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Our Red Flag Is Still Flying in Peru!
The
People's War in Peru has shown a resiliency, a flexibility in the
face of difficulties, an ability to overcome problems and a selfless
revolutionary stubbornness that has shocked the reaction almost
as much as the apparent prospect of imminent revolutionary victory
did a few years ago. This is all the more inspiring to the masses
around the world given the serious blows that the Communist Party
of Peru (PCP) has confronted and has been striving to overcome in
the past period.
The
most important factor is the firm stand taken by the Central Committee
of the PCP. Under their leadership, the Party members, the combatants
in the People's Liberation Army it leads and the people who follow
the Party, including the many thousands of peasants and others who
exercise revolutionary political power in the base areas, will never
willingly give up their guns or their power and are determined to
fight on until nationwide victory. One important source of that
stubbornness is their understanding of the role of the People's
War in Peru as standard-bearer of the red flag of the world revolution,
and of the international support that it rightfully enjoys for that
reason. Never before has that international support been so strongly
felt as it is today in Peru - and never before has it been as necessary.
The
capture of Chairman Gonzalo on 12 September 1992 was a cruel blow.
But on 24 September 1992, from a cage where the regime had hoped
to humiliate him before the media, Chairman Gonzalo gave a speech
that was heard literally around the world. Most importantly and
memorably, he proclaimed that his imprisonment was "merely a bend
in the road".
A RIGHT
OPPORTUNIST LINE EMERGES
The
Cruelest Cut
Another
serious blow came a year later, not from the strength of the reaction
but from the emergence of a capitulationist line within the PCP's
own ranks. This line became the main disorganizing factor, especially
in the capital and other cities, and created a climate in which
many people rose to the occasion and were tempered, while some others
lost their bearings.
On 1
October 1993, at the United Nations in New York, Peruvian President
Alberto Fujimori read a letter that he attributed to Chairman Gonzalo,
calling for "conversations to end the war". He claimed that a second
and third letter by Chairman Gonzalo also existed.
The
PCP Central Committee put out a Declaration on 7 October 1993, on
the occasion of the anniversary of the Party's original founding
in 1928 (See page 18). It warned that the government would resort
to any means necessary to win a pending referendum scheduled to
legitimize Fujimori's coup, including by using a hoax to discredit
Chairman Gonzalo and promote capitulation, as part of government
psychological warfare operations and the overall U.S. doctrine of
low-intensity warfare. Without arguing against conversations or
negotiations in the abstract, it unequivocally declared that the
Party would never abandon the People's War.
Later
the regime released another letter signed by several CC members
and other prominent imprisoned Party members as well. It called
for vigilance against "provocations" by Party members opposed to
these conversations and demanded that such people be "exposed",
by implication, to the enemy. Along with this statement, the regime
circulated a photograph of the purported signatories together with
Chairman Gonzalo and Elena Iparraguirre (Comrade Miriam, said to
be a member of the Party's highest leadership.) It was made into
a leaflet, thrown from Armed Forces helicopters into the air over
shantytowns in the cities and battle zones in the countryside, with
a headline proclaiming "Your leaders have given up, so you should
too."
The
regime's claim that these communications came from Chairman Gonzalo
himself was - and continues to be - in obvious contradiction with
the continuing total isolation it has imposed on him. This isolation
makes it impossible to verify whether or not it is just a complete
fabrication, or exactly what Chairman Gonzalo's thinking is. It
has also made it impossible for Chairman Gonzalo to function as
part of the Party's chain of information and collectivity that had
served as the basis for his leadership. Supporters of the People's
War and progressive people all over the world have responded to
this situation by continuing the campaign to defend his life, and
stepping up their efforts to break the isolation. Fujimori's often-stated
threats to kill Comrade Gonzalo were repeated on 21 May 1995, when
the Peruvian president told a Brazilian TV reporter that, considering
the conditions of confinement, he expected Chairman Gonzalo to die
"within three years" from his psoriasis, a disease that is not life-threatening
with proper medical treatment.
Fake
"Historical Breadth"
The
content of the proposed peace accords was to become increasingly
clear in the coming months as documents came out of prison, especially
"Take Up and Fight for the New Decision and the New Definition"
(known in Spanish as Asumir). This long-winded essay expounds
a whole analysis of world history and the current world situation
in an effort to justify the claim that the People's War cannot "advance
but only maintain itself" and that it should not even try because
of the danger that the Party would be wiped out. (Reprinted on page
60. See the article by the Union of Iran Communists [Sarbedaran]
starting on page 28 for a detailed analysis of this thoroughly reactionary
document.) However, all the false pomposity of Asumir's fake
"historical breadth" and real pessimism and cowardice was made very
clear in the "11 point programme" (see page 64) that prison officials
permitted pro-negotiations prisoners' family members to bring out
along with Asumir. The essence of this "peace plan" - the
bottom line of this line - is an offer to disband the revolutionary
army, dismantle the revolutionary base areas and betray the revolutionary
masses who have made the revolution theirs, leaving them unarmed,
unorganized and at the mercy of the enemy's vengeance, in exchange
for a release of prisoners and amnesty. By the end of 1993 and early
1994, the authorities were allowing ringleaders of this line to
meet with other prisoners in order to win them over (while brutally
suppressing the supporters of the revolutionary line), and releasing
some individuals to spread this poison outside.
Two
things have become unmistakably clear: First, this line goes completely
against the line developed by the PCP under the leadership of Chairman
Gonzalo in the course of the rebuilding of the Party and the People's
War, and against the basic precepts of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as
well. Second, while this line was not just concocted by the enemy
and it has won adherents from the Party's ranks, the active support
of the enemy is an indispensable condition of this line, and it
leads not only to capitulation but collaboration with the enemy.
Asumir
asserts that revolution in the world has entered a stage of ebb,
a claim whose refutation is beyond the scope of this article (for
RIM's views, see "On the World Situation" in AWTW 1995/20).
But this is simply meant to justify a complete reversal of judgement
on what Mao labelled bureaucrat capitalism, the system in Peru and
other oppressed countries, where a disarticulated and distorted
capitalism is emerging on the basis of imperialist domination and
the persistence of semi-feudalism. According to Asumir, "the
bureaucrat road has become viable". It holds that this growth of
capitalism has already put an end to semi-feudalism, with the implication
that there is no longer any need for New Democratic Revolution.
The conclusion is, firstly, that the growth of bureaucrat capitalism
has made it impossible for the peasant war now being led by the
Party to continue, and, secondly, that bureaucrat capitalism will
inevitably collapse amidst general crisis in the coming decades,
making the protracted warfare led by the Party unnecessary and the
dangers not worth the risk.
In addition
to this contention dressed in the garb of "theoretical" assertions
about the objective conditions, Asumir also bases itself
on the more immediate claim that it is impossible and wrong to continue
the People's War because of the subjective conditions, that is,
the situation among the communists themselves, above all because
Chairman Gonzalo has been imprisoned. This argument is hollow, a
circular argument whose conclusions are smuggled in at its starting
point. Why can't the Party's Central Committee lead under current
circumstances? The only reason given for the claim that "the problem
of leadership cannot be resolved" is exactly because the present
Party leadership are continuing the People's War, in opposition
to the forces that are seeking to stop it. But the real question
about the Central Committee as it is now constituted - and even
at its most delirious the regime has never claimed to have captured
all the Party's leaders - is the political and ideological line
they are carrying out. The present leadership have already proved
more than "competent" enough to have determined that the People's
War must be sustained and advanced, and that those "veterans" or
anyone else who calls for its abandonment are going against the
interests of the people.
The
contention that "leadership is decisive" is wrong when what is meant
is that individuals and not line is decisive. There is more than
a little stench of feudalism about such a conception of leadership,
which puts loyalty to individuals above loyalty to the revolutionary
interests of the world proletariat and the masses, based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
Maoists
judge any proposed negotiations from the point of view of the basic
interests of the people. Mao pointed out, at a time when he himself
had proposed negotiations during the revolutionary war, that these
interests meant maintaining the revolutionary army and the masses'
revolutionary political power. While Marxists can and have used
negotiations and other tactics in the revolutionary struggle, no
tactic can replace the Marxist central task - to seize revolutionary
political power through revolutionary war as the first and necessary
step on the road towards communism. There is no other way that the
oppressed can transform the world in their image, and any other
path can only lead to accommodation with the old world that defends
itself with the most brutal reactionary violence. In Peru today,
giving up the people's army and revolutionary political power would
mean giving up everything - everything the Party has achieved and
the very basis for the revolution to advance. The idea that the
Party should sell out the present revolution so that it can save
its cadres for some future revolution amounts to selling out the
people for the advantage of a few. This kind of capitulation, if
carried out, could only make revolution all the more difficult in
the future.
It should
be no surprise that this line implicitly calls for participating
in elections, by claiming that "no one represented the people" in
Fujimori's 1993 referendum - as if the PCP, instead of continuing
the People's War, carrying out armed actions against the elections
and calling for what proved to be a widely supported electoral boycott,
should have participated in that farce. It should also be no surprise
that by the time of the April 1995 presidential elections, representatives
of this line abroad were brought by limousine to the Peruvian embassy
to publicly cast their ballots for Fujimori. This is the result
of a line that argues that "the People's War cannot advance but
only maintain itself and that entails growing dangers".
The
February, 1994 CC Meeting
In February
1994, at an historic CC meeting held in a revolutionary base area,
the Party concluded that a Right Opportunist Line (in Spanish, LOD)
had emerged from within its ranks. It reaffirmed the basic line
developed under Chairman Gonzalo and put forward in the Party's
First Congress held in 1988-1989. It said that the Party could never
go against these principles and that no one could be a Party member
who did not accept the basic line of the Party as formulated in
these Congress documents. It declared that although the "evil grouplet"
of LOD ringleaders had "placed themselves outside the Party" by
their own stand and actions, the struggle against the LOD had to
continue and be "raised to the level of a line struggle" in order
to sweep away a line and wrong ideas that stood in the way of the
revolution's triumph. (See page 20.)
Actually,
as the PCP analyzes, this struggle had already broken out in the
Party even before Chairman Gonzalo's capture, in the face of the
objective necessity that the revolution take a qualitative leap.
The very progress the People's War had made posed the question of
moving forward toward country-wide victory. Meanwhile, the enemy
continued to attack the Party in different ways and, most importantly,
was able to capture Chairman Gonzalo and some other Party leaders.
All this had the effect of focusing up a line struggle whose roots
go back much further.
The
LOD has features in common (including some common adherents) with
the two-line struggle about whether or not it was possible to go
forward that had broken out within the Central Committee on the
eve of the launching of the People's War. While this question was
settled decisively at that time - through organizational measures
as well as by the development of the People's War itself - it is
the nature of two-line struggle in all parties that it develops
in waves, with ebbs and flows, as well as twists and turns. It exists
constantly, but undergoes a qualitative leap into open antagonism
at certain key points, in conjunction with decisive moments and
turning points in the class struggle in society as a whole, which
pose new questions or give renewed life to old questions.
At its
February 1994 meeting, the PCP Central Committee said, "It is necessary
to go deeply into the antecedents, process and current situation
in order to define the current level of struggle throughout the
Party." This means examining the objective situation in which the
LOD emerged and the various series of political problems that arose
in this context and posed questions regarding the road of the Peruvian
revolution itself.
BACKGROUND
TO TODAY's TWO-LINE STRUGGLE
The
Objective Situation
By mid-1992,
the advancing People's War launched 12 years earlier had brought
the country to a rolling boil. The Party analyzed that the People's
War had entered the stage of strategic equilibrium. In this stage,
the PCP held, the revolution would go all-out to prepare for a strategic
offensive and the reaction would go all-out to recover its lost
positions. The guerrilla army was developing mobile warfare (larger,
better-armed units in more highly coordinated, larger-scale actions)
and stepping up preparations for insurrection in the cities. The
Party's centre of gravity remained in the countryside, where Open
People's Committees had flourished since 1990, but the urban masses
of poor were acquiring armed strength in preparation for the final
battle for the country's liberation. At that point, the Party held,
the centre of gravity would shift to the cities. In the shantytown
of Raucana, seeds of a whole new kind of society ruled by the workers
and peasants and based on cooperation sprouted only five kilometers
from the Lima presidential palace.
Faced
with the prospect of a triumphant People's Republic of Peru, it
was inevitable that the Peruvian ruling classes would react with
all the desperate fury of cornered beasts, and that imperialism,
too, would bring into play more of its deadly resources.
The
possibility of a full-scale U.S. invasion was openly discussed in
the U.S. Congress in the early 1990s. But the U.S. sought to avoid
"another Vietnam" by focusing its intervention on low-intensity
warfare and especially counterintelligence. Starting in 1988, the
U.S. encouraged and assisted the formation of a unit called the
GEIN (Special Intelligence Group) whose specific mission was to
hunt down the top PCP leadership.
Constant
squabbling and conflicts within Peru's ruling classes had proved
to be a serious obstacle to the prosecution of the reactionary war.
On 5 April 1992, Fujimori carried out a military coup against the
parliament and courts in an effort to unite the various factions
by force and implement centralism under bayonets. In doing this,
he had the backing of the United States, including the approving
presence of the U.S. ambassador at the time of the coup, and a level
of financial and military support that continues to be by far the
highest in South America. The naked repression Fujimori unsheathed,
the measures taken to restore conditions for profitable foreign
investment, by plunging many millions of people deeper into hunger,
and the campaign to decapitate the Party leading the masses, all
served one common purpose: to ensure that Peru did not slip out
of the clutches of imperialism.
Fujimori
sought to resolve contradictions between the police and Armed Forces
by putting the police under Armed Forces leadership. Having brought
the prisons under direct military control, on 6 May Fujimori unleashed
his troops to massacre Party leaders held in Canto Grande prison.
U.S. intervention stepped up and climaxed in the 12 September 1992
capture of PCP Chairman Gonzalo.
Events
Pose Old and New Questions
Events
themselves were posing the question of the stage and main tasks
of the revolution. The PCP held that the principal contradiction
in Peruvian society was between the masses of people and semi-feudalism,
but that this contradiction would shift to one between the Peruvian
people and a massive foreign invasion, either by the U.S. directly
or acting through Peru's neighbours, whether this came before or
after the nationwide seizure of power.
In his
cage speech, Chairman Gonzalo called for the Party to organize a
People's Liberation Front and turn the People's Guerrilla Army into
a People's Liberation Army, an approach discussed at the Third Plenum
of the Party's Central Committee earlier that year. The CC would
later write in an August 1993 document that this did not mean that
the principal contradiction in the country had changed, since U.S.
intervention was still occurring mainly - though not exclusively
- through the Peruvian Armed Forces, but rather that the increasing
polarization of society itself would allow the Party to form a broader
united front, with a more active role for the national bourgeoisie
(that section of the bourgeoisie whose development is blocked by
imperialism and semi-feudalism, including capitalist rich peasants).
Proponents of the LOD, however, argued that the peasant war had
come to an end, that the centre of gravity of the Party's work had
shifted to the cities, and that "Peruvian society as a whole", specifically,
the two sides in the civil war, had to come together to "save the
Republic" from dismemberment at the hands of a U.S. imperialism
that was seen as somehow external to this situation. In this view,
the fundamental alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry that
had served as the cornerstone of the revolutionary united front
should be replaced by an alliance with the regime through which
imperialism rules Peru - a regime which is itself the foremost representative
of the system of subordinated capitalism and persistent semi-feudalism
upon which imperialist domination rests.
Mao
developed the understanding that national liberation in oppressed
countries is essentially a peasant question. The mobilization of
the peasants under the leadership of the Party by means of agrarian
revolution is in no way a threat to the Party's ability to lead
a broad united front against the country's domination. Rather, it
is the very basis of the proletariat's ability to lead and win the
New Democratic Revolution. After nationwide victory in the New Democratic
Revolution, it is the alliance with the peasants, and especially
the poor peasants, who in Peru as in most oppressed countries make
up the majority, that allows the proletariat to go over to and persist
in socialist revolution and move forward towards communism.
As the
1993 RIM document Long Live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism! put
it, the revolutionary road Mao charted for the countries dominated
by imperialism is "protracted People's War, surrounding the cities
from the countryside, with armed struggle as the main form of struggle
and the army led by the Party as the main form of organization of
the masses, mobilizing the peasantry, principally the poor peasants,
carrying out the agrarian revolution, building a united front under
the leadership of the Communist Party to carry out the New Democratic
Revolution against imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism
and establishing the joint dictatorship of the revolutionary classes
led by the proletariat as the necessary prelude to the socialist
revolution which must immediately follow the victory of the first
stage of the revolution." The Declaration which serves as
the founding document of RIM points out that the negation of these
points has long been a hallmark of revisionism in such countries.
The LOD's approach adds up to a one-stage, urban-centred view of
the revolution in Peru that is very similar to the "traditional"
revisionist views that once dominated the PCP and that Chairman
Gonzalo led the struggle against in rebuilding the Party in the
1960s and 1970s. This is true of both the "parliamentarist" and
"Guevarist" variants of revisionism (the latter, as represented
today in Peru by the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement [MRTA],
for example, sometimes envisions the countryside as the main theatre
of revolutionary warfare but does not see the peasants as its main
protagonists).
During
the PCP's First Congress, held during 1988-89, an extremely important
issue arose. After discussion, the Congress resolved that the most
important point of what the PCP calls Gonzalo Thought, "a product
of the application of the universal ideology of the international
proletariat to the concrete conditions of [the Peruvian] revolution",
as that meeting defined it, is the recognition of Maoism as a third
and higher stage of Marxism, as opposed to the contention that the
most important point was the thesis of the militarization of the
Party. The development of this understanding represented a far-reaching
advance in demarcating with the view that would reduce Maoism to
its military dimension.
That
Congress was also the occasion for struggle against tendencies to
negate the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution. One form
such tendencies took was negating the need for the peasants to free
themselves and smash feudal barriers to progress, and thus refusing
to implement the basic slogan "land to the tiller". Another was
to make an absolute separation between the New Democratic Revolution
and the immediate passage to socialist revolution by advocating
"interrupted revolution".
Documents
of the Central Committee's Third Plenum, held during the first half
of 1992, speak once again of tendencies to negate the existence
of semi-feudalism and the need to mobilize the peasants against
it. Among other ways, this manifested itself in practice in the
position that land seized from the landlords should not be turned
over to the peasants. Such a move would have meant the risk that
local Party leaders would take the place of the landlords instead
of leading the peasants themselves to overthrow semi-feudal relations.
In its
third session, in 1989, the Congress called for fighting revisionism
as the main danger. The PCP CC's Second Plenum, held in the latter
part of 1991 and early 1992, issued a warning to fight capitulationism
and called for learning from the campaign conducted during China's
Cultural Revolution to criticize the Chinese classical novel Water
Margin. The novel's hero leads the peasants in an uprising against
the emperor's corrupt officials but finally turns against those
who want to go "too far" and oppose the system itself. Instead,
he ends up accepting the emperor's call for amnesty and for enlisting
the rebel troops in the imperial army.
The
LOD's negation of peasant war is a basic pillar of its capitulationist
line, exactly because that is the war the Party is leading. It was
inevitable that the two-line struggle today, like the two-line struggle
of 1979, would eventually focus on the war itself, since this is
the Party's main task.
From
Bourgeois Democrats to Bureaucrat-Capitalist Roaders
The
emergence of the LOD with the call for peace negotiations represented
a qualitative leap from wrong tendencies previously existing in
the Party to a complete political and ideological line in antagonistic
opposition to that of the Party. Coupled with this was the mounting
of an organized "evil grouplet" operating in open opposition to
the Party's highest leading body, its Central Committee.
The
advance of the People's War and the difficulties it has encountered
have conditioned the form that this LOD has taken, but these were
the external conditions, not the internal cause, of this development.
Mao taught that two-line struggle within the party is a reflection
of the struggle between classes in society overall.
The
negation of the revolution's democratic tasks - and especially the
opposition to peasant war - can represent the interests and outlook
of bourgeois or petit-bourgeois forces who oppose the restrictions
imperialist domination places on them but are reluctant to accept
a society ruled by the workers and peasants. In the long run, New
Democracy and socialism represent liberation for them too, since
in the real world there is no viable alternative to the dictatorship
of the reactionary classes aligned with imperialism other than the
dictatorship of the revolutionary classes led by the proletariat.
But some people whose outlook reflects or is influenced by those
classes may "get on the bus" of revolution, only to seek to get
off when it passes their "stop" - when they feel it impossible or
undesirable, whether in circumstances of difficulty or of victory,
to accept the proletariat's line of relying on the poorest and most
oppressed of the masses and above all the poor peasants to go through
the interlinked stages necessary to thoroughly abolish the old society.
This phenomenon of "bourgeois democrats turning into capitalist
roaders" was seen - and combatted - in Mao's China as well, during
the Cultural Revolution, when some long-standing Party leaders (including
Deng Xiaoping) became representatives of those who opposed deepening
the socialist revolution and sought to drag China down a different
road, that of the restoration of capitalism. The LOD are not capitalist
roaders in exactly that sense, but they certainly are advocates
of the bureaucrat capitalist road.
TWO
ROADS
"So
Much Sacrifice for Nothing?"
Even
without accepting the regime's claims about the stand of every specific
Party leader in prison, it is clear that what the CC correctly emphasizes
is only a handful of people have turned against the revolution.
It also seems that this handful has been able to confuse some and
win over others, especially in the prisons where they have the collaboration
of the authorities. There have been several contradictory reports
in Peru's reactionary press about the number of prisoners who have
signed a statement in support of the proposed "peace negotiations".
It seems that several hundred have done so, especially in Canto
Grande, where the authorities have transferred pro-LOD leaders from
other prisons and given them the necessary freedom of movement,
while the revolutionary line is suppressed and many prisoners may
know very little about it. The mother of one slain revolutionary
son visited her daughter in Canto Grande. When the mother was told
about the LOD, she cried, "Has there been so much sacrifice for
nothing?" The police promptly threw her out. Even in Canto Grande,
however, there are apparently substantial numbers of prisoners who
have refused to sign, which is even more significant given the pressure
on pro-CC prisoners and efforts to make the prisoners of war believe
that Chairman Gonzalo is behind the call for negotiations.
Outside
of the prisons, the LOD has failed to organize a rival party, despite
its efforts. But while some LOD leaders might dream of building
a legal party apparatus to fool some people and use it as capital
to serve themselves, the LOD doesn't have to succeed in this to
serve the interests of the counterrevolution. Many of those arrested
in the course of 1994 were followers of the LOD or influenced by
it. At least in some cases, it seems that these arrests were due
to disputes between the government's intelligence services. One
clear manifestation of how the regime is manipulating the situation
came in mid-1994, when it boasted that it had captured a series
of important pro-CC cadre. When these prisoners were presented to
the press, they could actually be heard chanting pro-peace negotiations
slogans. According to reports, these people were in fact either
pro-LOD or people influenced and demoralized by that line.
In other
words, during a first phase one important effect of the LOD was
to demoralize and demobilize its adherents and those influenced
by it. This often led to arrest because capitulationist views had
taken the form of underestimating the viciousness of the enemy and
failing to act according to the necessities of clandestinity. But
soon this was leading to another form of capitulationism: the open
collaboration with the enemy that leading LOD figures had practiced
since the beginning and that the enemy demanded as the price for
avoiding life imprisonment, torture or death. This line has it own
logic, and the enemy is more than willing to enforce it. Once embarked
upon, those caught up by this line find themselves trapped in a
vicious cycle from which there is no easy escape.
Two-Line
Struggle Decisive
Part
of the LOD's approach was to "democratically" and disingenuously
demand that the People's War stop for a debate, in which everything
would be debatable, including the colour of the Party itself. Such
people have little to do but write documents, while the CC must
lead the war and wage two-line struggle in that context. The Party
members, fighters, the masses who live in the base areas, and so
on have been informed about this struggle, studied documents and
taken a stand for the CC's position. This two-line struggle is vital,
not only for defeating the LOD's attempts to hijack the Party, against
which the CC has dealt a resounding blow, but also to raise the
level of understanding and unity to that required by the situation.
It has
to be grasped that once a people's war has been launched, there
is no turning back. The reactionary armed forces and the regime
will not allow it. This can be seen most clearly in the countryside,
where the peasants are "caught between two fires" in a way very
different to what is imagined by those who use this term to argue
that the Armed Forces and the revolution are equally bad. It is
dangerous to support the People's War even in the smallest way,
such as, for instance, feeding passing guerrilla fighters, let alone
taking up arms against the government. Tens of thousands of peasants
have died for their real or suspected support. But even in cases
where the peasants of a particular village or area might not actively
aid the People's War, then the Armed Forces still come in and force
them to act against the revolution and their own interests - and
may torture and kill them anyway out of distrust and hatred for
the exploited. Caught between the "fire" of the enemy directed against
the revolution and the "fire" of everyday exploitation and oppression,
the poorest in society find that revolution is the only way out.
A few renegades may possibly be allowed to change sides - although
the regime may seek to crush them all the same as a lesson to others.
But for the masses there can be no "amnesty and enlistment", as
the protagonist in Water Margin called for.
It is
not Party policy to punish those who ask to leave the revolutionary
army or the base areas. But it is Armed Forces policy to track down
such people and offer them an alternative: help locate and murder
comrades, or face torture and death. In contested areas under Armed
Forces control, all the peasants must register with the authorities,
and all are expected to do whatever is asked of them, unless they
want to be considered "terrorists".
Still,
despite these harsh, repressive conditions in which weaker elements
are bound to drift away, just as they drifted in during higher tide,
the regime has not been able to find a sufficient number of takers
for its reactionary bargain. Its vaunted reports of up to six thousand
repentant guerrillas have been repeatedly ridiculed, even by some
of the legal press in Lima, for being highly exaggerated and yet
not very many. TV channels broadcast elaborately staged reactionary
ceremonies, deliberately patterned on the Inquisition, in which
"repentants" don the medieval hats and hoods made infamous by the
Ku Klux Klan in the U.S., kiss the regime's flag, and abjure the
"devil's" red flag of revolution. In Armed Forces-controlled areas,
ordinary peasants are forced to participate. Reporters have interviewed
people who have played the "repentant" repeatedly, sometimes under
different names. Some of them are active-duty soldiers or recently-demobilized
draftees who have been obliged to do so by their superiors. Others
are released prisoners re-arrested and forced to publicly curse
the revolution time after time, as if in a never-ending nightmare.
This
is the stage on which the two-line struggle is taking place. These
are the conditions that the LOD is counting on to be more "persuasive"
than any documents in promoting capitulation. Even a few can cause
great damage if they turn traitor. Thus the two lines express themselves
very sharply, not only in documents and written ideas, but especially
in the deeds that flow from ideas, written or not. This underlines
the decisiveness of the political and ideological line of the Party
and its ability to train a section of the masses in those ideas
as one vital part of turning them into a material force.
"A
BEND IN THE ROAD"
What
Chairman Gonzalo declared in September 1992 about the revolution
taking a "bend in the road" is far from disproved. No informed observer,
reactionary or not, disputes that the revolution is holding out,
especially in important areas of the countryside. Most importantly,
because the Party has maintained the revolutionary army and the
People's War, it has been able to preserve revolutionary base areas,
the masses' New Power, which Chairman Gonzalo once described as
the essence of people's war. They are not only its greatest achievement,
but also its bone marrow, providing sustenance, military intelligence,
and new forces to the revolutionary army, enabling the revolution
to attain the goal of protractedness, which can only favour the
people and disadvantage the enemy. It is exactly this protractedness
that the LOD has turned against and that opportunism often opposes,
in good times or bad, seeking some quicker and easier solution.
Protractedness is what enables the proletariat, through the leadership
of its party, to build up revolutionary strength and transform itself
and other class forces in the furnace of warfare, in a process that
has always been full of twists and turns in any country where it
has ever occurred.
Bone
Marrow of Revolution
These
base areas exist in Ayacucho, in the highlands that have been a
stronghold of revolution since the beginning, in the provinces of
Cangallo and Victor Fajardo in the eastern part of the department,
and in northern Ayacucho, in the densely populated mountains of
Huanta and in La Mar from the mountains north through the jungle
along the Apurímac river (see map). They exist extensively in the
Huallaga river valley, from Tingo María to north of Tarapoto, according
to the enemy, along an axis stretching some 400 kilometers. They
also exist in the North, in Piura and northern Cajamarca. The regime
is building new counter-insurgency bases in the departments of La
Libertad and San Martín to cut off links with the Huallaga. They
are building similar bases in the southern department of Puno and
in Arequipa, where that department borders Huancavelica and Apurímac.
In addition to these base areas characterized by "open People's
Committees", where the red flag flies defiantly 24 hours a day,
there are also more clandestine forms of political power in many
other places where the enemy doesn't want to admit it and the Party
doesn't want to advertise.
These
base areas are not isolated hideouts - just the opposite. Because
they are places which the enemy may be able to penetrate, occasionally
and at great cost, but not hold, it is there that the revolution
can openly mobilize the masses and rely on them most fully. Nor
are these areas impregnable fortresses to be held at all cost. The
PCP follows the Maoist policy of never giving up a base area that
can be held while avoiding battles that cannot be won. Above all,
the revolutionary spirit of the fighters and the support of the
masses has given the People's Liberation Army a tremendous mobility
that enables them to outflank and outmanoeuvre the enemy, and thus
retain or regain the initiative. The areas where the PLA operates
are vast, and the country itself is large and geographically very
favourable for People's War. The same backward production relations
and forces that constitute such an obstacle to the country's emancipation
also provide excellent conditions for these relatively autonomous
base areas to sustain themselves and make it impossible for the
regime to impose its control everywhere.
"Knocked
Back to 1984"?
Some
"Senderologists" (professional "PCP-watchers" for the enemy, who
call the PCP "Sendero Luminoso" or "Shining Path") like to claim
that the People's War has been knocked back to the level of the
early or mid-1980s. They base this on a quantitative assessment
of government reports of engagements and actions. Of course, it
would be ridiculous to blindly accept the regime's figures, especially
in a situation where the Fujimori regime has blatantly striven to
shackle and intimidate the press more than ever before. An Ecuadoran
newspaper reported that in April 1995, during an upsurge, there
were 178 revolutionary armed actions in Peru, taking place in 16
of the country's 24 departments. However, the number of actions
has decreased, and for now guerrilla warfare is taking precedence
over mobile warfare in the People's War. For instance, in terms
of the size of units and degree of coordination of the revolutionary
troops, and the level of engagements, successful actions now generally
involve the ambushing and wiping out of Armed Forces patrols, one
or two platoons at a time, and there have been few recent reports
of the kind of massive assaults on enemy fortified positions that,
while never common, did occur repeatedly and spectacularly at the
end of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Still,
15 years of people's war have brought about great changes in the
masses of Peru and in the Party. An aroused peasantry exists in
vast areas of the country. Hundreds of thousands of people have
been trained in waging revolutionary war and exercising political
power and are not willing to settle for less. The Party itself has
been transformed in the course of the People's War, filling its
ranks with Marxist-Leninist-Maoist workers and peasants, and the
aroused masses are an inexhaustible source of replenishment. The
trained and experienced cadres who have never stopped fighting are
enormously important for drawing on those resources. Here, again,
the decisiveness of political and ideological line is evident.
There
is something else that must be said about this claim that the People's
War has been "knocked back to 1984". That was an extremely hard
period for the masses and the revolution, when the Armed Forces
first came in and directly attacked, replacing the more ineffective
police and carrying out a policy of wanton genocide. The revolution
faced difficulties and setbacks, which were not overcome overnight,
but they were finally and triumphantly overcome, leading to the
great advance of the revolution in the latter part of that decade.
The strengths enjoyed by the PCP today that did not exist in that
period, and the fact that a real two-line struggle against opportunism
can only make the Party immensely stronger, provide even more reason
to consider the difficulties of the recent period as but a "bend
in the road", as Chairman Gonzalo put it.
THE
CURRENT SITUATION
The
Military Situation
In the week
before the inauguration of Fujimori's second term on 28 July 1995,
the date by which he had sworn he would completely "wipe out Sendero",
the People's Liberation Army ambushed Armed Forces patrols and attacked
police barracks and other military targets in the departments of
La Libertad, Ucayali, San Martín, Huánuco, Ayacucho, Huancavelica
and Lima. As part of this, the town of Nuevo Progreso in the Upper
Huallaga valley was seized and a mass mobilization of townspeople
and peasants held.
This
fighting, however, was not just a sudden and unexpected "flare-up",
as extremely unhappy reactionary commentators called it, but rather
indicated a deeper pattern. Campaigns of encirclement and suppression
and counter-campaigns - in which the enemy attacks and the revolutionary
army resists and strives to outflank the enemy and seize the initiative
- continue to be the basic pattern of this war.
Throughout
1994 and the first half of 1995, the regime carried out major operations
in a number of areas, including: the valleys of the Ene and Apurímac
rivers in the department of Ayacucho and bordering departments;
the central jungle area of the departments of Pasco and Junín, in
the valley of the Mantaro River in the Peruvian central mountain
region; and the hills and forests of the Huallaga River valley in
the departments of Huánuco and San Martín. The Armed Forces have
organized several thousand troops and helicopter gunships for deployment
along these three main fronts: what they call the Huamanga Front
(based in northern Ayacucho), the Huallaga Front, and the Junín
Front in the centre of the country, which is used both to attack
there and in conjunction with the other two fronts.
Ayacucho
has always been the most fiercely contested area of the country,
by both sides. The seriousness of the situation there for the reaction
was brought out by a spectacular action in December 1992. The city
of Ayacucho, which is the department's capital, was seized and held
for some 40 minutes by the revolutionary forces, who did not seek
to permanently hold it at that time. Police headquarters, army barracks
and the Republican Guard were pinned down with mortar and rocket
fire as fighters drove through the town in cars and trucks, throwing
bombs at reactionary targets and giving out leaflets. The enemy
didn't show its face until the guerrillas started to retreat. This
forced the reaction to concentrate forces and speed up their plans
for an encirclement and suppression campaign in the region.
In March
1994, the Armed Forces attacked the Ene river valley and the Huanta
area as well in a campaign under the personal leadership of General
Nicolás de Bari. In stereotypical reactionary style, it was labelled
"the final offensive", as, of course, were all the ones that followed.
In August 1994, two helicopters carrying Bari and other military
chiefs were attacked and had to turn back and land. Since then,
enemy offensives in the region have been hit with several successful
large-scale ambushes, including one in which a colonel was killed,
and another in December 1994 in which an enemy unit of several dozen
men was wiped out.
In both
the Ene and Ayacucho, as well as elsewhere, Fujimori has developed
the standing practice of using "ronderos" (paramilitary groups of
civilians directed by the Armed Forces) and strategic hamlets (settlements
in which the peasants are regrouped so as to be subject to direct
military observation and control). These "ronderos" have a social
basis for existence besides pure Armed Forces terrorism, since they
are often led by landlords, "gamonillos" (small-time local feudal
tyrants), cattle and sheep thieves (a plague upon the peasants and
a target of the new revolutionary political power), retired Armed
Forces personnel and others whose interests are with counter-revolution.
But Armed Forces occupation makes it easier to force some peasants
to participate in the ronderos as human shields for the reactionaries.
In the
Ene, their favourite battle formation is peasants in front, ronderos
behind them, and the army behind them both. Then the Armed Forces
put out communiques emphasizing the number of Asháninkas killed
or found in common graves, as if the PCP and not the Armed Forces
were responsible.
The
Asháninkas are a tribal people in the isolated jungles of eastern
Junín and the Ene valley. The Armed Forces have long worked in the
area through missionary settlements and other "charitable projects"
enforced by strategic hamlets and ronderos. They follow a dual policy
of trying to use the contradictions between the tribal people and
land-seeking colonists from other areas to isolate the Asháninkas
from "outsiders" and keep them under paternalistic control, while
at the same time basically favouring the big colonist plantation
owners against the native people. Thus Armed Forces "aid" to the
Asháninkas is coupled with massacres of those who rebel and even
those who try to flee exploitation by heading deeper into the jungle
- massacres that the Armed Forces turn around and blame on the PCP.
PCP policy is to target the regime and big exploiters, and many
Asháninkas have become revolutionary fighters and Party members.
Ronderos
have been used against the revolution in Ayacucho for many years.
The PCP's method for dealing with them is to mobilize masses against
them. One of the most outstanding examples was in 1990, when 700
to 1,000 peasants were organized to march through a large swath
of Ayacucho and the two adjoining departments to wipe out rondero
bands. Though the open People's Committees have been overthrown
by the Armed Forces in some areas here, they have persisted in other
areas and have been rebuilt where formerly defeated. The seizure
of the Ayacucho town of San Juan de Lucanas in April 1994 by the
People's Liberation Army, in the area of Cangallo-Victor Fajardo
where the above-mentioned march took place, was a significant step
in this continuing process of what the PCP calls "restoration and
counter-restoration".
The
Huallaga region was the scene of a major reactionary incursion called
"Operation Aries" in 1994 , in which several thousand troops burned,
looted, raped and murdered in dozens of villages. Helicopter gunships
tried vainly to fire upon guerrilla units that retreated and suddenly
reappeared, attacking where least expected. The bulk of these troops
finally had to be withdrawn. Another major offensive was launched
in the region in the latter part of 1994. Before it, too, was brought
to a halt, an Army unit guarding and repairing a vital Armed Forces'
lifeline, the road from Tingo María to Pulcallpa, was completely
wiped out in a blow that was as serious psychologically as it was
militarily and logistically. In March 1995, there was a series of
guerrilla attacks on Armed Forces units and strongholds throughout
the countryside in the department of Huánuco. In mid-May 1995, amidst
yet another reactionary offensive, an Armed Forces patrol was wiped
out near the town of Aucayacu. This region is particularly important
because it is where U.S. involvement has been most visible on the
ground - Aucayacu is not far from the U.S. base at Santa Lucía,
which had already been attacked at the beginning of the decade.
No
"War Against Drugs" for Fujimori
It is
ironic to point out that the "war against drugs" that was used as
the pretext for direct U.S. involvement has now been all but forgotten,
at least as far as Peru is concerned. On 9 December 1994, General
Bari declared that he considered ending the narcotics trade a goal
that cannot even be pursued until "after the defeat of terrorism".
Under Armed Forces rules, Bari should have retired several years
ago. But despite a scandal in which key Bari aides were publicly
linked to the drug cartels, Fujimori intervened to change the rules
and ratify Bari as continuing head of the Armed Forces Joint Command.
This move apparently met with U.S. approval, indicated by the fact
that it came in conjunction with a visit by the chief of the U.S.
Armed Forces Southern Command in charge of Latin America and the
renewal of U.S. military supplies for the regime.
The
vast majority of the peasants in the Huallaga region grow coca leaves.
Although most of them have their own family plots, they are hemmed
in by the backwardness that makes it unprofitable to grow any cash
crop but coca and by the marauding Armed Forces and drug cartels.
These overlords carry on in much the same way as the semi-feudal
landlords whose domination the peasants left the mountains to escape
a generation or two ago. The PCP's policy is to protect the peasants
against the civilian and uniformed narcotics traffickers who exploit
and rob them, while encouraging them to diversify their crops. Many
of them do, to a varying extent, despite the loss of cash income
this represents, because they understand that if they can't feed
themselves, their new revolutionary political power can't survive
under Army blockade, nor can they escape from the clutches of the
drug barons and be able to contribute to the country's liberation.
When the army comes into a village in the Huallaga, any peasant
caught growing much yucca or corn or raising chickens can be considered
a "terrorist" to be robbed, raped or murdered. The peasants support
and join the revolution because they see no other way out of the
exploitation and degradation they are subjected to no matter what
they grow.
Especially
at this point, when the government seems stronger than it did a
few years ago, practically all the major drug traffickers are linked
to the regime. The regime is, in turn, more dependent than ever
on the $1 to $2 billion a year brought in by the coca trade through
both "legal channels" (government-sponsored money laundering) and
the bribes that provide the "glue" holding the regime together.
The drug traffic is one of the regime's most important sources of
whatever "stability" it retains, and therefore neither the government
nor the U.S. has made any move against it. However, it is also a
continuing source of instability, as gangster-style infighting for
the loot involves the very highest circles of the Armed Forces and
government. The stinking atmosphere of cynicism and corruption that
pervades all the regime's institutions arises from the reactionary
nature of the war it is fighting, but it thrives on the drug trade.
All this more than occasionally interferes with what for the U.S.
is the all-important task of trying to smash the People's War.
The
Cities: The People and the Opposition
Even
though the capital remains the reactionary regime's stronghold,
the People's War has continued to resound in the streets there.
In the period when the "peace talks" letters were being released
by Fujimori, on the eve of his 1993 plebiscite, the PCP's boycott
campaign included bombing a main business hotel and the airport,
simultaneously with attacks on government targets in many areas
of the countryside. In connection with the PCP's campaign to celebrate
the centennial of Mao Tsetung's birth, the Lima Prefecture that
served as DINCOTE headquarters was devastated in a daring assault
in December 1993. An armed shutdown in May 1994 involved thousands
of shantytown dwellers and others in the city's poor periphery and
was combined with guerrilla actions. To celebrate the PCP's birthday,
Lima and many other cities were blacked out entirely in October
1994, a disruption that became a major embarrassment to government
claims of having achieved the country's "pacification". Mass roundups
in the shantytowns at the end of 1994 showed the extent to which
the regime still considers the problem not to be one of "isolated
terrorists", as it claims, but of a whole section of the people
who are still "the enemy". Bombs continued to shake the capital
in March and again in May 1995 in conjunction with coordinated attacks
throughout the country.
For
the "other hill", as the PCP calls the regime, in an allusion to
Mao's dictum to study both sides in revolutionary war, the situation
has proved to be unstable. The reaction has shown some strength,
but also its limitations, and that it cannot resolve its basic contradictions
in any lasting way.
Bourgeois
opposition to Fujimori was at first kept low-key, not only by the
tanks Fujimori sent to silence Congress but even more by the undivided
U.S. support his regime has enjoyed ever since. Despite this, there
are signs of continuing and intensifying strains that now have little
safety valve.
Nothing
illustrates the weaknesses of the regime better than the April 1995
presidential elections, touted as a great victory by Fujimori backers
and apologists, including the U.S. government. On the eve of the
elections, a team of "observers" sent by the Organization of American
States (OAS) to bless the event professed "shock" at the discovery
of many thousands of pro-Fujimori votes placed in the ballot boxes
ahead of time. But the greater scandal was the historically unprecedented
abstentionism - 28% of those registered to vote refused to do so,
despite legal penalties and dangers, and 44% of all votes cast were
blank or spoiled ballots. Fraud or no fraud, Fujimori's claim to
have won 64% of the remaining votes is not very impressive. Never
in the recent history of Peru had a president been elected by such
a small percentage of the population. In reporting the abstentions,
spoiled ballots, etc., the magazine Caretas nervously concluded
that they were so high that it was "inconceivable" that so many
people were following the PCP's call for a boycott. While not all
non-voters are necessarily PCP supporters, these results give a
peek at just who is isolated from a large section of the masses
and ultimately dependent on terror - in this case, the military
power of the U.S. and the Peruvian Armed Forces.
There
were no important differences in the programmes presented by the
various candidates. (Candidates included Fujimori's wife, who tried
to run against him. In typical bourgeois-feudal style, Fujimori
responded by having her forcibly expelled from her quarters and
cut off from her children.) But the continuing extent of internecine
warfare amongst the ruling classes was revealed in a number of murders
and other measures carried out by the Armed Forces against Fujimori's
rivals. The regime first exiled and then demanded the extradition
of Fujimori's predecessor, Alan García, on charges of a degree of
corruption that is usually considered acceptable in Peruvian political
life. The head of García's APRA party was shot and killed by police
while campaigning, in what the authorities later called a case of
mistaken identity.
Some
opposition figures write and talk as though Fujimori, and even more,
his closest advisor, the narcotics lawyer Vladimiro Montesinos,
were the source of the country's problems and were manipulating
the Armed Forces. Their exposures of this gangster tyrant and his
criminal "Rasputin" have sometimes added welcome fuel to the flames.
But still it is important to distinguish between such views and
those of the PCP, which has labelled Fujimori "a puppet held up
on the bayonets of the Armed Forces", with the U.S., the real behind-the-scenes
puppetmaster.
Ecuador
and the Generals
The
war with Ecuador also revealed more than a little desperation on
the part of the regime. Fujimori first made an unscrupulous pact
with the Ecuadoran government for his own narrow political ends,
implicitly giving up the disputed territory. Then, on the eve of
the elections and amidst a serious drug scandal involving Bari and
Montesinos, Fujimori turned around and provoked a war with Ecuador
for the same sort of narrow motives. The PCP opposed this war, calling
for the people of both countries to unite against their reactionary
rulers and the U.S. imperialists behind them. The brief war itself
ended unsuccessfully for Peru and resulted in more dissension within
the Armed Forces. Several military men, including a retired general,
were given prison terms for criticizing Fujimori's handling of the
conflict.
Other
generals who have been punished for breaking ranks with Fujimori
include General Jaime Salinas, jailed for leading an anti-Fujimori
counter-coup in November 1992, who still has supporters, including
in the Armed Forces, and the exiled General Robles who exposed Fujimori's
hand (and Bari's orders) behind the Army's kidnapping and murder
in July 1992 of nine students and a professor at the teachers' college
known as La Cantuta, a case that continues to haunt the regime today
more than ever.
La
Cantuta
In June
1995, in a sweeping amnesty, Fujimori freed the low-level military
men convicted of killing these suspected PCP supporters. He pardoned
a total of 52 other named police and military officials convicted
of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and other crimes since the
People's War began, including the 1986 massacres of PCP supporters
in the prisons. At the same time, he gave amnesty in advance to
all unnamed military and police threatened with investigation in
other atrocities, such as the November 1992 death-squad machine-gun
killing of 15 adults and children at a chicken barbecue in the courtyard
of a building in the downtown Lima slum of Barrios Altos. (The military
claimed the party was a fund-raiser for the pro-PCP newspaper El
Diario.) With the same sweep of his hand, Fujimori also amnestied
his opponents among the generals. This was touted as a gesture of
"national reconciliation" - among rival factions in the ruling classes.
Yet the gesture seems to have blown up in Fujimori's face, judging
by the outcry and bitter ridicule with which it was received, not
only in some military circles, where it was rejected as a cynical
manoeuvre designed to cover up real differences, but even from some
"respectable" opposition forces who fear that the government risks
becoming far too exposed and isolated.
The
Cantuta case has repeatedly sparked daring protests from families
of the victims and students and others who have defied tanks and
police to take to the streets. At the University of San Marcos,
despite Army occupation there, and at other schools in the capital
and in provincial cities as well, strikes and demonstrations by
students and professors continue to burst out again and again.
A "Viable"
Economy?
The
economy is often considered to be where the regime has scored its
greatest success, but here too whatever stability that has been
gained has been a case of heating the house by burning the floorboards.
A favourable balance of payments and a more balanced budget have
been achieved by selling off the country's natural resources and
state-owned enterprises at bargain prices. The country is so awash
with narcodollars that the regime has been able to undervalue Peru's
currency and thus rein in inflation (though it remains in the double
digit range). But the result has been a flood of imports and further
bankruptcy of domestic production. The nature of the foreign capital
inflows has been extremely parasitic. They have centred almost exclusively
in telecommunications, construction and especially mining and oil
rights, while the country's industrial capacity continues to shrink
and its agriculture sinks further into ruin.
The
result is that Peru is becoming more dependent on imperialism by
the day. The bursting of the bureaucrat capitalist bubble in Mexico
could be taken as a warning against following this path, since it
was Mexico's "successes" that led it into crisis. But in fact it
is very unlikely that Peru can continue as far along that road as
Mexico. As an article in the International Herald Tribune put
it, "Economic growth is bound to be high initially, given that it
is coming from such a low starting point, but the likelihood of
this growth continuing into the next millennium is questionable
given the continuing threat to the economy from destabilizing influences...."
Latin American Weekly Reports pointed out, "the current level
of employment [is] 64% of its 1979 level, while the purchasing power
of current salaries [is] just 40% what it was in 1987.... The plight
of public-sector employees [is] particularly dire: their current
salaries buy only a fifth of what they could get in 1980." (This
includes teachers, public health employees, construction workers
and a very large part of the urban permanently-employed workers
and employees whom Fujimori's predecessors considered an essential
buffer between the main exploiters and the poorest masses.)
Both
Peruvian businessmen and the LOD like to ask themselves, Can Peru
be "the next Chile" in the coming millennium? By this they mean
a country where economic development and modernization are said
to have come without revolution. But Chile's economic "miracle"
- the expansion of its export-oriented agriculture and mining -
came about on the political basis of the needs of U.S. imperialism
to stop Soviet influence in its "backyard" and on the basis of the
30,000 people murdered when the U.S. directed General Pinochet to
seize power. Despite the growth of an urban middle class, Chile
remains a country in crying need of a New Democratic revolution
to free its productive forces, especially its people. When Pinochet
drowned Chile's elected "Socialist" government in blood, what did
that prove except that, as Mao said, without a people's army the
people have nothing? Did the imperialists and the Chilean ruling
classes act any less blood-thirsty because of the lack of a people's
war, or did they take advantage of the fact that the masses were
unarmed to conduct wholesale slaughter? Isn't this the only possible
result if the LOD were to have its way in Peru? Furthermore, while
Fujimori may aspire to be Peru's Pinochet, objective factors (especially
the weight of semi-feudalism in Peru, as well as the present state
of the world imperialist system) make it actually very unlikely
Peru could attain even this criminal "model".
There
have been what the PCP CC 7 October 1993 Declaration called "fleeting
flashes" in Peru's economy. The LOD points to them to argue that
the bureaucrat capitalist system is becoming "viable". But Maoists
do not hold that there can be no capitalist development in the countries
oppressed by imperialism, nor that this capitalism will ever enter
a state of permanent collapse. The "viability" of bureaucrat capitalism,
in this sense, is not really the question. The point is that its
development can never be anything but a further source of misery
and chains for the people, and it can only stand as an obstacle
to the real liberation of the productive forces, especially the
greatest productive force, the people. Neither whatever meagre development
the system reaps today, nor the prospect of what the LOD refers
to as the "inevitable" collapse of bureaucrat capitalism at some
time in the future, can relieve the revolutionaries of their responsibilities
to lead the masses of people in revolutionary war. What is inevitable
is that the masses of people will rebel against this system again
and again until they are led to put an end to it once and for all.
What
does it mean to say that "the bureaucrat road is becoming viable"
in a country where, according to official statistics, well over
two-thirds of the population are "very poor" and half of the poor
are starving? According to another set of statistics, 85% of Peruvians
lack one of the following items, and two-thirds lack two or more:
adequate food, housing, electricity, water and sanitation, medical
care and elementary education. What does it mean in a country where
there is abundant rich land, and yet the relations of production
cut millions of peasants off from the possibility of farming it
and keep them in starvation in the countryside or city? Where the
country's economy, to the extent that there is capitalist development,
works largely by selling the natural resources and other exports
to the imperialists to buy the imported food from them and then
paying the interest on the loans the imperialists grant to purchase
the food? How "viable" is this situation? Apparently, even a lot
of imperialists are less optimistic than the LOD. They are relying,
at the end of the day, on guns, not "development". Even if they
can win over or neutralize some parts of the middle classes for
a little while, they are ruining others, and worsening the conditions
that drive the country's poorest, the vast majority, to rise up
against them.
What
Is Really Necessary?
The
LOD blames the mood of the masses for what it claims to be the "imperious
necessity" that the Party capitulate. Of course, those who joined
the revolution, as the PCP says, "for a piece of the pie", are bound
to slip away or worse when there's not much to eat. Also, the national
bourgeoisie has backed away from the People's War, if only for now.
Perhaps the LOD is influenced by all that when it says, "public
opinion wants peace". But the masses are divided into classes, and
different classes and class sectors have different moods depending
on conditions as well as their social position. Even within that,
there are ups and downs, and the gains or difficulties of the People's
War itself have a big effect on the masses' self-confidence. As
in everything else, the LOD has it backwards: it is not the immense
majority of the masses who have turned their back on revolution,
but rather a handful of those who claimed to be their leaders. The
fact that the revolution has been able to hold out under fierce
attack is itself an indicator of the mood of an important section
of the masses, without whom such a thing would be impossible. And
persistence itself is a mood-creating factor. The stage is still
set for the great epic of the Peruvian revolution to continue and
advance, especially in the vast countryside where the regime can
never impose any "stability".
A PCP
document of January 1995 explained, "If our revolution were to suffer
a big defeat (which has not happened), the developing revolutionary
situation would turn into a stationary revolutionary situation,
as happened in China in 1927 when the revolution suffered a serious
setback due to opportunism.... What did Chairman Mao do? What did
the red line do? They didn't call for crying, nor for "dialogue"
they called for People's War and began the road of encircling the
cities from the countryside. That's what we should learn from."
Mao
said that as long as the masses and the Party exist, all sorts of
miracles are possible. It is the line of the PCP Central Committee
- and not the LOD - that is in accord with basic reality on the
national and international levels. The objective conditions for
continuing the People's War exist. It is up to the PCP to continue
holding out and solving problems in order to advance. This is what
they are determined to do. The comrades in Peru are continuing to
shoulder this responsibility, determined to combine the power of
the masses of people with the basic line that has guided the Party
and with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism itself. This, too, we should learn
from.
It is
up to the proletariat and oppressed peoples of the world to step
up support for them now in this crucial hour. The stakes are very
high for the world revolution.
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