An interview with a leader of the Brazilian rubber workers

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10 SOCIALISTACTION AUGUST 1992 A leader of the Brazilian rubber workers' union, to which the martyred defender of the rain forest, Chico Mendes, belonged, spoke in San Francisco at a number of events in late. July. On July 25-26, José da Silva Pereira, known as Zé Peruano, secretary general of the Brazileia Rural Workers' Union, spoke at the Conference on Independent Political Action, sponsored by the Labor Party Forum, where reporters for Socialist Action met him. Hayden Perry asked him the following questions.

Socialist Action: It seemed that Chico was left all alone, that his death came inexorably, like a Greek tragedy. It seemed as if the ranchers could kill anyone they chose.

De Silva Pereira: The reason that Chico seemed isolated was that the process of the workers' taking control of their union was a long one. We started with an opposition caucus in 1982. In Chico's time, only one local union was in the hands of the workers—his. But after 1990, we managed to unite, and we now control the bulk of the trade-union movement in the Amazon region.

We worked to build both the PT [Workers' Party] and the union movement in the area. For some time, the PT has controlled the government of the state, Acre.

SA: What is the relationship of the rubber tappers' union to the Brazilian trade-union movement?

DSP: The union that Chico Mendes led, which today has 3330 members, is affiliated to the CUT [Central Unica dos Trabalhadores, the federation associated with the Workers' Party (PT).] SA: What is the relation of the tappers' union to the Indians?

DSP: We have to admit that our relations with the Indians today are not the best. But we have made a big step forward. Before, the problem was that the whites persecuted the Indiansthey massacred them.

However, we came to realize that both the rubber tappers and the Indians were being attacked and manipulated by the landowners. So, now we discuss our problems, and relations are improving. We stand together against the repression.

SA: Has the union been able improve the workers' conditions?

... Yugoslavia (continued from page 1: “Who's responsible for the 'hell' in Yugoslavia?”)

the British business magazine The Economist, was an important factor in a major defeat for the Bosnian and Croat forces fighting in the key Posavina area in norther Bosnia.

The British magazine pointed out that for the Croatian government "cutting Serb lines from Serbia to Serb strongholds in northern Bosnia and eastern Croatia was a crucial objective." The military stakes for Croatia in the fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina have typically been ignored by the capitalist press, which has been trying present Croatia as equally guilty of aggression.

A simple look at the map will show that the tides of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina will be decisive in determining whether Croatia will be able to avoid being cut to pieces by Serbian forces.

The virtually untrained and unequipped Bosniak militias are still far from a match for the Serbian aggressors. In this situation, the retreat of the Croatian forces in Posavina (in northern Bosnia), under threat of Western sanctions, resulted in a disaster for the Bosniaks, who fled en masse in front of Serbian forces intent on "ethnically purifying" the area.

History of alliances

It should be noted also that there is a long history of alliances between the Croats and Bosniaks. The Serbs, who were in direct confrontation with Turkey before World War I, were more anti-Muslim. The violent ethnic conflicts in the pre-World War I and interwar period were between Serbs and Bosniaks.

It is clear now that the Muslim Bosniaks are a distinct nationality, and along with the Albanians, the most oppressed of the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. Whether the Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs DSP: In general, the organized workers are doing better. But in some cases, the plantation owners are trying to drive the tappers off the land. There has been a campaign to raise money in the United States for their defense.

SA: What effect has support from environmentalists had?

DSP: Pressure from environmentalists has helped to get the government to set up strategic reserves. There was some help to set up a rubber tappers' cooperative. But in general the campaigns of the environmentalists have been on the level of propaganda. They have not offered much concrete help.

The Amazonian region is vast, and a who live in Bosnia-Herzegovina could be considered part of the Bosniak nationality was still being debated in Yugoslavia before the present war.

It now seems indisputable that a section of the Croat population in Bosnia-Herzegovina and a smaller section of the Serbs have given primary loyalty to the new Bosnian state.

Nonetheless, given this complicated history of nation formation, it would not be surprising if Croat leaders remained dubious about the strength of Bosniak national consciousness. Moreover, the Common Market condition for recognizing Bosnian independence was local self-government (cantons") for the various peoples of the state.

Whether the Bosniaks are recognized as a nation will depend on their ability to mobilize to defeat the Serb aggression. But it is in the interests of the Croats that they do, and thus become a strong ally against Serb expansionism. In the absence of that, Croatia's holding on to strategic areas in the region would be a poor compensation.

The Serbian "ethnic purification" campaigns are not a new phenomenon. The interwar Yugoslav state mounted concerted campaigns to force Muslims to emigrate to Turkey and to Serbianize various areas.

Under the German-Italian occupation during the Second World War, right-wing nationalist movements among all the nationalities, with encouragement from the occupiers, committed atrocities against national minorities living on the same territories.

Tito's partisans managed to emerge as the dominant force largely because they pledged to meet the aspirations of the various nationalities and at the same time convinced them of the need to unite against the fascist occupiers.

Stalinists abandon promises In order win the confidence of the peoples, the Communist Party had to change its line on the national question. It had pregreat deal of aid would be necessary to show much impact.

SA: Is the World Bank continuing its project of supporting infrastructural works to bring in settlers?

DSP: Yes. But the local people are resisting. Besides, I don't think that there is much future for these projects. The Amazonian land is not really fertile. When it is cleared, it produces only for a year, and after that it is barren. The government is bringing in settlers, but it is not offering them any facilities.

SA: Have the cattle ranches been more successful?

DSP: Cattle are not really profitable in the Amazonian region. What is profitable viously denied that the Yugoslav peoples represented different nations, referring to them as "tribes." During the fight against the fascist occupiers, however it pledged to recognize their national aspirations, including those of the Albanians.

After the Communist Party gained power, however, these promises were quickly abandoned. A bureaucratic dictatorship standing above the nations sowed the seeds of the present conflict, as it manipulated these peoples to maintain its power. The Croatian national movement of 1971 was crushed by Stalinist methods. The Croatian party was purged, and leaders charged with "nationalist deviations" were jailed, including the current president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman.

An "antinationalist" propaganda and intimidation campaign was whipped up. And then, in 1974, a constitution was adopted that offered from above all sorts of concessions to the national aspirations of various peoples, from the Bosniaks to the Kosovo Albanians.

The appetizers given to the Albanians in the Kosovo region of Serbia led, after frustration set in, to an upsurge demanding full national rights. The Serbian and Yugoslav authorities brutally suppressed it.

This conflict served as a preparation for Serbian strongman Milosevic's current aggression against the Croats and Bosniaks.

The reform-Stalinists' answer to such conflicts was to try to promote atomization of the populations. Individuals and selfmanaging collectives, they argued, should replace "tribes" as the basic units of society, and should be bound together by objective laws of the "social market."

However, as the regime was forced to allow independent organization, all the opposition parties arose on the basis of the various nationalities. In fact, the first challenge to totalitarian rule was a campaign in the mid-1960s in defense of Yugoslav PanAlbanian political prisoners.

Thus, the standard commentary in the is rubber and other rain-forest crops, as well as fishing.

SA: So, why are they continuing to burn down the forest, when there are no great financial gains from this?

DSP: What the government and the estate owners want to do is to concentrate the ownership of the land. We are defending the strategic reserves. We know that one of the great values of the region is the potential medicinal plants it holds.

SA: In view of all the scandals, has the government put any limits on burning down the forest?

DSP: All of the governments that have authority over the Amazonian region, as well as the World Bank, talk about ending the destruction of the rain forest. But they are continuing it, and I have no hope that they will ever put a stop to it. The only hope is in building the trade-union movement and the Workers' Party.

The problem today is that the Workers' Party is capitulating. When the party developed in the 1980s, it had a good program— workers' control, jobs for all, nonpayment of the foreign debt. Now we are fighting to get the party to go back to its original program. It is essential that the workers have a party of their own, that they take power.

Before the PT, the workers voted for the national bourgeois parties, like the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States. They were all the same. The Workers' Party needs to go back to its working-class program.

SA: You are working in a very remote area. How can we keep the connection between the workers in Amazonia and in the U.S.?

DSP: We are visiting the United States more often these days, and people are beginning to understand that our problems are not just those of the peoples of the rain forest, but those of all people. In particular, we need financial help, because the price for the product we produce is very low. It is important for people here to organize campaigns in our defense.

José da Silva Pereira will be in California again in November at the invitation of the state AFL-CIO. He can be contacted at the following address: Sindicato does Trabalhadores Rurais Acre, TRAV. Xapuri No. 67, Brazileia, Acre, Brazil, CAP 69930. Telephone: 058-546-3970.

world capitalist press that the collapse of the Stalinist regimes released the genie of national warfare is quite false. The totalitarian regime in Yugoslavia did not suppress national hatred but fostered it. What made it possible for a period to overcome ethnic conflict was a socialist revolution, the unity of the Yugoslav peoples against foreign occupiers, and their common economic exploitation.

In the Soviet Union also, national conflicts were overcome by a socialist revolution, which led to an unprecedented unity of peoples based precisely on fostering and not rejecting their national aspirations. The counterrevolutionary Stalinist regime, however, came to base itself more and more on the chauvinism of the dominant Russian nation, like Milosevic in Yugoslavia.

Under the alleged ethnic peace of the Soviet Stalinist regime, in the World War Il period, entire peoples were outlawed, deported and decimated.

Long before the present conflict, national antagonisms were fanned in the Balkans by competing capitalist great powers, who often moved in the name of "humanitarian" considerations. The great powers of our day are not showing any better intentions. The attempt to assign equal or comparable guilt to all the parties in the conflict, the victims and the perpetrators of chauvinist aggression, is part of an operation designed to reduce the Yugoslav peoples to pawns.

If socialists fall into the trap of viewing all the nationalisms of the Yugoslav peoples as the same, they will play into the hands of the imperialist operation by giving credibility to the idea that the only solution can come from some "neutral" or humanitarian outside force.

The only solution is the defeat of the Serbian chauvinists by the Serbian masses themselves, who are more and more demonstrating their opposition to Milosevic's adventure, and by the mobilization of the peoples who are the victims of Serbian neo-Stalinist chauvinism.

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appreciation of the pressures that forced Carlson to resign is given by party leader James P. Cannon shortly after her resignation:

"Grace Carlson is a victim of the reactionary atmosphere in general and the witchhunt in particular. Her sudden action