Ché Guevara’s guerrilla efforts was the strong opposition of the pro-Soviet party to such collaboration. According to Eliseo Reyes Rodriguez (a Cuban army captain whom Ché labeled “the best man of the guerrillas” (and who was killed in combat in April 1967), when Mario Monje[sic], the proSoviet party Secretary-General, came to the guerrilla headquarters on January 1 1967, one of the conditions he set for collaboration of the pro-Moscow Communists with the guerrillas was that the pro-Peking people not be included in the group.[137]
Inti Peredo added another detail about this meeting of Monje and Ché. It had to do with Moisés Guevara, a member of the proChinese party, who left it to join the guerrillas. According to Peredo, ”Monge opposed this tenaciously, but only gave sectarian reasons about consistency. He categorized Moisés as ‘pro-Chinese.’ That was enough to stigmatize him.” Ché Guevara argued the point with Monje, and in fact Moisés Guevara did join the guerrillas on January 25, 1967.[138]
When, after his death, Ché Guevara’s diaries of his guerrilla campaign were published, Fidel Castro offered “A Necessary Introduction” to the volume. In it he strongly attacked Oscar Zamora, calling him “another Monje who had once promised to work with Ché on the organization of an armed guerrilla fight in Bolivia, and who later withdrew his commitments and cowardly folded his arms when the hour for activation arrived, becoming one of the most poisonous critics in the name of ‘Marxism-Leninism’after Ché’s death.”[139]
Oscar Zamora responded publicly to this attack by Fidel Castro. He addressed Fidel in a document in which he said, “To cover up the truth you launch an infamous calumny that I didn’t fulfill supposed promises. But Ché himself, with revolutionary honesty, had made dear the truth that it was the Monjes, the Kolles and the other revisionists who were the only ones you charged with the task of preparing the guerrilla base.”
The Santiago, Chile, newspaper La Nación, reporting Zamora’s document, said, “Zamora accuses Havana of not having informed the Communists of the Peking line of the presence in Bolivia of ‘Ché,’ while at the same time having an ‘excess of confidence’ in the ‘revisionist’ militants, headed by Monje. He maintains that this dual action led to the near extermination of the guerrillas.”
136
Harry Villegas Tamayo,