Three Bolivian Miners Killed - No Accident!

Yesterday (May 6, 2009) three miners were killed in Caihuasi [town near the Huanuni tin mine]. This was no accident. We hold the government of Morales and his army responsible. These deaths that the direct result of the drive for profits by the bourgeois government of Evo Morales and imperialist transnationals. Stop killing the workers!

On May 6, in the mining district of Huanuni, as they finished their shift, Coca Edwin Cucuna, 24, Julian Lajares Policarpio, 35, and Simón Rodríguez Mollinero, 38, died in a mine explosion. This tragedy happened at the 160 level (at 160 meters below ground) while preparing the site to be worked by the next shift of miners.

All the media talk of the bourgeoisie is that what happened is the result of an "accident."

This a lie! It is nothing but murder! The government of Morales which did not spend any money on maintaining the mine and the safety of miners is responsible. While the minerals, oil and other raw materials are still high on the world market, the "Bolivarian" governments like that of Morales, Chavez and the boli-burgeoisies profit from the bones, muscles and blood of workers.

Thus, while the workers hit by inflation fight for better living conditions, wages and to defend their jobs, and, like the miners of Huanuni, for a decent retirement pension, these governments have responded with brutal repression at the hands of the murderous army of Morales, or like Chavez, brutally suppressed the workers of Sidor steel workers striking for their just demands.

Bullshit! It is the workers who always pay with their lives, while the union leaders like Montes collaborate with this government and its agreement with the counterrevolutionary fascists of the Media Luna [the Eastern part of Bolivia that contains around 80% of the mineral wealth] that smashes our brothers and sisters in the East.

These leaders, Montes, Solares and Mitma [Guido Mitma, the head of the Bolivian Federation of Mining Unions] subordinate the workers organisations to the government of Morales, negotiating with the SMTMH [Sindicato Mixto de Trabajadores Mineros de Huanunian - Huanuni Miners union] an agreement whereby if the government invests in the Huanuni mine, workers will forgo a wage increase for many years!

This is a lie, there is no investment. Already they are making miners redundant and stopping production bonuses. They're just false promises! The government did not invest during the mining boom, how will it invest when mineral prices are falling! Once again trying to con miners!

Huanuni miners, like all workers in Bolivia, are super-exploited: the surplus value is torn from our labor by the national capitalists, the imperialists and the Morales government uses a small part of it to buy the services of the treacherous union leaders to control the workers and make them submit to the pact between the MAS and the fascists!

Last year Montes and Solares disarmed the miners of Caihuasi in the face of armed police repression causing the assassination of two miners and many more badly wounded. Now today they serve the greed of the capitalists to run down the conditions in the mines so that once more Huanuni goes into mourning for the dead! Stop killing the workers!

With the death of fellow miners, the SMTMH decreed a mourning period throughout the mine for 48 hours. This should become a day of mourning and protest in the whole of Bolivia to unite the workers' ranks. The Huanuni miners vanguard should again stand alongside the miners of San Cristobal, who occupied the mine of the multinational Pan American Silver, taking hostage the bosses, technicians and contractors to press their demands; and alongside the superexploited workers of the cooperatives and those thousands of miners out of work.

We must return to the Pulacayo Theses, there must be unity in the ranks of the miners vanguard:

* The sliding scale of wages and working hours to create jobs for all!

* National Congress of rank and file delegates of COMIBOL [State Owned Mines] unemployed and cooperative workers!

* To raise a militant campaign for the nationalization of all the mines, beginning with Mutún, and under workers' control!

* Any miner who does not exploit another miner can get a job in the nationalised mines and share in the gains of all miners!

* Industrialization will come from the expropriation of all the transnationals as demanded in 2003-2005!

* To win this we must fight for the resolutions of the general assemblies of the miners of Huanuni in July 2008, which declared Montes, Solares and Mitma as traitors to be implemented! Collaborators get out of the leadership of the COB [Bolivian Trade Union Central], the FSTMB [National Miners Union], and all local unions!

To build a miners militia that will strike terror in the hearts of the cowardly Santa Cruz oligarchy, the proletariat and poor peasants must break with the MAS, return to the revolutionary road of 2003-2005, re-founding the COB of 1952 together with its armed militia!

* Its Us or Them: Class against class!

* The miners will not be blackmailed with dismissals or wage cuts to pay for the crisis of the national bourgeoisie and the transnationals!

* Huanuni miners unite with all workers such as industrial workers, the teachers of La Paz, and the militant youth of the UMSA [University Mayor de San Andres in La Paz]. For a Congress of delegates of the COB, along with the poor peasants and militant students fighting to rebuild the 1952 COB militia!

The hundreds of miners who have been killed in the mines of Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Latin America, Africa and Asia are the martyrs of the international working class. Their blood stains the banner of the many millions of immigrant workers and and low paid workers in the U.S. and the imperialist powers of Europe, the workers of the former workers' states now exploited by the former Stalinist bureaucracy reborn as a new exploiting class.

Raise the bloody flag of these martyrs to workers everywhere! Throughout the world the working class has begun its battle against the capitalist parasites: the workers of Madagascar, the militant workers and youth of Greece, France, Guadeloupe and Martinique and the former states workers!

International Trotskyist League (LTI)
Of the Leninist Trotskyist Fraction
May 7, 2009

May Day message to the world working class from South Africa

The handful of capitalist parasites are plunging the over 5 billion working class and fellow poor, into the abyss. For several decades there has been no real productive growth in the world economy. The control of the world by monopoly capitalism (imperialism), as demonstrated by so-called Anglo Boer war 1899-1903, ushered in an era of wars, civil wars and revolutions.


Today is no different: over 80% of the world's arable land is under the direct control of the world's monopolies- thus they are in a position to shift their burden of falling profits onto the working class- the capitalists know that we can do without many things, but we must eat. Thus the drive by capital through increased prices in food, transport and housing. Thus we have the massive increased attacks by the capitalist class to lower wages and to retrench millions more.

Around the world, the working class is resisting these attacks.

The uprisings in Guadaloupe, Martinique, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Greece are all signs that the working class is starting to go on the march, to resist the crisis of capitalism being placed on the shoulders of the masses.

The monopoly capitalists are attempting with various strategies to control the working class. In South America and South Africa, they use Popular Fronts (alliances of capitalist parties with the trade unions) to control the masses. When uprisings occur here, the popular fronts increasingly use the fascist jackboot. In the last year fascists took over half of Bolivia. The so-called socialist Morales, allowed the peasants and workers to be massacred; the Morales regime brutally put down a strike by the Huanuni miners- some were killed. The bolivarian regime of Venezuela and the popular front of Lula in Brasil supported a pact with the fascists that has in effect divided the country into half- giving control in part to the fascists. There are some activists in South Africa and elsewhere who want to import the bolivarian regime. This will be a huge mistake.

In South Africa, the crisis of housing reflects the start of the resistance of the working class to the attacks by the capitalists; from Delft, Grassy park, to the Durban Abahlali to Kliptown and Alexandra, the working class has started the resistance; these fights for housing for all and jobs for all needs to be placed on the agenda of all unions so that the unemployed and employed workers join in common fight with common fighting committees (the fights against retrenchment and against high prices also needs to be placed on the agenda of all unions). But without a decisive change in leadership of the unions the working class will be left isolated in struggle. Thus the fight to put broader struggles on the agenda of the unions, it is important to build action committees of employed and unemployed workers, which unite the struggles against high prices, for housing, against retrenchment and for jobs for all. These workers committees should spearhead the resistance to the capitalist onslaught.

There has been growing international support for the scrapping of the sentences of the Kliptown 5 (activists who were sentenced for alleged public violence when the masses rose up for houses 2 years ago- these activists received 2 year suspended sentences. In Kliptown there is a huge squatter camp next to the multi million rand white elephant called Freedom Charter square and a 4 star Holiday Inn. Messages of support have been received from the Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (FLT) [which has a presence in Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Brasil and New Zealand; the FLT has spearheaded the campaign in South America and New Zealand in defence of the Kliptown 5 which has resulted in messages being received from the Federal University Local in Cochabamba, Bolivia, from the heroic workers of the Brukman factory in Argentina [the workers took over the factory by force when the bosses unilaterally closed it] and from the Central Union of Bolivia (COB)- the message is appended below.

The FLT and WIVL have begun a process of joint programmatic work and discussions with a view to uniting the revolutionary fighters from South America, New Zealand and South Africa. This is but part of the same process of the fight for the rebuilding of the Fourth International. Without the coming together of the vanguard working class fighters from the imperialist centres, from Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, from China, from all the former deformed workers states and the colonies and neo-colonies, the struggle to defeat the capitalist offensive will yield only temporary gains. The WIVL makes a call for all principled working class fighters and groups to join with us in the fight to turn the current offensive of capitalism-imperialism into an offensive by the working class, in the life and death struggle, for Socialism.

This is our short and brief message to the world working class, on Mayday 2009.

--
Shaheed Mahomed, Secretary, Workers International Vanguard League
1st Floor, Community House, 41 Salt River rd., Salt River, South Africa 7925
ph 0822020617, fax 0880214476777
workersinternational@gmail.com
web www.workersinternational.org.za

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Central Obrera Boliviana

To the comrades of the WIVL (Workers International Vanguard League) and the 4 activists sentenced for their participation in struggle for better housing and living conditions of the people.

Comrades

The workers of the Bolivian affiliates of the COB (Central Obrera Boliviana) hereby present our moral and material support for the cause that you are struggling for and which today has led to the imprisonment of your cadre, who are victims of demagogy, which is a worse form of fascism and veiled iron fist against whomsoever encourages people to stand up for their rights, a struggle we have been busy with since 1955 when we were formed; such social responsibility as housing is today is being neglected by those representatives and defenders of capitalism- they have only one response and that is to criminalise the struggle of those activists who are reclaiming this right to housing, etc.

We, together with yourselves, have only one way to fight against those who greedily cling to power for the benefit of a few while on the other hand the masses are claiming their rights; we dare not lose hope or abandon our struggle and in the spirit of workers internationalism we most energetically raise our condemnation, our protest against the ANC government of South Africa, who is abandoning the people and imprisoning those who reclaim their basic rights.

Comrades, the way forward of our struggle is clear: for a socialist revolution!

DEATH TO THE DEFENDORS OF CAPITALISM!

VIVA THE STRUGGLE OF THE WORKERS!

FOR THE COMPLETE FREEDOM OF THOSE WHO ARE IMPRISONED FOR DEMANDING DECENT SOCIAL CONDITIONS AND BETTER CONDITIONS OF LIVING!

VIVA THE SOUTH AFRICAN WORKING CLASS!

DOWN WITH THE ANC GOVERNMENT OF SOUTH AFRICA!

VIVA WIVL!

La Paz 22 April 2009