Walter Montoya, educational delegate of the SUTEBA
Matanza and national leader of Democracia Obrera speaks
“An union bureaucracy of the unemployed movement is
arising”
“They distribute the Planes Trabajar without any type
of control of the ranks and files neither of direct democracy”
We interview Walter
Montoya, educational delegate and national leader of Democracia Obrera who,
with the heroic picketers of the North of Salta faced the bullets of the
gendarmería, and to the bureaucracy of the unemployed movement, the Stalinism
and the PO in the Asamblea Piquetera on February 16th and 17th.
D.O.: Walter, they didn’t allow you to speak and a
band of the movements Stalinist and of the Partido Obrero expelled you?
W.: No, not only me. Dozens of delegates wanted to
speak and my expulsion, besides to that other delegates and comrades, was a
punishment to all those that wanted to impose the direct democracy in that
Assembly.
D.O.: What did you think of that moment, when people
surrounded you with clubs and guns inside an assembly that called
"piquetera”?
W.: I remembered when I was in Salta, when I left my
school, when the comrades of the North of Salta summoned, for June 17th
last year, to a Congress to all the activists and fighters and I went, I was
present there, and just that day came the brutal repression of the gendarmería.
I thought in that. When there in Salta, under the grained fire of the
gendarmería, with the comrades, in the pickets, we didn't ask from what party
or current you were, if you had written down yourself before or not, if you
were in the list of the “calling organizations”... that is to say, there, in
the pickets, we all spoke because we all were in the first fight position. I
also thought in my educational comrades of the SUTEBA of La Matanza that sent
me their solidarity, and even the union gave me a union permission voted in
Assembly for not being discharged while I was in the struggle in Salta, I
thought of that...
D.O.: Of course, if the bullets of the gendarmería
didn’t silence you, it may be hard for you that in an Assembly of unemployed
you were not allowed to speak...
W.: No,
no, wait. The unemployed workers
never kept me silent. Never the fighters in an Assembly of fighters made me
keep silent. In my union I always speak, we are one of the representative
currents in the SUTEBA Matanza; we are respectful of the direct democracy. But
in that Assembly on Saturday and on Sunday the direct democracy could not be
allowed, because there is arising a union bureaucracy of the unemployed and
picketers movements, composed by the small parties and bosses that share out
the “Planes Trabajar” as real “red manzaneras” without any type of control of
the ranks neither of direct democracy. For that reason it is a pride for me to
have been the explosive, with my intervention, that dozens of comrades began to
demand for the right to speak and to fight for the direct democracy. Because
those that don't fight for the workers’ democracy, for the direct democracy in
the mass meetings, it is because some business they have at the top with the
politicians of the infamous regime.
D.: You should have read the declarations of Altamira
of the PO in the newspaper La Nación of February, Sunday 24th...
W.: Yes, they are a real scandal. Altamira bets to the
breakup of the Popular Assemblies, as he has been betting to that the
unemployed movement that was born in Cutral Có, in the coordination bodies of
Jujuy, in the bridge of Corrientes, in the fight of the workers of Cruz del
Eje, in the Assemblies and sovereign congresses of the Department General San
Martin in Salta, to be subordinated to the parties.
D.O.: Why is that insistence in subordinating the
movement of masses to the parties?
W.: These leaders are servants of the infamous regime,
as deputy Altamira is, who today offers to the decadent bourgeois state and its
damned regime a Constituent Assembly to leave the crisis; they need
imperatively the Popular Assemblies to be dissolved and to dissolved the direct
democracy of the employed and unemployed movement; They are declared enemies of
a great National Congress of employed and unemployed workers with delegates
commanded by the rank and files, because they just want to put everything
inside the small parties, because they want to win the elections to a
Constituent Assembly. They are servants of the regime, they don't fight for a
power of the workers’ and people’s organizations, they don't fight for
self-defense committees to confront the Fascist bands of Duhalde and the
gendarmería: they fight for a “democratic” Constituent Assembly to save,
calling to vote, this infamous regime. And for that reason they need that the
parties become big, the Popular Assemblies small, the organs of the unemployed
very small; because they need votes to prevent development of the organs of
direct democracy, of workers’ and people’s power and to prevent the working
class and the people to advance to the workers’ revolution. They are servants
of the regime.
But these are not more than a small link, very small I
would say, of a chain of treacherous leaderships that want to impede, at any
price, the committees of unemployed, of the workers in fight and the Popular
Assemblies to develop, extend, be centralize. And I will tell you more: they
want to impede the self-defense committees to be built up. Because the one that
attacks the workers’ organizations that are in the frontline of a struggle,
accusing them of “provocateurs”, it is because, for sure, before the working
class and the people, he wants to expose the enemies as allies and the allies
as enemies. And because he doesn't want, as Altamira and the Stalinist union
bureaucrats of the unemployed movement, to build up self-defense committees to
smash the Fascist bands, the praetorian paid guards of Duhalde and the PJ that
already begin to terrify and to attack the workers’ and popular organizations,
as they already did in the Central Market, where D´Elía and Alderete left in
their own hands a minority sector of unemployed so that those hoodlums beat
them brutally and slaughter them. Or as in Merlo, where 300 of those paid
“pointers” attacked a defenseless unemployed movement and the popular
assemblies of the area.
That means that they are a fifth-column: that they
divide and they demoralize from inside, so that the enemy strikes from outside.
They are all agents of the same regime and of the same employer that pays to
the Fascist bands of “pointers” of the PJ about 500 dollars per month to each
one. And to others with Planes Trabajar, so that they manage them without any
control, like deputy D'Elía, councilman Altamira and all the left parties
enemies of the labor democracy do. Or as the state does with the statized
unions, paying to the bureaucrats millions of dollars of the social security
and of the compulsive cut rate of the union quotas so that they support
Duhalde.
DO: the comrades of Neuquén and the Comahue have just
informed us that the combative workers of the construction of that area have
rose into the struggle again.
W: Yes. There, hundreds of workers tossed to kicks the
bureaucracy of the UOCRA (Construction Workers of the Argentine Republic Union)
that more than a union of employed workers of the construction it is an
unemployed movement of workers. There, the old bureaucracy distributed 3000
“Planes Trabajar” to keep quiet one of the most combative labor sectors in the
last years. More than that, the bureaucracy distributes the plans in their
delegations in Cutral-Có that is where we could say that the Argentine
unemployed movement was founded.
The provincial government is desperate, because it
loses the control over one of the most combative sectors of the working class
in Neuquén. The UOCRA of General Roca, in Río Negro was occupied too. They have
sent Avalos there, an old bureaucrat that lead the UOCRA of Cipoletti in 1984,
when Pollo Flores, worker of the construction and classist leader was brutally
murdered by a member of that leadership.
We have found out that the UOCRA of Martínez has
already sent 100 gunmen to recover the union, for order of Duhalde and of the
government of the MPN of Neuquén. The gunmen of Martínez are there to kneel
down those combative labor fighters.
Meanwhile, sectors of the old bureaucracy try to be
mingled amongst the fighters and they call to make a unique list for new
elections with the combative wing of Christiansen -the old labor leader of the
construction of the MAS in Neuquén. But, how can be clear an elections if only
vote the employed workers which are not more than 5% of the union membership,
while 95% of the workers of the construction are unemployed?
For that reason, as a workers’ leader, correspondent
of Democracia Obrera who has just written to me says, what has to be built up
there is a body of delegates, representative of the ranks of workers of all the
existent works, and of the workers’ neighborhoods with a delegate every 20
unemployed workers of the construction, so that they take on, with self-defense
pickets and direct democracy, the leadership of the union.
It is that the workers and the people are not able to neither
they want to delegate any more: neither on bourgeois politicians, neither on
union leaders that are screwed in the armchairs for years and nobody can
remove. To enter in that trap would be fatal for the combative workers of the
construction of Neuquén.
In that province they are the labor fighters of Zanón
fighting for months in the defense of their work source, and those of the
ceramic factory of Cutral-Có who have just blockade the road. I want to clear
up that in the Assembly on 16th and 17th they didn't
allow to speak one of the delegates of the four ceramic factories of Neuquén
who was present there... when that province is a powder-magazine of workers’
and popular struggles!
Self-defense committees and direct democracy are the
only one alternative that the workers have to coordinate their fight and to
triumph.
D.O.: This weekend we saw you in the Asamblea
Interbarrial of Parque Centenario...
W.: Yes, I went to the Interbarrial to see personally.
I want to clarify that I was there and no security team surrounded me. I didn't
see any committee of security of any party pursuing the opponents. I saw an
extraordinary direct democracy, the assemblies deciding by voting or by lot who
coordinates it, because they are not always the same assemblies those that
coordinate the debate and the voting, they are rotating, in each assembly it is
voted by hand raised who coordinates it. I witnessed an exemplary meeting of an
independent organ, from the state and of the employer regime. I thought then...
here there is not bureaucracy that is making business with the hunger of the
workers and the people! Because it is liquidated the labor democracy and the
direct democracy; they become leaders forever, when the money is managed
without control and they keep a part of what is managed for them; that is to
say, when there are bureaucrats that no matter how often they wear coats as
Ubaldini did in the old union bureaucracy, no matter how often they wear vest
like D'Elía and Alderete, no matter how much they use balaclavas or red
handkerchief, they don't have ideology: they want to distribute money and to
keep the prizes. Labor democracy is enemy of that, of all privilege in the
labor movement, of all the bureaucracy, because they are those that bury and
betray from inside the workers’ struggle. For that reason I am proud for the
fight that I gave.
D.O.: What else have you seen in the Asamblea
Interbarrial on Sunday?
W.: I Saw to the same parties that had expelled me
with a security picket one week before in the meeting of Avellaneda. But, there
in the Interbarrial they are camouflaged, the same as the radical “pointers” or
the CTA, without showing their faces saying that they are of the PO, without
saying of what party they are members, because they can not speak there yet,
because they have not won the right. I saw them acting boldly, trying to
destroy the direct democracy.
D.O.: was she/he solved to summon an Interbarrial
National Assembly on March 17th of all the popular assemblies of the
country?
W.: Yes. And all the militants of parties of the left
that I know that spoke on behalf of this or that assembly, were distinguished
trying to impose motions that were all defeated in the voting. They suffered a
boisterous defeat. First they proposed to form a calling board of the National
Interbarrial. What does it make you remember to? I remembered at once the
calling board of the Asamblea Piquetera of February 16th and 17th,
that nobody never knew, all over the five previous months, where they met. From
Democracia Obrera we went almost ten times to the headquarters of the MAS where
supposedly they met, and they lay to us everything, they always gave us a
different date and a mistaken site so that we wouldn't take part. The proposal
of those of the secret meetings of calling boards, that become those that
organized the Assembly and that to their whim decide who speaks and who does
not, last Sunday was defeated by 99% over 1% in the Interbarrial. And I want to
clear up that there were more than twenty delegates of those popular assemblies
that meet in the Parque Centenario who had attended the meeting on February 16th
and 17th. And after that, all these prying delegates, with no
exception, reported to their popular Assemblies that there had not been
democracy and that not everybody had been allowed to speak. Then, I tell you
again: I am proud of what we, from Democracia Obrera, have done, because we
warned to the popular assemblies who are their enemies that want to destroy
them, from outside and from inside of them. Because there is not only outside,
it is also inside. Only the outside enemy is clear, while the one of the inside
is overlapped, it is camouflaged to destroy an organ of direct democracy.
Why instead of using 100 armed people with clubs,
employees of Martino, of Altamira and of the PC of the Banco Credicoop, to
attack me and the comrades, they don't put all their strength, their clubs,
weapons, in the service of the popular assemblies and the organizations of the
workers and the people to smash the Fascists in Merlo? For that reason I won’t
stop saying that they are different agents of the same regime that pays them.
Because to have paid guards, allowed by everyone, to control the opponents,
like it was seen on February 16th and 17th, it is to
demoralize and to divide the proletarian vanguard to prevent it to build up, in
an unified way, common pickets to smash the Fascist bands.
DO: Weren’t the delegates of the Popular Assemblies
allowed to speak in the Assembly of February 16th and 17th?
W: Of course, how they will allow them to speak, if
Altamira, the PC, Martino, together with organs of human rights next to the
CTA, are trying to organize the “Plaza del NO” on March 24th, with
Carrió, the employers of the Pymes and the Banco Credicoop, against the “Plaza
del Si” of Duhalde!
To keep on living the unemployed movement with their
pickets, and the popular assemblies, means to keep up the labor and popular
alliance. It is to unite the pickets with the popular assemblies, that is to
say, to build up the self-defense committees of those same organizations to
smash the Fascist bands that want to smash them and to destroy that unity.
It is to centralize the dozens and dozens of factories
in struggle against the closures and sackings and to open the way toward the
organization of thousands delegates breaking with the treacherous union
bureaucracy union that support the government in a social agreement.
They cackle about “the unity of pickets and
saucepans”, but they want that unity behind the priests, the opposition bourgeoisie
of Carrió, of the Banco Credicoop and the Pymes that work for a different
alternative to save the infamous regime that is through premature elections,
what is exactly the same than what Altamira wants for his Constituent Assembly
and to get many votes.
DO: What do you think about the resolutions of the
assembly of Parque Centenario?
W: I find that they show that wide sectors of the mass
movement are learning. There is a process of deep reflection: from December 19th
and 20th, the Plaza de Mayo fulfilled in dozens of opportunities.
And everything continues in the same way: All of them are not gone and the
catastrophe has deepened.
That is what the Trotskyists describe as that there is
a perfectly organized plan of the enemy and there is not a leadership of the
masses worthy of the current crisis.
The fifth-column acts in such a way so that the
exploited and its organizations can’t go up to an end in their experience and
can’t reach the conclusion that it is necessary to organize a new assault, to break
up any relationship of the fighting organizations of the masses with the
bourgeois state, to arm to defend themselves from the attack of the Fascist
bands, of the murderers that attack brutal and unpunished the peaceful actions
of the unemployed as in Merlo, or who killed the young just because they spoke
supporting the fight of the masses in front of a television, like in the
massacre of Floresta.
But it learns. For example, in the Interbarrial it was
posed and it was approved that there would not be any violence within the
popular assemblies and the National Interbarrial that was summoned; that
everyone could speak; that there will not be any guard of security to the
inside but to the outside, of self-defense. This was approved by ovation, in
the same way that it was approved by ovation -after I was disallowed to speak
in the Asamblea Piquetera on February 16th and 17th-,
that in the next assembly everyone will speak, with a mandated delegate every
twenty workers. The labor democracy is imposing against those that want to
liquidate it to go to elections to Constituent Assemblies and to betray the
Argentinean revolution that began.
D.O.: Were you in Padua?
W.: Yes I was beside my comrades of Democracia Obrera,
bringing the solidarity against the attack that they had suffered in Merlo. I
was talking with several of the leaders of the Assembly of Padua. They told me
that yesterday they had a meeting where they solved to propose to all the
popular assemblies that the “cacerolazo” of this Friday 1st of March
to be concentrated in Merlo, so that all the popular assemblies will surround
the Square of Merlo to make nuzzle the Fascist Otahecé, who dared to beat to a
pulp, with three hundred hoodlums, the unemployed that, defenseless, were
organizing with the small ruined shopkeepers and the workers of the different
factories of the area, their popular assembly in the square of Merlo.
In that meeting of Padua it was discussed, in the
first place that it is necessary to put up self-defense committees. And there it
was also said that all the left parties and labor currents that supported had
together to put their shoulder to the self-defense pickets and the popular
assembly to face the paid hoodlums of Otahecé, that is to say, self-defense
committees, not to pursue the opponents but to face the enemy!
D.O.: Were you with representative leaders of that
Assembly?
W.: Exactly, one of them, comrade Pablo, instigator of
the Assembly of Padua that spoke in the Asamblea Interbarrial, told me again
what he had said there, and I say it here through his words, because he
requested me to transmits it: he openly said -all the currents were there, as
the MAS and the PO that won't allow me to lie- that the enemy is outside with
the hoodlums and the Fascists to smash the popular Assemblies, but it is also
inside with pickets to impede and to liquidate the direct democracy. And
comrade Pablo of the Popular Assembly of Padua is right. Because everyone want
to dissolve the popular assemblies and the direct democracy of the unemployed
workers, because they all of them want altogether drag us behind the CTA in the
Frenapo, behind Lilita Carrió. They want to mix the water and the oil that
never mix, they want to mix to the employed and unemployed working class and
the expropriated small savers, with representatives of the employers, of
parties as the ARI of Carrió, or priest Farinello's Social Pole. This is the
struggle that has been established today, and the combat of Democracia Obrera
against that, for the direct democracy, for the independence of the popular
Assemblies, of the movement of unemployed, of the organizations of the workers
and the people in struggle, from the employer state and from the infamous
regime and their waged politicians.
Comrade Pablo asked us to openly denounce that him,
Pablo Soler and comrade Miguel Gaburri - of the Assembly of Padua as well- have
been threatened to death on the part of the Fascist bands of Otahecé and
Duhalde. I want to denounce this, and to add that I, Walter Montoya, have been
threatened to death as well, and have been attacked by the apparatuses of the
Stalinism and the PO, and that I consider them responsible, and in particular
Altamira, Christian Rath, Pitrola, Rieznik and the whole leadership of the PO
for my physical integrity and of that of all the militants of Democracia
Obrera.
DO: Do you want to say anything else?
W: Yes, that so much counterrevolutionary plan is to
impose the plan of the yankee imperialism that Duhalde and the infamous régime
of the PJ and the UCR are preparing, with the support of Daer and Moyano. New
looting to the wages, millions of unemployed sustained with miseries of 20
pesos (10 dollars) per month, hundreds of thousands of sacked workers, full
liquidation of the public health and education. Only this way the “community of
business” will be able to recover its earnings invest, on the ruins of the
nation and the hunger and the spoliation of the working class and its allies.
That is one road. The other one is to impose a
workers’ plan and a way out to the crisis so that they are them who pay for it.
But for that it is necessary to extend, to generalize, to centralize and to arm
the embryos of dual power organs, to prepare a new assault of the masses that
finishes dislocating this infamous bourgeois regime and to their forces of
repression.
Nothing of this will be possible if in the workers’
and mass organizations these treacherous leaderships are not defeated. To go
forward up to that it is necessary to build up the self-defense committees to
smash the Fascist bands which are the outpost of the dogs of the gendarmería
and the police, and of the breed of official genocidists of the Argentinean
army.
I call to the conscious labor fighters, to the
thousands that have militating in the Trotskyist movement and that today are
encouraging with their accumulated experience of years these processes of the
popular assemblies and of the unemployed movement to the necessary regrouping
the ranks of the Trotskyism to international and national level to rise a
vanguard revolutionary party to return to the workers and popular masses the
leadership that they deserve.
From Democracia Obrera we are already converging,
based on lessons of the most advanced events of the world revolution and of the
Argentinean revolution, with dozens of groups, cadres and militants of the
Trotskyist movement at an international and national level to advance in the
way of building up party of the 4th International.
Translated into English by
Marcos Smith