Perhaps nowhere better than in Latin America did the Comintern show all the contradictions and finally, the lack of viability and efficiency of a world organization with a structure too rigid, too centralized and too vertical. At every step in the history of the world organization or of its national sections, it appears that as the Comintern was a single world party, then the source of the legitimacy of the national sections was less in their real strength and the degree to which they were imbedded in their own society, and in the working classes they were supposed to represent, than in the acknowledgement by Moscow that they were true ‘bolshevised’ Communist Parties. This circumstance sometimes makes it very difficult even to decide which criterion should be used to mark the simple question of the date of foundation of a given party. Should that criterion be the date of its first National Congress or the date of acceptance as a member by a World Congress of the Communist International? The fact is that using the first criterion creates at least two problems. Firstly, it contradicts the most carefully kept of the Comintern's organizational principles – that of being one single party and therefore having the right to decree the foundation of a particular section.