Bolvia Junta Deep in Debt

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After more than ten weeks in power, General Garcia's grossly misnamed 'Government of National Reconstruction' remains in crisis.

The junta continues to face resolute internal opposition so that: even sections of the military are beginning to distance themselves from the regime which is still treated as a pariah in the bourgeois chancelleries of the world.

Even the dictatorships of the Southern Cone of Latin America have muted their praise of the junta and are now throwing their energies into organising a political readjustment of the dictatorship that will enable the USA to grant it recognition and free the IMF and the banks to renegotiate Bolivia's massive foreign debt.

Bankrupt

Bolivia is bankrupt. Her external debt is $3.1 billion (72% of export earnings) of which $1.6 billion must be repaid to the banks before the end of the year.

Credits to private banks have now been suspended, the state smelting company ENAF is unable to pay contractors for tin, COMIBOL (the state mining corporation) alone is due to pay debts of $50 million by the end of the year yet it has virtually no cash-and 1980 tin production will be the lowest since 1965.

Within ten days of the coup the price of bread in La Paz had risen by 750% and widespread speculation and hoarding forced the generals to declare a price freeze to avoid bread riots and strikes in the civil service and the army. Yet the $100 million in cash the junta received from the leading cocaine traffickers has Back unemployment and tina.

tion-it was used to pay bonuses to the troops to guarantee their loyalty. Similarly, Videla's offer of $200 million, free wheat and generous terms for the purchase of Bolivian gas is of marginal importance and has, in any case, been partially withdrawn.

The junta is desperate to avoid a devaluation of the peso and further unemployment because this will certainly destroy the tenuous support it enjoys from sections of the national bourgeoisie and leave it isolated in the face of massive popular opposition.

At first the army and the bourgeoisie rallied around the Garcia clique in fear of the alternative: but the fissures in this unity are becoming daily more apparent.

Cocaine Local capitalists were unhappy about the junta's decision, to leave the Andean Pact, and their representatives forced Garcia to reverse this while supporters of the former dictator, General Banzer, have succeeded in "playing down' the cocaine connections of the regime and have obliged the junta to allow them to take charge of negotiations with the IMF and the US.

The extent of Banzer's bid for power is still unclear; but What 1s beyond doubt is that it would mean continued bloody dictatorship, more efficiently administered and more clear sighted in its alliance with the imperialist power.

The IMF's terms for renegotiation of the debt are a political 'clean-up' (i.e. no more talk of legalising the cocaine trade), a major devaluation of the peso, and the sacking of at least 10,000 state employees.

However, this attack on the working class will not be effected, even by a unified military offensive, without massive opposition-for while the working class has suffered a major setback it is by no means decisively defeated.

Although the strike in the major mining areas effectively ended in the last weeks of August, go-slows, sabotage, non-cooperation and union reorganisation have continued and tin production remains extremely low.

'Drastic sanctions'

Military commanders in the mining camps have regularly threatened workers with 'drastic sanctions' for this "treason"

but even with the physical destruction of the headquarters of.

the COB (Bolivian TUC), the hundreds of deaths, estimated 2,000 wounded and 2,500 political prisoners, not to mention the thousands of exiles and those in hiding, the Bolivian proletariat is able and prepared to consolidate in retreat.

However, this process is not the same thing as learning the political lessons of the coup, and there remains the overwhelming danger that the forces of the working class will be drawn behind the reformism of the anti-dictatorial section of the bourgeoisie in alliance with the Communist Party and the petty bourgeois radicals of the MIR.

Siles, the leader of the bourgeois UDP and President of the "clandestine government' has now left Bolivia for Washington to lobby the State Department, and the call for the overthrow off the dictatorship is treated by international solidarity campaigns as identical with the consolidation of bourgeois democracy.

It was precisely the inability of bourgeois democracy to rule Bolivia that led to the coup-a fact consistently and uniquely proclaimed by the Trotskyist POR (as shown in its material reproduced in SP 215).

Revolutionary Marxists must intervene in the campaign for solidarity with Bolivian workers and work for blacking action and the defeat of the dictatorship: but they must fight consistently against the spurious "democracy' touted by Siles.

Instead we demand a workers' and peasants' government, which is the only means by which democratic rights will be achieved and the imperialist stranglehold broken in Bolivia.

HELMUT SCHMIDT, the re-elected West German Chancellor, greeted the election results with the judgement that "the coalition could be very pleased with them"

In fact this was a carefully worded comment because it was his bourgeois partners in the ruling coalition, the "Liberal"

Free Democrats (FDP) who gained most seats, extending the government's majority to over 40 in the Bundestag.

But former Christian Democrat (CDU) voters turned away from the ultra-right Cold War policies of Franz-Joseph Strauss, the Bavarian Prime Minister.

In an almost exclusively twocornered fight the fringe parties -including both Communists and neo-Nazis-polled less than in previous elections whilst the new factor in West German politics, the Ecological Party;

(Greens) gained 2% of the vote.

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Wednesday

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