A WORLD TO WIN  &nbps; #17   (1992)
 

Peru People's War Reaches Strategic Equilibrium
Communism Marches Forward in Peru

"Peru: Guerrillas Gain the High Ground" shrieks the usually sober New York Times. American officials warn that the Peruvian government is drifting towards defeat. They are raising a shrill cry of alarm because the situation in Peru has shifted. As the Communist Party of Peru (PCP, called "Sendero Luminoso" or "Shining Path" by the press) has proudly announced, the people's war has left behind the stage of strategic defensive and reached the stage of strategic equilibrium.

The key to the new stage is that the Party-led People's Guerrilla Army (PGA) has won relative stability for the base areas in the countryside, where the poor peasants and their allies have set up their own revolutionary political power under Party leadership. These base areas are the bone marrow of the people's war.

In describing the general path for revolution in oppressed countries, protracted people's war, Mao Tsetung described strategic equilibrium as the second of three necessary stages, following after a stage of strategic defensive. Now the PCP is hastening and awaiting the conditions that will allow the final stage, the launching of a strategic offensive to wipe out the enemy's regime completely and establish the People's Republic of Peru.

Strategic equilibrium does not imply that the main forces of the PGA (in addition to its local forces and militia) have already achieved equality with the government's larger and much better-equipped military. But this stage has been made possible by the PGA's success in going over from guerrilla warfare to more regular warfare. Now it is able to mount bigger-scale, better-coordinated and more effective operations against the enemy. They have become politically and ideologically seasoned, increasingly skilled at fighting day and night, and somewhat better-armed (with automatic rifles, mortars, sometimes machine guns and grenade-launchers and occasionally rocket-launchers). Their numbers have multiplied.

A key "secret" to the PGA's strength is the revolutionary base areas. The PGA uses them as powerful bastions from which to launch counter-offensives, luring the enemy in deep and then surrounding and wiping out enemy units, even though the enemy may have surrounded the base area overall. They are bastions because of the organized support of the masses, which enables the revolutionary army to be light and mobile, with simple logistics, reliable lines of communications and excellent intelligence. They allow the PGA to create favourable conditions to attack the enemy or avoid combat when conditions are not favourable, applying Mao's dictum of "in strategy one against ten, in tactics ten against one" to wipe out the enemy piece by piece while building up armed strength until the enemy can be wiped out thoroughly and completely.

These bases are not invulnerable. Though the enemy cannot possibly occupy the whole length and breadth of the countryside that has risen in armed revolution, it continues to launch encirclement and suppression campaigns against these revolutionary strongholds. The PCP rejects the revisionist conception of liberated zones, such as the pro-Soviet (and ultimately not very anti-U.S.) guerrillas sought to build in El Salvador, where the idea was that strength comes from relying on guns plus impenetrable mountains. What makes the people's war in Peru invincible is that its military strength has created the conditions in which a whole new society - a whole new regime and revolutionary way of life - is flourishing in vast areas of the countryside. The poor peasants and their allies have overthrown the landlords and local tyrants, the representatives of the big capitalists and the U.S.-dominated system. They are creating their own new politics, economy and culture. All forms of oppression - of Peru as a nation, of the peasants by the landlords and other exploiters - are beginning to come to an end. This New Democratic society they are building will open the door to socialism and even more profound revolution after power is seized country-wide.

What is propelling the PGA forward is that the communist vision of a revolutionary society is becoming a concrete reality in the base areas. This reality is also making itself felt far and wide. In all matters of life big and small, it offers vigorous proof that there is an enormously better alternative for the overwhelming majority of Peru's people. The enemy, huddled against the coast and in fortresses in the country's biggest cities, cannot offer any way out of misery for the immense majority of people and finds it increasingly difficult to keep its own system going. Even if the enemy unleashed far more forceful blows against the revolutionary base areas, through U.S. assistance or even an outright U.S. invasion, while that would make the situation more difficult for the PGA tactically it could not reverse this fundamental advance. In fact, as PCP Chairman Gonzalo has said (AWTW No. 15), a U.S. invasion would create even more favourable political conditions for the PCP to unite the vast majority of the Peruvian people.

The PCP has analysed that, for the people, the immediate military tasks are to further develop mobile warfare to the higher level required to bring about the conditions for the final stage of the people's war and to prepare the urban insurrections that will mark the war's victorious conclusion. In the organizational sphere, the task is to "Organize the Seizure of Power Amidst People's War" by building the Party that guides this whole process, the PGA that is its cutting edge and the new state that is at the heart of people's war. It has called for a "great leap in the organizing of the people for the people's war", in the mass organizations in the countryside that make up the new state, in various kinds of organizations in the cities laying the groundwork for the future armed urban insurrections, and in the PGA itself. For the enemy, the government currently headed by Alberto Fujimori, the most unashamedly pro-imperialist president in recent Peruvian history, the most pressing tasks are to revive the economy, reorganize the state and regain lost ground on the battlefield to stop the people's war.

It is in terms of these two antagonistic sets of tasks that the news from Peru should be assessed.

Unfolding Mobile Warfare

The government has seen its military situation worsen drastically, even from the point of view of its own decrees and statistics. It has been compelled to declare a state of emergency in most of the mountain highlands (except the northwest and southwest corners), the long, fertile river valleys of the eastern foothills and the more populated part of the eastern jungle lowlands, many of the short, steep valleys leading west to the Pacific coast (except for the southern coastal desert, and the bigger cities and large-scale cotton and sugar cane farms of the northern coastal plains), and the entire area around Lima.

Ayacucho and the South-Central Mountains

The south-central mountain departments of Ayacucho, Huancavelica and Apurimac, where the armed struggle first arose in 1980, continue to be the country's most bitterly contested region. In June 1991 the reactionary Armed Forces launched an offensive against the revolutionary base areas in the western part of this region. The PGA counterattacked, marching out of the base areas to hit the Armed Forces rear guard set up in the town of San Miguel, to the east, near the Apurimac river where Ayacucho adjoins Apurimac and Cuzco. Guerrilla columns seized the town, besieging and destroying Army and police barracks and local government offices. Armed Forces bulletins reported several dozen casualties. This town was especially important as a headquarters for ronderos, paramilitary units used by the Army to pit civilians against the revolutionaries. Several days later, a military patrol venturing out to try and reorganize the rondero units was ambushed and wiped out, again with several dozen government casualties.

In the province of Lucanas, in the south-central part of the department, the PGA unleashed a series of major assaults in August, apparently in conjunction with an overall guerrilla counter-offensive. It attacked the town of Laramate August 11th, eradicating an anti-guerrilla base manned by several dozen soldiers. The guerrillas called people to a mass meeting in the central plaza. Two banks that had long fattened off the peasants were burned to the ground and peasants sacked stores belonging to big landowners. Many local peasants were reported to leave with the withdrawing guerrilla troops. On the same day, the relatively large town of Puquio about 80 kilometres to the southeast was also attacked. In addition to razing the local Army and police bases the guerrillas confiscated a large quantity of weapons.

September saw intensive fighting continue throughout Ayacucho. In the northern corner of the department, near where it meets Junin, in an area 80 kilometres north of the major garrison city of Huanta, a series of ambushes eliminated one Army patrol after another within a few days. In each case guerrillas killed the officer in charge. Of his dozen soldiers, those who were not dead or wounded often went "missing" - deserting or joining the guerrillas. On September 24th, an ambush annihilated a larger unit composed of four Army patrols sent to repair the sabotaged power lines that supply Huanta. To the east, near the village of Tapuna towards the Cuzco border, on September 26th the PGA successfully ambushed a convoy of ronderos carrying an arms shipment. Several hours later these arms were used to attack an Army patrol.

On October 7th, the anniversary of the PCP's founding, an armed shutdown paralysed transport and commerce across the whole department. The PGA swept like a raging torrent cutting a 100-kilometre swath from northeast Huanta to the southeastern part of Huamanga province (south of the city of Ayacucho), the most militarized area in Peru. In a series of five engagements against the Armed Forces in rapid succession, they destroyed Army posts, rondero bases and strategic hamlets (where the Armed Forces had imprisoned peasants, seeking to "drain the ocean to kill the fish"). An article in El Diario, the clandestine Lima newspaper that supports the people's war, reported that in the battle to destroy a rondero base, PGA units firing rockets drove back a helicopter attack. Twenty-five soldiers and 62 ronderos were killed. This offensive, according to El Diario, led to the establishment of several new Open People's Committees, where revolutionary political power can now be fully exercised.

The fighting in Ayacucho shows very clearly how this war is developing, not in a straight line of expansion or passive defence of the base areas, but through interlinked and repeated offensives and counter-offensives, in which the enemy deploys its comparatively stronger forces and sets up bases to launch "encirclement and suppression campaigns" seeking to strangle the red areas, while the revolutionary forces strive to retain the initiative despite being under attack, by launching counter-offensives when and where conditions are favourable. In his military writings, Mao called this "the main pattern of China's civil war" as well.

South

Cuzco's La Convencion valley, east of Ayacucho, has been declared an emergency zone, along with a few other parts of Cuzco. For a long time this area was not believed to be under strong PCP influence. All of central and northern Puno has also only recently been officially put under a state of emergency, though in this case the PCP has been leading a peasant upsurge there since 1986. Peruvian press dispatches reveal several victorious ambushes in Puno during September, during the People's Guerrilla Army counter-offensive.

Centre

The PGA has taken enormous, rapid strides along the Ene and Tambo river valleys, in the corner of the department of Junin adjoining Ayacucho and Cuzco, a forested foothills region home to the Ashaninka tribal people. On September 30th 1991, "a column hundreds of guerrillas strong", according to the European press, rained automatic weapons fire and rocket-propelled grenades for two hours on a locally pivotal Armed Forces base. An Armed Forces offensive the previous May and June had established ten such bases in the region; by October six of them lay in ruins. A series of ambushes annihilated several Army patrols. The remaining bases are now completely dependent on helicopters for their resupply. The government is said to have only two helicopters in the area.

This is exactly the kind of weakness that the U.S. is currently seeking to resolve by applying its own ample resources. For several years now there have been reports that the U.S. is planning to set up an American-run firebase in this zone. Such a base would be used as a rear area from which to launch attacks along the Ene River and the Apurimac that leads into it, hammering into the long-established revolutionary base areas of northern rural Ayacucho and seeking to crush them against the anvil of troops based in the big garrisons in the cities of Ayacucho and Huanta. With the revolution's victories in Satipo province in eastern Junin, it seems that it is the reaction that is being outflanked, for the moment at least.

In the Mantaro River valley, which runs south between two Andes ranges from the department of Pasco down into western Junin and Huancavelica before cutting east to join the Ene, the government faces disaster. The Army's 31st Division, in charge of "pacifying" this valley and the adjacent area in Huanuco, set up a string of bases in early 1991. One was at the railhead town of Goyllarisquizga. Within a few months, 70% of the division's nearly 900 soldiers were out of action - casualties or deserters. Newspaper accounts reported that in April soldiers at Goyllarisquizga staged "48 hours of total disobedience". Though they eventually surrendered to hordes of officers sent in from the city of Cerro de Pasco, the Army had to shut down the base and transfer them elsewhere.

In August and September, comparatively large-scale PGA attacks smashed into towns in eastern Junin, Cerro de Pasco and Huanuco. Three towns were temporarily seized, their police units wiped out. With the execution of a few local tyrants, particularly hated government officials and informers, the representatives of the old order were driven out. El Diario speaks of the new political power based on miners and peasants flourishing in a line stretching across three departments from the city of Huanuco to La Oroya, a region of zinc, lead and silver mines, foundries and hydroelectric plants that produce much of the tribute imperialism extracts from Peru.

All of Ica, a coastal department south of Lima and west of Huancavelica and Ayacucho, has come under emergency rule, along with the entire department of Lima, including the valleys leading from the mountains to the Pacific through which flow the roads, rail lines and power lines feeding into the capital, and the two coastal provinces immediately north and south of the capital. Of course the emergency zone also includes the capital city itself and its adjacent port of Callao.

Upper Huallaga River Valley

The Huallaga River runs north through jungle foothills on the eastern edge of the Andes for several hundred kilometres, from the department of Huanuco through San Martin before eventually descending to Peru's vast eastern jungle lowlands drained by the Amazon. It is an area where the people's war has achieved great strength, permitting the emergence of extensive Open People's Committees. It is also where, so far, the PGA has most directly clashed with U.S. imperialism.

In June 1991 the PGA temporarily took over the medium-sized Huallaga River city of Aucayacu, near the border between Huanuco and San Martin. They attacked and pinned down a joint Army-police base from which two Army battalions (a commando battalion and a construction battalion) had terrorized the townspeople and the peasants of the region. Here too El Diario's dispatches report that the revolutionaries called a mass rally, destroyed government installations and recruited fresh fighters. In August authorities in Tingo Maria, about 50 kilometres downriver, warned - falsely, it turned out - that guerrilla columns were on the verge of seizing this major city, already paralysed several times in the last few years by PCP-led armed shutdowns.

But the enemy is not on the verge of surrender. The U.S. base at Santa Lucia, hit hard by the PGA in April 1990, is still spewing death out into the surrounding countryside. President Fujimori made a point of giving a speech there in October 1991. The Peruvian Armed Forces' Madre Mia base, destroyed by the PGA in July 1989, has since been rebuilt, attacked and mauled, and rebuilt again.

The people's war is also expanding into the jungle lowlands of the department of Loreto, particularly the more populated edge west of the Ucayali river, now also an emergency zone. In August the PGA ambushed a 40-man Marine patrol at Aguaytia, on the region's only major road, leading between the cities of Tingo Maria and Pucallpa. Half the Marines were killed before reinforcements arrived. The PGA units withdrew and successfully eluded the large-scale Armed Forces operations that combed the area in search of them.

North

Guerrilla actions have been reported all across northern Peru, though there are no emergency zones in the far north yet. El Diario mentions a guerrilla zone (an area where guerrillas can count on mass support to manoeuvre and hit the enemy) extending through the department of Piura to the Ecuador border. In August, guerrillas blew up the foreign-owned oil pipeline near Olmos, a city in Lambayeque.

A major emergency zone has been declared along the Cajamarca river valley between the eastern and central ranges of the Andes mountains at the southern edge of the department of Cajamarca. In the area around the Maranon River toward the eastern end of the department of La Libertad and the adjoining area in the department of Ancash, in August PGA ambushes reportedly forced the Army to call off its rural patrols in the region and withdraw to its barracks at Tayabamba. A 50-man mixed Army-antisubversive police patrol had been trapped and torn apart in a narrow ravine near Tayabamba in the Ancash mountains in July. In August, a police outpost was assaulted and destroyed in the town of Pariacoto. The local authorities, infamous for their abuses, were put on trial by the masses in the main square and executed. Also executed were two Polish missionary priests accused of supplying military intelligence to the American government in preparation for more direct U.S. intervention.

Stepping Up Preparations for Insurrection

The departmental capital cities are not now being contested by the PGA, but the revolution is certainly measuring its strength against the enemy there, especially in the central mountain regions and the Upper Huallaga. Starting on July 28th, Peru's national day, all the cities in the department of Ayacucho were closed down tight for three days. This includes the important - and heavily enemy-occupied - cities of Ayacucho and Huamanga, where markets, stores and all transportation halted in conjunction with the PGA offensive sweeping through the countryside. Armed shut-downs also paralysed the cities of Huancavelica, Puno and Huancayo. Work and commerce halted throughout the department of Pasco, city and countryside alike. The few lorries to be found on the main motorways were attacked and burned. Smaller towns in Apurimac, Cajamarca and the Upper Huallaga were also shut down.

In Lima, as the political and economic situation continues to wind inexorably tighter both the capacities of the revolution and the enemy's repression have taken big leaps. Lima was rocked by an armed strike on May 29th. In scores of violent actions combining the power of crowds of shantytown youth with the leadership and abilities of the People's Guerrilla Army, the results of the PCP's political and organizational work in the city were partially and briefly revealed. Resounding lightning raids struck police outposts placed to hold back the endless tangle of shacks on the dry hills that surround the city on three sides. Breaking through this containment, armed demonstrators and guerrilla units hit banks, government buildings and other targets all over Lima.

At midnight June 19th, following attacks on power lines that brought total blackness to 11 departments, bright red fireworks lit up the four cardinal points of the Lima skyline in homage to the fifth anniversary of the Day of Heroism in which almost 300 revolutionary prisoners of war fought to the death against government forces sent to murder them and break the morale of the revolution. The Naval base at Callao, home to the units that attacked the Fronton island prison in 1986, came under mortar attack; nearby a military transport bus full of Marines was blown up by a car bomb. Mortar fire also smashed into the lower floors of the Ministry of the Economy. A police force major was shot near the city's main military compound. In three shantytowns along main roadways descending from the mountains, PGA units seized supply lorries destined for big stores and warehouses and distributed their contents.

Similar scenes were repeated on October 7th, on the anniversary of the PCP's founding, when "gigantic crowds", according to El Diario, sacked food lorries and stores in Villa El Salvador, San Juan de Miraflores, Canto Grande, Comas and other shantytowns. In the city centre, throngs chanting slogans in favour of the PCP and the people's war took over many major intersections, while guerrillas attacked police and Army units. Especially worrisome to the enemy was the extensive and well-received revolutionary agitation in the central wholesale markets, upon which the capital and even the Armed Forces depend for food supplies.

The Universities

The military have occupied the campuses of San Marcos, La Cantuta and Lima's other main universities, as well as a few provincial schools. President Fujimori tried to enter La Cantuta along with his invading soldiers at 1 am May 21st but was pushed back by massed students. Later that morning at San Marcos he was met with a hail of stones. What the government describes as "depoliticizing the universities" and "classes as usual" amounts to a reign of terror. The troops paint and repaint olive drab over the red slogans that cover the walls - slogans that appear afresh afterwards. They conduct incursions into dormitories and dining halls searching for "subversive" books and papers and grabbing students who resist them.

On June 19th, as red flags and posters sprouted up all over the city and lightning marches under the protection of PGA units rallied people in many shantytowns, students left San Marcos to stage a march in the proletarian district of San Gabriel in homage to the San Marcos students and the workers, peasants and others killed in the 1986 prison massacres. The police and Army surrounded the demonstration and then searched house to house for students, killing 14 and arresting 120. Two days later a San Marcos student and his two younger brothers were found shot dead; a storm of protest broke out when a TV news programme showed footage of the three being grabbed and stuffed still unhurt into police cars in front of their house a few hours earlier. The police, who at first tried to portray their deaths as a mystery, later were forced to admit the three had been arrested for painting "Yankee Go Home" on a wall.

Canto Grande Prison

About 600 people are being held on subversion or other charges linked to the people's war. Some are in a handful of provincial jails, but most have been transferred to the new Canto Grande prison near Lima. There they are kept segregated from the common prisoners, in two separate pavilions (one for men and one for women) behind high walls and gun towers, where they have organized communal living, eating, studying, sports, culture and handicrafts in order to survive, keep their revolutionary morale high and continue to serve the revolution in whatever way possible.

In June, provocateurs tried to stir up fighting that could be used as an excuse "to eliminate the 396 men and women prisoners of war, but their resistance and the solidarity of the 1733 common prisoners foiled this plot", as a statement smuggled out of the prison described it. Then in August, a thousand police armed with machine guns, grenade-launchers and armour-piercing weapons surrounded and stormed the two pavilions. The prisoners fought back with whatever was at hand, to keep them out, as if their prison were a fortress. By morning workers and shantytown residents from nearby San Juan de Lurigancho blocked all access roads between central Lima and the prison. Even with parts of the prison destroyed and a constant massive police presence inside, the prisoners were able to repaint their revolutionary slogans on walls the police had painted over and prevent the authorities from re-establishing full control. Fujimori put the prisons in the hands of the Armed Forces in September, ostensibly to "prevent the smuggling into prison of alcohol and drugs".

Raucana

The traditional power structure erected by the reformist left and the churches based on charity schemes is crumbling in the few shantytowns where it was once strong. Villa El Salvador, blessed by the visiting Pope a few years ago as a "model of love" in contrast to the PCP's "preaching of hatred", is now suffering helicopter-borne police raiding parties searching out "subversives". But by far the most spectacular developments have been in the shantytowns along the Carretera Central, the traffic artery leading eastward into the mountains from the outskirts of Lima.

In mid-1990, taking advantage of the interregnum between the outgoing and incoming presidents, thousands of homeless families invaded a large, walled-in pasture in the hills above the slums of Ate-Vitarte. Most of them were peasants recently driven out of the mountains by hunger and repression. For a short period of time they called their settlement "New Hope", then they renamed it "Jorge Felix Raucana" after a resident killed by police in an attempt to dislodge them. About a quarter of the men found work in the small factories and workshops of the area. The rest, along with women and children, try to make a living on the city's streets as sidewalk vendors.

Suddenly in mid-1991, prompted by the authorities, the Lima press and television began to froth at the mouth in unison about the danger to the public surfacing "only nine kilometres [five miles] from the Plaza de Armas", the centre of Lima. The 1500 families were accused of having organized a communal way of life, with collective gardens, livestock (rabbits and chickens) and a dining hall, in addition to individual plots. They had their own law and order, at least on local matters, and eradicated wife-beating, prostitution, stealing, drugs and habitual drunkenness. The media took it as evidence of the dark presence of "fanaticism" and "terrorism" that in a district once considered one of the capital's most dangerous, women could walk home unworried late at night and doors could be left unlocked. People from other shantytowns were reported to be coming to Raucana for help dealing with their own problems.

A judge hearing the case against Raucana ordered the squatters evicted on August 9th. Two days before police were scheduled to sweep over the walls protecting the neat rows of shacks, thousands of residents seized the initiative themselves by taking over several kilometres of the Carretera Central. Agitators and leafletters fanned out in the surrounding shantytowns and elsewhere in Lima calling on people to come to Raucana, under the slogan "We Have A Right to a Roof! Not One More Eviction Against Lima's Poor!"

The authorities were kept at a standoff for a month. The daunting terrain of mud and tank-trap trenches dug into the ground between the shantytown and the nearest road made it difficult for the police to stage the kind of massed, sudden strike they favour. Residents on watchtowers set on stilts kept a constant watch, as did their friends throughout the area. Thousands of people remained mobilized. Finally, on September 6th, several thousand soldiers came in, with automatic weapons and armoured vehicles, backed by a thousand police. The residents resisted with heaps of burning tyres, slings and Molotov cocktails, but eventually retreated from a confrontation they could not win.

House-to-house searches failed to come up with any of the arms caches the invaders claimed to be seeking. They set up a permanent military camp, imposed a curfew and began implementing the doctrine of "winning hearts and minds" made infamous by the U.S. in Vietnam and now being widely implemented by the Fujimori government: after destroying the communal gardens and bakery and looting the clinic, they began dispensing food, medical care and liquor, announcing that anybody who refused their charity would be considered a "Senderista". A file card system was set up to categorize everyone according to such things as whether they had a voter's card or could be suspected of having heeded the PCP's calls to boycott the elections.

But this story is far from over. Three weeks after the troops came in, hundreds of residents organized into resistance groups and armed with rocks and dynamite once again blocked the Carretera Central. Soon they were joined by thousands of workers, students and housewives drawn out of the nearby factories and slums. They stoned the occupation forces, defying the helicopters whirling overhead that doused them with teargas.

The enemy would like to brag that it has "taken back" Raucana, and the universities, and so on, and perhaps even, ironically, the prisons. But in Lima and other main reactionary bastions there was never any question of being able to build the same kind of revolutionary political power as in the countryside. Right up until the very end the enemy will continue to enjoy certain strongholds where, when it comes to a showdown, until the final showdown, their brutality rules. That brutality will not save them; in fact, it will be part of their undoing.

Under today's conditions, the Party's work and the war it is leading must still be centred in the rural areas. But the Party and the people's war are becoming increasingly linked to the daily struggles of millions of people in the shantytowns, in the markets, in the factories, hospitals, schools, and in confrontations with the enemy on all kinds of issues in Lima and other cities. These developments are part of getting ready politically, organizationally and militarily for new conditions.

Tasks Faced by the Enemy: Stopping the People's War

To give an idea of the level of fighting, in August 1991 during the PGA counter-offensive, the government reported 80 soldiers and police killed, said to be the highest one-month total of the war up to that date. With 220,000 men armed with modern weapons, the Peruvian Armed Forces is still far more powerful than the PGA. It could afford this rate of casualties for a long time if that were all there were to it. But while the PGA is becoming more united, better trained, more effective and larger, the reactionary Armed Forces are deteriorating.

Their soldiers are a big problem: they are losing and starving and sick of fighting an unjust war for a starvation-producing system. Rations have always been short for Peruvian soldiers; now, with supply lines overextended and many units isolated for long periods, the Armed Forces lack the means to resupply field units. Even rice is often wanting. During the first three months of 1991, 40% of new Army conscripts deserted and 550 Army officers resigned, leading the Armed Forces command to "suspend" the right of officers to retire.

With the police, the situation is worse. The ascendancy of the Armed Forces generals amid the sharpening struggles within the ruling classes does not sit well with police officials. As for the average cop, they are paid so little and show so little zeal in their duty that the ruling classes are losing confidence in them. A Peruvian senator complained that one in seven robberies and holdups are committed by policemen. A bourgeois publication advises businessmen to "cross the street" when they see a cop. More importantly, government authorities are worried about the effect of flyers directed at policemen and revolutionary agitation now broadcast over captured police radios, urging them to take their guns and uniforms and go over to the side of the people.

The Fujimori government has proved to be even more bloodthirsty than its predecessors. The "democratic" veil that cloaks this U.S.-dominated dictatorship of the big exploiters is being torn even further asunder by murders and massacres in Lima neighbourhoods on a scale until recently reserved for the countryside and prisons. Lawyers have documented over 250 "disappearances" during Fujimori's first year in office. These are largely people who "disappeared" in prison or in custody, and do not include the estimated three thousand people killed since July 1990 by the Armed Forces and police in the countryside, where they follow a strict policy of "no prisoners or wounded" (according to a Lima TV show that was immediately canceled).

But the Fujimori regime has learnt the lesson that firepower alone is not enough in this war. Peruvian civilian experts and officers trained in the U.S., and the U.S. government itself, are working to implement the "low intensity warfare" approach developed by the imperialist powers in other counterrevolutionary wars, especially Vietnam. This includes:

- An emphasis on decapitating the Party using sophisticated intelligence work. The government has boasted of hurting the Party apparatus in Lima. It has tried very hard to capture PCP Chairman Gonzalo.

- More systematic use of civilian paramilitary forces to tie up the PGA, especially in intensely contested areas. The government is endeavouring to rebuild these gangs the PCP had eliminated or neutralized in many places. Fujimori personally officiated over military parades to mark the handing over of semi-automatic shotguns and automatic rifles to rondero bands in the countryside (including among the Ashaninka tribal people) and Lima itself.

- Social projects of various sorts, in order to separate off the middle forces in society from the revolution, especially in the countryside, bribe a few people in the lower classes to become government stooges and generally relegitimize government authority in practice (for instance, by having the Army carry out a vaccination campaign).

The Economy

Peru's economic crisis would be a catastrophe for any country. In the context of the people's war it is a major political obstacle to rallying Peru's propertied classes to save the system. In an effort whose magnitude reflects its desperation, like a gambler attempting to reverse his sinking fortunes by doubling his bets, Fujimori has tried to impose one of the most sweeping economic reforms ever seen in Latin America.

Fujimori asserts that these measures would allow Peru to follow the South Korean example by attracting direct foreign investment on a monumental scale. They include auctioning off all state-owned enterprises and public services right down to the disease-ridden sewage system, eliminating most protective labour legislation (such as restrictions on overtime and holiday work, and on firings and redundancies), and abolishing import tariffs and currency restrictions. They also feature proposals to promote the development in the countryside of a better-off strata of peasants financially tied to Peruvian monopoly capitalism and imperialism, at the expense of poorer peasants and without uprooting existing semi-feudal relations. A key part of this would be breaking up the SAIS (nationalized traditional estates) and granting titles to land now formally owned collectively or farmed without title, so that the land could be bought, sold and mortgaged.

It is not clear how much of this Fujimori will be able to implement. But a few things are already clear. Although Fujimori's initial draconian measures brought inflation to "only" 2000% during his first year, and down to about 5% a month in September and October 1991, this is still high enough to poison any revival in an economy where production has plummeted for three years straight - giving Peru simultaneously both the worst inflation and the worst recession in Latin America. In view of the situation in the world as a whole, where there can hardly be said to be a rush to invest in any oppressed country, and given the political situation that has led a business journal to award Peru the title of "the world's most dangerous country for investment", not even the most capitalist-minded commentators are very hopeful that Fujimori or anyone else can magically unlock this situation. So far, he has gotten high grades but little else from international lending agencies and banks, while Peru continues to pay out $90 million a month in interest alone for previous loans it still has no hope of retiring.

Fujimori's measures have already had unintended consequences. For instance, government budget cutbacks have provoked a radical mood among Peru's several hundred thousand public sector workers, especially the teachers and health workers who make up a key part of the middle classes he must win over to succeed. The crushing of small and medium-sized businesses is also cutting against Fujimori's political efforts.

Reports from the ruling classes' own institutes say that only 25% of Peru's work force is now fully employed, that 83% of the population is underfed, and that the percentage on the brink of starvation - over half the population - has doubled in the past three years. The government's schemes to win "hearts and minds" through a foul mixture of charity, reforms and trinkets do not seem very formidable when it is helpless in the face of the cholera epidemic that has killed thousands of Peruvians in the last year, many times more than in neighbouring countries.

The State

The problem Fujimori faces with reorganizing the state is that it rests on a battered Armed Forces and a society in crisis. Increasingly bitter clashes between different branches of the state, three new prime ministers in little more than a year and constant cabinet reshuffling, the unprecedented - and unsuccessful - corruption charges brought against former President Alan Garcia - all this is testimony to rising quarrels among the ruling classes. So too is a series of murderous letter bombs sent to journalists and politicians who have made powerful enemies. Even key materiel for the war, such as imported advanced telephone monitoring equipment, is often diverted for use in inter-ruling class contests.

The reforms with which Fujimori proposes to salvage the system cannot succeed without disrupting the interests of some forces at the heart of the class alliances represented by the state.

In order to put a lid on the Lima press where the boil of divergent interests has been bringing too many ugly facts to the surface, Fujimori has issued a decree authorizing himself to jail reporters and confiscate media that reveal anything but officially released information about the war.

As for the legitimizing drapes of elections which are supposed to hide the class dictatorship behind them, that is not going very well. After the PCP counter-offensive began in August 1991, the government was forced to cancel local elections scheduled in 20 provinces and almost 500 districts where there are no longer any local authorities even in name. Almost a million people were supposed to vote in these areas located in 19 of the country's 24 departments. The biggest problem the Peruvian reaction faces in restructuring its state is that another, rising, revolutionary state based on the interests of the vast majority of the people is now beginning to prove itself in practice.

U.S. Intervention

The U.S. government set out to openly move into the war in Peru in 1990, as part of Bush's "war on drugs". That intervention has developed in some expected ways, partly because of the unfolding of other events in the world, and partly because of growing disagreements within the U.S. ruling class about how to handle Peru. When Fujimori took office, the American Ambassador handed him a proposal to break the generation-long freeze on U.S. "aid" to Peru with a $90 million package, including $35 million in military equipment. Fujimori labelled this amount insufficient and stalled for a year before approving the pact. Then when he finally came to Washington to sign it in September 1991, the U.S. Congress refused to release funds for the military portions of the plan and the whole thing remains at an impasse. The Congressman in charge of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Robert Torricelli, announced, "There is a total policy gridlock with regard to Peru."

This is not quite true: there is consensus that the U.S. must intervene; the question is what to do. As Torricelli himself said earlier, "[I]n the final analysis, the United States has to get involved in Peru."

Long before this pact came up, the U.S. government was already intervening, not only covertly, as it did in the early and mid-1980s, through phony "civilian advisors" and CIA "mercenaries", but overtly as well. An article criticizing Bush in Foreign Affairs (V.69 No.1, 1990), a quasi-official theoretical journal of the U.S. ruling class, emphasizes this, noting that the U.S. base at Santa Lucia is the biggest and most expensive U.S. military installation south of the Panama Canal. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which has run this base since 1987 with the official mission of training the Peruvian counter-insurgency police, operates in Peru under the direction of the Pentagon, which in turn directly coordinates communications and technical intelligence for Peru out of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama. Since 1989, U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets) on "loan" to the DEA have trained 800 men in Peru.

All the while Fujimori was strutting around and combining high arrogance with unashamedly pro-U.S. servility, bellowing what had already been whispered into his Washington-based advisors' ears, that the Bush plan did not go far enough, U.S. Ambassador Anthony Quainton (a counter-insurgency specialist) and U.S. Army General George Jowland (on the spot in Peru) were playing a major role in the war. During this period before the two governments reached a formal agreement, the Peruvian Armed Forces signed several accords directly with the U.S. Army.

The Bush-Fujimori pact calls for increasing the number of Green Berets and other U.S. personnel; training and equipping two battalions of the Peruvian Army, as well as Navy (riverboat) and Air Force (helicopter and attack plane) units; and revamping the Peruvian military's communications system. Though the amount of money in question is not much for the U.S., it is substantial for a country where the entire military budget is only a few hundred million dollars. The Pentagon has focused on critical military spheres where the money can have the greatest multiplier effect on the efficiency of a conscript-rich but technology-poor Army. At the same time, far more money is being injected into Peru in the guise of "economic aid". One of the very few loans Peru has been granted is $425 million from the International Development Bank to rebuild Peru's roads. The repair of roads regularly dug up by PGA-led peasants would be a basic step towards stabilizing the reactionary regime economically. But its military importance would be even greater. Where there are no roads the government cannot impose its system.

No serious inner-circle imperialist political analyst is still trying to claim that the PCP is in league with the drug dealers. That thesis, invented for U.S. public consumption, has been discredited. "Sendero has not attempted to enter into some sort of alliance with the Colombian traffickers" who control the drug trade; on the contrary, it is the Peruvian Armed Forces "who have reached some sort of accommodation with the traffickers." (Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Summer 1990). Lately, some of this has been said to a less restricted audience, including in mass-circulation media such as The New York Times (November 10th) and Newsweek (August 26th), which refute the claim that the PCP is using drug money to buy arms and go so far as to report that the Peruvian Army frequently directs its fire at its U.S. advisers in order to protect the drug trade.

The New York Times quotes a leading American Congressman complaining that the Bush plan is hopeless because the Peruvian Army and police are "totally and completely corrupted" by the drug trade. Why say this now, and fight about it in Congress, when it was no less true when Congress approved the "war on drugs", or even a decade ago? A major reason is, as Foreign Affairs says, "the ultimate success of the... Peruvian Army's efforts remains in doubt." In short, the urgent problem with the Peruvian Armed Forces is that they're losing.

This is why the corruption and short-sightedness (from the point of view of imperialism's interests) of the Peruvian Armed Forces has become a major question. By putting the personal enrichment of its own officers ahead of the general counter-revolutionary cause, the Peruvian Armed Forces itself has become a major obstacle to implementing the policies that many imperialists think are the only chance they have in Peru.

One problem is how to try and win over the coca-leaf growing peasants to the government side. The Peruvian Army, by working with the drug traffickers in enslaving and plundering the peasants, is said to be creating favourable conditions for the success of the PCP in the Upper Huallaga and other coca-leaf producing regions. (The PCP's policy is to protect the peasants' lives, land and crops while persuading them to at least partially replace coca with food crops that can sustain revolutionary base areas, and to build up the revolutionary political power and armed strength to squash all these parasites.) With the aim of tipping the equation the other way, reactionary schemes have been proposed ranging from subsidizing peasants to grow other crops, to, far more practically, trying to bring the drug trade more under the state's official aegis. Whether the calls to broaden Peru's already legal coca leaf industry to include the whole Upper Huallaga Valley are officially implemented or not, they show an increasing determination not to let the "war on drugs" flag of convenience get in the way of fully subordinating everything to the war against the people's war.

This debate about drug policy is only a piece of the larger question of how to develop and implement an overall approach to the war along the lines of the "low intensity warfare" concept integrating, on the one hand, well-focused military might (building up the specific abilities needed by the reactionary armed forces to fight a highly mobile and illusive enemy), torture (to root out the revolutionary infrastructure and leadership) and terror (massacring entire villages or herding the peasants into strategic hamlets to isolate the masses from the guerrillas), and on the other, economic and social policies designed to rally a broader social base for the government from among middle forces who have currently turned their back on it. Fujimori seems to want to carry out these sorts of policies, but he may not be able to.

If the Peruvian Armed Forces, at least in their present form, are incapable of carrying out such a programme, then one very possible conclusion according to imperialist logic is that the U.S. military itself must play a far more extensive and direct role in the war. It might not necessarily start out by replacing Peruvian foot soldiers but by training them and leading them both at the highest command echelons and in "the field". This would not preclude a massive U.S. invasion. After all, the U.S. government justified its initial involvement in Vietnam by explaining that sending in a few Green Beret teams would keep the U.S. from having to wage a wider-scale war.

So far, Bush's critics have been far more forthright in criticizing him than in spelling out their own proposals in detail, at least in public, but one thing must be said: what is "low intensity warfare" for the U.S. means high-intensity savagery aimed at the Peruvian people and their vanguard, the PCP.

The question of "human rights" is making an increasingly sinister appearance in the reactionary debate around Peru. Like the "war on drugs", it should be analysed in terms of what it is being used to achieve and not just in the abstract. Especially since the Allied armies ganged up on Iraq in the name of "human rights", this concept has become an excuse for big powers to do what they want in oppressed countries. In the specific context of the debate around Peru, the question of "human rights" is being raised now (11 years after the Peruvian government began responding to the people's war with indiscriminate slaughter in the countryside, five years after the prison massacres, etc.) as a codeword for more U.S. involvement.

Amnesty International is playing a dangerous role in this matter. Its report ranking the Fujimori government the world's worst "human rights" violator today, released on the occasion of Fujimori's September 1991 state visit to Washington, did not deter Bush, who responded by specifically congratulating the Peruvian president on his human rights record. But rather than turning to the people and exposing U.S. complicity, AI took up a crusade against the PCP and its supporters abroad, spreading lies about alleged PCP atrocities that even Peruvian bourgeois newspapers, for their own reasons, have exposed as the work of the government and its paramilitary forces.

When Fujimori came to San Francisco in November, Amnesty International picketed both his appearance and a revolutionary bookstore AI considered associated with the "Yankee Go Home" campaign. The press that had been blacking out the news of the campaign gave full prominence to this tiny protest. No matter what the intention behind the "even-handed" principle of blaming rich and poor alike for social violence, in practice this is an attempt to drive a wedge between the people's war and some progressive figures and forces who contributed to arousing opposition to other imperialist wars waged by the U.S. Fujimori might not be completely comfortable with AI's policy, but it suits the U.S. imperialists.

It is important for those who oppose U.S. intervention to expose today's U.S. involvement in Peru, and also to expose and fight the disguised attempts to create public opinion for escalating the war in the near future. Whether it be by killing students in Lima or by political counter-insurgency in the U.S., all of the forces in this imperialist debate want to silence the cry "Yankee Go Home" - because none of them intend to stand by and "lose" Peru to the masses of Peruvians.

But people's war is unbeatable. It is not a question of a few military techniques the imperialists could adopt or adapt for their counterinsurgency. It comes from the communist outlook, based on the interests of those who have nothing to lose, the international proletariat, and developed to its highest level by Mao Tsetung. In the hands of a genuine Communist Party like the PCP, this outlook and the general military doctrine Mao also developed can give rise to concrete policies that for the first time in history fully unleash the masses of people and their inexhaustible potential.

A spectre is haunting the world - this is how Marx and Engels described the inevitable outbreak of communist revolution. Today, when communism is supposed to be dead and the corpse of Soviet-style phony communism is at last being buried, the armed advances of Peru's formerly downtrodden masses thrusting skyward the red banner are more than a spectre - they are a reality, a reality that dictates that the imperialist oppressors attack and that the world's oppressed stop them.