Vol. 71/No. 46      December 10, 2007

In the excerpt below, Saldaña describes how he joined the Bolivian Communist Party in 1950 and went to work in the country’s largest tin mine to recruit other miners to the party. Saldaña and other revolutionaries left the CP in 1966, when the party leadership, under the direction of its general secretary, Mario Monje, refused to support the guerrilla effort led by Guevara. Saldaña led the ELN’s underground network in the cities and tin mining regions, which supplied the guerrilla fighters and recruited more youth, miners, and others to their ranks.

Following the death in combat of Guevara and most of the other ELN fighters in October 1967, Saldaña continued his revolutionary activity. He died in Havana in 2000. Copyright ©2001 Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

Question: Tell us something about your personal history. How did you become involved in political activity?

Saldaña: Well, my first political struggles began when I entered high school. I was always on the side of the revolutionary forces.

Question: What year was this?

Saldaña: In 1947 I began high school in the city of Sucre. In 1946 there was a popular insurrection against the government of [Gualberto] Villarroel. Villarroel was hanged from a lamppost in La Paz, together with one of his followers… .

In 1950 the Communist Party was formed primarily by young people who had been members of the PIR [Party of the Revolutionary Left]… . I participated in some actions, strikes that ended in confrontations, in massacres. That was when I began my political life, in the CP. This was in 1950. I was practically a founding member… .

Then I became a member of the Communist Party’s organization commission, and in that commission we began to consider what to do, how to organize the party. We decided that the most important thing was to organize the party among the proletariat. But we had to consider what sectors of the proletariat were the most important, and where in the countryside we should devote special attention.

That was how we decided we had to begin in the mines. We identified the most important mines in the country at the time: the Siglo XX, which had around 6,000 workers, the largest mine on the continent at that time; Potosí; and Pulacayo.

At first we did what had always been done. A leader would travel, meet with some people who belonged to the party or wanted to belong to the party, a cell would be formed, the comrade who had attended the first meeting would leave, and then nothing would happen after that. And once again we would have the same situation.

So three comrades went to these three mines to stay there about a month, find the people, meet with them, and organize the party.

But we reached the conclusion this wasn’t enough. We would go, assuming we could hit all three, hold a bunch of meetings with people we had met with many times, explain the situation, and then once again the thing would evaporate. The only way to guarantee that the party would be organized for real was for us, the three of us, to enter the mines. That was how I became a miner at Siglo XX.

We also determined that we had to go inside the mines themselves, not remain outside in other sections, but to go into the very center of the mine. And so I became a miner.

The section I entered, which was made up of young men, was the specimen section. These are miners who go around in groups taking samples from the unmined locations and bringing them to the laboratory to determine what quantity of mineral the specimen contains. This was a mobile group. One day they would work here, the next day there, and the following day somewhere else. It was an ideal situation to make contact with a lot of people.

At first the specimen section had around 200 workers. Eventually the majority of the miners there became members of the party; they formed their cell and held meetings. That was where we recruited Rosendo García Maismán [the leader of the mine workers’ federation at Siglo XX].

So now the party existed. Then we pointed out the party had to expand within the mine, and we said that people should transfer to different sections of the mine. But people did not want to move. In order to have the others do so, I had to set the example, and I went to the most difficult section, Block Caving.

There the amount of space was very small, and there was a lot of dust. A lot of dynamite was used, there were many explosions. In short, the work was very tough, very difficult. There are people who get silicosis after three months. Their lungs are destroyed. That’s where I went.

García Maismán went to one section. And the same with the other comrades, who transferred to different sections. Then the party encompassed much more. It wasn’t just the specimen section, but we had party groups in other sections.  
 
 
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