Vol. 78/No. 29      August 11, 2014

QUESTION: Many who disagree with the revolutionary perspectives Che Guevara fought for argue that he and his fellow combatants were mistaken in going to Bolivia in 1966. Can you give us some background on the class struggle in Bolivia that shaped this decision?

SALDAÑA: The Bolivian people have a long history of struggle. There have been moments of really violent confrontations between the people and the repressive forces, though the two sides were not equal. More than once in the history of the country there have been true popular insurrections that toppled governments. There have also been massacres of miners, peasants, factory workers, and other working people in the cities, mainly La Paz.

Perhaps the defining moment of popular struggle was 1952. At that time a military junta ruled the country. As head of the police force, the minister of the interior conspired and launched a coup, but popular participation began changing the character of events, giving rise to a popular insurrection. For several days there were armed confrontations in the streets of La Paz, Oruro, and other cities, and the popular forces came out on top.

That’s how the revolutionary process of April 1952 began, with the fall of the military junta that was governing the country and the rise of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR). Wherever there was a confrontation, the popular masses defeated the military forces. For all intents and purposes, in those cities where there were confrontations the army came apart. …

QUESTION: Did the miners have their own militias?

SALDAÑA: Right after 1952 there were workers and peasants militias, which were armed. But over the years, in various ways, they were disarmed. If workers militias still existed, it was more or less in name only. But some workers, both in the cities and in the mining areas, kept their weapons. In the first years, after 1952, the peasants also purchased weapons, but little by little these were taken away.

At the end of October 1964, after the events of Sora Sora, there was a massive wave of arrests in La Paz of workers and students. …

René Barrientos, general of the Bolivian air force and vice president of the republic at that time, organized a coup d’état on November 4, 1964. President Víctor Paz Estenssoro, the MNR leader who in 1952 had decreed the nationalization of the mines, the agrarian reform, and universal suffrage, was deposed. In the course of the coup there were armed confrontations with workers and others, in the streets of La Paz, for example. And there were even popular confrontations with the army itself, although the army adopted the stance that it was placing itself on the side of the people in carrying out the coup.

On November 4, 1964, workers seized a series of places, including the Panóptico jail in downtown La Paz. All the political prisoners there were set free, many of whom had been arrested at the end of October. There were also union leaders who had been in jail for months. All these people went out into the streets. …

After November 4, Barrientos opened things up a little. The especially repressive measures against the workers were lifted. The workers’ radio stations were permitted to resume. The union locals were reopened. But Barrientos soon faced growing working-class resistance to the dictatorial measures of his regime.

In May 1965 the government decreed a lowering of wages in the mines and ordered a massive wave of arrests of workers leaders. They were immediately deported, sending large numbers into exile in Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay. They were taken as far as possible from the Bolivian border — to the south of Argentina, to the south of Chile. Soon, little by little, they began to return to the country secretly.

In October 1965, the same year as the large-scale arrests, there were massive strikes by workers demanding freedom of their union leaders and the restoration of wage levels. The political movement was again heating up. There were armed confrontations in the main cities and mining centers.

In October, once again armed confrontations took place, and the military occupied the Central-Southern Council, a series of mines located in the south of the Department of Potosí, an area in which nothing had ever happened, that is, there had been no violent confrontations. The workers occupied other mines, too. So these armed confrontations in the cities themselves presented a new situation to us, to revolutionaries in Bolivia.

This was more or less the situation in the country at that time. We can thus answer the question of whether or not Bolivia was fertile ground for initiating the kind of revolutionary struggle Che envisioned.

QUESTION: What do you think?

SALDAÑA: I believe it was. The conditions existed. There was repression; there were aspirations of the population that had not been satisfied and urgently required a solution; and the people could not fulfill their aspirations in the existing situation. There were solid reasons for the people to fight, to struggle, and they were increasingly doing so, but without results.

I also want to recall here the situation in Latin America as a whole. This was taking place in Bolivia in particular. But the same situation was being repeated, to different degrees, with its own characteristics, in the rest of Latin America.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home