Central America in turmoil

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Struggles in Central America, the Caribbean and northern South America are continuing to cause the imperialists grave concern. The State Department grandly announced a week ago that US military advisers had toured barracks in El Salvador to forestall a right-wing coup against the present junta-which has failed either to check the independent actions of the army or to implement its agrarian reform and nationalisation of the banks.

Military aid

• The imperialists are beginning to pump economic and military aid into the weakling reformist' junta but it will be of little avail.

The level of political violence in El Salvador has actually worsened since the overthrow of dictator Romero last October. Since then over 500 pepole have been killed and many more 'disappeared'.

The three major guerrilla groups-National Resistance, (NR), the Popular Liberațion Forces (FPL) and the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP)have now agreed on a strategic and tactical alliance with the Communist Party, but lack the means for an all-out assault on state power.

The army, meanwhile, is pushing for a total pogrom in the manner of its 1932 slaughter of 30,000 peasants. by left wingers in San Salvador Pinochet's declaration of 11 September 1973 is broadcast from radio stations controlled by the ruling clique, and the level of class violence has reached such a point that, according to the Panamanian regime, the US government is now discussing with Central American states the possibilities of reversing its policy and backing the right wing of the military as the only way left to avoid a much repetition feared of Nicaragua.

These fears must have increased with the news that in Guatemala in the last two weeks there have been strikes in over 60 sugar plantations and a stream of worker-peasant demonstrations.

This upheaval • is despite increased repression in which twenty people have died and over a hundred been wounded, causing Costa Rica to withdraw its ambassador and further weaken support for the regime.

The dictatorship has also suffered the loss of Col Jose Fernandez, a leading figure in its repressive operations, who was executed by the Guerrilla Army of the Poor.

There has also been a renewed spate of land occupations by cotton workers led by the ORPA (Organisation of the People in Arms) guerrillas.

Honduras has also been hit by this tide of rising militancy. A week ago the army was forced to occupy the major industrial city of San Pedro Sula following riots in protest at petrol price rises.

GUATEMALA HONDURAS -temala COSTAR Miles Kme And the growing organisa- the island. tional strength of the peasant Gèn. Policarpo Paz and setting up a 'reformist' alternative.

Somoza lobby, the Carter administration has been faced with two less acute but no less symptomatic problems.

The first was the calling of elections by Michael Manley. This follows his inability to implement the IMF stabilisation plan in Jamaica without unleashing class violence of a type last seen in the 1938 riots and seriously jeopardising the already weak imperialist hold on Manley's challenge to / the Second was the military coup in Surinam (once Dutch NCOs. • The political content of the coup is not yet clear, but the disturbance in this 'secure backwater' has worried the mandarins of Washington-not least because it promises to fuel the destabilisation of the regime of Forbes Burnham in neighbouring Guyana.

There the challenge of the workers, particularly in the haarita ned a10ao Arantaina vauxie anu sugar muustries, has been contained only by deployment of troops and increasing repression.