Bolivia: Coup by MNR’s Labor Henchmen in the COB

Juan Rey

Labor Action, 3rd November, 1952.

Bolivia: Coup by MNR’s Labour Henchmen in the COB

Santiago, October 24th. – [...] The Central Obrera Boliviana [the trade union federation] has now published its Open Letter to President Paz Estenssoro on the mine nationalization issue, calling for nationalization without compensation and under workers’ control and administration. It was a very good letter, written with Socialist spirit, like the document The Ideological Position of the Bolivian Working Class discussed in our last article.

The government was scared by this Open Letter, precisely because of its “Socialist spirit”, and ordered its “labour ministers”, Lechin and Boutron, to attempt a kind of coup d’etat within the Central Obrera. A session of the Central was thereupon organised with a strong turn-out by the Nationalists [who ordinarily do not participate in the sessions]; and at this meeting they revoked and condemned the position on nationalization, which had just been published in La Nacion, the official government organ. They then formed a new commission to draw up an Open Letter to the President, with a Nationalist majority upon it.

Today the press published the new document. It accepts the basic idea of workers’ control and participation in the administration of the mines, but distorts this idea in a vulgar “yellow”, totalitarian, Peronist way.

In the first draft of the Central Obrera, the workers are the masters of the mines, of production and administration; in the new yellow draft, the workers are reduced to watchmen and doorkeepers of the state administration. The bureaucracy is all, the workers are nothing. The new draft was passed by the Nationalist majority which had been mobilised, after an extensive discussion directed against Lechin and Boutron.

None of the workers’ delegates would sign the new Open Letter, and so it was published over the signatures of Lechin and Boutron themselves. The paper published by Lechin and Boutron has been reactionary and disgraceful in its response, defending the government’s position on state capitalist methods and distorting the earlier draft’s views on workers’ control and administration.

Breach Due

The government does not dare to fight the idea of workers’ control, and so it “accepts” the letter of the demand but distorts its spirit and its Socialist content. The conflict between the working class masses and the government is inherent and latent, though not yet entirely open. Some mines have adopted resolutions backing the position of the Left in the Central Obrera.

In this way, the government, with the help of Lechin, has administered a setback to the POR faction in the Central Obrera. But the publication of the draft law on nationalization and its application in the mines must inevitably sharpen the conflict between the mine workers and the new state bureaucracy. Then we can expect an open breach between the two. But the workers are very strong and armed, and the government party is weak and divided.

The issue of the nationalization of the mines contains within itself the problem of the struggle for political power, because the workers and the government understand the whole question in different ways. It also raises the problem of a new insurrection, a purely workers’ insurrection.

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