Paraguay: pawn of the

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Paraguay. Power Game, price £1.50 The recen Latin American Bureau publication Paraguay Power Game ought to promote some vigorous interest in a country whose ruling elite has held sway undisturbed for far too long.

A readable handbook, it is full of useful information including a concise history describing the pattern of acute economic deformation common to all backward countries.

Throttled

Socialist Press readers will be all too familiar with the Trotskyist analysis that shows how imperialist interference has throttled the development of capitalism almost from its conception in such countries and consequently also prevented the formation of . an independant national capitalist class capable of laying the economic, political and social bais for bourgeois democracy.

These positions must be measured against the concrete development of particular countries if they are not to become mere cliches for us.

Paraguay Power Game, whatever its other faults or merits, can be highly recommended as a set piece, a five finger: exercise for such measurement.

Paraguay's first two national leaders, Dr de Francia who ruled for nearly 30 years from the foundation of the Republic in 1812 and his sucessor President Carlos Lopes (1842-65); pursued progressive policies of extensive state control over its economic resources, welcoming foreign technical expertise without private investment, and leading the country to become one of Latin America's leading trading nations.

Well organised state farms and a policy of renting land for unlimited periods to peasant squatters boosted agricultural production beyond the point of self sufficiency to the export of timber, cotton, tobacco and fruit.

Schools

Railway lines were laid and an iron foundry established, all paid for by public money from profitable state enterprises and foreign trade earnings.

Free and obligatory primary schools were set up in a country which boasts a high level of illiteracy over 100 years later.

These policies were viewed as detrimental to the interests of the ruling cliques in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro and their European capitalist masters.

Matters came to a head when the Blanco Party in Uruguay was overthrown with the help of Brazilian intervention and culminated with the signing of the Treaty of the Triple Alliance by Brazil, Argentina and the new Uruguayan Colorado regime in Uruguay-with the political and financial backing of the powerful British government.

The Alliance aimed to take control of the Paraguayan economy away from the state and. annex strategically important areas of its territory.

Five years of fighting reduced the population from 5000,000 to 250,000 destroyed the economy and saw a quarter of its land lost for ever.

Dependenće

Paraguay was thus reduced to its proper place in the imperialist schema of things, to a state of corrupt and impoverished dependence in which it has since remained.

The economy was denationalised and saddled with a huge foreign debt for loans which vanished into the pockets of the new elite who handed over as collateral the customs, revenues, public lands, railways and all public buildings.

State-owned land was sold off to Argentine and British capitalists at give-away prices while the traitors who had sided with the Triple Alliance squabbled amongst themselves in their Liberal and Colorado parties over the pickings to be gained from foreign economic domination.

There followed a long period of occasional coups, countercoups and bursts of organised discontent-while far away a new imperialist star was born.

The Chaco war with Bolivia (1932-5) came to a conclusion satisfactory to Standard Oil interests in the area, unsurprisingly negotiated by the US Ambassador to the Peace Conference.

By now the Colorado Party was gradually gaining the ascendancy, consolidated by. its victory over the combined LIAISON COMMITTEE DISCUSSIOI BULLETIN No. 2 Articles on Nicaragua, Parity Commission and TILC Declaration Price 40p plus 15p p&p from WSL, BM Box 5277, London WCIV 6XX forces of the Liberals, "Febreristas" (bourgeois nationalists seeking a return to the "golden age" before the Triple Alliance debacle) and the Communists.

A certain Alfredo Stroessner was steadily scrambling his way to becoming the undisputed leader of the pack by a military coup on May 4 1954.

He is now the longest surviving head of state in the world.

In present day Paraguay the extent smugeling officially organised susoind constant flow of cheap goods One was in the lavatory; another couldn't operate the electronic voting machine; and one arrived a few minutes too late from a trip to Hong Kong.

And so, to general astonishment, and by a single vote. Italy's fortieth post-war government fell.

The astonishment resulted from the fact that the secret parliamentary vote which brought down Francesco Cossiga's centre-left government on its important series of austerity economic measures had been preceded a few moments earlier by a public vote of confidence which it had comfortably won.

Absentees

So it was not the three absentees (the incontinent, the incompetent and the unpunctual) which did the damage but the 30 or so nominal supporters who voted in favour of the government in public then against it in secret.

No-one has admitted to being in the 30 and virtually all tendencies of the Christian Democrats and Socialists are accusing the others of being the PO Box 134, London NW1 4JY. which has effectively aborted any remaining hope of developing an industrial infrastructure. Unequal land distribution has produced an agricultural system so criminally inefficient that only 2.2% of land is under cultivation, leaving the most fortunate peasants to scratch a meagre living from tiny "minifundio" plots, and to widespread emigration.

By 1979 a quarter of the population was living elsewhere, maily swelling the villa miserias' in Argentina. traitors.

But it was not the 30 "traitors" nor even the hundreds of Communist MPs who form the bulk of the opposition who brought down the government, but rather the millions of Ítalian workers whose patience with inflation and the growth of unemployment is coming to an end.

With its desperate need to solve the problems of low profitability, Italian capitalism now once again lacks even the excuse for a government represented by the Cossiga cabinet.

The government crisis immediately led the Fiat management to retreat from an expected confrontation with its workers by delaying 14,000 proposed forced redundancies.

But Fiat's crisis is so deep that the 14,000 permanent redundancies were replaced by 24,000 immediate "temporary» 3-month lay offs.

But far from calming the explosive situation in the class struggle, Fiat's action has provoked the immediate pros pect of a major general strike throughout Italy.

The anger of the working class has forced the CP leadership to intensify its opposition stand in particular by moving For the capitalists, life is not half so grim. Paraguay has undergone a period of rapid economic growth over recent years with the building of the Itaipu dam together with Brazil and the massive development of the eastern border region.

There has been increasing penetration by transnational corporations attracted by cheap labour and extremely favourable conditions and a huge influx of Brazilian capital, labour and military control in that region.

However, as the booklet points out:

"For the Paraguyan peasants in the eastern border region, the Brazilian invasion and the consequent boom in agricultural production has meant only land evictions and increased repres sion"

According to the authors, Stroessner's repression has effectively quelled opposition from the base with the exception of the peasant "ligas ágrarias supported by a section of the Catholic church.

This may well be true, but an analysis of the labour movement beyond the list at the front of the book would have been useful.

The book is essentially 'human rights' orientated, and Berlinguer out of the purely parliamentary arena in order to maintain some kind of control of the mass movement.

Party General Secretary Enrico Berlinguer said of the struggle over the Fiat redundancies:

"If the negotiations fail, we will need to think of harder forms of struggle including occupation".

At the same time Berlinguer has called on the Socialist Party to form a joint opposition to the Christian Democrats and even to form a joint government.

This is a new development though it does not seem to imply a basic change in strategy. Berlinguer's words are rather an attempt to shock the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party into allowing the CP into a broad class enllaborationist there is a well documented liturgy of Stroessner perpetuated • abominations, ably supported by his ex-Nazi cohorts locally and his friends in South Africa and elsewhere.

The book's failure lies in that it is entirely reformist and social democratic in character, welcoming signs of a broad based opposition to the regime and stating that "change within the Colorado party itself is a crucial determinant of progressive political change in Paraguay"

Whereas it is true that splits in the ruling class are critical to the dislocation and overthrow of the regime, the crucial determinant for real political change can only lie with the revolutionary organisation of workers and peasants on class lines, not tailing a weak grouplet of malcontent bourgeois reformists, Not only do such reformists seek their own ends, fundamentally in contradiction to those of the oppressed, but they are historically incapable of carrying them through.

Both options are clearly far from imminent: but a look at Paraguay's neighbours alone should be proof enough of the impossibility of transforming dependent countries into stable bourgeois democracies. coalition.

But Socialist Party Secretary Craxi's purge of left wingers from the SP leadership, and the appointment of Christian Democratic President Forlani as Premier-designate make the admission of the CP to government as improbable as ever.

Berlinguer of course is much too experienced a Stalinist bureaucrat to leave himself no escape from his present left positions.

He still says the CP must be either in government or it will be in opposition.

But the let-out is that he says that the opposition can be more or less strong depending on what policy the government pursues.

Already he says the CP is prepared to support new emergency economic austerity measures to replace those which had to be dropped when the Cossiga government fell, nearly provoking a major run on the lira-only averted for now. by raising interest rates to emergency levels.

But no-one expects Forlani to be able quickly to form a government. And a general strike threatens.

There can be no doubt that in these circumstances more and more sections of the Italian bourgeoisie will be searching for something better than the increasingly unstable parliamentary system.

It was a Christian Democratic MP who commented when Cossiga fell that "Turkey is not far away"

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