Trotskyist League Forum – DEFEND, COMPLETE, EXTEND THE NICARAGUAN REVOLUTION!
Arias “peace” hoax threatens Nicaraguan masses
Speaker: Peter Stevens, Trotskyist League
Saturday 9 April 1988, 7:30 p.m.
International Student Centre
33 St. George St. (n. of College)
For more information contact the Trotskyist League, Box 7198, Station A, Toronto, Ont. M5W 1X8, or call (416) 593-4138.
The battle over Central America which has raged throughout the ‘80s has reached a watershed. The Arias “peace” plan, engineered by the U.S. Democratic Party, aims to give a “democratic” face to the imperialists’ drive for counterrevolution in the region. To “verify” compliance with this “peace” hoax, Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega has made risky concessions in order to appease Washington. The Sandinista leader agreed to direct negotiations with Reagan’s counterrevolutionary mercenaries, a broad amnesty including former members of the dictator Somoza’s murderous National Guard, and lifting the state of emergency enacted to clamp down on the “internal contras.”
Now more than ever, defense of the Nicaraguan Revolution means completing the revolution by destroying the internal “fifth column” that leeches off the desperate masses. Expropriate the bourgeoisie! For agrarian revolution to take back the land from the cattle barons, sugar and cotton plantation owners and coffee capitalists who themselves “expropriated” the impoverished peasantry under the imperialist-protected Somozas and their predecessors. The Nicaraguan Revolution can survive only by igniting social revolution throughout the Central American isthmus, drawing into battle the powerful proletariat of Mexico, and linking up with sharp class struggle in the heart of North American imperialism.
Yet the so-called “left” and “solidarity” milieu in this country has embraced the imperialists’ Arias “peace” hoax, and is either whitewashing or enthusing over every concession by the Sandinista leadership to the reactionaries. Canadian Action on Nicaragua, for example, urges not labor action against imperialism but treacherous appeals to the Canadian government to “support the Central American peace process by…insisting that Reagan end contra aid.” Behind them march the Toronto Anti-Intervention Coalition (a bloc of the fake-Trotskyist Alliance for Socialist Action and the dubious “Bolshevik Tendency”), who called a protest outside the American consulate last February 2 on the sole slogan “Oppose U.S. contra aid.”
Opposition to U.S. contra aid goes for bargain basement prices in this country. Not only the social-democratic NDP but the Liberals, most Tories (and indeed most European capitalists) oppose aid to the loser contras—because they have a different counterrevolutionary strategy. They think they can succeed where Reagan’s dogs of war have failed, by squeezing Sandinista Nicaragua economically and diplomatically through schemes like the Arias plan. Refusing even to raise the call to “Defend Nicaragua,” the ASA/BT’s demo call covered for these counterrevolutionary machinations of our “own” capitalist class. At the very moment when Mulroney & Co. offered to send Canadian “peacekeeping” troops to Nicaragua as part of the Arias plan—there to keep the “peace” of the graveyard, as in Lebanon—these two-bit hustlers’ leaflet dropped all mention of opposition to Canadian imperialism.
We of the Trotskyist League say “Anti-imperialism abroad means class struggle at home!” Under the impact of the Cold War, the so-called “left” in this country has moved sharply right, covering for imperialist anti-Sovietism from Afghanistan to Poland to Central America. (Naturally, the ASA/BT cabal breathed not a word of Soviet-defensism on their February 2 demo.) In contrast, we have consistently emphasized that Nicaragua is a front line in the anti-Soviet war drive, saying “Defense of Cuba, USSR begins in Central America” and “Nicaragua needs Soviet MIGs!”
What’s needed is not empty “solidarity” rhetoric tailored to appeal to the North American imperialists but concrete acts of proletarian internationalism, from hot-cargoing military goods to Central America, to political strikes in the event of direct imperialist intervention. The key to mobilizing such solidarity is a fight against the pro-imperialist labor misleaders and their “left” lackeys who support the sellout NDP tops in Canada and the Democratic Party in the U.S. We need to build revolutionary workers parties committed to the fight for international socialist revolution.
U.S. and Canadian imperialists: Hands off Nicaragua!
Smash the contras!
Military victory to the FMLN in El Salvador!
Set Central America aflame through workers revolution!
Labor donated 3/88