Plan Colombia:
operation without
6 International Viewpoint #324 September-October 2000 the country covers some 1.2 million square kilometers, has three mountain ranges and borders with Panama, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil. The Amazonian forest is no-man's land and there the guerrillas can count on a logistic rearguard
For Eduardo Pizarro, Colombian specialist in military subjects, "If the Colombian war becomes serious, we will anaesthetic finish neither like El Salvador nor like
Vietnam but like Sierra Leona, a struggle of all against all" (Clarin, Buenos Aires,
IT amounts to much more than a confrontation between "two politicalmilitary states" (the one governed by president Andrés Pastrana, and the other being built by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de
Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo (Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia-Army of The People - henceforth FARC). It is a warlike escalation, supported by the United States. On Wednesday August 23,
US President Clinton approved an advance payment of $1,319 million for Plan Colombia. In reality, he signed a declaration of war and a commitment from imperialism to finance, arm and command that war.
The US decision to relaunch a militarist strategy threatens to set the region on fire.
ERNESTO HERRERA
TIETNAM, El Salvador, the
Balkans.. Sierra Leona. They are
In simple metaphors.
not
Colombia there is a war and any hypothesis comes within the field of the probable.
The victims (dead, wounded, kidnapped, disappeared) are counted in the tens of thousands, the "displaced" (in the majority peasants) at almost a million; the country fears one of the worst economic crises of the past century with an unemployment rate of over 20% and with capital fleeing in fright. The human rights organizations denounce a systematic massacre and a paramilitary operation of "social cleansing" on a huge scale. Plan Colombia
"Vietnamizes", definitively, a conflict that has already lasted forty years. During his visit to the city of Cartagena, Bill Clinton said, "Colombia is not Vietnam, and this is not imperialism". Then what is it?
Model
A number of analysts and diplomats have begun to give an approximate answer: the model being applied is that of
Central America in the 1980s and 1990s.
In particular El Salvador, where the United
States did not send troops but organized the counterinsurgency to defeat the revolu-
Frente tionary process led by the
Farabundo Marti para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN). The Salvadoran civil war ended with the peace accord signed between the FMLN and the rightist government of Alfredo Cristiani in January 1992.
However, Colombia is not El Salvador. In that small Central American country, there was an army of 60,000 well-trained soldiers and the FMLN was without strategic backup after the Sandinistas had lost power in Nicaragua. In Colombia, the army (130,000 soldiers, of whom less than 25,000 are deployed in the fight against the guerrillas) faces a powerful enemy made up of more than 20,000 combatants distributed across 70 military fronts that can count on an organized social base of 60,000 people. Simultaneously, both the FARC, and to a lesser extent the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), maintain extensive liberated zones.
### Total autonomy
In addition, they finance themselves from sources that allow them millionaire incomes and total political and military autonomy: taxes collected from narcotics traffickers to protect the cocaine cultures, taxes on the oil companies, and the takings from the kidnapping industry. Moreover,
September 3, 2000). Involving thousands of "armed actors" , the paramilitaries, guerrillas and narcotics traffickers.
Gabriel Marcella, a Colombian strategist who teaches in the Military School of the United States, foresees the "possible Balkanization" of the Andean region if the intervention is not reversed. Even the Pentagon fears that Colombia is a war that cannot be won.
### Negotiating card
In any case US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Pickering insists that Plan Colombia, in its military component, is a negotiating card with the FARC. That is, to force the main armed organization to enter the labyrinth of reciprocal concessions. Nevertheless, in an official communiqué on August 23, the command of the FARC said: "As Plan Colombia is also an attempt of US dissuasion directed at the insurgency, we can guarantee that the FARC, supported by the people, is ready to withstand any ultimatum".
It was presented on October 20, 1999 by Republican senators DeWine, Grassley and Coverdell, before session 106 of the Foreign Relations Committee of the US Congress. Under the name of "Plan for peace, prosperity, and the strengthening of the state", the original title of draft law S1758 Alliance Act, or Plan Colombia... as it is known in this neck of the woods.
Objective: to associate the internal war of Colombia and the drug trafficking networks of the Andean region as a threat to the United States. How much does it cost? A provisional estimate:$7,500 million, with 80% of the first payment ($1,300 million) consisting of military equipment, cooperation in intelligence, training of two new antidrug battalions and two helicopters, Blackhawk and Huey.
"The Plan aims to intervene in three geographic areas: most important would be
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* Colombia
International Viewpoint #324 September-October 2000 7 the department of the Putumayo, the most conflictual border zone with Ecuador. It is assumed that operating here, in combination with the army, are the paramilitary, extreme right-wing "self-defence" groups, part of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) and Bloque 48 of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC)"
### Supply
Also, "the border province of Sucumbíos (Ecuador) is seen as the region that supplies all these forces. The rest of the military operations would concentrate in the center and the southwest of the country. But in the geopolitical approach of the Pentagon the port of Manta (province of Manabi), located on the Ecuadorian Pacific coast, is the key component of Plan Colombia.
As invasion by land is ruled out for the time being, the tendency is to carry out the intervention by air and sea, as in the last Balkan war. There is then the threat that the base at Manta is something more than "a point of logistical support". And in fact, Plan Colombia has assigned a role to it similar to that enjoyed by the military base at Palmerola (Honduras) in the war against Nicaragua and El Salvador." (Jose Steinsleger, articles in the Quito newspaper Hoy).
In a hearing before the Senate, general Charles Wilhelm, head of the Southern Command, explained that the United States sees Manta as "... the suitable site to replace the capacities lost after leaving the Howard airbase (the Panama Canal)" According to Wilhelm, "the importance of Manta is that it is the only site that will
LOO TILLASCAGE
T. HAL. give us the operating range we need to cover all Colombia, all Peru and the cocaine-cultivating areas of Bolivia".
### Crisis
On the other hand, the economic and political crisis in Ecuador, with more than 80% of the population mired in poverty, means that any economic aid from outside is seen as manna from heaven. In this sense, of the cheque for $1,300 million that Clinton presented to the Colombian president Andrés Pastrana, $47 million is for the "functions of intelligence and monitoring of Ecuador"
"Plan Colombia seeks the isolation of the guerrillas in those zones of the southwest where it is possible to detect them by means of the modern apparatuses of intelligence and to destroy them without need of a land invasion... the agricultural imports of Colombia have increased by 90%, which represents a dramatic blow for employment in the rural areas, where the war is centred. And the exodus has begun of the Colombians who live in the zone towards Ecuador, where day by day hundreds of people are arriving."(ibid)
For Heinz Dieterich Steffan, the level of military intervention by the United States in Colombia is equivalent already, "to that of its intervention in South Vietnam in 1963, in Nicaragua in 1983 and El Salvador in 1984" ("La Telaraña del Imperio" El Siglo, Santiago, December 18, 1999). And the country has become the third largest recipient of US military aid, behind Israel and Egypt.
Colombian specialists agree that the approval of the aid package of aid threatens to break the fragile equilibrium of the
Colombia * peace process. They insist that the
Colombian government lacks the admini trative and institutional capacity to hand the two million dollars that it will recei every day, and that it is very probable th the drug trafficking will not end, but mor to other regions of the country.
Of Marxist origin, the FARC has expe rienced an impressive growth in recent years. Its military infrastructure has transformed it into a truly mobile army. From
"hit and run" operations they have acquired an operational capacity enabling them to maintain prolonged fighting, take towns, resist and strike back hard at the official army. This has given them an effective presence and real power in more than half of the country and led them to define themselves as a "state within a state"
### Demilitarized zone
That status was reinforced when, during the peace negotiations with the government of Pastrana, the FARC was able to impose a demilitarized zone (November 1999) of 44,000 square kilometers in the south of the country. There, the FARC constructs its "national project". This is a experience without many antecedents in Latin America.
They have attained something similar to sovereignty, if we define this as absolute authority over a territory. They dictate laws, they administer justice, they assure services, they organize the educational system, and they give support to thousands of coca farmers, who they protect from the antidrug units of the army and the Drugs Enforcement Agency.
The FARC has constructed something very similar to a state. They have a system of independent government, a flourishing economy and a control over the population, although conflicts with the social movements take place.
It is not surprising then that it does not wish to abandon all this in order to integrate itself into a political system and a state that is falling apart and whose legitimacy is at rock bottom. On the other hand, the insurgent organizations maintain the fresh memory of how the integration of the Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19) and the Fuerzas Populares de Liberación (FPL) after the previous peace accords ended up: the murder of their main leaders and thousands of militants... and the cooption of a few of them to supervise the massacre.
In the strategic horizon of the FARC Madeleine Albright traveled with urgency
8 International Viewpoint #324 September-October 2000
* Colombia "the conquest of the power for the construction of socialism" remains. If the government of Pastrana wants peace, it will have "to abandon the neoliberal model", to repudiate the external debt and to create a more redistributive economic framework. Such demands are a blow for the oligarchy and difficult to contemplate.
Obviously, the armed revolutionary movement is the political expression of a radical proposal. That raises the destruction of the bourgeois State. The FARC have never lost sight of that objective, and they pursue it through negotiations or by "military means". Peace, then, based on mutual recognition and the balance of powers is impossible unless the creation of a virtual "South Colombia" governed by the FARC is accepted. Faced with this dilemma, the belligerents look to create an asymmetry in the correlation of forces: the Pastrana government through foreign intervention, the FARC by accumulating social and territorial bases, arms and com-
Contagion
Fearing the danger of contagion and the consequences for business, Argentine foreign minister, Adalberto Rodriguez Giavarini could not be more eloquent: "the Colombian conflict complicates the region" (Clarin, Buenos Aires 27/8/2000). In particular because "the crisis drives away investors".
The summit of 12 South American presidents which began on August 30 in
Brasilia dealt with the themes of regional integration, free trade, relations between the MERCOSUR and the Andean
Community of Nations (CAN) and the future of the American Free Trade Area that so much concerns the United States.
Agreements and, mainly, declarations of good faith were signed. However, the background was provided by the
Colombian crisis, the "democratic fragility" in countries like Ecuador, Peru, and the lorry load of uncertainty that is Plan
Colombia.
Brazil has sealed its 1,600 kilometer border with Colombia to prevent possible incursions of guerrillas, paramilitary and narcotics traffickers. In addition, its diplomacy has adopted a critical position towards "foreign interference" in the business of state. The empire, meanwhile, presses forward. Secretary of State to Brasilia, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Lima and Quito.
She looks for support and commitments. However, the governments have their doubts. Things are already complicated enough for these rulers: recessions, antineoliberal campaigns, plebiscites against the foreign debt, strikes and popular mobilizations at various levels that threaten their legitimacy. And they do not want the disorder of the "neoliberal order" to be combined with a new wave of anti-imperi-
Different reactions
Anyway, the reactions are different. Nicaragua has taken advantage of the context to insist on its claim to the archipelago of San Andrés and Providencia, currently under Colombian sovereignty, but where there are continuous secessionist yearnings; Panama, having recovered "sovereignty" over its Canal, does not forget that the De Concini amendment incorporated to the Treaty of Bilateral Neutrality (attached to the Torrijos-Carter treaty) allows Washington "to act against any threat against the Canal or the Pacific transit of ships".
That is, the United States can claim the right to a direct intervention in Colombia; Ecuador, in the middle of a pre-insurrectionary climate and a crisis of domination, strengthened its bonds with the United States. It accepted Plan Colombia in exchange for 81.3 million dollars (fight against drugs, improvement of the radar system at the Eloy Alfaro airport) and ceded the base of Manta. Peru for its part intensified the militarization of its border and is associated with the idea of creating a cordon sanitaire around Colombia;
Bolivia, which will receive 110 million dollars from Plan Colombia, supports the
United States.
Venezuela also has strengthened its borders in a complex situation. Where complex frictions and recurrent incidents coexist they have to do with old quarrels
(in the Gulf of Venezuela), recent separatist manifestations in Colombian departments like Norte de Santander and
Vichada, and the invasion of hundreds of people fleeing the horrors of the war, taking refuge in Venezuelan localities. At the same time there is a "Bolivarian spirit"
between Venezuelan President Chávez and the FARC.
In the more distant areas the panorama does not appear too consistent either. Some Caribbean islands are aligned with Washington, and stand to gain 43.9 million dollars for the modernization of systems of espionage in Aruba and Curazao under Plan Colombia. Cuba plays a discreet role; Fidel Castro has promoted an attitude of dialogue in the ELN, but he has little authority over the FARC.
Mexico has sought to distance itself from Colombia and thus appear before Washington as an ally in the matter of drugs and insurgency (and with the war in Chiapas as a potential factor of instability. As for the Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina and Uruguay) there are still no clear signals.
Whatever, when in the next months Plan Colombia begins to be implemented in full, one will see if the governments possess a real autonomy or are subordinate to the dictates of US imperialism.
The parties of the Sao Paulo Forum, through their Working Group, have already announced their total rejection of Plan Colombia and solidarity with Colombian people, its social organizations and the insurgent movement.
### Time bomb
Diverse NGOs, social and religious movements, have said that the Plan will escalate the armed conflict still more, running the risk of inaugurating another
Vietnam, and campaigns and networks of solidarity with the Colombian popular movement are mobilized in their respective countries and developing. Jose Miguel
Vivanco, executive director of Human Rights Watch has called Plan Colombia a
"time bomb" for human rights. (El Pais,
Madrid, July 7, 2000).
Amnesty International, which participated in the "Alternative Table" organized in Madrid in July, has called for a campaign against Plan Colombia, denouncing the use of paramilitarism as a state strategy, and the internal consequences that
"will aggravate alarmingly the present humanitarian crisis" (Amnesty
International No 44, Spanish edition,
August-September 2000).
Jose Vicente Rangel, Venezuelan foreign minister says that the Plan "aims if not at the Vietnamization, at least the
Colombianization of the region." (Ansa
Agency, July 7, 2000)
Meanwhile, the powerful
"Plan Colombia means war"
THE following interview with FARC comandante Raúl Reyes was carried out by FERNANDO ROMÁN for the Buenos Aires daily
Página/12
International Viewpoint #324 September-October 2000 9
Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) rejected Plan Colombia and in a public declaration, it affirmed its opposition, especially when it seems that there will be a direct participation of Ecuadorian forces, without concern for the violence of which the civil population will be victim, fundamentally the indigenous peoples and nationalities".
### Renovation
The background is the renovation of a counterinsurgent strategy of intervention. Like in the Dominican Republic in 1965, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua in 1981-90. The only difference is that Plan Colombia (as in Grenada and Panama) will not happen through a concealed operation. They seek, as James Petras says " to destroy dialogue and the movements that dare to defy the imperial monolith'. (Plan Colombia and its critics, Agency ALAI, July 17, 2000)
But in a situation where the dominant classes are shaken by a deep political crisis, of legitimacy, this is accelerated by the brutal effects of the recolonising offensive of multinational capital, Plan Colombia reemphasizes the importance of anti-imperialist struggle.
In a Latin America where broad and radical social resistances are articulating emancipatory alternatives which, albeit still from a defensive perspective, begin to sketch a new political scenario. *
•T is difficult to enter the zone con-
I trolled by the FARC, covering as it
_does some 44,000 square kilometers. From the airport at Las Delicias, only half an hour's flight from Bogota, to the FARC camp at San Vicente del Caguán there are only 150 kilometers. The commonest way to get there is by bus, running the risk of an assault or in taxis driven by kamikaze drivers along a road eroded by torrential rains listening to songs played at full blast that recount heroic legends of narcotics traffickers. After passing three roadblocks staffed by soldiers armed to the teeth, and the FARC roadblocks — only distinguishable from the others through their footwear
- an immense poster by the side of the road with the faces of Bolivar and Che Guevara tells you that you have arrived in New Colombia, the center of the zone of the peace negotiations between the FARC and the government of Andrés Pastrana.
I meet with commandante Raul Reyes, "chancellor " of the FARC, in his office, built from wood and nylon. In his hands, a book of poems by the Uruguayan Mario Benedetti and resting on his desk his M16 gun. He seems more like a university professor than a guerrilla who has been fighting for decades in the Colombian forest.
What is the vision of the FARC as opposed to Plan Colombia?
Plan Colombia is a plan for war. It is a plan that opens the doors wide to the hawks in the United States so that they can have a greater intervention in Colombia's internal affairs. It is a plan that means pain for the two peoples, both North American and Colombian, bringing the two nations into conflict. For that reason, we call on the international community, the Latin American peoples, so that the US is not allowed to intervene on behalf of the Colombian governing class in the guise of the fight against drug trafficking.
Colombia *
• What future is there for the peace negotiations with the government after Plan Colombia?
Plan Colombia puts the dialogue at serious risk. We know that even in the government of the United States there are different factions. There is a sector that is against Plan Colombia, that views with great concern the increased presence of US military advisers in Colombia, the airplanes, the helicopters, the sophisticated elements to detect communications that are part of Plan Colombia. These sectors are in the US Congress, the thinking circles of the United States, the US people, who see that Colombia is going to be an experiment for imperialist war. To them also we want to appeal, so that they can affect their own country, their own government, so that Colombia can settle its internal problems without interference from the world powers.
And we have said to the national government in our last meetings with all frankness that we do not accept any commission that comes to control the behavior of the FARC in this area nor anywhere else in Colombia, because we are the insurgency, we are the people in arms, we are an armed organization that rose up against the state, against the injustice of the state. Therefore, it does not recognize any of the laws of the state. For that reason they cannot accept that the FARC is put under their laws because they are not going to accept them. The FARC has every intention of engaging in a dialogue, to look for agreements by means of dialogue for the solution of the problems of our people, of the 18 million Colombians who are unemployed, in poverty and misery. The FARC accepts no kind of pressure, neither external nor internal.
• What risks does Plan Colombia carry for the region?
10 International Viewpoint #324 September-October 2000
* Colombia
THE average age of FARC members is 25. Most of them joined the guerrilla organization between the age of 13 and 15. In Colombia boys begin to work in the field at 7, and 5 years later they are considered as men, can marry and have children. For those who want to escape a destiny of certain poverty, the arrival in town of a column of the FARC, with its combatants who are well fed, literate, armed and above all respected, exerts an incredible fascination. Joining the guerrillas is an option for those who have nothing.
Clad in his impeccable camouflage uniform, a black youth who they call "el negro", 22 years old and 10 years a guerilla, says in a firm voice: "My life is the FARC. Outside, Colombian youth has no future. The only thing that they have left is to work from dawn to dusk, to get drunk in a bar at weekends and get women pregnant. Here if you want you never stop learning and I want to learn to be a revolutionary like Che". *
Plan Colombia is not about fighting drug trafficking. That story is, in fact, the excuse. It is a plan of extermination against the Colombian population. It is a plan that not only destroys the precarious forms of subsistence that the peasantry has by means of the production of cocaine leaf or the poppy but also contaminates the ecosystem, destroys the water and oxygen resources of the Colombian Amazonia, which has been called the lung of the world. An Amazonia that we share with Brazil, Venezuela, Peru and Ecuador, the heritage of humanity because it is an oxygen laboratory and a rich source of fauna and flora.
• How do you see the presence of the United States in the region today?
As a serious danger to the national sovereignty of Colombians, as a serious risk for the peace dialogue, as a threat to Colombia and the continent because today it is our country and tomorrow it could be any other. The United States is much emboldened since the collapse of the Soviets and looks for war everywhere with any pretext. Today in Colombia it is the pretext of the fight against the drug trafficking, but the United States does not fight the drugs trade in its own country. And in other areas it is the pretext of the fight for human rights, which it does not respect in its own country either. It is a very great threat because it seeks to intimidate any people or organization who is against its policies. It is what it has done all these years against socialist Cuba and all the peoples that have fought their imperialist policies
• Is the launching of the Bolivarian Movement in April of this year an answer to the political and military extension of the United States across the Andean region?
Plan Colombia not only affects the dignity of the Colombian people but also all the countries of South America, and in particular Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador and Brazil. It is a very great offensive by the empire against those dependent peoples and the so-called Third World that is in a situation of poverty, exploitation, misery and backwardness as a result of the policies of the United States, that have been applied by the rulers of our country over the last 50 years. That situation of pauperization of Colombian life has now intensified with the application of the economic opening, the neoliberal model, the policies of the IMF and the World Bank. To this we must add the doctrine of national security that has been applied in Colombia where the military have been the best students of the school of torture, disappearance, massacre and murder that the School of the Americas with US instructors has represented. For that reason the responsibility that the United States has in the situation of violence which Colombia and the countries of the area live in is very great. In Colombia there are paramilitary organizations financed by narcotics dedicated to crime, directed, supported and trained by the Colombian military.
With the Bolivarian Movement for the New Colombia, the FARC seeks in the first place to offer the people a different option, of struggle, combat for dignity, life and rights. We consider that the work of our Liberator is unfinished, we have to make it reality and for that we offer the popular masses a different option so that they protest, different from that offered by the Liberal and Conservative parties, distinct also from the armed struggle, different from a clandestine organization, something to which all the people of different political, military, religious, ethnic sectors can join, without any distinction because it exists to defend the heritage of the Colombians, their wealth, dignity, mother country and national sovereignty. This Bolivarian Movement can go beyond the borders of Colombia and is inspired by the liberating conception of Simon Bolivar and people like San Martin, Martí and so many others that have left us a way for fight for definitive emancipation. The Bolivarian Movement has a big future. It is an alternative that will stop being clandestine once we have managed to unite millions of Colombians to change the destiny of this country and to undertake the construction of the New Colombia, of a Colombia on the road to socialism.
• How is the relation with the population in the zones under FARC control?
As the FARC is a revolutionary political movement with the commitment to fight for the power to rule Colombia, they have taken care to address the problems of people. There are many problems of the people that the government does not address, because in many regions of Colombia the state has no presence except for the army or the police. There is no role for the state except repression, violence, intimidation. The presence of the State should guarantee the protection of the human rights of its inhabitants from cradle to grave. There are no political rights. For that reason we have a long list of Colombians, who are dead, disappeared, dislocated, in exile. The FARC, where it is present, takes on the task of addressing the problems of the people. Thus the people approach the guerrillas and request help in solving problems that are not addressed by the mayors or the governors or the inspectors of police or the politicians, like for example the improvement of the roads, the bridges, the highways, the schools, the health positions or the debts owed to the governmental institutions or the municipal administrations.
• The presence of so many youth in the FARC is impressive.
The guerrilla of the FARC is a young one, the old ones are its national leadership but the guerrillerada, from the commandantes at the front down, are under 30. The Central General Staff of the FARC, its highest body, is under 50. Every day they arrive in the ranks of the FARC - more youth, women from the countryside, students from the universities, everywhere. And the percentage of women increases. Today in the FARC we are 40 percent women. *
PRESIDENT of the St Petersburg soviet during the revolution of 1905 then again in October 1917, leader of the revolutionary military committee which organized the insurrection in Petrograd in October 1917, negotiator of the peace of Brest-Litovsk, founder of the Red
Army, heated polemicist against Lenin before 1914 then his close collaborator from 1917, combatant against the degeneration of the Russian revolution after 1923, expelled from the Communist party in 1927, deported in 1928, exiled in 192%, assassinated by a Stalinist agent in 1940 in his Mexican exile - the life of Leon Trotsky is mixed up with the fabulous rise of the revolutionary movement at the beginning of the 20th century and its
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
An attempt to explain the 20th century
Tall which preceded the Second World War.
Dossier *
Dossier -Trotsky 60 years on
TROTSKY'S first major contribution to Marxism came in the
This dossier, appearing shortly after the 60th anniversary of Trotsky's assassination — a crime denied by its authors and their successors for more than 50 years -deals with some aspects of Trotsky's theoretical legacy. More than a homage — which would certainly be merited - we have attempted to respond to the question of in what respect, sixty years after his death, the theoretical contribution of Trotsky retains relevance.
Theoretician of capitalist contradictions, theoretician and practician of the revolution, Trotsky also analyzed, while doing all he could to avert them, the two most significant defeats of the world workers' movement: the bureaucratic degeneration of the first workers' state and the victorious rise of fascism. Qualified as "prophet" by his biographer Isaac early years of the century with the development of what came to be known as the theory of permanent revolution. Michael Läwy analyzes the continuing relevance of this theory. After his theory had been vindicated by the October 1917 revolution, Trotsky then witnessed the bureaucratic degeneration of that state and attempted to explain it in his book The Revolution Betrayed. Jan Malewski examines the origins of and validity of Trotsky's analysis of the Stalinized Soviet Union. One of Trotsky's major struggles in the last decade of his life was to alert the German workers' movement to the Nazi
Deutscher because of the impressive number of a posteriori verifications of his predictions, Trotsky has above all left an approach to the main historic turning points of the 20th century which renders them intelligible. This takes on all the more importance today given the social democratic betrayal from 1914 onwards followed by the Stalinist degeneration. The work bequeathed by Trotsky is all the more important for all those who wish to refound the movement for the emancipation of humanity. |J.M.J* threat. Manuel Kellner looks at how Trotsky's analysis of fascism developed and its contemporary lessons. Finally, Francois
Vercammen analyses Trotsky's conception of the revolutionary party and J.M. Krivine examines Trotsky's final struggle to found the Fourth International. Please note that two articles that were to have appeared in this dossier, Michel Lequenne on Trotsky and culture and Luis Pilla Vares on direct democracy in the south of
Brazil have been held over for space reasons and will now appear in the next issue of IV. * International Viewpoint #324 September-October 2000 11