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Moreover, the company ad been declaring absurdly iw tax returns on its land 1d it was on these figures lat the regime assessed the nount of compensation ue.

Imperialism had not een subjected to such an front since the nationalisaon of U.S. oil firms in lexico and Bolivia in the te 30s.

The response was swift. 'ithin two years the CIA rganised an invasion on the 'ounds of 'communist" filtration and influence in le Arbenz government.

Upped and left

Arbenz, rather than iake an anti-imperialist and as demanded by the lasses, upped and left.

The PGT responded to le defeat by adopting a blicy of 'national ¡conciliation' under the ew right-wing dictatorship.

Despite the loss of all leir conquests the masses ontinued to resist. The rample of Cuba was stremely important and by le early 60s the PGT was bliged to follow the petty surgeois opposition in itting up guerrilla bands.

A succession of military gimes has been able to ipe out the rural guerrilla treat but it has also needed ¡ set up 'unofficial' death juads going by such names 'Ojo por Ojo' (an eye tor i eye) and the "The Secret nti-Communist Army' to rrorize the workers and asants.

These groups now institute a state within the ate and have begun to turn eir attention towards embers of the frightened rurgeoisie.

100% increase Such was the confiince of the regime that at le end of last September ie Mayor of Guatemala ity announced a measure lat no government in the st thirty years had dared authorize: a 100% crease in urban bus fares.

This was a particularly snificant move because ansport costs take up at ast 15% of the urban orkers' wage and an erage of three people om each family use the The unions, manifest agitate economi demands played a ing the The buses every day.

Furthermore, the real increase was much greater since the bus routes, which are privately operated, were altered so that a number of trips were necessary to get from the working class suburbs to the industrial area.

The workers replied immediately. There were a series of mass demonstrations and whole families turned out in the streets of the ghettos to engage in running battles with the police. At least 500 people were arrested.

A general strike was called-and over 60% of the urban workforce responded. This is particularly impressive since the two organisations that made the call-the National Council for Trade Union Unity (CNUS) and the Council of State Employees' Organisations (CETE) are less than five years old.

The basic demands were for reinstatement for all fired as a result of union activity, the release of all those arrested, and the return to the old bus services.

The regime was obliged to re-establish the old system but had to pay the private companies a subsidy of 50 million as the price for this move.

inexperience the however, was in their failure to over the basic and political that had also major part in bringmasses on to the rate of inflation and the right. • of assembly and organisation are key concerns to the workers and slogans on these issues were as much in evidence as those protesting about the fare increases.

This weakness was exploited by the military who quickly set about assassinating union leaders and instituted general repression. In the last week of April alone over eighty people were killed by the This is not gratuitous Armoured cars in Guatamala City violence. It is class violence exercised with one simple aim in mind: to stamp out the insurrectionary movement of the masses.

The regime is quite clear about its objectives the means it has to use. It is far more worried by the events in the rest of Central America than by Carter's bleatings over 'human rights'.

The most immediate threat to the Guatemalan regime is the collapse of its brother in El Salvador.

The oligarchy in this small, vastly over-populated state (it has a population density of 505.2 per square mile compared with an average of 93.7 for Central America as a whole) is smaller and more consolidated than anywhere else in the region.

The fourteen families that control the bulk of the nation's wealth have diversified their interests and prefer to reside in Miami or Switzerland than stay at home to witness the methods used by their military lackeys to guarantee optimum return on investment.

Six of these families own 72,000 hectares of land between them while 305,000 peasant families farm a total of 42,000 hectares in lots that are too small for subsistence.

The sheer desperation of the peasantry broke into open rebellion in 1932 when the crash of the coffee market led to famine throughout the countryside.

Land was seized and crops taken to avoid starvation, eighty or SO farmers and foremen being killed in the process.

The army was sent in and spent two weeks killing as many peasants as it could lay its hands on.

The final death-toll was over 20,000 and may have been closer to 30,000.

For over forty years El Salvador has been ready to explode. It was in sober recognition of this fact that in 1961 the army stopped indulging in internal coups and adopted a system of electoral fraud which has kept a string of gruesome and witless generals in power.

The cost of this "democracy' is popular mobilisation and political violence every four years.

So great was the fraud in 1977 that even the imperialist powers themselves dithered before granting recognition.

The current crisis is a direct result of the popular movement initiated by the last election.

This mobilisation has deepened and extended on an unprecedented scale because of the ability of the unions to maintain their organisation in the face of the predictable onslaught of the military and its private death squads-"Orden" (Order) and 'The White Warriors"

The state has been unable to stop the work of the two major peasant unions-FECASS of the Christian Democrats, and the more leftist Unjon of Rural Workers (UTC).

FECASS is controlled the People's Revolutionary Bloc (BRP), which is a reformist organisation and presently in a dominant position inside the opposition United. Front for Popular Action (FAPU).

The armed wing of the BRP is the FPL (Popular Liberation Force) which is responsible for much of the guerrilla activity in San Salvador.

There are two smaller guerrilla groups-the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) and the Armed Forces of National Revolution (FARN)-which have mainly concentrated on kidnappings and bombings. These groups appear to be to the left of the BRP.

The BRP has grown rapidly since 1975 when it became perfectly obvious that it could never come to power through legal means.

It is, nevertheless, far from a united polițical party and while it may receive the blessings of the Archbishop of San Salvador it is heavily reliant on radical student cadres.

Students play an important role in the anti-imperialist struggle throughout Latin America and EI Salvador is no exception.

The authorities have long recognised this and the university has been under military occupation for over seven years now.

The important conquest of university autonomy and the right of the students to elect lecturers and their faculty colleagues, and in 1975 dozens of students were killed after an occupation.

The western bourgeois press has concentrated on the reaction of the youth in the setting up of the guerrillas. No reader of the Guardian can have overlooked the coverage of the fate of the two local managers of Lloyds Bank International, one of the leading institutions of imperialist capital in Central America.

How many column inches are given over to revealing the plight of those who are regularly shot down in demonstrations or in agitating for conditions of work that would have been rejected by British workers a hundred years ago? How often are we told of the more residual but no less devastating violence of superexploitation and starvation?

Let us take a normal 'work situation' in the 'La Constancia' factory in San Salvador.

This tactory, one of the more advanced in the country, manufactures unnutritious soft-drinks of the type peddled throughout the sub-continent. Last year its profits were $12 millions.

Occupation

Hours of work are organised . entirely to meet production . schedules so that the night shift leaves the plant at 2 a.m. When workers asked for transport at the end of the shift the bosses refused even to contemplate discussions.

Clearly there was no alternative but direct action. At the end of April a hundred workers occupied the plant and threatened to blow it and themselves up unless the management would negotiate.

The army arrived before the capitalists, who were relieved to hear that this was now a matter of public order and that they could go home.

The occupation lasted four days before troops stormed the factory, killed eight people, wounded twenty and arrested everyone. 'Such events occur weekly in El Salvador. A pre-revolutionary situation exists and civil war is close at hand.

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professors were lost, left- wing academics were shot, often at the instigation of