PERU: prepare organs of workers' power

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Last week the Peruvian military dictatorship, which does not have the political strength to impose its existing anti-working-class programme, signed a deal with the International Monetary Fund which will oblige it to attempt even tougher anti-working class measures.

The IMF's price for baling the generals out of bankruptcy is a huge cut in public spending which would throw about 40,000 government employees out of work.

This move can only provoke another wave of strikes at a time when the government is already being hit by a seemingly irresistible wave qf strikes.

Strike illegal

A month ago, the government was forced to concede most of .the demands (higher wages, reinstatement and union recognition) of 30,000 teachers who had been on strike for two months.

Other public sector employees-including health, railway and shipbuilding workers-are on strike with similar demands.

But the most dangerous of the current strikes for the regime is that of the mineworkers, which began 3 weeks ago in Cerro de Pasco, and continues to spread.

Last week 10,000 miners marched on Lima to support their demands for the reinstatement of 400 workers sacked after last year's general strike.

These included the mineworkers' union leader Victor Cuadros who the government refuses now to recognise.

It has declared i the whole strike illegal, and given an ultimatum for a resumption of work by last week end.

But such threats are empty unless the regime of General Morales Bermudez can back them up with credible threats of repression.

This is no question about the willingness of the regime to take such measures as its record shows only too clearly.

But there is every doubt of its ability to repress a working class and peasantry which every day takes steps to strengthen its organisations and increase its mobilisations.

In this way it has wrung a string of concessions from the crumbling dictatorship.

This is clearly seen in the recent events in the "Constituent Assembly" , which far from being the democratic screen which the regime wanted to create, has become a focus for the political problems of the dictatorship.

• Broad groups At present the A.embly seems to have divided ito three broad groups-the right wing majority headed by the nationalist party APRA, which is trying simultaneously to appear sympathetic to the insistent demands of the masses and protecting the government against serious attack; the centre group consisting of the CP (Unidad) and the right wing of the "radical" generals' Socialist Revolutionary Party; and the left consisting of the two electoral fronts, the FOCEP dominated by parties which claim to be Trotskyists, and the UDP led by Maoists.

Co-ordinated

In spite of the enormous varieties of political positions in these two fronts, they have to some extent coordinated their interventions in the Assembly.' Ten Assembly members representing the FOCEP, the UDP and the left wing of the PSR which claims to have broken with the generals, have presented a resolution to the Assembly.

Blanco This declares the Constituent Assembly the sovereign political body of Peru, saying that it is inconsistent with the continuation of military rule and that it "should assume all the legislative and executive powers of the nation to implement an emergency plan based essentially on:

the full exercise of democratic freedoms;

the reinstatement of sacked workers;

urgent measures to solve the economic crises centred on the non payment of foreign debt;

a general increase in wages;

the free distribution of land to th peasants."

Signatories

Among the signatories of this resolution, which the APRA- dominated Assembly leadership is embarrassedly trying to bury, are Victor Cuadros the mineworkers' leader, Ricardo Narpuri, Magda Benevides and Herman Cuentas of the POMR (Peruvian section of the French OCI's international tendency), and, for the PST (largest of three Peruvian sympathising sections of the USFI), Hugo Blanco and metalworkers' leader Enrique Fernandez.

In the last two issues of Socialist Press, we published an interview with Enrique Fernandez. all his political positions, we think that from this interview some important points emerged.

In the first place it was possible to see that a sizeable section of the Peruvian masses (workers and peasants) now looked to leaders who claimed to be This is probably more true today in Peru than in any other country in the post war period except for Bolivia and Sri Lanka.

And in Peru this occurs when all the objective elements of a pre-revolutionary situation are rapidly developing-the crumbling of the regime, the absence of a stable alternative for the bourgeoisie, a disastrous economic situation with no way out by a capitalist route, and a huge upsurge of the working masses on their own demands.

Correct

Enrique Fernandez stressed in his interview the importance of breaking the allegiance of the important sections of the masses whose political loyalty was still, as they showed in the alections, to the bourgeois naționalists of APRA.

That is correct; and the left resolution presented to the assembly can play a role in exposing the false pretences of the APRA leaders.

At the same time,: such resolutions are necessary to make tactical use of the Assembly against the military dictatorship.

It would be ultra-leftist at a time when organs of workers' power do not yet exist, to refuse to make tactical use of the Constituent Assembly in this way.

But the Constituent Assembly cannot even begin to resolve the political problems of the Peruvian masses-though some of the "left wing" in the Assembly think it can especially the CP).

The test of a working class leadership claiming to be Trotskyist in Peru will be the extent to which they can use their position in the mobilisation of the masses to call for not only the overthrow of the dictatorship, but the replacement of the present fraudulent Constituent Assembly by a democratically elected assembly and at the same time for the building of independent Soviet-type organisations of workers' power which can provide the basis for the complete overturn of capitalist rule in Peru.

That is the struggle which now on the agenda.

Protests have swept through every major town and city, meeting the violent resistance of police and army who have killed dozens of demonstrators in their attempts to restore the everyday order of vicious repression.

Meanwhile, the Shah's government has "officially" stated that opponents of his regime are responsible for a fire in an Iran cinema which killed nearly 400.

This is likely to lead to a further stepping up of repression against the left in Iran.

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