Communism

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Communism

Between the years immediately after the founding of the Soviet Union in 1917 until its collapse in 1991, the Latin American Communist movement was closely tied to Moscow. The long-term strategy of Communist parties as well as positions on specific issues generally coincided with Moscow's thinking, sometimes referred to as "orthodox Communism." Nevertheless, during this extended period, Latin American Communists occasionally assumed positions and engaged in actions that to varying degrees were temporarily at odds with the official Moscow line.

The basic Moscow-approved Communist strategy during these seven decades (with the exception of the World War II years) was the prioritization of the struggle against imperialism, specifically U.S. domination. The anti-imperialism of the Communist movement was tied to the concept of a dual revolutionary process, which supposedly corresponded to the sequence of the Soviet revolutions of February and October in 1917. According to this scheme, the first revolution was supported by a "national progressive bourgeoisie" and consisted of the establishment of a democratic government that promoted agrarian reform and national industrial development. The achievement of the objectives of the first stage was seen as a prerequisite for advancing to the second stage, which was socialist. While some sectors of the non-Communist left also defended this thesis, others questioned the existence of a "progressive bourgeoisie" in Latin America and argued that this entire class was inextricably tied to the imperialist system.

EARLY YEARS AND POPULAR FRONTISM

Communist parties were formed throughout Latin America during the decade and a half following the Soviet revolution. Some, as in the case of Argentina, were split-offs of existing socialist parties, whereas others, such as the Communist Party of Mexico, consisted of many former anarchists. In the case of Chile, the Socialist Workers Party, founded in 1912, changed its name to the Communist Party under the influence of its main leader, ex-typographical worker Luis Emilio Recabarren. The Communist Party of Venezuela, as that of several other countries, was founded in 1931 by nonveterans with little previous organizational ties. The early Communists were students, intellectuals, and other members of the middle sectors; few of them belonged to the working class (the Chilean Communist Party being an exception).

The Communist parties joined the Communist International (the Comintern), which was created shortly after the Soviet revolution and saw itself as one worldwide party. Various international Communist organizers aided in the founding of Communist parties throughout Latin America. The most prominent was M. N. Roy, from India, who unsuccessfully attempted to win over delegates at the Second Comintern Congress in 1920 to the thesis that the political struggles of underdeveloped countries was central to the world revolutionary process.

During its early years, the Latin American Communist movement was more independent than at any other time. The most heterodox thinker was José Carlos Mariátegui, founder of the Peruvian Socialist Party in 1928, which refrained from calling itself "Communist" although it affiliated with the Comintern. Mariátegui glorified the collective spirit that the Peruvian peasants inherited from their Incan past, which he saw as the seeds of a socialist society. In an action that was largely independent of the Comintern, the Salvadorian Communist Agustín Farabundo Martí led an armed insurrection in 1932 that the army brutally crushed. Another icon of the Communist movement, former military officer Luís Carlos Prestes, led an uprising with heavy participation by Brazilian Communists against the government of Getúlio Vargas in November 1935, an insurrection that was contrary to the Comintern's prodemocratic line at the time.

At its Seventh Congress in July 1935, the Comintern initiated its strategy of broad alliances known as "popular fronts," with parties to the right of the Communist parties in opposition to the threat of fascism. At first popular frontism was designed to achieve far-reaching economic and political reforms, but after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 it consisted of Communist support of governments opposed to Germany. The one popular front that came to power was the coalition of the Communist, Socialist, and Radical Parties in Chile, whose candidate Pedro Aguirre Cerda won the presidential elections in 1938. Several Communist parties supported presidents during World War II. Two leading Communists, Juan Marinello and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, entered the cabinet of the first government of Fulgencio Batista (1940–1944) in Cuba; the party of Venezuelan President Isaías Medina Angarita formed an alliance with Communists for the 1944 municipal elections.

COLD WAR YEARS

In the latter years of World War II, splinter groups emerged in the Communist parties of Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru that were opposed to conciliatory stands, including the "no-strike" policy promoted by Earl Browder, the secretary-general of the U.S. Communist Party. With the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, Latin American Communists hardened their positions and denounced "Browderism." The political polarization set off by the Cold War turned former allies against the Communists. Thus the Radical government of Gabriel González Videla in Chile, elected in 1946 with Communist endorsement as a continuation of popular frontism, passed the Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy in 1948, which outlawed the Communist Party. While the Chilean Communist Party went underground, its counterparts in countries run by military dictatorships in the 1950s, such as that of Batista in Cuba and Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela, faced ever harsher repression. Polarization also split the continental labor movement the Confederation of Workers of Latin America (CTAL), which was under the direction of the Mexican trade unionist Vicente Lombardo Toledano and under strong Communist influence. Motivated by Cold War considerations, Serafino Romualdi of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) played an active role in pushing for the CTAL's schism in 1948.

The pro-Soviet Communist movement in Latin America was generally reluctant to support armed movements; not surprisingly, the Cuban Communist Party, known as the Partido Socialist Popular (PSP), at first criticized Fidel Castro's clandestine Movimiento 26 de Julio for being putschist (supporting a military seizure of power). But Castro's advent to power on January 1, 1959, was a milestone event for Latin American Communists and resulted in the merging of the PSP and the Movimiento 26 de Julio into a new Communist Party of Cuba. Most, but not all, Latin American Communist parties opposed Castro's call to arms in the 1960s. Ironically, in Venezuela, which was one of the continent's more solid democracies, the Communist Party initiated the guerrilla struggle in 1962, although it gradually extricated itself from the movement after 1965. Communists in several other nations also engaged in armed warfare. After considerable hesitation, the Communist Party in El Salvador joined the guerrilla front Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in 1979. The party's secretary general, Jorge Handal, became a guerrilla commander and, in 2004, the FMLN's presidential candidate. In the 1960s the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which represented the armed wing of the Communist Party, reactivated the previous decade's armed struggle, known as "La Violencia," between Liberals and Conservatives, and has maintained itself as the nation's largest guerrilla organization since then. Finally, the Communist Party of Chile joined the far-leftist Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) in forming the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR) in 1983; it carried out sabotage, kidnappings of military personnel, and, in 1986, an attempt on the life of dictator Augusto Pinochet.

EUROCOMMUNISM AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION

Beginning in the 1970s, in a phenomenon known as Eurocommunism, European Communist parties rejected long-standing Marxist dogma. This development, together with the liberalization policies known as perestroika, initiated in 1986 by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, inspired some Latin American Communists to follow a flexible line. Eurocommunism influenced Venezuelan Communist Party dissidents to break off from the main party to form the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) in 1971, which advocated a democratic "Venezuelan road to socialism" and soon became the nation's largest leftist party. Ten years later, the Communist Party of Mexico coalesced, with four smaller parties, into the Socialist Unified Party of Mexico (PSUM), which in turn dissolved itself to enter the Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRD), led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. By uniting organically with leftists who defended diverse ideological currents, the Mexican Communists abandoned dogmatic notions long associated with the international Communist movement.

The developments culminating in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 weakened the Communist movement in Latin America. Thus the Chilean Communist Party (PCC), historically the largest in Latin America dating back to Recabarren, saw its electoral intake severely diminished to 3 percent for its secretary general and candidate Gladys Marín in the 1999 presidential elections. Furthermore, beginning in the late 1980s the Communists' long-standing ally the Chilean Socialist Party maintained an ongoing electoral alliance with the Christian Democratic Party, which excluded the PCC. Those few who stayed in Communist parties hardened their stand after 1991. With the election of Hugo Chávez as president of Venezuela in 1998 signaling leftist electoral inroads, Latin American Communists sided with the radical brand of leftism over the moderate one. Thus the Communist Party of Venezuela avidly supported President Chávez; the Communist Party of Bolivia ran candidates on the slate of Evo Morales's Movement toward Socialism (MAS) and supported his candidacy in 2005 when he was elected president; and the Communist Party of Peru endorsed the candidacy of Ollanta Humala in the 2006 presidential elections. In contrast, the Communist Party of Argentina maintained a more critical attitude toward President Néstor Kirchner, elected in 2003.

THE BALANCE SHEET OF SOVIET INFLUENCE

Although Latin American Communist parties generally hewed to the Moscow-endorsed line, they occasionally assumed relatively independent positions. Examples include the thinking and actions of first-generation Communist leaders such as Mariátegui, the emergence of anti-Browder Communist factions at a time when the U.S. Communist leader enjoyed considerable prestige, and the influence of the Cuban Communist Party on some Latin American parties at a time when Fidel Castro was considered a maverick within the international Communist movement.

The balance sheet of pro-Soviet Communist influence in Latin America was mixed. On the one hand, the local Communist Party failed to play a major role in the two successful leftist Latin American revolutions, namely that of Cuba in 1959 and Nicaragua in 1979. On the other hand, after defying the Soviets during the first decade of the Cuban revolution, Castro's qualified support for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 signaled a convergence of Cuban-Soviet positions lasting until 1991. In addition, the Communists maintained major influence over a period of time in a number of labor movements. Examples include the General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP), which was founded by Mariátegui in 1929 and since the late 1960s has been the nation's largest labor confederation; the Chilean Workers' Central (CUT), founded in 1953, as well as its two major precursor organizations; and the Communist-controlled Unionist Confederation of Colombian Workers, founded in 1964. Finally, the colorful careers of various important Communists added prestige to the movement. These figures included, in addition to Mariátegui and Prestes, Julio Antonio Mella, the founder of the Cuban Communist Party who was assassinated in 1929; Gustavo Machado, a long-time Communist head from an aristocratic family; and Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet who died days after the Pinochet-led coup in 1973.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Alexander, Robert J. The Communist Party of Venezuela. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1969.

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Carr, Barry, and Steve Ellner, eds. The Latin American Left: From the Fall of Allende to Perestroika. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993.

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Steve Ellner

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture