SOUTHERN JEW! Socialist Pres pamphlet Southern A POR Letter
Socialist Press1981 1981-05-28Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 2 →
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We have received a letter from Guillermo Lora, leader of the Bolivian Workers Revolutionary Party (POR).
Lora is protesting at the action of the French OCInow a leading element in the newly-launched Fourth International (International Committee)-in destroying POR literature valued at an estimated 20,000 Francs (£2,000).
The literature had been lodged at the OCI offices in Paris during the time that the POR was affiliated to the OCI's "International", , the OCRFI. Since the two organisations split in early 1979 there have been repeated efforts to retrieve the material. It is now clear that it has been destroyed.
While we disagree with too readily branding political opponents as willing or unwilling 'police agents' " we feel that the POR's complaint should be investigated.
Lora writes:
"I denounce before the international working class and the revolutionary movement the fact: that the French OCI-now proclaiming itself the Fourth International-has destroyed a large amount of valuable political literature and propaganda which the POR had left in its offices in Paris.
Surely this was their response to the criticisms that we Trotskyists have made of reactionary ideas and Stalinist methods.
in Bolivia the police persecute our publications and destroy our stocks of propaganda, in the same way as the OCI has done.
In fact it appears that there is a united front between these two repressive organisations against a revolutionary movement that works within the Bolivian masses under very hard conditions of clandestinity.
I myself and the POR are prepared to take our case to any revolutionary tribunal formed of organisations that claim to be Trotskyist or of the working class, to prove that the supposedly revolutionary organisation called the OCI is using police-like methods in the political struggle-like the confiscation and massive destruction of their opponents' propaganda.
Guillermo Lora General Secretary, POR A NUMBER of leading members of the Czech opposition group "Charter 77" have been arrested.
Among them are former foreign minister in the Dubcek government Jiri Hajek.
The edginess of the bureaucracies all over Eastern Europe is plain. They all fear developments such as Poland. The Charter 77 oppositionists must be defended by the whole labour movement.