Condemn OST Attack on Panamanian MSR

The United Secretariat of the Fourth International repudiates the antidemocratic methods, foreign to the revolutionary Marxist tradition, used by the leadership of the Socialist Workers Organisation (OST) of Costa Rica on January 7, 1980, in raiding the headquarters and stealing material resources and propaganda from the Revolutionary Socialist Movement (MSR) of Panama. Having the support of a small minority, they claimed to ‘expel’ all the comrades loyal to the Fourth International who rejected the split by those who proposed affiliation to the Parity Committee formed by the Bolshevik Faction and the Organizing Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International (OC- RFI). [See “The Split by the Leninist Trotskyist Tendency and Bolshevik Faction,” December 4, 1979, IP/I, page 1275.] Indeed, this action of the OST, an organization participating in the Parity Committee, is clearly sabotage of the revolutionary activity our MSR comrades have recently been carrying out in relation to the protests of the Panamanian people against Reza Pahlavi, ex-shah of Iran, who has found refuge in that country. Our comrades have been in the vanguard of the massive mobilizations against the ex-shah and the Panamanian government, which had accepted the dictates of U.S. diplomacy. There has been worldwide publicity of the repressive actions taken by the Panamanian National Guard against these demonstrations and particularly the heavy repression that injured our comrade, Miguel Antonio Bernal. The use of violence by the OST against the MSR opens the way to police provocation, to greater repression by the Panamanian government against the MSR, and to the bourgeoisie taking up a campaign discrediting Trotskyism in order to influence broad sectors of the population. For these reasons, the United Secretariat condemns the OST’s criminal actions and calls on its members to step back from using such methods. At the same time, it sends solidarity greetings to our MSR comrades, sympathizing organization of the Fourth International, and calls on all sections of the International to redouble solidarity campaigns with the Central American revolution, of which the Panamanian revolutionary movement is part.