Mario Monje

Mario Monje Molina (born March 29, 1929 in Irupana ; † January 15, 2019 in Moscow ) was a Bolivian politician and co-founder and general secretary of the Communist Party of Bolivia . He played an important role in Che Guevara's guerrilla war of 1966/67, which ended with Guevara's death.

biography

In 1950 Monje was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Bolivia (PCB, Partido Comunista de Bolivia ) and later General Secretary of the party. He led the party on the pro-Soviet line. In 1964 a small Maoist group (PCB-ML) split off . The 7th Party Congress of the PCB, led by Monje, affirmed the policy of the "peaceful path to power" in April 1965.

In the mid-1960s, under the leadership of Mario Monje, the PCB played an ambiguous role when Cuba tried to export its own model of armed struggle to other Latin American countries since its victory in the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Monje, like a dozen other PCB members, had received military training in Cuba since April 1966, but, like others, spoke out against the plans for a revolution in Bolivia triggered by a guerrilla war , which was also strictly rejected by the leadership of the Soviet Union . As a result, the position of Monje and the Communist Party in connection with the activities of the Guevara-led guerrilla group Ejército de Liberación Nacional has been questioned from many quarters. In the wake of the controversy, Monje resigned from his post as General Secretary of the Communist Party at the beginning of 1967, and was succeeded by Jorge Kolle, brother of the Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

Monje was repeatedly imprisoned from 1968 to 1970 for his political activities. As provincial secretary of his party, he was imprisoned again in 1971 before he was granted political asylum in the Soviet Union. Since then he has lived in Moscow , where he worked at the Latin American Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR until his retirement . He died in January 2019 at the age of 89.

Controversy with Guevara about the guerrilla war in Bolivia

According to the original plan, which had also been explained to the Cuban fighters in Cuba, initially only a regional training base for guerrilla fighters from Bolivia, Peru, Brazil and Argentina was to be built in the relative isolation of the Bolivian mountains. Monje assumed that the war itself should not be waged in Bolivia, but in Argentina or Peru. The Bolivian Communists were better organized than their Argentine and Peruvian comrades. In contrast to Guevara, Monje saw himself primarily as a politician who wanted to come to power democratically, and not as a warrior. Monje was against the use of the PCB infrastructure that he had built for a violent revolutionary war. According to Guevara's plan, Monje was to lead the urban underground struggle, while the PCB members trained in Cuba and their international comrades in arms would each open a front in two mountain regions of the country.

On December 31, 1966 , a meeting with Guevara took place on a farm on the Río Ñancahuazú that had been converted into a provisional guerrilla base a few weeks ago , which Monje had acquired with funds received from Cuba. In this case, Monje made it clear that he could not accept that the role of political leader of the Bolivian Revolution assigned to him by Guevara should be subordinate to the role of military leader reserved by Guevara for himself. He was ready to resign the leadership of the party he had founded, but not to support the fact that the revolution in Bolivia was in the hands of a foreign commander. For his part, Guevara was not ready to submit his authority to a Bolivian command, so that the hoped-for personnel and infrastructural support from the PCB did not materialize. This was the last contact between the two men. The Central Committee of the PCB made it clear in a letter of January 11, 1967 to Fidel Castro that the Bolivian Revolution and the armed struggle must be planned and led by Bolivians. Despite opposition from the party leadership, around twenty PCB members took part in the guerrilla war, most of whom were killed in the process. After the PCB was canceled, Ernesto Guevara contacted the pro-Chinese PCB-ML led by Moisés Guevara, who joined the guerrilla in March with around a dozen comrades and spontaneously recruited volunteers.

criticism

In the Cuban media like EcuRed , Monje is called a “traitor”. In his introduction to Guevara's Bolivian diary, published in 1968, Fidel Castro accused Mario Monje of having “done nothing other than assert shameful, ridiculous and undeserved claims to orders” against Guevara, ”despite her lack of personal experience in Guevara guerrilla warfare, Monje had“ the political and want to dispute military leadership of the movement in Bolivia ”. He said that he had not kept his commitments to support the guerrillas, but "cowardly crossed his arms at the hour of the act" and "boycotted" the movement by "intercepting" communists who were ready to fight in La Paz. Castro further denigrated Monje as an “incompetent, hypocritical and scheming leader” who had thwarted the development of the revolutionary fighters. Aleida March , Guevara's widow, accuses Monje of being responsible for his death.

Like his successor Kolle in 1968, Monje recalled in later statements that no Bolivian had invited Guevara, but that Guevara had gone to Bolivia with his war plans on his own account. In addition, in the spring of 1967 he insisted on Castro about the hopeless military situation of Guevara and urged that the Cubans come to his aid with a liberation squad, to which he received no answer from Havana.

Web links

• La leyenda de Mario Monje, el líder comunista que se negó a participar en la guerrilla del Che Guevara. ( Memento of July 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) In: E′a of September 3, 2012, accessed on November 25, 2013 (Spanish)

proof

1. ↑ МОНХЕ МОЛИНА dic.academic.ru, accessed on January 17, 2019
2. ↑ "В Москве умер известный боливийский коммунист Марио Молина (Bolivian communist Mario Molina died in Moscow)". Retrieved January 17, 2019 (Russian). 
3. ^ The Sino-Soviet Dispute Within the Communist Movement in Latin America. (PDF; 10.7 MB), p. 139, CIA study of June 15, 1967, accessed on November 25, 2013 (English)
4. ^ Henry Butterfield Ryan: The Fall of Che Guevara: A Story of Soldiers, Spies, and Diplomats. P. 67, Oxford University Press, 1998 (English)
5. ↑ ^{a b} Matilde Zimmermann: Che Guevara's Bolivia Campaign: Thirty Years of Controversy (PDF; 28 kB) . Departments of History and Latin American Studies, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
6. ↑ La leyenda de Mario Monje, el líder comunista que se negó a participar en la guerrilla del Che Guevara. ( Memento of July 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) In: E′a of September 3, 2012 (Spanish)
7. ^ ^{A b} Alarcón: Memorias de un soldado cubano. P. 120
8. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Mario Monje: "El destino de Che Guevara fue predeterminado". ( Memento of the original from February 7, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Radio interview (21:13 min.) By La Voz de Rusia from October 19, 2012, accessed on February 7, 2015 (Spanish)
9. ↑ José Andrés Sánchez: Los pasos que dio Guevara en Bolivia ( Memento of October 11, 2007 in the web archive archive.today ) , eldeber.com.bo
10. ↑ Ryan: The Fall of Che Guevara. P. 66f
11. ↑ Dariel Alarcón Ramírez: Memorias de un soldado cubano: Vida y muerte de la revolución. Pp. 140–144, Tusquets, Barcelona 2009 (Spanish)
12. ↑ Mario Monje. In: EcuRed , accessed January 27, 2016 (Spanish)
13. ↑ Fidel Castro: A Necessary Introduction , kpp.aksios.de, Spanish original text in Granma ( Memento of December 2, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
14. ↑ Ryan: The Fall of Che Guevara. P. 67