No solution to Bolivian crisis

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The political crisis in according to the new President Walter Guevara Arze.

Guevara was 'elected' to the presidency by the new Congress after a stalemate between the two leading candidates-Hernan Siles Suazo of the UDP and Victor Paż: Estenssoro of the MNR-Historico.

Neither had an absolute majority, but Siles claimed that he had been fraudulently deprived of 53,000 votes and began to mobilise his supporters for strikes and blockades to demand his inauguration.

This drew fears of a rightist coup and after several days of bickering and dealing Congress came to order and hurriedly appointed Guevara to take office for a year until fresh elections_can be held.

Clearly the crisis is far. from over-it shows every sign of becoming permanent.

Guevara's record is even worse than that of Paz and Siles. He was the leading figure of the right wing of the MR even before the 1952 Revolution. • He was also the major instigator of attacks-political and physical-on the working class resistance to the 1956 Stabilisation Plan that heralded the reimposition of fuli imperialist control in Bolivia.

So great was Guevara's derision for even Siles' form of populism that he split from the MNR at the end of the 1950s to form the Partido Revolucionario Autentica (PRA) which actively aided the fall of the MR and the establishment of the bloody Barrientos dictatorship in 1964.

Now Guevara has announced an 'apolitical' cabinet that excludes members of the UDP and the MR-Historico.

Unpopular

•The new Minister of Economy is the very far from apoliticat Guido Hinojosa, former president of the Banco de La Paz, who now plans to introduce wage controls, tax increases, devaluation and rise in domestic fuel prices at the behest of the IMF.

These moves are so unpopular, that the two previous regimes have gone to considerable lengths to avoid imposing them, despite the fact that they were fully supported by the army.

Drastic remedies

Guevara and Hinojosa presumably believe that by allowing the Senate to press charges against former dictator Banzer (for delivering militants up to Pinochet for summary execution) they will buy off trouble.

Nobody could argue with the charges against Banzer, except that they could be extended to 99% of the High Command, not to mention the MNR.

But the charges will do nothing to alleviate the crisis of the Bolivian economy and bourgeois political apparatus.

With elections once more on the horizon, with dozens of ambitious and disgruntled politicos out of work, with revenues from tin and oil falling disastrously and the working class awakened, angry and increasingly prepared to take action, Guevara and his lackeys will be required to take drastic remedies.

These remedies will have to be administered to the most militant working class in South America, a working class that over the last three decades has sought decisive politica leadership for the establishment of socialism in Bolivia.

It is therefore critical that Trotskyists, who alone can provide such a lead, fight alt nationalist and popular frontist deviations to build a mass party based rigorously on class independence, the Transitional Programme and the call for a workers' government.

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Bolivia after last month's elections has been 'resolved'