Guatemala Coup-no Reforms in Sight

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The change in the front-men will make no difference to the army's brutality against the people Ing to grips with major world struggles Comi A NEW bulletin containing resolutions on a range of international questions offers militants a chance to assess the politics of the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee.

The TILC, formed in 1979. comprises sections in Britain (WSL), Italy (LOR), Denmark (RAF), and Australia (SF), together with a group of Turkish militants.

A US section, the RWL, is prevented from affiliation by reactionary US legislation. All of these sections have expanded and strengthened quite substantially in the last 18 months.

TILC's strength and contribution to the class strugdtt.... gle lies not in its numerical strength - its sections remain only small in comparison to the tasks they face - but its fight is to develop a coherent programme and perspective for those forces fighting the hetravals of reformist and Stalinist leaderships on a world scale.

The founding document of the TILC - "The Transitional Programme Today's Class Struggle' -is an attempt to take forward the principled and method Sf Trotsky's 1938 Transitional Programme in the light of the experiences and struggles of the postwar period.

The resolutions in the new 'TILC Bulletin' mark Harry Sloan pamphlet fr Internations Committee further development along • these lines, with analysis of the Polish martial law; the current stage of the struggle in Central America; the crisis of Italian capitalist rule; the struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of the apartheid capitalist state in South Africa; and the new situation following the election of Mitterrand in France.

Far from acting as tiny sect, preoccupied only with a few pet notions or feuds with rival Trotskyist groupings, the TILC demonstrates in these resolutions that it sees the primary question as the reviews im the / Liaisol THE RECENTLY overthrown dictatorship of General Lucas Garcia in Guatemala had a human rights record so bad that even Ronald Reagan could not bring himself to support it.

For years the Guatemalan military waged a war against the largely Indian peasantry which amounted to genocide. • Overwhelming evidence of this forced the US government to stop arms supplies to Guatemala. The regime turned instead to Israel for weapons.

Today the Guatemalan ruling elite needs to be bolstered up by US arms if it is to combat the rising popular movement Central America. Cosmetic alterations are needed before the Guatemalan military goes out as defender of the free world' against the red menace.

Whether the recent coup was made in the USA or not, it certainly came with Washington's blessing.

The US government had a long history of military involvement/intervention in Guatemala, as in the rest of Central America. In 1954 it organised the overthrow of material struggle for new leadership in the daily battles of the working class and oppressed masses internationally.

There is no attempt simply to counterpose wooden, facile formulae of "orthodox Trotskyism" to the unfolding struggle of the working class: but neither do the TILC resolutions rest content • with reflecting and registering the struggles already underway.

In Poland, for example, an analysis of the forces driving towards martial law is coupled with insistence that:

''The weakening of the power of the ruling bureaucracy, by a programme of radical reforms, can only be the prelude to the decisive confrontation. In that conflict the proletariat must either be prepared to challenge for power, smash the state machine and replace it with its own organs of class rule which alone can properly defend the nationalised property relations and develop a planned economy or face defeat at the hands of the existing armed forces and repressive apparatus. In this sense Poland is the Chile - of Eastern Europe."

It is from the failure of Solidarnose's leadership to grasp these tasks, and not on any abstret basis, that they criticised.

The resolution "also points out that in the the mildly reformist government of Col. Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz tried to give some uncultivated land belonging to the US-owned United Fruit Company back to the landless Indian peasants. This created pandemonium in US government and business circles.

Like most Central American societies, Guatemala is extremely unequal. In 1978, the top 5% of the population received the 59% of the national income, while the bottom 70% received 7%.

The top group in Guatemala is predominantly Spanish in origin. Originally owning the coffee and fruit estates, this elite has evolved into a symbiotic relationship with US business interests.

The encroachments of the estate owners on communal Indian land led to the growth of the guerilla movement after 1954. There has been military government and guerilla warfare in Guatemala continuously since then, although the guerillas did suffer big defeats in the US-backed 1966-70 counter insurgency campaign.

A key figure in the brutal suppression of the guerillas developing currents inside Solidarnose that were calling for workers' management there were the seeds of a more advanced leadership, which could have been developed in the direction of Trotskyist politics.

Again a concern to relate to the movement can be seen in the way that, while championing the demand widespread within the Polish workers' movement for national self-determination, the resolution makes clear that the TILC itself argues for "an independent socialist Poland.

On Central Americ, the resolution outlines the strategy of imperialism for crushing the struggles of the masses - and the different tactics offered up by the social democrats of the Second International.

It examines the level of mobilisation of the masses in the region before mapping out a political orientation towards the guerrilla and political 'fronts' that have emerged.

This orientation consists in spelling out the obligation of Marxists to fight alongside these formations insofar as they strike blows against imperialism, while preserving political independence from their bourgeois and petty bourgeois leaderships, whose objectives fall for short of completing the necessary socialist revolution.

'The reality is that the bourgeois forces will

at that time was General Rios Montt - described in

Washington as a liberal and a born-again Christian. Now his first actions as Guatemala's new president have been to dissolve Congress and suspend the constitution.

• There are obvious parall els with the 1979 coup in El Salvador, where the right wing dictatorship was repl aced by a would-be reformremain in the fronts only insofar as it is their programme and perspective which predominate and that therefore they remain in the fronts only to strangle the struggle for socialist revolution."

The resolution concludes by stressing the impossibility of resolving the problems of the masses within the confines of the existing balkanised Central American states.

Distinctive also is the resolution on solidarity with the South African working class, which focusses upon the developing strength and independent organisation of the black proletariat.

It is this working class - and not the isolated guerrilla units of the ANC - which holds the key to the overturn of the capitalist class and its apartheid system.

And it is the international working class which has in its grasp the means to bring real solidarity in the form of blacking action, and supporting strikes.

In its assessment of the situation in France, the TILC insists that the essence of Mitterrand's government is that _ for all its dressing. of economic reforms - it is a bourgeois government, even more committed to NATO and to Cold War polities than was Giscard.

The resolution goes on to map out a line of political Lucas Garcia ing military group under president Duarte. The reformers were quickly forced out of that government, and it resumed its genocidal war against the people.

In Guatemala the officers may be young', said one journalist, ' but they aren't reformist' iffiliate to the El Salvador Solidarity Campaign, 29 Islington Park Street, London N1 independence for the French working class in its fight to improve wages and conditions.

Such positions form the bedrock of the polities of the TILC, from which it argues its criticisms of the other, larger, groupings which regard themselves as Trotskyist, and issues an appeal for an Open Conference to discuss the present disarray and political probiems of ' the world Trotskyist movement.

The resolutions are, I understand, shortly to be reprinted in the Workers Socialist League's magazine Workers Socialist Review.

For militants concerned with the fight for an international revolutionary leadership, they make important reading.

A limited • number of copies of the Bulletin are available from the WSL. PO Box 135, London N1 ODD Advertisement Trotskyist International Liaison Committee bulletin, 40p; TILC document «Transitional Programme in Today's Class Struggle, 60p. Add 20p per item for postage: from WSL, PO Box 135, London N1

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