‘Nicaraguan Independence Fighter Calls to Latin American Workers’ by Augusto Cesar Sandino from The Pan-Pacific Monthly (San Francisco). No. 35. April, 1930.

(The following appeal to the workers of city and farm of Nicaragua and all Latin America, was made on February 26, from Vera Cruz, Mexico, by A.C . Sandino, leader of the armed independent struggle of the Nicaraguan people against Yankee imperialism. Hitherto, Sandino had relied on military force alone and seemingly was without perspective of the need for organized mass action of the proletariat as a class, as the independent leader of any genuine and effective fight f or national liberation. We are therefore glad to publish this call, which is an endorsement of the Latin American Trade Union Confederation, which occupies in Latin America the same role as the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat. EDITOR.)

THE working class of all Latin America suffers today under a double exploitation: that of imperialism, chiefly Yankee imperialism, and that of the native bourgeoisie or national capitalist exploiters who, in their wish to obtain favors from the insatiable invaders daily intensify the destruction of the revolutionary movement, the persecution of the workers’ leaders, their imprisonment and exile.

In this criminal work, the imperialists count not only with the aid of the Latin American dictators, but with an agent still more opprobrious; the organizations and “leaders,” that is to say officials, of trade unions, bought off with crumbs wet with the blood of the colonial peoples, which “leaders” try to seize power in the trade union movement in order to infest it with their class collaboration, sidetrack it from the road of revolutionary struggle -the only effective means of fighting imperialism and its continental lackeys.

Besides these enemies of the working class, there exist the nationalist “left” charlatans, who with gestures and demagogic phrases retard the crystallization of a real anti imperialist movement based on the exploited workers and peasants of America.

In Latin America, imperialism easily make use of Pan-Americanism to mask its penetration, and it was due to the heroic soldiers who with me defended the sovereignty of Nicaragua to unmask this deadly force represented by the recent congresses of the Pan-American organizations, The Pan-American Federation of Labor and the Pan American Union.

The first named organization held its Fifth Congress in Washington in July 1927, and during its sessions the most cowardly and criminal massacre of Nicaraguan workers and peasants was carried out, a slaughter by Yankee airplanes. The congress, including the false representatives of the Nicaraguan workers, did not have the courage to call the murderous marines by their right names, accepting the formula of “foreign forces” insisted on by the imperialist Mathew Woll, Vice-President of the Pan-American Federation of Labor and of its mother the American Federation of Labor. The only resolution asking the peremptory withdrawal of the Yankee pirates, the liberation of Porto Rico, of the Philippines and the absolute rejection of other forms of imperialist domination in Latin America, had only the vote of its author, and he received the censure of all the congress, the Nicaraguan delegation solidarizing itself with the “Monroe Doctrine of Labor” ratified by Green.

The second organization, the Pan-American Union, held its congress in Havana in January, 1928. While President Coolidge was issuing phrases of “Union,” of “Pan American fraternity,” his soldiers were violating Nicaraguan women, his aeroplanes were setting fire to towns and murdering unarmed men, women and children. In this congress there were present all the dictators, semi-dictators and future dictators of the continent. As in the congress of its trade-union agents to which we have referred above, also in the Pan-American Union congress, there was not passed even a pusillanimous pronouncement against “interventions.”The word “Nicaragua” was not even uttered by all these accomplices of the crimes that were being committed against it.

To all these treasons and attacks the reply of the proletariat of Latin America has been: Organization. In the last two years there have been created revolutionary trade-union organizations in Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Honduras, Panama and other countries, which held a great congress at which was created the Latin-American Trade Union Confederation, one of the pillars that must support the anti-imperialist fights of the future.

In the said congress, among the few countries that were not represented were Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Porto Rico, these countries among those most bled by the imperialist invader. This is not an accident. The reason is found in the foregoing, or in other words that in each one of these country the poison of the Pan-American Federation of Labor has penetrated for a period, a period that in the name of the struggling people of Nicaragua, we hope has terminated. Thus was the trade union movement of these countries wrenched away from its fundamental base, which is the irreconcilability of the interests of the exploiters, agents of imperialism, and of the exploited; the only guarantee of the triumph of our cause.

Comrades: Our leaving of Nicaraguan territory has not been a rest in our fight against our common enemy, Yankee imperialism, but the prolongation of that fight in the sense of the attainment of new contingents to it, as we expect the Latin-American Trade Union Confederation may be.

Always our army has recognized the aid that the sincere revolutionaries have given its hard struggle; but the sharpening of the fight, with the growing pressure on the part of the Yankee bankers, the vacillating and timid elements, by the very character that the struggle is taking, abandon us, because only the workers and peasants will go on until the end, only organized force will gain the victory.

Comrade Nicaraguans! And all those who are yet unorganized and outside the Latin American Trade Union Confederation! In the name of the heroic soldiers of the defending army of national sovereignty of Nicaragua, we cry out; Organize! Your post is in the files of the Latin American Trade Union Confederation, the only trade union organization defending the interest of the working class.

The Pan-Pacific Monthly was the official organ of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat (PPTUS), a subdivision of the Red International of Labor Unions, or Profitern. Established first in China in May 1927, the PPTUS had to move its offices, and the production of the Monthly to San Francisco after the fall of the Shanghai Commune in 1927. Earl Browder was an early Secretary of tge PPTUS, having been in China during its establishment. Harrison George was the editor of the Monthly. Constituents of the PPTUC included the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Indonesian Labor Federation, the Japanese Trade Union Council, the National Minority Movement (UK Colonies), the Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire (French Colonies), the Korean Workers and Peasants Federation, the Philippine Labor Congress, the National Confederation of Farm Laborers and Tenants of the Philippines, the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions of the Soviet Union, and the Trade Union Educational League of the U.S. With only two international conferences, the second in 1929, the PPTUS never took off as a force capable of coordinating trade union activity in the Pacific Basis, as was its charge. However, despite its short run, the Monthly is an invaluable English-language resource on a crucial period in the Communist movement in the Pacific, the beginnings of the ‘Third Period.’

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