[unofficial translation of FLT statement]
On the 5th of November, Daniel Ortega, heading the coalition of the FSLN with the Somocistas (party of the former dictator Somoza) and representatives of bourgeoisie, won the presidential elections in Nicaragua.
After 16 years, the ex- sandinista guerrilla commanders come back into power in Nicaragua to impose the double chains of Yankee imperialism and CAFTA (Free Trade Agreement of Central America), which will turn Nicaragua into a giant assembly plant to enslave and exploit the working masses of that country, the second poorest in Latin America, after Haiti, and to transform it into a Yankee protectorate.
The electoral victory of Ortega is connected to the big pacifist wave that saw the Democrats win the mid-term election to prevent a real anti-war movement from developing. Thus the Nicaraguan workers and peasants have been fooled into thinking that the Sandinistas can appeal to the US Democrats to win concessions from US imperialism.
On the contrary, as Ortega has admitted, the Sandinistas are now a bourgeois party whose task is to administer the businesses of the bourgeoisie – as they are doing already in local body politics, strengthening CAFTA so that the Yankee imperialists can make big profits by exploiting the assembly workers like slaves and forcing many Nicaraguan workers to enter the United States illegally.
During the election campaign Ortega aligned himself with the “Bolivarian Revolution”, in order to deceive the masses, and to increase business opportunities with the countries of the Mercosur. His electoral victory was greeted by Fidel Castro and by Hugo Chávez, who had already promised to provide Nicaragua with cheap oil, and by all the stalinists, Castroists and other promoters of the fraudulent “Bolivarian Revolution” who belong to the World Social Forum.
Almost 20 years after selling out the revolution, the “Sandinista yuppies” students of Fidel Castro and the Cuban restauracionista bureaucracy won the elections
It is necessary to say clearly that the victorious Sandinistas, like the FMLN of El Salvador, are now recycled as yuppies of Wall Street. Along with Fidel Castro they betrayed the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran revolutions in the mid 1980’s by making the counter-revolutionary agreements of Esquipulas and Contadora.
So when the exploited masses rose up in a general strike on the 19 of July, 1979, and overthrew the dictatorship of Somoza, the Sandinistas came to power on the crest of that wave. They expropriated the properties of the Somocistas but refused to expropriate the imperialist monopolies and bourgeois property, introducing a “mixed economy” that resembles that of the Castroite bureaucracy plan for capitalist restoration in Cuba.
Then when the masses fought heroically defeated the Contras arned by US imperialism, at the costs of 100,000s of lives, the Sandinistas, like the leaders of the FMLN of the Salvador, negotiated a deal with the US brokered by Fidel Castro, that sold out the military victory of the masses by turing the FSLN into a legal political party and agreeing to “free elections”. As a result, the bourgeoisie staged a counter-revolution and its candidate, Chamorro Violet, won the 1990 election. In El Salvador, the FMLN also became a legal political party, and the majority of its guerrilla army was integrated into the counter-revolutiohnary regular army of the bourgeois state.
These are the “brilliant graduates” of the Castro school of counter-revolution who now come to take their prizes. Thus, Daniel Ortega, the flamboyant president of the new bourgeois government of Nicaragua, on the 1st of May last, appreared alongside Fidel Castro in Havana at the celebration of the workers international day. Then on the 2nd of December he returned to Cuba to participate in the festivities for the anniversary of the disembarkation of the Granma and the postponed birthday celebration s of Fidel.
We say clearly: Ortega and the Sandinistas are a bourgeois current, and, like most of the Stalinist and petty bourgeois populists who have come to power in recent decades in Latin America, have no problem in governing with one foot in Wall Street and Washington, and another foot in Havana. Indeed for Daniel Ortega, as for Chávez, their “model” is that of the Castro bureaucracy as it prepares to complete the restoration of capitalism in Cuba and turn itself into a new bourgeoisie.
So on the 2nd of December, Raul Castro called on the victorious Democrats to negotiate a deal between US imperialism and the Cuban regime. What possible problem could Ortega have with the Castroite bureaucracy that has already made joint-ventures with imperialist transnationals to mine nickel, in tourism, foreign trade, and Cuban oil; that uses “chavitos”, a currency that is pegged to the dollar for business deals and which can be sent offshore as super-profits, while the vast majority of workers are paid in devalued Pesos?
The tragic lesson of Nicaragua: only the victorious workers and peasants revolution can will free the nation from imperialism
Once again, the tragedy of the working class and the exploited peoples of Nicaragua, serve as a fundamental lesson to the Latin American and world proletariat.
Only the victory of the proletarian revolution, where the working class leading the poor peasants and all nationally oppressed peoples, behind a revolutionary party and program, overthrows the bourgeois state and expropriates the bourgeoisie, replacing it with a workers and peasants government based on the self-organized and armed masses, can free the nation from imperialism.
Only such a revolution that unites the Latin America, North America and the world, with the aim of creating a Socialist United States of Central and South America, can free the heroic Nicaraguan proletariat from misery, backwardnss and the near barbaric conditions resulting from imperialist super-exploitation and plunder.
On the contrary, the national bourgeois leaders, or the petty bourgeoise stalinists like the FSLN, betray the heroic revolutionary and anti-imperialist fights such as that of the Nicaraguan proletariat, strangling their revolutions, stabbing them in the back, so that the country remains dominated by imperialism and subject to the loss of the most basic workers rights.
The tragic lesson of Nicaragua, then, is today the burning issue for the workers, peasants and exploited of not only Latin America but the whole semi- colonial world, where the Stalinists, Castroites, fake Trotskyists joined with the reformists in the World Social Forum, call on them to support the “nationalist” bourgeois and the “patriotic” military leaders like Evo Morales, Chávez and now Correa in Ecuador.
Because there, in Nicaragua, we see today the terrible resu8lt of this political treachery of class collaboration. For years, these traitors called on workers to support, sometimes ‘critically’, the “revolutionary” Sandanista guerrilla commanders. The Morenist current even called the Sandinistas the “Jacobin Party” of the Nicaraguan revolution. And where are they? Ortega, the yuppie of Wall Street today administers the CAFTA and the slave labour maqulila assembly plants.
The second lesson of the Nicaraguan tragedy: it unmasks the impostor Celia Hart Santamaria and the “left wing” of the restorationist Castroite bureaucracy
The Nicaraguan elections demonstrate clearly that the masses will pay the price of defeat and continued submission to imperialism by following the cynical ideas of Celia Hart Santamaría in defence of the Castro bureaucracy.
She has hailed Trotsky as a “revolutionary”, following the lead of the fake Trotskyists who have falsified the legacy of the 4th International to paint Castro as the greatest living revolutionary, thus concealing the Cuban regime’s drive ot restore capitalism, and legitimizing the fraud of the “Bolivarian Revolution” which is organizing and centralizing the counter-revolution in Latin America.
But so open and shamelessly blatant is the betrayal of the recycled stalinism and Castroism serving the bourgeoisie, as is clear in the case of the Sandinistas, it is becoming more and more difficult for Celia Hart to justify in name of the “Trotskyism”, the most terrible class treachery against the working class.
So in the case of Nicaragua, Celia Hart admits in her article “The Pink elections of Nicaragua” that she has to spend much time thinking how to justify the fact that the “adored” Fidel gave his support to Daniel Ortega and the FSLN when this “celebrates the victory of the front between the FSLN and the neoliberal right of Montealegre” - that “has more than most parties of the region has turned so much to the right”.
How does this imposter explain Castro’s support for Daniel Ortega? … It is clear that it cannot resort to any argument from the arsenal of Trotskyism, not even by falsifying it. She has no choice but to resort to the classic justifications of Stalinism. She says [loosely translated]:
“… I think that President Fidel Castro is pleased to see a neoliberal government defeated in the region, …and that unlike Daniel Ortega, [Fidel} has never changed his fatigues and cares about each boy or woman who dies in the world. He offers the limited resources of Cuba to the poor people, and because he is honest and truthful about this I owe him my loyalty.”.
This is the same ridiculous argument that was made more than 30 years ago in the 1970s. The Stalinistas followed the orders of the Moscow bureaucracy to support this or that bourgeois government against imperialism. For example the PC in Argentina justified its support of the Videla’s dictatorship on the grounds that he was a “democratic general” who as head of state would trade with the USSR etc.
But there is no way that Celia Hart Santamaría can pass off this argument as Trotskyist!
On the contrary Trotskyism represents today the living example of Bolshevism and the experience of revolutionary Soviet Russia which signed the peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk. To end the imperialist war that was bleeding the soviets to death the Bolsheviks were foreced to deal with German imperialism in very disadvantageous conditions. But they never saluted the Kaiser as a “democratic monarch”! On the contrary they explained to the world that they signed the peace treaty with a pistol at their heads, and called on the German proletariat to reject the treaty and to rise up and overthrow the German imperialists.
Today, after the Stalinists have sold out the workers states to capitalist restoration; after decades of Castroite betrayals of the Latin American revolution, and giving support to the pro-imperialist bourgeois governments such as that of Kirchner or Tabaré Vázquez; when the Stalinists are unmasked as the “red alpacas” by the insurgent youth in Chile; when Ortega and the Sandinistas openly sell out the Nicaraguan revolution by joining a bourgeois government; the old arguments and justifications of Stalinism pulled out of the waste basket by Celia Hart no longer they deceive the advanced workers or youth. Only the fake Trotskyists, kneeling before the Castroite bureaucracy are able “to swallow (and taste) the toad” i.e. believe the lies of their leader, the Castroite imposter Celia Hart Santamaría.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment