FSLN women's leader confident of success

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Children at a childcare center set up near one of Managua's main markets 16 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 1985 Comandante Doris Tijerino is a commander in Nicaragua's Sandinista Army. She is also the coordinator of the Women's Continental Front Against Intervention (WCFAI), a front that was formed in 1982 to denounce and organize against U.S. imperialist intervention in the hemisphere.

Karen Wald, a North American correspondent in Cuba for the International News Service, interviewed Comandante Tijerino in Havana, Cuba, in June 1985 during the "Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean" called by the WCFAI. (See article on the conference in the September 1985 issue of Socialist Action./ We are reprinting below excerpts from this interview on the current situation in Nicaragua. The translation and abridgment of the interview are by Socialist Action.

Karen Wald: How has U.S. intervention affected the Nicaraguan people, particularly the women?

Doris Tijerino: Let me give you an example. For us women in Nicaragua, it has taken a great deal of effort and sacrifice to build rural childcare centers. Such centers had never existed in the past.

These centers are a place where the peasant women can leave their children for the day—where the children can eat in special dining halls. But they are usuBolivian strike (continued from page 20: “General strike jolts = new Bolivian regime”)

Placers, Philips Brothers, Tennant, and others.

Under Gen. Hugo Banzer, from 1971 to 1978, Bolivia approached the totalitarian ideal of the "national security state."

The workers' and peasants' unions were smashed, and labor organizers and political radicals were killed or exiled.

The population paid with its health and its life. Life expectancy in Bolivia is between 36 years and 56 years, depending on the region. The Indian peasantry, which makes up half the population, had an annual income of $174 in 1980— it has declined since then.

A factory worker today makes about $15 per month. The infant mortality rate is 213 per 1000 live births (compared with 15.7 per 1000 for Sweden or 21.4 per 1000 for the United States). And 70 percent of Bolivia's children suffer from malnutrition. Some 5.7 million of the 6 million Bolivians earn less than $300 per year.

"It was impossible even to demand a living minimum wage after 1971, says Peredo. "It was impossible to make any demands under Banzer. Each strike was the object of severe repression, with jailings, deaths, and deportations."

UDP betrays aspirations

Naturally when the military regime ended, the workers and peasants put great hopes in the UDP government of Siles, which took office in October 1982.

The UDP was a coalition of the left wing of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MRN-I) of Siles, the Bolivian Communist Party (PCB), and the radical Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). But the UDP lacked both a program and a will; it pleased neither the proletariat and the peasantry nor the bankers and the businessmen.

All economic problems multiplied. Inflation reached 14,000 percent. One dollar came to equal 900,000 Bolivian pesos. Bolivia fell $927.9 million in arrears on its foreign debt of $3.6 billion by last June. It had suspended all payments sometime before. Factory ally located out in the countryside far from the major towns and cities.

Frequently bands of Somocistas [exguards of the Somoza dictatorship, currently the large bulk of the contra forces-The Editors] destroy our centers, burning down the buildings and wages fell. Prices rose. Even the peasants' potatoes seemed smaller.

By February 1985, the workers were riled up-if not yet up in arms-and declared a general strike which lasted into March and culminated in huge demonstrations of miners and factory workers in La Paz.

Some leftists think that the workers could have taken power at that time, had there only been a revolutionary party.

The entire left, however, was discredited by the Siles government because the UDP was seen as a left government. All of the parties associated with the government went into crisis and split up, resulting in a big increase in the number and a reduction in the size of the left groups.

As a result, many who had voted for the reformist UDP in October 1982 voted for the fascist ADN in July of the 1985. Gen. Hugo Banzer won a plurality of the votes. In the parliament, however, the left, center, and even some conservative parties united to elect Paz president.

The failure of the UDP was a disaster and it will take some time to undo it. It Juan Lechin, leader of the Bolivian Workers Federation (COB). killing our children.

Life is very difficult for us. Still, this has not deterred the Nicaraguan women from continuing this work and becoming incorporated into the revolutionary process.

If U.S. imperialism thinks it can terrequires a real re-thinking of the reformist politics which have dominated the labor left in Bolivia since the revolution of 1952.

One of those who is going through that re-thinking process is Emil Balcazar, a 38-year-old miner in the country's biggest mine, Siglo Veinte.

Balcazar originally came from Santa Cruz in the tropics, but moved to the highlands, the altiplano, looking for work. He beçame a miner in 1968 and shortly thereafter joined the Communist Party.

He was jailed twice by Banzer's government-once by mistake-and once in 1976 for helping to organize a general "The immediate cause strike against the military occupation of the mines. He spent two years in prison and was tortured.

When Banzer fell, Balcazar got out of prison, and, as a Communist Party member, worked for the election of the Siles UDP. He was elected to parliament as a Communist.

But when the Communists didn't push for power through the UDP, Balcazar left parliament and returned to the mines. He then helped Ramiro Barrenechea, the former leader of the Jota, the Bolivian Communist Party Youth, organize a split in the party.

Balcazar, and others in his party, the PCB-Barrenechea, have rejected the reformist UDP, but they still have , not rejected the method of alliances between capitalist and workers parties in government: the popular front.

He believes it was correct for the PCB to join the UDP. But they should have transformed the democratic process into a revolutionary process,, he says. He still believes the workers' parties could have dominated such a coalition.

"We are convinced" he says, "that left could have been hegemonic in mission, it is thoroughly mistaken. On the contrary, all it is doing is deepening the people's determination to fight the Somocista bands, to join the militias, and to increase production to meet the needs of the family and the needs of national defense.

We in Nicaragua do not like having to divert our resources to the war effort but we are compelled to do so. It would be irresponsible-even criminal—on our part if we were to allow a return to the past.

The past meant 50,000 deaths for our people. To those we must add 8000 more who have died fighting the contras—a total of 58,000 deaths to defend our just cause.

A return to the past would mean forgetting what we learned during the literacy crusade. It would mean forgetting about the possibilities of building childcare centers, which there are still too few of.

It would mean a return to the days when polio killed our children. During the past four years not one child has died of polio. Polio has been eradicated. To return to those days would be criminal.

Frankly, we Nicaraguans would prefer to die-every single one of us—on the battlefield, or in a direct confrontation with imperialism, in the event of an invasion, than to allow a return to the past.

Yes, the Somicista bands do bother us and place obstacles in our path. But these bands would be meaningless— they would have been wiped out long ago-if it weren't for the support they receive from the U.S. government. | the UDP, but the problem is that the leaders disarmed and demobilized the masses, and the Communist Party leaders were responsible."

Balcazar and his comrades have moved to the left, but it isn't clear that they will be able to break with the reformist strategy or the deeper Stalinist politics of the PCB.

They may become a centrist party with a revolutionary rhetoric which only serves to obscure the need for a revolutionary strategy.

Possibilities and dangers

Attempting to win the PCB-Barrenechea faction and the left-wing MIRMasas faction to another strategy is the Trotskyist POR-U, the Unified Revolutionary Workers Party [the Bolivian section of the Fourth International— The Editors].

Antonio Moreno, a leader of the POR-U says:

'We are looking for a realignment or regroupment of all the forces of the left which came out of the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and the MIR.

"We have to put the left back together again and get back the political authority of the left within the mass movement.

«We should be able to carry out a great campaign to unify not only these parties, but also all of the exploited classes under the leadership of a new party."

The Trotskyists of POR-U want a regroupment of the revolutionary left into a new revolutionary party. They see the Sandinistas of Nicaragua and the FDR-FMLN of EI Salvador as their models.

It's an optimistic strategy with possibilities and also with dangers. The PORU is a small group and the other left parties are mostly nationalist and Stalinist parties which have by no means completely re-examined and come to grips with their problematic histories.

The danger is that the POR-U will be disoriented by the larger centrist groupings. The possibility is that the Trotskyists in POR-U will be able to give a revolutionary direction to a mass

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The U.S. war against Nicaragua esca-

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of the crisis is Paz's austerity program."