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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><!--StartFragment --><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=3><SPAN class=687192909-30042005><FONT face=Arial color=#999999
size=2>from</FONT></SPAN> </FONT><FONT color=#999999><SPAN
class=687192909-30042005>The Militant, <!--StartFragment --><FONT
color=#000000><FONT face="Times New Roman"><FONT size=3> </FONT><B><FONT
size=2> Vol. 69/No. 18
May 9,
2005</B></FONT></FONT></FONT><FONT face="Times New Roman" color=#000000 size=3>
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class=687192909-30042005></SPAN></FONT></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT color=#999999><SPAN
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT color=#999999><SPAN
class=687192909-30042005></SPAN></FONT><B><FONT size=5>Ecuador gov’t collapses
amid popular protests <BR></FONT></B><FONT face="Times New Roman"
size=4>Capitalist crisis, austerity measures fuel upsurge<BR></FONT><FONT
face="Times New Roman" size=3> <BR></DIV></FONT>
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<TD align=left><FONT size=2><B><!-- text here -->High school students join
April 20 demonstration in Quito, Ecuador, to demand the resignation of
President Lucio Gutiérrez. Banner reads “Ever onward to victory.”
<BR></B></FONT></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></DIV>
<DIV><BR><B>BY SAM MANUEL </B> <BR>In face of repeated demonstrations by
tens of thousands against his government, President Lucio Gutiérrez of Ecuador
fled into exile to Brazil April 24. He was the third president in that country
since 1997 to be brought down by mass protests fueled by anger at brutal
austerity measures against the living standards of working people. </DIV>
<P>Three days earlier, as antigovernment protests spread from the capital city
of Quito and popular anger grew—especially after a short-lived state of
emergency and the killing of two demonstrators by security forces—Congress voted
to remove Gutiérrez. He was replaced with Vice President Alfredo Palacio. </P>
<P>The collapse of Gutiérrez’s government is the latest expression of the
roiling discontent among working people and layers of the middle classes who
have been squeezed by the capitalist economic crisis throughout Latin America.
In Ecuador the wealthy have enjoyed the fruits of economic growth, while workers
and farmers face a continuing plunge in living standards, fueled by austerity
measures designed to boost the profit margins of foreign and domestic
capitalists. </P>
<P>Newly appointed president Palacio, seeking to get the demonstrators off the
streets, denounced his former colleague Gutiérrez as a “dictator.” He said it
was “immoral that Ecuador spends about 40 percent of its national budget to
service its $16.6 billion debt to international banks.” </P>
<P>Although Palacio quickly clarified that the government would continue making
its debt payments, Standard and Poor’s said it might lower Ecuador’s credit
rating because the recent unrest puts at risk the government’s ability to make a
$75 million interest payment in May. Investors in the country’s debt bonds have
been reducing holdings, Bloomberg news reported. </P>
<P>Antigovernment protests began to grow in mid-April. On April 15 Gutiérrez
declared a state of emergency. Demonstrators defied the ban, which the
government then hastily withdrew. The protests spread after police used tear gas
to prevent a march of 30,000 on the National Palace on April 19. </P>
<P>The mobilizations that led up to Gutiérrez’s ouster were substantially
smaller than the two-day strike and protests of 2 million that forced out
President Abdalá Bucaram in 1997 and the storming of the National Palace by
indigenous protesters in 2000 that brought down President Jamil Mahuad’s
administration. </P>
<P>Gutiérrez had expressed confidence that his government would weather the
protests, which had largely been confined to the capital and had been more
heavily middle-class in composition than the popular mobilizations of 1997 and
2000. </P>
<P>But the Ecuadoran rulers decided they did not want a repeat of the previous
upsurges. On April 20 the heads of the army and the national police withdrew
support for the president. The attorney general’s office filed charges against
Gutiérrez for “flagrant crimes” related to the deaths of two demonstrators.
Congress voted to oust the president because he had “abandoned” his duties, and
swore in Palacio. </P>
<P>That day Gutiérrez attempted to flee the country by military helicopter but
protesters shut down Quito’s international airport. For three days he took
refuge in the Brazilian embassy, and then flew to Brazil.
<BR> <BR><B><FONT size=4>Austerity measures spark protests
</FONT></B><BR>Gutiérrez, a former army officer, was elected in 2002 largely on
the strength of his association with the popular revolt two years earlier that
had toppled Mahuad, hated for his imposition of sharp austerity measures. While
giving lip service to the poor, Gutiérrez carried out similar policies to those
of his predecessors, earning him a reputation among Wall Street bankers as
“fiscally responsible.” </P>
<P>Under “market reforms” prescribed by Washington, Ecuador’s economy grew 6.6
percent last year. LatinSource, a New York-based analyst of Latin American
economies, praised Ecuador for “outperforming even the most optimistic
scenarios,” according to the <I>New York Times</I>. The “fiscal growth” was paid
for in sharply reduced spending on social services such as health care and
education. </P>
<P>For example, at the Baca Ortiz public hospital in Quito, considered the
country’s best children’s hospital, patients have to bring their own medicine
and doctors say they lack clean facilities, decent wages, and even the most
rudimentary equipment, the <I>Times</I> reported. Parents at the May 23
Elementary School in the working-class southern district of Quito pool their
money to pay for blackboards, classroom benches, paint jobs, and teachers
salaries. And conditions are much worse for the largely indigenous rural
population. </P>
<P>Growing anger at government economic policies was compounded by the
president’s political maneuvers. In December his congressional allies removed 27
of the 31 Supreme Court justices and packed the court with their own candidates.
“The new court then suspiciously cleared several politicians in exile of
corruption charges, including ex-president Abdalá Bucaram,” the <I>Miami
Herald</I> reported April 25. Bucaram returned from exile just days after the
court cleared him. </P>
<P>It was these kinds of conditions that sparked a popular revolt in 1997 that
culminated in a two-day strike and protests of as many as 2 million people
against the economic austerity measures imposed by Bucaram, in face of which
Ecuador’s legislature decided to remove him. The strike was led by Ecuador’s
largest organization of indigenous peoples, CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous
Nationalities of Ecuador). </P>
<P>In 2000 the government of Jamil Mahuad was brought down by another revolt.
Ecuador’s parliament was occupied by thousands, again led by CONAIE and other
Indian organizations. Among the measures that earned Mahuad popular hatred was
the replacement of Ecuador’s sucre with the U.S. dollar as the country’s
currency. With an exchange rate of 25,000 to one, already meager wages and
savings were slashed overnight. </P>
<P>That revolt led to a short-lived provisional governing triumvirate consisting
of the president of CONAIE; Gutiérrez, then an army colonel; and a former
supreme court president. However, this provisional government voluntarily ceded
power to the military, which then handed the government to Mahuad’s vice
president, Gustavo Noboa. The Noboa regime prosecuted lower echelon officers
associated with the revolt, among them Gutiérrez. </P>
<P>The new president, Palacio, has sought to distance himself from Gutiérrez. He
has pledged to overhaul the country’s social security system and settle wage
demands by state doctors, according to Bloomberg News. He said he would favor
renegotiating terms of how monies from an oil stabilization fund are spent, 70
percent of which is currently set aside to make debt payments. Ecuador is South
America’s fifth-largest oil producer. </P>
<P>Wall Street bankers have expressed concern over the instability in Ecuador
and what it means for their profits. “The uncertainty over who will be the next
president and what type of policies he will implement are enormous,” said Boris
Segura of Standish Mellon Asset Management in Boston. “Today it’s the vice
president, but nobody knows who will be in power the day after.” </P>
<P> </P>
<P><!--StartFragment --> <B><FONT size=5>30 years since victory of Vietnamese
people <BR></FONT></B><FONT size=4>SWP National Committee hailed<BR>‘Victory for
all oppressed’ in May 1, 1975 statement<BR></FONT><FONT face="arial, helvetica"
color=#999999 size=2>(feature article)</FONT><BR> <BR><!-- Put text above here --><B>Printed below is a
statement adopted May 1, 1975, by the National Committee of the Socialist
Workers Party, at a meeting in New York City. We are reprinting it as part of
celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the day—April 30, 1975—the Vietnamese
people drove the final detachments of imperialist troops from their soil.
Copyright © 1975 the <I>Militant.</I></B> </P>
<P>On this May Day the world working class is celebrating the history-making
victory of the Vietnamese rebels, who have succeeded in expelling the last
contingent of imperialist armed forces from their country. </P>
<P>The Socialist Workers Party hails this victory, which has come after decades
of heroic struggle against a succession of imperialist powers. The triumph is a
powerful reaffirmation of what May Day itself represents to the workers
movement: worldwide solidarity of all the oppressed. This solidarity found
powerful expression in the international antiwar movement, the strongest
component being right here in the United States, where the American
revolutionists played a major role. </P>
<P>The victory in Vietnam will inspire the peoples of the colonial and
semicolonial world who are fighting for national liberation from economic and
political domination by imperialism. It is a victory for all those throughout
the world who are fighting oppression and exploitation. </P>
<P>For nearly ten years the war in Southeast Asia was the central focus of the
struggle between imperialism and the advancing world revolution. The U.S. rulers
decided to contain the revolution in Vietnam by American military means and
entrenchment of a counterrevolutionary government in South Vietnam. They wanted
to show the peoples in the colonial and semicolonial areas that any who tried to
stand up against U.S. imperialism would be crushed. But although Washington’s
mighty military machine pounded this tiny country year after year, it could not
defeat the popular resistance. </P>
<P>The victory of the Vietnamese people over imperialism was long delayed by the
policies of Moscow and Peking. In 1945, after the defeat of Japanese
imperialism, the Vietminh swept into power. Under Stalin’s agreements at Yalta
and Potsdam, however, Indochina was to remain in the imperialist “sphere of
influence.” The Vietminh, whose leaders were trained in the Stalinist school,
accepted the reentry of imperialist forces, which ushered in the next phase of
the war. </P>
<P>After the French were defeated by the Vietminh in 1954, both Moscow and
Peking pressured the Vietnamese to accept the division of their country and the
creation of the artificial “country” of South Vietnam, this time under
Washington’s aegis. </P>
<P>Moscow and Peking refused from the beginning of Washington’s escalation to
provide adequate material aid for the Vietnamese rebels or to take the
initiative in organizing international mass actions in their behalf. This
betrayal was condemned in 1967 by Che Guevara, who warned that the Vietnamese
were “tragically alone” in their struggle and that in addition to the guilt of
U.S. imperialism, “they are likewise guilty who at the decisive moment
vacillated in making Vietnam an inviolable part of socialist territory….” </P>
<P>This treachery took its most blatant form in the spring of 1972, when Nixon
was toasted in Moscow while he was carrying out the brutal bombing, mining, and
blockade of North Vietnam. It was under this pressure that the Vietnamese were
forced to accept the continued presence of the Thieu puppet regime in the 1973
accords. </P>
<P>But despite these obstacles, which greatly increased the cost in blood and
suffering for the Vietnamese people, their revolutionary aspirations pressed the
struggle forward. <BR> <BR><B><FONT size=4>International movement
</FONT></B><BR>The heroic resistance of the Vietnamese helped promote the
radicalization of a new generation of youth throughout the world. An
international antiwar movement developed, with hundreds of thousands of
demonstrators taking to the streets throughout the United States and in cities
such as Tokyo, Melbourne, London, Berlin, Mexico City, and Paris. </P>
<P>The brutality of the Pentagon’s military onslaught revealed for the whole
world the terrible lengths to which Wall Street will go in order to maintain and
advance the capitalist system. Millions of Vietnamese were killed. One million
Cambodians, one-seventh of the population, were killed or wounded. The
countryside of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos was devastated. </P>
<P>The military cost alone for bringing about this death and destruction amounts
to an estimated $400 billion. More than 56,000 American soldiers lost their
lives. </P>
<P>As the U.S. military commitment deepened, and the economic and social costs
of the war at home rose, the rulers found it harder and harder to use the old
anticommunist arguments to justify their brutality. At each turn, they were
exposed as brazen liars. </P>
<P>Washington put all its political and military authority on the line in
Vietnam, but the White House strategists miscalculated badly. They
underestimated the determination of the Indochinese people to be rid of foreign
domination and their capacity for struggle to achieve that goal. And they
underestimated the deep antiwar sentiments of the American people and their
ability to see through the government’s lies about its aims. </P>
<P>The defeat of the imperialists in Vietnam thus represents something new. It
is the first war of such size that the United States, the world’s strongest
imperialist power, has lost. It is also the first war that has led to the
development of a mass antiwar movement inside the United States. It is this
overt antiwar sentiment that left the White House with no choice but to accept
defeat and to withdraw to a new line of encirclement of the colonial revolution
in Southeast Asia. </P>
<P>President Ford and others in ruling-class circles are bemoaning the rise of
what they call “isolationism.” They are trying to persuade the American people
to support the “internationalism” of a world police force, of B 52s, of secret
wars, and of organizations like NATO and the CIA. <BR> <BR><B><FONT
size=4>A common enemy </FONT></B><BR>But the American people’s opposition to
imperialist military adventures is not “isolationism.” Just the opposite. It is
part of the internationalism of the oppressed and exploited all over the globe
who have a common interest in struggling against a common enemy. </P>
<P>As a result of the political education the American people have gained from
the war and the antiwar movement, the options open to the top cops of
international capitalism have become more restricted. They now must bring into
their calculations the likely opposition of masses of Americans—including GIs—to
new U.S. military operations to prop up dictatorships threatened by popular
rebellions. </P>
<P>They can no longer rely on the American people bowing passively to the
defense of imperialism under the banner of anticommunism. As all the opinion
polls now show, the American people are opposed not only to intervention in
Vietnam but also to U.S. military intervention in other areas of the world. </P>
<P>The antiwar movement played a crucial role in helping to bring about this
change in American political consciousness. This movement began ten years ago as
a small minority of the population. But it won over the majority of the American
people. <BR> <BR><B><FONT size=4>Role of the SWP </FONT></B><BR>The
Socialist Workers Party is proud of the role it played in leading and organizing
the antiwar movement in the United States. From the very beginning, the SWP
recognized the importance of this movement and threw its energies into it. </P>
<P>In the November 22, 1965, issue of the <I>Militant</I>, Fred Halstead, a
leader of the Socialist Workers Party and a prominent antiwar organizer,
predicted the course the antiwar movement would follow: </P>
<P>“It is well within possibility that not just a few hundred thousand, but
millions of Americans can be actively involved in the struggle against the
Vietnam war. A movement of that scope, even though centered around the single
issue of the war, would have the most profound effects on every social structure
in the country, including the trade unions and soldiers in the army. </P>
<P>“It would very probably also result in a general rise in radical
consciousness on many other questions, just as it has already had an impact
against red-baiting. But above all, it could be the key factor in forcing an end
to the Pentagon’s genocidal war in Vietnam. The lives of untold thousands of
Vietnamese men, women, and children, and U.S. G.I.’s may depend on it. That
alone is reason enough to put aside sectarian differences to unite and help
build a national organization which can encompass anyone willing to oppose U.S.
involvement in Vietnam, regardless of their commitment, or lack of it, on other
questions.” </P>
<P>This understanding of the significance and impact of the antiwar movement
guided the activities of the Socialist Workers Party throughout the course of
the war. Building this movement was seen as our foremost task.
<BR> <BR><B><FONT size=4>Perspective for Vietnam </FONT></B><BR>What
is the perspective now opening before the Vietnamese masses with the defeat of
U.S. intervention? </P>
<P>The Vietnamese people have been fighting for more than thirty years for
national and social liberation. This irrepressible struggle—generated by the
intolerable conditions of life of the masses of peasants and workers—took its
first leap forward with the Vietnamese defeat of Japanese imperialism at the end
of World War II. It continued after the war, first against the French, and then
against the United States. </P>
<P>This fight for national liberation against imperialist domination was closely
intertwined with popular struggles for an end to repression, an end to onerous
taxation, for land reform, and for other social gains. </P>
<P>The leaders of the Vietnamese liberation forces have often compared their
struggle to that of the revolutionary fight of the American colonies against
Britain two centuries ago. </P>
<P>The parallel is valid, but unlike the American Revolution, which occurred
when capitalism was on the rise as a world system, the Vietnamese revolution is
occurring when world capitalism is in its death agony. The fight for national
liberation in Vietnam has been a fight against the most powerful capitalist
countries and their puppet regimes, and it has an anticapitalist logic and
potential. </P>
<P>The indigenous capitalist and landlord class within Vietnam was so stunted by
the imperialist domination of the country that it has always been completely
dependent on the imperialists for support. This has meant that the struggle
against foreign capitalism has also been a struggle against its domestic agents
and counterparts. </P>
<P>With the defeat of the Saigon army, and with Washington’s options severely
limited by antiwar sentiment at home, the objective possibility now exits for
achieving the long strived for goal of national unification and
self-determination of Vietnam. The objective conditions also exist for a social
revolution to abolish the entire system of exploitation for private profit. </P>
<P>The needs of the masses of workers and peasants of Vietnam run directly
counter to the interests of the landlords and capitalists and their military
machine, which supported the U.S.-created puppet government. A workers and
peasants government independent of these elements in needed to carry out such
tasks as land reform, lowering of taxes, and reunification of the North and
South. </P>
<P>The upsurge in South Vietnam and the crumbling of the puppet Saigon
government have already carried the Provisional Revolutionary Government well
beyond its stated program of “reconciliation” with the now collapsed Saigon
regime. “Reconciliation” with the remaining capitalist-landlord forces is
impossible without going against the desires and interests of the masses of
peasants and workers. </P>
<P>After years of suffering and war, the Vietnamese masses deserve the full
fruits of their victory. The task ahead is unification with the workers state of
North Vietnam and the establishment of proletarian democracy. A government based
on soviets as exemplified in the October 1917 revolution in Russia would inspire
the masses throughout Asia and throughout the world and would bring appreciably
closer the victory of socialism on a global scale. </P>
<P>This is the perspective we as revolutionary socialists support as we
celebrate the victories now being won in Vietnam. <BR> </P>
<P> </P>
<P><!--StartFragment --> <B><FONT size=5>Vote Communist League in UK!
<BR></FONT></B> <BR><!-- Put text above here --><B>The <I>Militant</I> is
publishing the following statement issued by the Communist League election
campaigns for Parliament in Edinburgh, Scotland, and London. The general
election in the United Kingdom takes place May 5. </B></P>
<P>British and all imperialist troops out of Iraq, Ireland, Africa and the
Balkans! Defend the right of the power-starved colonial world to
electrification! </P>
<P>Organize and strengthen the unions to resist the bosses’ attacks! </P>
<P>In two constituencies in the UK general election, working people have the
opportunity to vote for a working-class alternative to the parties of
capitalism. Communist League candidates Celia Pugh in Bethnal Green and Bow,
London, and Peter Clifford in Edinburgh East are presenting a revolutionary
working-class program to reach out to our sisters and brothers around the world
in order to strengthen the struggle against our common enemies—the imperialist
aggressors and capitalist exploiters the world over. </P>
<P>The line presented by the capitalist parties—“vote for us and we’ll do it for
you”—is a fake and a fraud. Real social change will not come about by getting
someone into Parliament. The emancipation of the working class must be the act
of the working class itself. </P>
<P>Moreover, what the capitalist parties—whether Labour, Tory, Liberal-Democrat,
Scottish Nationalist, or whichever—really mean is “vote for us and we’ll do it
<I>to</I> you.” No matter who wins the election, the prospect for working people
remains the same: at home, a grinding offensive by the employers against our
living standards and conditions of work; government attacks on the social wage
and on workers’ rights; scapegoating of immigrants as the billionaire rulers
prepare for an open assault on working-class conquests. And their foreign policy
will continue to extend these attacks on working people abroad, through
imperialist wars. </P>
<P>Driven by the weakness of the British economy in a weakening imperialist
system; by the failure of neo-colonial models from Iran to Argentina; and by a
world financial crisis, the UK rulers are hitching their wagon to Washington in
an attempt to safeguard their place in the pecking order in the imperialist
redivision of the world. In this world of sharpening crisis and interimperialist
competition, Prime Minister Anthony Blair has stated, with support across
Parliament, that London’s military forces are “a huge part of British foreign
policy in the 21st century.” </P>
<P>In election hustings, using loudhailers from campaign tables on the streets,
in their election literature, in the media, at social protests, the Communist
League candidates have been explaining that these questions can’t be resolved by
a vote once every 4-5 years. They’ve been using the election to advance the
international campaign to sell thousands of copies of the Marxist magazine
<I>New International</I>, which explains the line of march of the working class
to wrest political power from the billionaire rulers through a revolutionary
struggle and establish a workers and farmers government. This campaign will
extend way past the May 5 election date. </P>
<P>Both Communist League candidates are workers who participate in the daily
resistance to the government and employer offensive. They are using their
campaigns to tell the truth about the strike action by workers at Ambala Foods
in Stratford, London, who have recently organized a union and are today using
that union to defend their interests. This action by workers overwhelmingly from
the Indian sub-continent is strengthening all workers—it needs and warrants
solidarity. The employers’ offensive will lead to more Ambala Foods. Resistance
will deepen and broaden. And it’s such resistance that’s generating the seeds of
the coming rebellions against the rule of the exploiters and provides hope for
humanity’s future. </P>
<P>The Communist League candidates have used the campaign to talk up the need to
defend a woman’s right to choose abortion. The leaders of the main capitalist
parties have stated that, following the election, parliamentary time may be made
available for enacting legislation restricting abortion time limits. But this,
like all major questions faced by working people, has not been debated in the
election. </P>
<P>In different ways, not just the openly capitalist parties, but also their
left hangers-on, have centered their campaigns on the need to vote against Blair
and Brown, or Tory leader Michael Howard, or a local MP of one or another party.
But it’s not <I>who</I> you’re against, it’s <I>what</I> you’re for. Vote not
for the individual, vote for the program. Vote Communist League.
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