Guatemalan peasants desperate struggle

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The occupation of the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City a fortnight ago, which resulted in the killing of 40 people by the police, , was an act of sheer desperation, The peasants who took over the building came from the northern province of Quiche which has been particularly badly hit by the repression of the dictatorship of Gen. Lucas Garcia in recent years.

Quiche is in an area known 'as the Northern Transverse Strip (NTS) which has been given a special free trade status by the military in order to lure in oil 'and mineral companies and pump capital into the ailing Capitalists operating in the NTS pay very low taxes, receive special concessions and have virtual carte blanche to do what they will with the local population, for which troops have been placed at their disposal.

Thus, such companies as Sir James: Goldsmith's Basic Resources, registered in Luxemburg, plough through villages and forcibly buy lands at rock bottom prices in order to lay pipe lines.

Where there is army is sent in.

In 1978 over a hundred peasants were staughtered in the : town of Panzos, in Alta Verapaz, after refusing to yieid their lands.

Reports from San Miguel de Uspantan, in Quiche, give details of a score of peasant leaders being held in a dry well by the army.

Northern Guatemala is suffering, all the violence inherent in untempered imperialist expansion. i The cost to the workers and peasants has been extraordinar-, ily high: between eight and ten bodies are discovered daily; over 20,000 died at the hands of the military between 1966 and 1976 and more than 20,000 were killed in the 18 months up to the end of 1979.

The level of class violence has been more constant than in any other region of Latin America.

Corruption

After years: of corruption and expropriation the military has become a major sector of the capitalist class in its own right and has responded, to fluctuations in the relations of production-both between capital and labour and between rival sections of capital in competition-in the only way it knows-coercion.

Hence the 'reformist' sector of the bourgeoisie has suffered physical and political attacks to the degree that it no longer operates as a coherent force, leaving the State Department little choice for an alternative to the present crowd. of butchers.

Guatemala is crucially important to the imperialists. It is the only real defence against the tide of insurgency in Central America.

The Guatemalan bourgeoisie has long been the hegemonic force in the area and the army is the only one capable of resisting a mass uprising.

' In 1972 the Guatemalans intervened in El Salvador to suppress a Christian Democratic coup; and in 1978 they went to the aid of Somoza, salvaging the National Guard from defeat in the first phase of the civil war.

Now they are the only real guarantors for the weak and disorientated Honduran dictatorship of Gen. Policarpo Paz, and Guatemalan troops are known to be massing inside Honduras and on the northern frontier of El Salvador to invade should the Salvadorean masses launch a full-scale rebellion.

In Guatemala itself opposition to the dictatorship has been growing appreciably.

The two main union federations (comprising over 160 industrial unions and 150 peasant organisations) have formed the Democratic Front against Repression (DFR), the programme of which is simply to defend basic bourgeois democratic rights.

In view of the failure of any bourgeois reformist party to survive the repression the DFR has taken on an almost unsought political importance and will clearly play an impor: tant role in the now familiar popular frontist alliances springing up in Central America.

In the countryside the increasingly militant Committee for Peasant Unity (CUC) is drawing substantial support through its call for harvest-time strikes and its tacit backing for the guerrillas.

The leading guerrilla force is the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) which has undertaken over seventy occupations of villages and several well-publicised kidnappings of . leading political figures, as well as the execution of the general commanding the death squads.

The EGP is now conducting combined operations with two other groups-the Revolutionary Organisation of the People in Arms (OPRA) and the Armed Forces of Rebellion (FAR) which find support from dissident sectors of the Christian Democrats and Stalinists.

Guatemala is perhaps excep tional in Central America in the preponderance of: the peasant masses, which are increasingly determining the form of the Backward force Compared even with the peasantry of Handuras the Guatemalan rural masses have long been an extremely backward force, characterised by their attachment to feudal forms of production and political passivity.

Now, as they become mobilised and challenge the dictatorship they must be won to a behind the proletariat or they will become mere cannon-