Joint Statement from the OCI, POR Partido Obrero Revolucionario and the Organizing Committee of the Communists of E Europe (12.10.71)

[p026] hat o happened ‘y Bolivia? IN THIS issue we re-print a report by Guillermo Lora, general secretary of the POR (Revolutionary Workers’ Organization), on events between August 18 and 23 this year leading up to the right-wing military coup by Col. Hugo Banzer. ON AUGUST 18, the awaited and announced coup d’etat by the right wing of the army broke out, having as civilian support the dismem- bered FSB of Mario Gutierrez (one section headed by Riveros who claims to be a leftist) and the MNR, the faithful servant of US imperial- ism in the so-called Lima Pact. The Minister of the Interior Jorge Gallardo Lozada made the official announcement and _ added that a state of emergency had- been declared. (‘El Naci- onal’, La Paz, August 20.) ‘The Revolutionary govern- ment announces that the fascist coup is underway headed by Mario Gutierrez, chief of the Falange Socialista Boliviana and 72 Guillermo Lora minority groups of the right of the MNR. ‘In the face of rightist sub- version, whose coupist scheme has been perfectly detected, a national emergency is declared - and we call together the revolu- tionary and people’s organiza- tions to mobilize around the Revolutionary Government in order to defend the conquests of the Bolivian people and to destroy the fascist revolution. The government is in control of the situation in thé countryside and stands firm on the postulates of October 7, together with the people.’ Previously it was predicted that the putschist gorilismo [the right-wing bourgeois militarists] would initiate countér-revolu- tionary operations in the perip- hery of the country, having as an axis the military troops stationed in the East. In fact, the subver- ,sive movement extended itself rapidly to the divisions of River- alta, Camiri, Bermejo, as far as Tarija. These fire pincers—pow- erful pincers certainly, because part of the army was engaged in it—were pressing and_ closing in on La Paz more and more, not so much in the eyes of the population but on the military hierarchy. The defections of the garrisons counter-’ of Cochabamba and Oruro turned the situation of President Torres into an insustainable one, making it impossible for him to recap- ture Oruro, which was strongly surrounded by the Rangers, of Challapata. - The military insurrection began by raising the flag of a furious anti-communism. This must be understood as_ the _ struggle against the decision of the mass and revolutionary organizations to establish a socialist regime and a government of workers and peasants: against the strengthen- ing of the Popular Assembly as an organ of power of the masses and of the proletariat which realizes the slogan of the worker- peasant government; against the danger to the state that majority working-class participation in COMIBOL would mean and the single university under the direc- tion of the proletariat. Said in another way, gorilismo, when discovering that the accelerated advance of the revolutionary pro- cess posed its immediate crush- ing, saw? itself forced to con- summate a preventive counter- revolutionary coup. MILITARISTS The campaign aimed at justi- fying the coup concentrated on