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This sounds like a near unprecedented development in Latin America. I don't know of any other country there where the traditional army has come under the kind of popular pressure that would lead it to make such a declaration. I am not sure that even the Venezuelan army has done so. Of course, in Cuba and Nicaragua, the traditional armies were defeated and abolished and the replacing armies did at points make such declarations. (This did not happen during the regime of Gen. Torres in Bolivia in 1971, though Torres himself signed socialist declarations. Of course, on this list someone is bound to raise the example of Chiang Kai-shek signing up with the Comintern in 1926, but he did not do so as head of the army but as head of the Kuomintang, the traditional bourgeois-revolutionary party, and neither the army, the party or Chiang were required to declare for socialism to do so.) The Morales regime has had conflicts with sections of the army, which supported the separatist landlords and capitalist in the eastern part of the country. And the Bolivian revolution is in part the product of a mass uprising that defeated the military. At the same time, I know that the MAS and the broader stratum of pro-revolution activists in Bolivia have been pretty systematically participating in and propagandizing the army from the bottom up for some years now. One tell-tale sign will be how the US government and military respond to this development. At a certain point, for instance, the US government clearly decided that the Venezuelan army was no longer viable for their purposes (although I am sure they still do subversive work there as elsewhere). I very much doubt that we are at the end of the line as far as conflicts between sections of the army command-officer caste and the revolution. And I doubt that the Bolivian worker and peasant militias will be laying down their arms. But this is nonetheless a tribute -- regardless of any likely reluctance and two-faced pledges by the high command, which I cannot definitively judge from here -- the breadth and strength of the Bolivian process. And it is an extremely flimsy basis for unbridled attacks on the current leadership of the process in Bolivia. Fred Feldman ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
