COLOMBIAN PEASANTS GRAB LAND

The Italian monarchist party has signed an electoral pact with the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) and will submit a joint slate of candidates at the fortheoming general election on May 7.

The pact was ratified at the monarchists' fifth congress • last weekend at which Almirante, the MSI leader, laid down terms which caused a split in the monarchists' ranks. About a quarter of the party's national committee refused to accept the fascists' terms. regime, headed by Marshal Badoglio who led the Italian army in Abyssinia, was established soon after Sicily fell to the allies in July 1943.

At the time, the local Communist Party leaders opposed the formation of Badoglio's government, which was a blatant attempt to maintain in power the monarchy which had backed Mussolini.

But Stalin had different ideas, and his Italian errand-boy, Palmiro Togliatti, was not slow in putting them into practice. He had foreshadowed the formand Togliatti tank leadina portfolio, the Ministry of justice.

It was from this vantage point in the capitalist state machine that Togliatti not only ensured the continued presence on the statute book of the fascist laws which today. are used against working-class militants, but signed a new Concordat with the Vatican.

MEDDLE This Concordat, which besides giving the Church extraordinary powers to meddle in civil affairs Landless peasants in the Magdalena and Cauca valleys of Colombia in Latin America have launched a big movement to occupy the huge landed estates.

Land occupation has long been a feature of the class struggle in Colombia, where more than 1 million families out of a total population of some 20 million, have no land of their own and are forced to sell their labour to the owners of the big estates.

The occupations have frequently been symbolic because the peasants, armed only with sticks, are easily driven off the land by the landlord's men or by the police.

But symbolic or not, the movement is now taking on a mass character. Recently, the peasants took over 4,500 acres of coffee estate belonging to an absentee landlord. The landlord turned out to be none other than the Minister of Agriculture, Hernan anto camno The government's grandiose plans to ameliorate the misery of the landless poor in the countryside and the unemployed in the towns is nothing more than window-dressing for the continued dictatorship of the big fruit and coffee companies.

The so-called Alliance for Progress, formed by the US government under John Kennedy, involved a 'reform' of Colombian land-holding system. In the ten years since this law was passed, the situation the peasants has worsened considerably.

Agricultural prices are falling rapidly, and there is a world surplus of coffee, one of Colombia's main crops. Many of the dispossessed peasants are forced to migrate illegally across the border into Venezuela, where industry is more developed.

Others have moved to the towns where they join the vast pool of unemployed living in appalling conditions on the margins of the local industries.

The failure of the agrarian reform illustrated by government's own figures. These show that from 1961 to 1971, 40,000 families benefited from the division of 900,000 acres of land.

Most of this consisted of what tion. Thement calls 'colonizaThe peasants have rebaptized the process under the derisory name confinacion (imprisonment).

Others have been established on fallow land bought at inflated prices from the former proprietors.

Much of this process has been organized by the semi-official National Peasants' Association, established as a safety valve for the peasants' discontent. Since June 1970, when President Pastrano Borrera took office, the pace of the so-called reform has slowed down considerably.

It was he who • installed Ocampo, a member of the ruling financial oligarchy, as Minister of Agriculture. Not unnaturally, Ocampo is a vicious opponent of the peasant movement.

The government's latest effort is the 'reform of the agrarian reform', rejected out of hand by the landless peasants and treated with equal hostility by the latifundistas (big landlords) who dominate Colombian agriculture.

The latifundistas, entrenched on their estates, have no intention of abandoning even the most minor of their privileges. The same goes for the urban landlords who threatened by the mild ete consider their DOSTON form which the government has advanced.

They point to the growth land occupations as an indication thep the persis so long as till government offers even the mildest reforms. They want a total clamp-down on the pretensions' of the urhan and rural oppressed.