[The following interview with Hugo Blanco was obtained in Santiago shortly before the coup by Birgitta Nyblom, a correspondent for Dagens Nyheter. It was published in the August 27 issue of the Stockholm daily. As of September 24, there is still no word on Blanco's whereabouts. The translation of the interview is by Intercontinental Press.]
"I received an offer, in an indirect way, from the military regime in Peru to work in the land reform," reports Hugo Blanco, the peasant leader from the highlands who was freed in early 1971 after seven years in prison.
"I was very glad to. But I made one condition: The land reform would have to be carried out in line with what the peasants wanted."
That was the last Hugo Blanco heard about the offer.
Half a year after he was released from prison he was deported to Mexico. He was kept in jail there a short time.
Following intense negotiations with the Peruvian ambassador, Hugo Blanco was issued a legal passport instead of the false one he had been sent with. He traveled to Argentina, and was held in prison there for three and a half months.
"Prison conditions were awful," he says. "Physically, they were better than in Peru, but morally speaking they were much worse. The hostility of the guards was terrible."
Hugo Blanco has been in Chile since the end of last year, thanks to the general secretary of Chile's Socialist party. He happened to visit Argentina, and obtained a transit visa.
Hugo Blanco's residence permit in Chile runs out in January, and hedoes not know what will happen then. When he himself applied, he couldn't get a visa to any Latin American country.
"But you could go to Sweden!"
"But Sweden is so far from Peru," he replies. "And things are probably too quiet for me to be able to live there."
Hugo Blanco laughs. He is homesick.
"What I want most is to be able to return legally to Peru."
Just as in Mexico and Argentina, a condition Hugo Blanco must observe in Chile is that he not take part in, or make statements about, the country's political affairs. Helives with his ten-year-old son in one room and a kitchen in Santiago, and earns a living writing articles.
A while back, Hugo Blanco requested permission from the Peruvian embassy to make a short visit to his home town in Cuzco, since his mother was seriously ill and had asked him to come. He was to make the trip secretly and allow himself to be under surveillance the whole time.
The police in Cuzco checked with his mother and verified that she was near death.
But Blanco did not receive permission to make the trip.
"That was a heavy blow for me," he says. "My mother was the one person I loved most."
Hugo Blanco is not yet forty years old. It is ten years since he was taken prisoner in the town of Zurite, and two years since he was deported from Peru. What happened during the half a year that he was out of jail, in Peru?
He reports that he was forbidden to return to Cuzco and the valley of La Convención, where he organized the peasants. He was allowed to stay in Lima, but was not allowed to leave it.
"The government thought I should stay in the capital city of Lima, after I had been a peasant leader. I would be like a fish on dry land there!
"But as a matter of fact, it is in the workers movement, in Argentina and Peru, that I got my training," says Hugo Blanco. "I was a local peasant leader in the mountains. But the government characterized me-this is what they said when I was put in prison —as a national leader, which I was not.
"This only worked to the government's disadvantage. The report about me as a national leader only meant that as soon as a group of workers got involved in a struggle, they asked about me and invited me to give a speech about imperialism or some other subject. Then they could discuss methods of struggle with me."
As a result, Hugo Blanco was arrested for twenty-four hours during a miners strike. The same thing happened during the teachers strike in September 1971. He was on the way to the drugstore when he was arrested.
"But," says Hugo Blanco, "one should not exaggerate the situation in Peru. They put people in jail for a while. Some are killed, others deported. Then comes a softening up. Peru does not have a regime like those
HUGO BLANCO
in Brazil or Bolivia. Proof that there is not a total state of repression in Peru is that the regime now neither puts us in prison nor kills us— it de ports us."
Hugo Blanco is a Trotskyist, a member of the Fourth International. He has noticed that within the workers movement some people have a thirdworld orientation of working in the slums — what are called "barriadas" in Peru, and "favelas" in Brazil.
"I met people in Peru and Mexico who carried out this kind of work. In Chile, on the other hand, I don't know any. I think that it is an inaporganized, particularly within the working class. For me, the struggle of the workers in their factories is the most important. You can see this in a practical sense in Chile. You can also see it in Peru."
"But what about the valley of La Convención?" I wonder.
"I believe that what I did in La Convención was correct, for the peasant movement was in the vanguard at that time. But now the situation is different. The working class is in the front lines-in Peru, Argentina, Chile, and in Latin America as a whole."
In Peru, the land reform is still being implemented on the government's terms. The tenant farmers are no longer treated like serfs. The ranches are being run as cooperatives by free farmers - that is the model.
It is successful along the coast with its rich sugar plantations. But the project has rough going, and meets with reluctance, in the backward mountainous areas of the Andes. This is where the Indians live, in a society where things are traditionally owned and used collectively.
The Indian peasants, whom Blanco worked with, have neither the work nor the influence that go together with land ownership. They haven't even got shoes on their feet yet.
In reality 70 percent of Peru's peasants have not been affected by the land reform.