15 September 1992

Comrade Gonzalo (Abimael Guzmán), the Chairman of the Communist Party of Peru and an outstanding leader of the communist movement internationally, has been captured by the reactionary Fujimori regime on September 12th. This was accomplished after a 12-year man hunt by the Peruvian army and police, guided by U.S. imperialism's notorious "counter-insurgency" apparatus. Even though the Constitution of Peru outlaws the death penalty, the Constitution has been suspended, the regime is threatening to execute Comrade Gonzalo, and the imperialist press is preparing public opinion for such an outrageous crime. It urgently falls upon the people the world over to fight to defend his life.

With his Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line, Comrade Gonzalo has played the central role in initiating and steadily advancing the revolutionary war of the people in Peru against the ruling classes and their imperialist overlords who have been squeezing profit and the very life out of the Peruvian masses for centuries. Chairman Gonzalo has become the recognized leader of millions of workers and peasants and their embryonic new state being built in the course of the people's war. He has led the revolution in Peru forward, not only to benefit the masses of that country, but to serve the oppressed and exploited of the whole world.

Comrade Gonzalo represents the uncompromising revolutionary vision of a communist future without barbarous class divisions, without imperialism. He is the political enemy number one of the imperialists and the reactionaries the world over who dream of prolonging their bloody rule forever.

Even beyond Peru, millions worldwide who despise the brutal social system these bourgeois voices represent look to Chairman Gonzalo and the people's war he is leading to batter down the old social order and bring the fresh revolutionary winds of liberation that know no boundaries among the oppressed.

The capture of Comrade Gonzalo is a bitter blow to the revolutionary people the world over, and the danger to our comrade's life is extreme. This attack is also a challenge, a call for us to stand up and successfully prevent the reactionaries from taking the life of Chairman Gonzalo and, through struggle, hand his captors a big defeat. Defending the life of Comrade Gonzalo means defending the right of the slaves to rebel, it means defending the revolution and communism.

Chairman Gonzalo is accused of treason, but it is the Peruvian state which has betrayed the country and is completely at the beck and call of its Yankee masters.

Chairman Gonzalo is accused of 27,000 deaths, but it is the Peruvian armed forces who killed the great majority of these people, including in internationally known cases where they massacred unarmed peasants and workers and buried them in mass graves.

Chairman Gonzalo is accused of "narco-trafficking," while it is well documented that it is the Peruvian army and state, up to its highest levels, that are up to their necks in the narcotics industry and smuggling.

Chairman Gonzalo is accused of "terrorism", but it is the Peruvian state which murdered hundreds of political prisoners in cold blood in 1986 during the infamous El Frontón massacre and as recently as May of this year, when forty unarmed women and men were slaughtered in Canto Grande prison.

Chairman Gonzalo is accused of disrupting the national economy, but it is the shameless Fujimori who administered the infamous "Fuji-shock" at the orders of the IMF and the World Bank, further starving the already impoverished people and creating the conditions for the cholera epidemic.

The towering strength and revolutionary vitality of Comrade Gonzalo's political and ideological line is clear from the deep roots it has taken among workers, peasants and intellectuals of Peru, from the major military advances the people's war has achieved, to the embryonic new proletarian state and the beginning shoots of the new society which has begun to be set up in base areas in the countryside and to a growing extent in the shantytowns outside Lima itself.

We must fight for the recognition of Chairman Gonzalo's stature as the leader of the newly emerging state of the Peruvian people. We must demand that the international conventions concerning the treatment of prisoners of war and political prisoners be respected. We must help all of the oppressed and exploited, all who oppose imperialism and reaction, to understand the stakes of this battle, and we must arm them with the truth.

We will not allow them to take the life of this precious and uncompromising revolutionary communist leader.

Move Heaven and Earth to Defend the Life of Chairman Gonzalo!

We Need Comrade Gonzalo at His Post, in the Forefront of the Revolution in Peru and the International Communist Movement!

Fight for His Liberation!