The events of the last few months in Nicaragua represent a new stage in the decay of the Somoza dictatorship. They indicate a sharpening of the crisis of the dictatorships imposed on Latin America by imperialism and the native ruling classes.
The tyranny of the Somoza family, installed more than forty years ago and maintained by the most barbaric violence, was deeply shaken at the beginning of 1978 by powerful mass mobilizations. These mobilizations came in response to the murder of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, a spokesman for the moderate bourgeois opposition.
Since then, street demonstrations, strikes by students and workers, and semispontaneous urban uprisings have multiplied in all Nicaraguan cities, as well as in large rural areas.
This is the context in which the military offensive of the FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) took place in September. The FSLN is now the main military and political force fighting the regime. This offensive was aimed at taking several cities, and at liberating a politically and militarily important area of the country, near the Costa Rican border, in order to install a provisional government that would be recognized and supported by many Latin American governments.
None of these objectives were attained. At the cost of a real massacre, Somoza's army was able to stifle, one by one, the uprisings marking the high points of this offensive. The systematic shelling and machine-gunning of civilian populations left 5,000 to 10,000 dead and more than 50,000 wounded.
After Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, this savage brutality from a dying dictatorship shows what degree of barbarity capitalist rule can reach in its declining phase. It also shows that the campaign around human rights and democracy being carried out by the imperialist powers is hypocritical and a hoax. The U.S. government did nothing to stop the massacres. To the contrary, lacking an immediate alternative that would be in keeping with its interests, it did not hesitate to openly maintain support to those carrying out the massacre.
At that cost, all that the Somoza tyranny has won is a short breathing spell. It is more isolated and hated than ever, 1378 and the heavy silence that hangs over the Nicaraguan people is an omen of new explosions to come. There are already growing indications of this.
The struggle against the Nicaraguan dictatorship, and solidarity with the Nicaraguan people, are already mobilizing broad sectors of the masses in Costa Rica, Central America, Mexico, and Venezuela. At this crucial and dramatic moment for the people of Nicaragua, the Fourth International calls for the mobilization of a powerful international movement in solidarity with the Nicaraguan people, its organizations, and the FSLN, which is the main target of repression. The crimes of Somoza and his mercenaries must be exposed and condemned. All the accomplices of the dictatorship—first and foremost the government of the United States—must be exposed and condemned.
We must do everything in our power to halt the massacre and tear the arrested militants away from their executioners, by demanding their immediate release.
The collapse of the Somoza regime threatens to shake Nicaraguan society and the capitalist state to its roots, by opening the way for the immense, uncontrollable force that the masses’ social aspirations represent. Demands for democratic rights, land, jobs, education, decent housing, minimal public services, and genuine national independence are at the root of the events in Nicaragua. Capitalist rule and subordination to imperialism are incompatible with satisfying these demands.
The masses cannot expect any sector of the ruling classes, the “liberal” or “national” bourgeoisie, to restore their democratic rights and fulfill their economic demands, despite whatever efforts may be undertaken by some sectors of imperialism, the Latin American bourgeoisie, and the Nicaraguan ruling classes to find an alternative to the Somoza dictatorship.
It is the worker and peasant masses, all the exploited layers of the population, who, mobilized and organized within the mass movement's own structures, and acting in a unified and _ concerted manner—a necessity dramatically confirmed by the defeat of the September uprisings—will overturn the dictatorship in a full-scale battle against the entire ruling class and its system.
Therefore, the fact that the FSLN, in carrying out its struggle against Somozaa_ struggle that we unconditionally support—has established alliances with major sectors of the bourgeoisie, even asking them to join in a provisional government, represents a grave danger to the Nicaraguan revolution and to the FSLN itself.
It is up to revolutionary Marxists to make every effort to destroy the obstacles that mask the class character of the popular struggle against the tyranny of the Somoza family. To struggle to overturn the Somoza dictatorship is to struggle for the dissolution of the National Guard and of all the repressive bodies of the regime. It is to struggle for the emergence of people’s militias capable of standing up to imperialist military maneuvers. It is to struggle for the release of all political prisoners, for the full exertise of democratic, political, and trade-union rights and freedoms. It is to struggle:
1. For the nationalization of all the Somoza family’s holdings and the big imperialist and nationally owned enterprises.
2. For a full, genuine agrarian reform. 3. For breaking all the political, economic, and military pacts with imperialism.
4. For free elections and for a sovereign, popularly elected constituent assembly, in opposition to all formulas for a provisional government that are supposed to replace Somoza, without the masses having been consulted.
5. For a workers and peasants government representing the interests of the oppressed.
Down with the Somoza dictatorship!
Imperialism out of Nicaragua and all of Latin America!
Freedom for the Nicaraguan people!
For a workers and peasants government!