Zamora then asked Fidel, “Why don’t you explain, if only for the experience, what caused the breaking of contact with Ché and Manila? You have the duty to tell the people the truth and the truth is that Manila also failed in the guerrilla logistics, and that Manila is the leadership of the Cuban Communist Party.”[140]
Ex post facto, the Bolivian Maoists criticized the Guevara guerrilla effort, implicitly and explicitly, indicating what they thought had been its weaknesses. In January 1968, Liberación, the organ of the PCB (ML) carried an article entitled “Mao Tse-tung’s Thought and Armed Struggle in Our Country.” It argued that all revolutionaries should follow Mao’s dictate that “the revolutionary war is a war of the masses; it can be waged only by mobilizing the masses and relying on them.” It added that revolutionaries should always obey the “Marxist-Leninist law,” according to which “they can never ignore the masses and try to substitute for them.”[141]
In mid-1969, the PCB (M-L) issued a document that in passing criticized Ché Guevaras’ guerrilla effort. It stated, “The principal error of the guerrilla force was that it neglected the role of the Peasants, failed to win their support and did not carry out intensive political work among them.”[142]
Further History of the Pro-Peking Party
Although the Bolivian Maoist party clearly had no participation as such in Ché Guevara’s guerrilla operation in 1966—1967, there were several reports in subsequent years of efforts of the PCB (ML) to organize guerrilla warfare. In July 1968, the Chilean Conservative Party newspaper El Diario Ilustrado carried a UPI dispatch reporting that Maoist elements, principally students, had organized a guerrilla group in the Chapere region of Cochabamba Department.[143] About two years later, Oscar Zamora, who in January 1970 had claimed that “imperialism” and “its Bolivian lackeys” could be defeated only through “armed struggle,” was reported to be leading about 100 Maoist guerrillas in a region of Santa Cruz Department, and another guerrilla force of Maoists was operating in the Chapare region under leadership of Roberto Sánchez, head of the Juventud Comunista Boliviana, the Maoist youth movement.[144] However, none of the Maoist guerrillas reached the seriousness or engaged the government’s attention to the extent that Ché and the Cubans did.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Bolivia was governed by a series of military dictatorships. General Barrientos died in early 1969, and later that year power was seized by General Alfredo Ovando, who proclaimed a nationalist program, that included expropriating the property of the Gulf Oil Company in Bolivia. Ovando lasted less than a year and was succeeded by General Juan José Torres, who allied himself to a greater or lesser degree with the organized labor movement and various left-wing parties. Under Torres there was organized the Popular Assembly, vaguely patterned after the 1917 soviets, in which organized labor, peasant organizations, and Communist, Trotskyist, and other leftist parties were represented.
Torres was overthrown in August 1971 by General Hugo Banzer. He was backed at first by the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement and the ultraconservative Falange Socialista Boliviana, but the Banzer regime soon evolved into a simple military dictatorship. Banzer stayed in power until 1978. He was followed by seven presidents in five years.
The Maoists strongly opposed virtually all of the governments during this period. We have noted the hostility of the Barrientos government to the PCB (M-L). When, early in 1969, Barrientos declared a state of siege, the PCB (M-L) issued a statement: “We must not fear that the enemy concentrates his hatred against the Communist Party because that proves that we are marching on the correct road to revolution. The difficulties are temporary. We are capable of overcoming them through revolutionary activities, and, under the guidance of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tse-tung thought, we shall unite the whole people and march ahead.”[145]
It was under Ovando that the PCB (M-L) was reported seeking to organize guerrilla war. Zamora attacked the Ovando government as “progressive and reformist in appearance” but “reactionary and pro-imperialist in content,” and “directed by the Pentagon.”[146]
The PCB (M-L) did not support the Torres government either. However, the party apparently did not continue guerrilla efforts under Torres, and it was one of the parties represented in the Popular Assembly.[147]
The Maoists were also opposed to the Banzer dictatorship. William E. Ratliff wrote in 1973, “According to Oscar Zamora, the Banzer government is a puppet of the U.S. imperialists and the Brazilian gorillas, and hence the Bolivian people must struggle against both the puppet government and the imperialists. The mining proletariat is considered the ‘revolutionary vanguard of the Bolivian people and peasants struggles, particularly in northern Santa Cruz Province, were said to be of great significance.” The PCB (M-L) continued to argue that “only the armed action of the masses, based on the correct political and ideological unity of the revolutionary forces, can put an end to fascism and liberate the Bolivian people.”[148]
As late as May 1978, by which time Banzer had called elections for his successor, a statement of the party’s Central Committee, published in the Catholic daily Presencia, was arguing that “The military-fascist dictatorship imposed on the Bolivian people through the August 1971 coup represents the interests of imperialism and of the local reactionaries. The PCML has maintained and continues to maintain a total, complete and militant opposition to the dictatorship. Even the slightest conciliation cannot exist.”[149]
In spite of their official opposition to the Banzer regime, when I was in Bolivia in 1975, I found that this it was not unrelenting. Faced with a military dictatorship, which at that point there was no hope of overthrowing, and wishing to defend whatever influence they had in organized labor, the Maoists had certain contacts with the regime. I was informed that where the proMoscow Communists maintained relations with the Ministry of Labor, the pro-Maoists maintained contact with the Ministry of Interior.[150]
After the overthrow of Banzer there were elections in 1978, 1979, and 1980, as a result of the military overthrowing successive presidents.[151] During this period, the Maoists began to participate in electoral politics for the first time. The party’s Central Committee announced, that “The Popular forces must participate in the electoral process with their own independent objectives: to combat and unmask the electoral fraud as the dictatorship’s instrument for institutionalizing continuism; to unite all the popular, democratic and revolutionary forces… and to organize and prepare the people in order to stimulate the struggle against fascism and imperialism for national liberation and socialism.”[152]
In the 1978 election, the PCB (M-L) was part of the Revolutionary Front of the Left, together with labor leader Juan Lechín’s Revolutionary Party of the Nationalist Left and several other groups. In an election manifesto, the PCB (M-L) said that in the contest it was “guided in its actions by Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung thought” as well as by “the Leninist principles of democratic centralism, collective leadership, and criticism and selfcriticism rule the party’s life.”[153]
144
145
147
For information on the Popular Assembly, see Robert J. Alexander,
148
William E. Ratliff, in
150
Interview with U.S. Embassy political officer who must remain anonymous, La Paz, July 21, 1975.
151
For information on these changes of regime, see Robert J. Alexander,
153
Robert J. Alexander, in