Volume 1, No. 7, September 2000

The armed struggle in Peru, led by the Communist Party of Peru (PCP) has now entered its twentieth year. It continues to advance, facing the three lakh Peruvian army, backed, trained and supported by US advisors and officials. It continues to advance inspite of the massive extermination of entire villages; butcheries of not only revolutionaries, but also their relatives; bombardments; trials by hooded judges; prisons, which resemble concentration camps .... and even after the arrest of its Chairman, Com. Gonzalo and other CC members in 1992; and the CC general secretary, Com. Feliciano, in July ’99. Even according to a US State Department report of 1995, 25% to 40% of Peruvian territory was under the control of the Maoists. The people’s war developed in the region of Ayacucho, Huancavelica and Apurimac, and was expanded to Pasco, Huanuco and San Martin; covering an area from the department of Cajamarca, on the border of Ecuador in the Northwest, to Puno on the border with Bolivia in the southeast of the country, striking and shaking up even the cities, especially the capital, Lima. The people’s war was not conceived in a single region and was developed simultaneously in several regions, although in unequal form, with a principal area. All activities were conceived within a strategically centralised and tactically decentralised plan.

The PCP was founded on October 7, 1928 by its brilliant ideologue, Jose Carlos Mariategui. As the PCP states, "he became the political expression of the proletariat in Peru..... in his 35 years of life, especially since 1918 (until his death in April 1930), and on his return from Europe, he worked tirelessly propagating Marxism-Leninism, organising the masses, and culminated his work by founding the Communist Party." It was he who successfully applied Marxism-Leninism to the concrete practice of the Peruvian revolution, in the spheres of Marxist philosophy, political economy and scientific socialism. Though, at that time (1920s) Mao’s theories had not taken shape, Mariategui’s understanding of the Peruvian revolution was similar to that developed by Mao for China.

Mariategui characterised Peruvian society as semi-feudal, semi-colonial, with the peasantry as the main force of the revolution, to be mobilised under the slogan ‘land to the tiller’. He clearly established the uninterrupted two-stages of the Peruvian revolution; and maintained that the bourgeois democratic revolution can no longer be led by the bourgeoisie, but must be led by the proletariat. He focussed on the question of the backward Indian (tribal) population. He stressed on the worker-peasant alliance, led by the proletariat and its party, the Communist Party. Not only this, he laid down the party’s political line towards trade union work, workers’ organisations, women, youth, teachers and intellectuals and various other work fronts.

Most important, Mariategui, also stressed the need for revolutionary violence and guerrilla warfare. He said "the red army is a new phenomenon in the military history of the world. It does not forget that its aim is the defence of the revolution. From its elan therefore, every specially martial or imperialist sentiment is excluded. Its discipline, its organisation and its structure are revolutionary." He emphasised its development as a peasant revolution which advances from the countryside and which develops into "revolutionary partisan platoons" and into guerrilla armies. He added that, "the guerrillas were simply the most active, most dynamic and most combative part of the masses."

But, soon after his death, the clique led by Del Prado sought to negate Mariategui’s great contributions. While calling themselves "Mariategui’s disciples" they turned him into an "inoffensive icon", which they enveloped in incense, while renouncing his road. Through the 1940s and 1950s revisionism dominated the PCP, influenced by Browderite ideas. Browder, (the US representative of the third international, with responsibility for Latin America) a predecessor of contemporary revisionism, advocated a clear abandonment of revolutionary violence, and an electoral tactic which promoted a so-called "National Democratic Front". This continued till the 1960s, when the great struggle between Marxism-Leninism and revisionism, shook the International Communist Movement. Specifically, the works of Mao Tsetung had a great impact on Peru. The ideological offensive in Peru was led by Com. Abimael Guzman (Com. Gonzalo).

The 1960s witnessed a deepening crisis of bureaucrat capitalism in Peru. This was reflected in a rising tide of the people’s movements, as also feverish battles within the ruling classes.

The workers staged widespread strikes and increased the level of their unionisation. The peasantry, in a massive upsurge, invaded landholdings in order to reclaim them. This gigantic wave took place from one end of the country to the other. There were also violent guerrilla outbursts of the Che Guevara type. Teachers and students also rose in popular struggles.

It was in such a situation that an ideological offensive led by Com. Gonzalo coalesced with the huge upsurge and mass movements.

Dr. Ruben Abimael Guzman Reinoso, was born on December 3, 1934 in the coastal town of Arequipa. He joined the PCP at the age of 15. During his school and college days, Peru was in the midst of a big upheaval, and Com. Guzman was witness to mass upsurges against the state, with big strikes and confrontations even at the university. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in Philosophy on "The Kantian Theory of Space" and in Law on "The State in Bourgeois Democracy." After graduation he moved to Ayacucho (from where the base areas were initiated) as a school teacher. Here he became one of the leaders of the party’s regional committees. At the height of the GPCR, he visited China. This had a profound influence on him.

In the 1950s itself, fierce debates were taking place in the PCP amidst the repercussions of the Cuban revolution. These struggles were reflected at the decisions of the IVth Congress of the party in 1962 which agreed to "two roads" : "The peaceful road and the violent one." From 1963 to 1969 Com. Gonzalo led the red fraction within the party, under the political strategy of following the "Road of surrounding the cities from the countryside." From 1969 to 1976 he led the party with the political strategy of "Reconstitution of the party for people’s war." From 1976 to 1979 there was the political strategy to "Complete the Reconstitution and establish the Bases" for the beginning of the armed struggle. The armed struggle was launched on May 17, 1980, a day before holding of the country’s general elections.

During the first political strategy the task lay in establishing the path of revolution. In 1964 the revisionist clique of Del Pardo and others were expelled from the PCP. Com. Gonzalo began to consolidate the party in the Regional Committee of Ayacucho: the centre of party work was focused in the countryside; in the cities the party organised the poor masses in the Neighbourhood Federations; and reorganised the Revolutionary Student Front. Also he launched the "Special Work", which was the military work of the Regional Committees. In a sharp two-line struggle against the positions of the central leadership he combated militarism and Focoism (‘Foco’ theory of Che Guevara). At the 4th Conference a further step was taken, by the party leadership declaring its adherence to Marxism under the guidance of Mao Thought. A further step was taken at the 5th Conference in November 1965, which centred its attention on the understanding of Peru society and revolution, thus bringing the party closer to Mariategui’s revolutionary line. At the September 1967 meeting of the Expanded Political Bureau, he outlined a strategic plan, whose principal task was the formation of the armed forces — this occurred, in the midst of a bitter factional struggle, where, most notably the factions of Patria Roja and of the Right liquidationism of Paredes, contended for leadership of the party.

During the second political strategy (1969-1976), Com. Gonzalo outlined the underlying revisionism within the party and the need for its reconstitution, on the basis of : party unity, upholding Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, and the Thought of Mariategui and the general political line. These positions were opposed by the above-mentioned factions. He established the Agrarian Programme of the party in 1969. In 1972, the Strategic Plan of the Regional Committee of Ayacucho was established. Right liquidationism was defeated, and in the party two fractions remained : the red fraction, fundamentally in Ayacucho, led by Gonzalo; and the "Bolshevik" fraction, acting mainly in Lima. The latter developed a ‘left’ liquidationist line that isolated the party from the masses. They had a military line that was opposed to people’s war. They were defeated in 1975, and their leaders fled.

During the third Political Strategy (1976-1979) the problem was to complete the Reconstitution of the party and to establish the bases to begin the armed struggle. The 7th Plenum of April ’77 called for "Construction, serving the armed struggle", countering the right opportunist line (ROL), which negated the importance of seizure of land and power in the countryside; and the importance of workers playing a leading role in the revolution, instead of confining them to the trade unions. In June ’97 Gonzalo launched the "National Plan for Construction" where dozens of cadres were sent to the countryside in the interests of the strategic needs of the people’s war and to build Regional Committees, taking into account the future Base Areas. In the 8th Plenum of July 1978, the "Outline for the Armed Struggle" was established. In essence, this outlined that the people’s war in Peru must be developed as a unified whole in both the countryside, as well as the city, with the countryside being the principal theatre of armed actions, following the road of surrounding the cities from the countryside.

This had four important milestones : Definition, Preparation, Initiation and Development of Guerrilla War.

(i) Definition : The decision of initiating the people’s war in Peru was taken at the 9th Expanded Plenum of June ’79. This agreement was achieved in the midst of three intense struggles : the first was against the right opportunist line that was opposed to beginning the armed struggle, denying the revolutionary situation. After the expulsion of this line a new Right Line believed that the armed struggle was impossible, that it was a "dream", and as it was a mere matter of principle, there was no need to take it up immediately. The third struggle was with tendencies of the Left on how to develop people’s war. Through this, Com. Gonzalo’s proletarian position was established and the party made a commitment to be guided by the leadership and its chairman, Com. Gonzalo. Concerning the organisation of the armed forces, it was agreed to form military cadres, specific groups for action and to undermine the reactionary forces by targeting the soldiers.

(ii) Preparation : During this period, the programme of the party is sanctioned, along with the general political line of the Peruvian revolution and the party statutes. Problems related to political strategy, revolutionary violence, the people’s war, the party, the army and the united front are resolved. The party prepared for the launching of the armed struggle by dealing with two problems : (1) The problems of Political Strategy, that outlines both the content and the objectives of people’s war from a long-term perspective, as well as in the short term ... as well as the guidelines that the people’s war should have, the military plans, their organisational structure and their ties with the New Power; (2) The initiation of the armed struggle: First, the Political Tasks of initiation — The political tasks that had to be fulfilled during the initiation of the armed struggle were: to boycott the elections; to promote militarily the armed struggle for land; and to establish the bases for the new conquests, especially the New Power. Second, the forms of struggle — guerrilla warfare, sabotage, propaganda, armed agitation and selective annihilation; Third, the Organisational and Military forms — armed detachments, with or without modern weapons; And Fourth, a chronology — date of the initiation and duration of the Plan, and simultaneous actions for specific dates.

(iii) Initiation : On May 17, 1980, the people’s war in Peru began. It lasted from May to December 1980. It resolved the problem of how to initiate the armed struggle, of going from the times of peace to the times of war. In this context, the militarisation of the party through actions and the Plan for Initiation, was a key factor. This was how a party of a new type was born; where the principal form of struggle, was the armed struggle; and the principal form of organisation were the detachments and squads. The most outstanding actions were : guerrilla actions in two localities of Ayacucho; setting fire to the municipal building in a district of Lima; and the boycott of elections by the people of Chuschi.

(iv) Development of Guerrilla War : This was completed by a plan that lasted from January 1981 to December 1982. The slogan was "Open guerrilla zones serving as Base Areas". This resulted in the opening of guerrilla war throughout the country seeking to "capture weapons, to stir up the countryside with armed actions, and go forward towards the Base Areas." A multitude of assaults on police posts and selective annihilation of landlords were carried out, generating a great mass mobilisation of peasants, that volunteered themselves for the militia, giving rise to a power vacuum for the reactionaries. The People’s Committees emerged, grew and multiplied ..... "Their appearance defines the Base Areas." The guerrillas attacked Ayacucho prison and after defeating 100 police, liberated the 200 prisoners; they attacked a number of police posts; they sabotaged the power grid and communication lines; and support was given to workers’ strikes by armed actions.

At the Expanded meeting of the Central Committee from January to March 1983 four political tasks were defined : a general reorganisation of the party; the creation of the People’s Guerrilla Army and the Revolutionary Defence Front of the People; their consolidation as People’s Committees in the countryside and as the Revolutionary Defence Movement of the People in the cities; and the Military Plan for Conquering Bases. A call was given to "Defend, Develop and Build" the Base Areas. A sharp armed conflict developed in which the reactionaries struggled to re-establish the Old Power and the revolution struggled to counter-establish the New Power. The Peruvian government now called in the military (Army, Navy, Air Force). The years 1983 and 1984 witnessed a struggle between restoration and counter-restoration.

White terror was unleashed in the countryside, especially in Ayacucho, Huancavelica and Aparimac. The result of this genocide was 8,700 Peruvian dead. Of these 4,700 were the poorest of the poor, mainly peasants and in the slums in the cities. 4,000 were ‘disappeared’. But the genocide did not produce the results intended; on the contrary the people’s war grew stronger.

Amongst the salient actions seen were : blows to the anti-guerrilla bases in the department of Ayacucho; the destruction of counter-subversive settlements; demolition of the electrical grid and the destruction of the highway system; the destruction of the agricultural ‘cooperatives’ set up by the government, with cattle redistribution and appropriation of land; ambushes in the central region, such as at Michivilca; sabotage of the sub station of the state mining corporation; the mobilisation of 1,60,000 peasants in the North, in the department of La Liberated, for the confiscation of 3,20,000 hectares of land (mostly pasture land) and 12,000 heads of livestock; land seizures in the south involving 10,000 peasants; the sabotage of the oil pipeline "Norpernano" and of the headquarters of the APRA in the city of Trujillo; destruction of the large company Tealero; ambush of the Republican Guards in Lima; sabotage of the embassy of the Russian social-imperialists; against dozens of local offices of the APRA party; against banks and factories ..... All this resulted in the declaration of a state of emergency with a military takeover in February 1986.

After the close of eight years of people’s war, there had been more than 45,000 actions; the militarised party had been tempered; the People’s Guerrilla Army had been developed and had increased in belligerence; and hundreds of organisations of the New Power had sprouted all over the countryside. The PCP document continues : "The Base Areas are the strategic bases which the guerrilla forces rely on to fulfill their strategic tasks and to achieve the objective of preserving and increasing their forces as well as annihilating and throwing back the enemy..... Chairman Gonzalo has established a system of Base Areas surrounded by guerrilla zones, zones of operations and points of action taking into account the political and social conditions, the history of struggle, the geographical characteristics and the development of the party, the army and of the masses. It is fundamental to support the validity of the road of surrounding the cities from the countryside and its heart, the Base Areas, because with only wandering guerrillas of insurrection the People’s Guerrilla Army would not have the Base Area as a rear guard that sustains it, neither would the New Power be built."

To sum up, the document adds that in the Eight years of People’s War upto 1988 there had been four plans : the Plan of Initiation; the Plan of Developing the People’s War; the Plan of Conquering Bases; and the Plan of Developing Bases.

In 1988-89 the party’s First Congress was held. That meeting defined Maoism as a third and higher stage of Marxism; and Gonzalo Thought as "a product of the application of the universal ideology of the international proletariat to the concrete conditions of the (Peruvian) revolution." In its third session, in 1989, the Congress called for fighting revisionism as the main danger. In 1990 the party declared that the level of armed struggle had shifted from the ‘strategic defence’ to the ‘strategic equilibrium.’

Yet the PCP’s CC’s second plenum, held in early 1992, issued a warning to fight capitulationism and called for learning from the campaign conducted during China’s Cultural Revolution to criticise the 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.

But as the revolution scaled new heights the counter-revolution prepared for a new onslaught. After the 1990 elections the ‘United Left’ (IU) was used as a major prop of the dictatorial rule. The IU received ministerial positions and important posts in public institutions. They encouraged the militarisation of the country. Together with 15 right-wing organisations they prepared a "common front against terrorism" and were instrumental in assisting Fujimori’s rise to power.

On April 5, 1992, Fujimori carried out a coup and installed his fascist dictatorship, propped up by the US administration. Under the guise of fighting ‘drugs’ the Pentagon had been deploying hundreds of Navy seal and Army Green Berets in Peru’s Andes and Amazon regions. At the same time, more than 100 patrol gunboats, fitted with M-60 machine guns and special biological weapons were being deployed for combat operations in Peru’s rivers.

In May ’92, just a month after Fujimori’s coup, 2000 troops of the army launched a missile and gun attack on Canto Grande prison. The prisoners fought for four days, but finally 100 were murdered and over 80 prisoners ‘disappeared.’

On September 12, 1992, the party chairman, Gonzalo and other top leaders were arrested. The counter-revolution continued its offensive against the PCP, by combining military attacks with ideological attacks. In early 1993, Fujimori released the so-called ‘Peace Accord’ letters, purported to have been written by Gonzalo himself. This document of capitulation was actively promoted by some ex-comrades from jail, including leading members. Confusion was sought to be created in the ranks of the PCP, with some ex-leaders even calling for the setting up of an alternative centre to the central committee.

But the revolutionaries gave a fitting reply to the attacks and schemes of the counter revolution.

A few days after his arrest, when the regime sought to humiliate Gonzalo, by producing him on TV, in a cage before 200 heckling journalists, Gonzalo turned the event into a revolutionary call. Addressing the public over the heads of the journalists, he proclaimed that his imprisonment was merely a bend in the road.

Besides, while Fujimori boasted that with the arrests he had finished off the PCP, the lie was proved by the fact that between the September arrests and the end of the year the number of armed attacks were 644. And as for the ‘Peace Accords’ document, the central committee openly declared that they were a fraud and demanded that Gonzalo be produced publicly (even his lawyers had been debarred from meeting him).

Meanwhile, the guerrilla war continued. In a spectacular action in December 1992, the city of Ayacucho was seized and held for 40 minutes by the revolutionary forces. In 1993, in the PCP’s boycott campaign, a main business hotel and airport were bombed, together with simultaneous attacks on government targets in many areas of the countryside. In the PCP’s campaign to celebrate the centennial of Mao the Lima Prefecture, that served as the DINCOTE (intelligence) headquarters was destroyed in a daring assault in December ’93. An armed shut-down in May 1994 involved thousands of shanty-town dwellers and others in the city’s poor periphery and was combined with guerrilla actions. To celebrate the PCP’s birthday in October ’94, Lima and many other cities, were entirely blacked out. In April 1995 presidential elections, 28% refused to vote, and 44% of all votes cast were either blank or spoiled ballots.

A 1995 report said "we advanced through Base Seven and Base 14, agitating and mobilising the masses, developing the take-over of cars on the Ayacucho-San Francisco highway, and annihilating the mesnadas (army-run para military) in the locality of Ccano, and confiscations of cattle to supply the Revolutionary Support Base Areas, ‘Red Bastions’, and the forces of the People’s Army of Liberation. This was complemented with ambushes and the scourging of enemy bases located in the vicinity of Revolutionary Support Base 33 ......"

The people’s war in Peru is a shining star over Latin America. Though it may have faced some difficulties, it stands in sharp contrast with the failed petti-bourgeois revolutions of El Salvador and Nicaragua, the Tupamaros who have been destroyed; or those in Columbia who are striking deals with the government. Because of its uncompromising class content, it is systematically ignored by the international media, while the others were glamourised. People’s March salutes the Maoist revolutionaries of Peru, and calls for the unconditional and immediate release of Comrades Gonzalo, Feliciano, and all other political prisoners languishing in the outrageous prisons of Peru.

<Top>