Obituaries

Mario Solórzano, 54, founder of the Social Democratic Party of Guatemala, which was a member of the Socialist International, died in Guatemala on 24 September.

He stood for the presidency in 1985 and won a seat as a deputy in the Congress in 1990. He served as minister of labour in the government of President Jorge Serrano Elias when he introduced measures in favour of the indigenous majority in Guatemala. He quit the post at the time of the coup of May 1993 when Serrano suspended the constitution, dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court.

He went on to take a part in the negotiations which ended with the signatory of a comprehensive peace treaty between the government and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union in December 1996.

He was married to Braulia, with whom he had three children.

Heinrich Buchbinder 80, a well-known representative of the Swiss Social Democratic Party at the activities of the International, died in Schinznach-Dorf on 11 December.

He dedicated himself particularly during the '80s and '90s to the work of the SI in the area of peace and disarmament and for some years to the activities of the SI Middle East Committee.

He leaves a widow, Chantal.

Alfred Nzo, 75, a leading figure in the struggle of the African National Congress against the racist régime in South Africa and for long the foreign minister of South Africa, died at Randburg on 13 January.

His party declared: "The ANC dips its revolutionary banner in honour of this dauntless and tireless fighter for the liberation of his country and its oppressed people."

Born in 1925 at Benoni on the eastern outskirts of Johannesburg one of five children of a clerk at the Modder B mine and his wife, Nzo was initially educated at a missionary school in the eastern Cape. At Fort Hare in 1945 he started university studies and a life-long career devoted to the successful destruction of apartheid, joining the ANC Youth League. But he left Fort Hare in his second year, returning to his native Transvaal where he qualified as a health inspector in 1951. His professional duties in the Alexandra township gave him an unrivalled insight into people's deep frustrations and appalling living conditions.

He was active in organising defiance against the white régime in the 1950s. He interviewed people about the society they would like to live in and helped organise the 1955 Congress of the People and the adoption of the Freedom Charter, a key document in the freedom struggle, in the same year. By the time he was 31 he had become chair of the Alexandra branch of the ANC, joining the national executive two years later. He was a prime mover in the Alexandra bus boycott of 1957 when thousands walked to work rather than pay the increased bus fares and forced the increases to be cancelled.

His political activities cost him his job and with it his right to living in Alexandra and he was imprisoned by the white regime for five months for failing to have a "residence permit". The place of his imprisonment was his father's old office, the mine having been transformed into Modderbee prison. In 1962 he was confined to his house under 24-hour arrest and later detained for 238 days. The ANC sent him abroad in 1964 and he represented it in Egypt, India, Zambia and Tanzania. At the Morogoro Conference in 1969 Nzo was elected ANC's secretary-general, a post he retained till 1991. After Cyril Ramaphosa succeeded him, he was appointed deputy head of the ANC's security department.

He played an important part in the negotiations with the de Klerk administration which led to the free elections held in 1994.

He was named foreign minister and was active in the Non-Aligned Movement and supported President Mandela's strategies insisting on maintaining South Africa's relations with governments which had aided the anti-apartheid fight.

Nzo was also active in seeking resolutions to Africa's conflicts. He had sought to strengthen the power of the Central Organ of the Organisation of African Unity for the Prevention, Management and Resolution of Conflict.

Bettino Craxi, former leader of the Italian Socialist Party PSI and the prime minister who served the longest unbroken term in office in Italy since the Second World War, died on 19 January in Hammamet, Tunisia, at the age of 65. He had guided the fortunes of his country in a period of strong economic growth but later left Italy after facing a number of charges. He was subsequently sentenced to imprisonment in absentia.

He was born in 1934 in Milan, the son of a Sicilian lawyer and his wife, and he was attracted to politics early in life. He dropped out of university to devote his life to the Socialist Party and he became a member of the Milan regional committee of the PSI at the age of 18, forming a strong political relationship with Pietro Nenni.

In 1976 he became party secretary in succession to Francesco de Martino and in that position presided over a rise in the party's share of the vote from 9.6 per cent to the 14.8 per cent which it achieved in the elections for the European Parliament in 1989. He became prime minister in 1983.

He was an effective communicator and the style of his leadership became known as "decisionismo", which was for many Italians a great relief from the indecisive governments which preceded his. Tall, balding and with a commanding presence, he presented a visual contrast with many unmemorable conservative politicians.

During his time as national leader he not only oversaw something of an Italian economic miracle but also maintain an active foreign policy, in Europe and beyond.

He faced down President Reagan on what he considered to be principles of national sovereignty and international law over US attempts to seize the Palestinian Abu Abbas from Italian territory after his plane was forced down in Sicily following the hijacking of the cruise liner Achille Lauro.

During Craxi's administration, his government succeeded in reducing inflation by reforming the system of automatic wage indexation.

He also modernised the concordat with the Vatican, the papal state in Rome whose independence had first been established in 1929 under the Lateran Pact between the catholic church and the Italian monarchical regime of the day.

He resigned as party secretary in February 1993 and went into voluntary exile the following year to North Africa.

Afflicted with diabetes he spent his last years writing on his favourite historical character, the nineteenth century hero of Italian unification, Giuseppe Garibaldi.

At the time of his death moves were afoot to allow him to return to his homeland.

Guillermo Estévez Boero, 69, for 20 years secretary general of the Argentine Popular Socialist Party, PSP, died in Buenos Aires on 3 February after a long illness complicated by acute pneumonia. A friendly and genial man who was a regular attender at gatherings of the Socialist International, he was a much respected politician in his country and beyond.

He was born in December 1930 in Rosario, the city where he based a long political career. As a young law student at the local Universidad Nacional del Litoral he came under the influence of Luis Jiménez de Azúa, the distinguished jurist who was Spain's president in exile at the time of the Franco régime. Estévez became a socialist under his guidance and rose quickly in student politics till in 1959 he was elected president of the Argentine University Federation which grouped the country's students. The following year he founded the National Reformist Movement, MNR, and went on to establish the Argentine Popular Action Movement, MAPA, one of several movements which came together in 1972 to form the PSP.

He stood for election to the presidency as a candidate for the PSP in 1983. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies on the Socialist Unity platform of the province of Santa Fe in 1987 thus becoming the first socialist to enter since the death of Alfredo Palacios in 1965. He was three times re-elected and was one of the members of the Constituent Assembly called to reform the constitution in 1994.

His parliamentary service included activity on the Labour Legislation, Mercosur, Public Health and Foreign Relations committees and his name was linked to legislation on medicines, bio-medical research, fisheries, the regulation of public opinion polls and treatment for the disabled.

He leaves a widow, Inés, and two children.

The Buenos Aires daily newspaper Clarin called him "a symbol of socialism" and "a great deputy and a fine person."

Signed articles represent the views of the authors only, not necessarily those of Socialist Affairs or the Socialist International

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