New Coup Pending in Bolva?

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Bolivia appears to be on the edge of yet another coup.

Last week, ex-dictator General Hugo Banzer (19718) finally broke openly with the crisis-ridden and thoroughly discredited regime of General Luis Garcia Meza.

For his pains Banzer was promptly placed under home arrest while his understudy Colonel Alberto Natusch was also locked up.

Natusch and Banzer stand at the head of a growing moverent within the military apparatus to remove Garcia who is now backed by the country's cocaine traffickers and virtually nobody else.

Although Natusch was wheeled out on Iv to "deny" both his planned coup and his arrest, it is no secret that a number ol conspiracies are aioot. tnal Garcia's days are numbered and that both Banzer and Natusch are working closely with the US State Department.

They are proposing a "civilian-military" regime to reorganise the dictatorship, provide the conditions for re-establishing diplomatic relations with the United States, opening channels with the IMF, and re-negotiating Bolivia's crippling $3.8 billion foreign debt.

Several days before the "arrests" two US Colonels arrived in Buenos Aires, to inform the Argentine high command -Garcia's principal supporters-that a new coup was being planned, that it was "theirs" and the Argenines should stay out of things.

failure The cause of these complex and apparently contradictory developments lies in the abject failure of the Garcia regime to provide stable rule.

This is not because it has desisted from wholesale repression-it has unleashed an unparalleled campaign not only against the workers and peasants but also against liberalism and all its institutions-but because it has been totally incapable of organising inter-capitalist relations of production, basing its strategy on the boom in the cocaine market.

Cut off from all possibility of credit because of US non-recognition, the bulk of the capitalist class-both the managers of the nationalised industry (70% of the economy) and traditional the neo-colonial comprador 'lame ducks'-are on the verge of bankruptcy.

They are now agitating for a "realignment" of the dictatorship, not because they want democratic freedoms, but because they need credit.

Banzer is the ideal person to put this programme through-nobody can doubt his dictatorial credentials nor his links with Wall Street and the Pentagon. Equally he is now, as a result of these links, prepared "to come in through the door... having previously entered by the window" (his bloody coup of August 1971).

The imperialists hope that the experience of the last nine months will have stifled an appreciable sector of the masses behind Banzer's slogan of "Peace, Order, Work" so that he can La pol against the challenge of the aged rightist popular ideologue Victor Paz Estenssoro and the social democrat Hernan Siles Suazo (UDP).

Won elections

The UDP, readers may remember, won the elections last June. It contains the radical petty bourgeois group, the MIR, and the pro-Moscow CP. Without any doubt, having thrown in its lot completely with the US, the UDP will back any coup that promises a new poll and the futile prospect of formal bourgeois democracy in this backward state.

The limited potential for 'democracy' in Bolivia under capitalism can be assessed from the fact that over the last three years the effort to establish a stable, elected government resulted in seven presidents, three elections, three successful coups and a dozen that failed, not to mention an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions.

For the working class and the peasantry the electoral road is a cul de-sac paved by bourgeois liberalism and reformism and blocked by the military.

While it may temporarily allow some freedoms (freedoms that are essential to the strengthening of the labour movement and the revolutionary party), it has absolutely no chance ot survival in the long run.

It is the task of Trotskyists to spell out this truth time and time again whilst. at the same time fighting for the political independence of the working class challenged incessantly by reformism and dictatorship.

Current developments, though from a liberal view progrèssive', • are from a revolutionary perspective simply a change of tactics within the enemy's campsomething Banzer or Natusch, or : whichever General, will not be slow to demonstrate in practice.