[Last week's overthrow of the dictatorship of General…]

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Last week's overthrow of the dictatorship of General Romero by a group of colonels is the first concrete result of the instability in Central America caused by the overthrow of Somoza and the establishment of the FSLN regime in Nicaragua.

The state department has been working overtime in El Salvador in an attempt to forestall civil war and the threat of a popular government coming to power.

"Liberation' At first State Department characters such as Viron Vaky and William Bowdler tried to persuade Romero to announce early elections and a degree of liberalisation'; but when he backed away from this and failed to curtail the murderous activities of the death squads, the imperialists had no choice but to stage a coup with the reformist' wing of the military.

Washington had denied any complicity in the coup, but its efficient planning and the almost total absence of opposition from the right bear all the hallmarks of a CIA operation.

However, the degree to which the imperialists are forced to go in their attempt to outflank the leftist popular organisations indicates their increasing weakness in this region.

In addition to declaring an amnesty, 'restoration of all human rights', a new land reform and modification of 'the old fashioned socio economic structure' the military junta has announced that will strengthen links with Nicaragua and establish diplomatic relations with 'all peoples and governments'-by implication including Cuba and the workers' states. Vance has pronounced himself thoroughly satisfied with such statements.

Unsurprisingly, there has been no indication of this rhetoric being implemented. A long curfew is in force, some left wingers have been arrested, meetings of more than three people are outlawed and political activity is effectively proscribed.

Fighting

Moreover troops have been used to dislodge workers from the factories they have occupied and dozens of people have been killed in fighting around and in the capital of San Salvador.

Even the reformist bourgeoisie and the influential liberal clergy have held back from full support for the new regime whilst groups of guerrillas have come into the streets, organised the building of barricades, MEXICO BELIZE EL SALVADOR Pacific Ocean 0 MILES distributed some arms and called for a full-scale insurrection.

There is no question of the junta succeeding in providing left cover for Washington.

The coup is clearly a last ditch manoeuvre and reveals the total crisis of the bourgeoisie and imperialists.

Vacuous

The promise of elections is totally vacuous and most unlikely to appease a significant sector of the masses. Popular resistance and the fighting are liable to increase and the question of power become ever more acute.

In many respects it is not surprising that it is in E1 Salvador that the war in Nicaragua has brought about political crisis most rapidly.

This tiny country is by far the most overpopulated in the region (233 people per square mile compared with 18 in Nicaragua) and boasts one of the most compact and ultramontane oligarchies in the world.

For many years the famous fourteen families' • exercised almost total control over the economy based on cotton, coffee, and indigo and although industrialisation has increased significantly in the last two decades the core capitalist class can be numbered in terms of 200 families and property is still remarkably concentrated.&.

According to recent censuses six families own 72,000 hectares of land while 305,000 peasant families farm 43,000 hectares, generally on the i basis of very insecure tenure.

In 1971 90% Caribbean Sea Managua COSTA RICA El Salvador covered less than ten hectares and together they accounted for less than 25% of cultivable land.

The calorie intake in the rural areas has actually dropped over the last ten years to two-thirds the level considered necessary to sustain an active life; unemployment is officially put at 45%. but in reality underemployment is almost total and a peasant can expect to work on average no more than 141 days in the year.

Ine lana question is vital, for despite the fact that El Salvador is the most industrialised state in Central America, coffee and cotton account for over 50% of export earnings and provide employment for the bulk of the labour force.

Romero It was the crash in the coffee market as a result of the depression that drove the peasantry to revolt in 1932.

In à movement headed by the Communist Party land and crops were seized in a desperate communal effort to avoid starvation.

But the leadershp of the movement had been infiltrated and the army moved in quickly to slaughter more than 20,000 people in an orgy of violence that has never been erased from popular memory.

Proscribed

From that day to this union organisation in the countryside has been proscribed.

This massive setback for the peasantry along with the lack of organisation in the small proletariat enabled the army to rule for nearly 30 years through a political system based on coups while the landed oligarchy held sway over the economy.

However, by the 1960s the Alliance for Progress and the formation of the Central American common market had accelerated industrialisation and increased the strength of the working class which now numbers 500,000.

This process also created a new sector within the bourgeoisie, too weak to challenge the landed sector, but of sufficient resource to back the US initiative for an 'electoral' political system and establish Christian and Social Democratic parties-the PDC and MNR.

Nevertheless, it was necessary for the military to retain power, and a system of fraud was established that kept the ruling PNC party in power from 1961 until now.

The cost of even a sham electoral process is popular mobilisation every four years and structural destabilisation.

In 1972 the fraud was SO extensive that the opposition candidate, Napoleon Duarte of the PDC, tried a coup with the assistance of some of those officers who last week toppled Romero.

Transparent

in 1977 when Romero, tormerly the minister of defence, was brought to power, the rigging of the poll was sufficiently transparent to cause the imperialist powers to dither before blessing him with recognition since this was manifestly a regime that was from its first day the enemy of the vast majority of the population.

Romero heralded a marked shift to the right and imposed a system of repression that must be considered among the most harsh in Latin America.

The army and police were supported by 'unofficial' terrorist squads such as the ORDEN and the White Warriors' Union which operated mainly in the countryside and killed hundreds of militants.

To itemise the attrition would be an endless task.

It hit all sectors; radical priests were frequently executed, the Jesuit order expelled for 'subversion' and encouraging communism' members of the middle class denounced by their colleagues and shot, dozens of students were killed in the army occupation of the campus in 1975 and, above all, trade unionists, peasants and leftists were spirited away in their scores to be tortured and assassinated.

Only a few days ago almost the entire national leadership of the newly united peasant union -the FTC-were taken out and shot on the edge of the Panamerican highway.

The opposition to Romero was organised in three broad groups which will now play a central role in the political arena and no doubt undergo shifts in composition and direction as the class struggle develops.

First, there is the reformist sector of the bourgeoisie, grouped around the PDC and MNR (which is backed by the Second 'socialist' International).

No popular base Whilst the MNR has no popular base to speak of, the PDC for a time controlled the strongest of the peasant organisations and still retains an appreciable following.

These two parties fought the 1972 and 1977 elections together as the National Opposition Union (UNO) which also contained the electoral front of the CP-the Nationalist Democratic Union (UDN) formed in 1969.

The Stalinist organisation in El Salvador is possibly the strongest in Central America outside of Mexico: Its entire orientation is clearly towards the forging of a popular front.

The CP paper Voz Popular' speaks of developing the forces of production (ie. capitalism) before taking power and the party's Seventh Congress in May dedicated itself almost exclusively to distinguishing between bourgeois democracy and fascism with scarcely. a reference to class struggle.

There is no question of the alliance with the bourgeoisie being in any sense a temporary tactical manoeuvie; it is now ten years old and its continuance is engraved in the political logic of Moreover, it will not be many days before its total bankruptcy will be revealed in the streets-where political matters are not discussed but shot out.

There are two popular political organisations in El Salvador which have a substantial base in the masses.

The Front for United Popular Action FAPU) is the smaller, more heterogeneous and more opportunist.

FAPU agreed to participate in 'popular discussions with the bourgeoisie. It considers land occupations as "provocative' calls for simply a democratic' government and sees the principal struggle as being against the fascists and military which, significantly, it identifies as parallel to rather than cosubstantial with the state.

FAPU's strength is mainly in the towns, and although it has the support of sectors of the working class, it lacks consoli dated organisation in the factories and several of its affiliated unions are no more than phantoms.

The leadership of FAPU is largely middle class and has strong connections with the FARN guerrilla group which earlier this year kidnapped the two British managers of Lloyds Bank.

In reality FAPU and FARN are simply two wings of the same organisation, but unlike the Nicaraguan case-where the guerrilla gave birth to the party' -in El Salvador the political and military organisations of resistance have been developed together, and objectively there is less chance of guerrillaism becoming the dominant form of opposition.

The Bloque Popular Revolucionario (BPR) was founded in mid-1975 around seven union that quit FAPU. These includer the largest peasant organisation -FECČAS-and the only legal entity in the alliance, the teachers union ANDES.

The Bloque is the principal focus of opposition in El Salvador the the most immediate parallel the Prolonged People's War faction of the FSLN, whose military strategy and pseudo-Marxist terminology is shared by the Bloque.

The Bloqúe categorises El Salvador as a backward capitalist state. It also defines the CP as opportunist and revisionist-but on the basis that the CP denies the possibility of the masses taking rather than because has actually allied itself with the bourgeoisie.

'Revolutionary pole' The question of power is a central element in the Bloque's politics and it considers itself as the revolutionary pole' of the masses and a workers and peasants revolutionary front.' In practice the Bloque is without a consistent programme and its activity is based on radical populism.

The guerrilla wing of the BPR is the FPL (Popular Liberation Forces) which has been increasingly active in recent months.

But however ill-defined and broad-based it may be, the Bloque is an organisation that already comprises tens of thousands and must inevitably develop a strategy that includes these forces rather than fall back on guerrillaism.

If the Salvadorean masses have maintained a remarkable resistance to the dictatorship and responded to the militancy of their comrades in Nicaragua, they are without a Marxist party and programme.

Organisations such as the Bloque that derive their strength from the spontaneous activity of the masses are incapable of carrying the assault on imperialism beyond militant persuit of reforms which, without the smashing of the capitalist state and expropriation of imperialist holdings is no assault at all.

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Poge 7 same time the figures published clearly show that